Born, 12 Feb. 1809, at Shrewsbury. Educated at Mr. Case’s day-school at Shrewsbury, 1817; at Shrewsbury School, 1818–25. To Edinburgh University, 1825. Medical career given up in favor of clerical. Matriculated at Christ’s Coll., Cambridge, Oct. 1827; entered upon residence, Lent term 1828; B.A., 1832; M.A., 1837. Sailed as “naturalist” on the “Beagle,” 27 Dec. 1831. Return to England, 6 Oct. 1836. Idea of clerical career abandoned. To Cambridge, Dec. 1836. In London, 1837–42. F.R.S., 24 Jan. 1839; Royal medal, 1853; Copley medal, 1864. Married Emma Wedgwood, 29 Jan. 1839. Secretary to Geological Society, 1838–41. In consequence of ill-health, removed to Down, Kent, 1842. Lived there, engaged in scientific work, till his death. Occasional visits to friends; and to meetings of British Association, Southampton, 1846, Oxford, 1847; Birmingham, 1849; Glasgow, 1855. County Magistrate, 1857. Hon. LL.D., Cambridge, 1877. Died, 19 April 1882. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “Letters to Prof. Henslow” (privately printed for Cambridge Philosophical Society), 1835; “Journal and Remarks, 1832–36” (being vol. iii. of “Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of H. M. Ships, ‘Adventure’ and ‘Beagle’”), 1839 (2nd edn. published separately, 1845); “Zoology of the Voyage of H. M. S. ‘Beagle,’” (edited by Darwin, with contributions to pts. i. and ii.), 1840–43; “The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs: being the first part of the Geology of the Voyage of the ‘Beagle,’” 1842; (2nd edn. published separately, 1874); “Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands visited during the Voyage of H. M. S., ‘Beagle’: being the second part of the Geology of the Voyage, etc.,” 1844; “Geological Observations on South America: being the third part of the Geology of the Voyage of the ‘Beagle,’” 1846 (2nd edn. of the two preceding published together as “Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands and parts of South America visited, etc.,” 1876); “Monograph of the Fossil Lepadidæ,” 1851; “Monograph of the Subclass Cirrepedia,” 1851; “Monograph of the Balanidæ,” 1854; “Monograph of the Fossil Balanidæ and Verrucidæ of Great Britain,” 1854; “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” 1859; “On the Various Contrivances by which Orchids are fertilized by Insects,” 1862; “The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants,” 1868; “The Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication,” 1868; “The Descent of Man,” 1871; “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” 1872; “The Effect of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom,” 1876; “The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the same Species,” 1877; “The Power of Movement in Plants” (with F. Darwin), 1880; “The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms,” 1881. Various papers communicated to scientific journals, 1835–82. Posthumous: “Essay on Instinct” (published in Romanes’ “Mental Evolution in Animals”), 1883; “The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, including an Autobiographical Chapter,” ed. by F. Darwin, 1887.
Personal
Darwin was as simple and jovial as a boy, at dinner, sitting up on a cushion in a high chair, very erect, to guard his weakness. Among other things, he said “his rule in governing his children was to give them lump-sugar!” He rallied us on our vigorous movements, and professed to be dazzled at the rapidity of our operations. He says he never moves, and though he can only work an hour or two every day, by always doing that, and having no break, he accomplishes what he does. He left us for half an hour after dinner for rest, and then returned to his throne in the parlor.
In the summer of 1818 I went to Dr. Butler’s great school in Shrewsbury, and remained there for seven years till Midsummer 1825, when I was sixteen years old…. Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr. Butler’s school, as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught, except a little ancient geography and history. The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank. During my whole life I have been singularly incapable of mastering any language. Especial attention was paid to verse-making, and this I could never do well…. When I left the school I was for my age neither high nor low in it; and I believe that I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect…. Looking back as well as I can at my character during my school life, the only qualities which at this period promised well for the future, were, that I had strong and diversified tastes, much zeal for whatever interested me, and a keen pleasure in understanding any complex subject or thing…. With respect to diversified tastes, independently of science, I was fond of reading various books, and I used to sit for hours reading the historical plays of Shakespeare, generally in an old window in the thick walls of the school. I read also other poetry, such as Thomson’s “Seasons,” and the recently published poems of Byron and Scott. I mention this because later in life I wholly lost, to my great regret, all pleasure from poetry of any kind, including Shakespeare…. Early in my school days a boy had a copy of the “Wonders of the World,” which I often read, and disputed with other boys about the veracity of some of the statements; and I believe that this book first gave me a wish to travel in remote countries, which was ultimately fulfilled by the voyage of the Beagle. In the latter part of my school life I became passionately fond of shooting; I do not believe that anyone could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds.
The one great representative body conspicuous by its absence was the Royal Family. In life, as Professor Huxley says, they had ignored Darwin, and they ignore him now that he is dead. Continents vie with each other in doing honour to the great man who is buried to-day. In England everything that is illustrious pays him a last tribute of reverence, royalty exempted. Sometimes a king or queen who cannot be present in person sends a lord-in-waiting, a goldstick, an aide-de-camp—some sort of functionary or other—to be respectful by proxy. Not even that cold civility was thought due to Darwin by the Queen, or by the Prince of Wales, or by any single member of the family which occupies the throne. It does not matter to Darwin. It matters a little to them—not perhaps very much, but it is one thing left undone the doing of which would have strengthened, as the omission of it weakens, in whatever degree, the attachment of Englishmen to their rulers.
Darwin’s funeral was a great gathering, though not so great as when Stanley was buried. It was the mourning of the mind in Darwin’s case, in Stanley’s the mourning of the heart.
| I loved him with a strength of love | |
| Which man to man can only bear | |
| When one in station far above | |
| The rest of men, yet deigns to share | |
| A friendship true with those far down | |
| The ranks: as though a mighty king, | |
| Girt with his armies of renown, | |
| Should call within his narrow ring | |
| Of councellors and chosen friends | |
| Some youth who scarce can understand | |
| How it began or how it ends | |
| That he should grasp the monarch’s hand. |
What we may call this fervid youthfulness of feeling extended through all Mr. Darwin’s mind, giving, in combination with his immense knowledge and massive sagacity, an indescribable charm to his manner and conversation. Animated and fond of humour, his wit was of a singularly fascinating kind, not only because it was always brilliant and amusing, but still more because it was always hearty and good-natured. Indeed, he was so exquisitely refined in his own feelings, and so painfully sensitive to any display of questionable taste in others, that he could not help showing in his humour, as in the warp and woof of his whole nature, that in him the man of science and the philosopher were subordinate to the gentleman. His courteous consideration of others, also, which went far beyond anything that the ordinary usages of society require, was similarly prompted by his mere spontaneous instinct of benevolence.
This self-restraint seems to me to have formed the climax to the most exalted nature it has ever been my happiness to encounter. Those who knew Charles Darwin most intimately, are unanimous in their appreciation of the unsurpassed nobility and beauty of his whole character. In him there was no “other side.” Not only was he the Philosopher who has wrought a greater revolution in human thought within a quarter of a century than any man of our time—or perhaps of any time,—and has given what has proven the death-blow to Theological systems which had been clinging yet more tenaciously about men’s shoulders because of the efforts made to shake them off; but as a Man he exemplified in his own life that true religion, which is deeper, wider, and loftier than any Theology. For this not only inspired him with the devotion to Truth which was the master-passion of his great nature; but made him the most admirable husband, brother, and father; the kindest friend, neighbour, and master; the genuine lover, not only of his fellow-man, but of every creature. Of no one could it be more appropriately said:—
| “He prayeth best who loveth best | |
| All things both great and small;” |
There is, now and then, a mind—perhaps one in four or five millions—which in early youth thinks the thoughts of mature manhood, and which in old age retains the flexibility, the receptiveness, the keen appetite for new impressions, that are characteristic of the first season of youth. Such a mind as this was Mr. Darwin’s. To the last he was eager for new facts and suggestions, to the last he held his judgments in readiness for revision; and to this unfailing freshness of spirit was joined a sagacity which, naturally great, had been refined and strengthened by half a century most fruitful in experiences, till it had come to be almost superhuman…. When the extent of his work is properly estimated, it is not too much to say that among the great leaders of human thought that have ever lived there are not half a dozen who have achieved so much as he. In an age that has been richer than any preceding age in great scientific names, his name is indisputably the foremost. He has already found his place in the history of science by the side of Aristotle, Descartes, and Newton. And among thinkers of the first order of originality, he has been peculiarly fortunate in having lived to see all the fresh and powerful minds of a new generation adopting his fundamental conceptions, and pursuing their enquiries along the path which he was the first to break.
One could not converse with Darwin without being reminded of Socrates. There was the same desire to find some one wiser than himself; the same belief in the sovereignty of reason; the same ready humour; the same sympathetic interests in all the ways and works of men. But instead of turning away from the problems of Nature as hopelessly insoluble, our modern philosopher devoted his whole life to attacking them in the spirit of Heraclitus and of Democritus, with results which are as the substance of which their speculations were anticipatory shadows…. None have fought better, and none have been more fortunate, than Charles Darwin. He found a great truth trodden under foot, reviled by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world; he lived long enough to see it, chiefly by his own efforts, irrefragably established in science, inseparably incorporated with the common thoughts of men, and only hated and feared by those who would revile, but dare not. What shall a man desire more than this? Once more the image of Socrates rises unbidden, and the noble peroration of the “Apology” rings in our ears as if it were Charles Darwin’s farewell: “The hour of our departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die and you to live. Which is the better, God only knows.”
May I beg a corner for my feeble testimony to the marvellous persevering endurance in the cause of science of that great naturalist, my old and lost friend, Mr. Charles Darwin, whose remains are so very justly to be honoured with a resting-place in Westminster Abbey? Perhaps no one can better testify to his early and most trying labours than myself. We worked together for several years at the same table in the poop cabin of the Beagle during her celebrated voyage, he with his microscope and myself at the charts. It was often a very lively end of the little craft, and distressingly so to my old friend, who suffered greatly from sea-sickness. After perhaps an hour’s work he would say to me, “Old fellow, I must take the horizontal for it,” that being the best relief position from ship motion; a stretch out on one side of the table for some time would enable him to resume his labours for a while, when he had again to lie down. It was distressing to witness this early sacrifice of Mr. Darwin’s health, who ever afterwards felt the ill-effects of the Beagle’s voyage.
The dwelling of the Darwin family, as I recall it, is a spacious and substantial old-fashioned house, square in form and plain in style, but pleasing in its comfortable and homelike appearance. The approach seems now to my memory to have been a long lane, as though the house stood remote from any much-travelled highway, and without near neighbors, surrounded by trees and shrubbery, and commanding a far-reaching view of green fields and gently undulating country. A portion of the house, the front, has, I believe, been built long enough to be spoken of as old even in England, to which in the rear some modern additions have been made. Entering a broad hall at the front, we passed, on the right, the door of the room the interior of which has since been made known in pictures as “Mr. Darwin’s Study;” and a little further on were welcomed immediately by Mr. and Mrs. Darwin to a spacious and cheerful parlor or family room, whose broad windows and outer door opened upon a wide and partly sheltered piazza at the rear of the house, evidently a favorite sitting-place, judging from the comfortable look of easy-chairs assembled there, beyond which was a pleasing vista of fresh green lawn, bright flower beds, and blossoming shrubbery, gravel-paths, and a glass greenhouse, or perhaps botanical laboratory, and, further yet, a garden wall, with a gate leading to pleasant walks in fields beyond…. The interior of the room wore a delightfully comfortable every-day look, with books and pictures in profusion, and a large table in the middle covered with papers, periodicals, and literary miscellany.
His days, as far as the state of his health would permit, were carefully parcelled out between work and recreation, to make the best of his time. Retiring to bed at ten, he was an early riser, and often in his library at eight, after breakfast and his first morning walk. Later in the day he generally walked again, often in his own grounds, but sometimes further afield, and then generally by quiet footpaths rather than frequented roads. The walks at one time were varied by rides along the lanes on a favourite black cob; but, some years before Mr. Darwin’s death, his four-footed friend fell, and died by the roadside, and from that day the habit of riding was given up. Part of his evening was devoted to his family and his friends, who delighted to gather round him, to enjoy the charm of his bright intelligence and his unrivalled stores of knowledge. To Down, occasionally, came distinguished men from many lands; and there in later years would sometimes be found the younger generation of scientific students, looking up to the great Naturalist with the reverence of disciples, who had experienced his singular modesty, his patient readiness to listen to all opinions, and the winning grace with which he informed their ignorance and corrected their mistakes.
Of Darwin’s pure and exalted moral nature no Englishman of the present generation can trust himself to speak with becoming moderation. His love of truth, his singleness of heart, his sincerity, his earnestness, his modesty, his candor, his absolute sinking of self and selfishness—these, indeed, are all conspicuous to every reader, on the very face of every word he ever printed. Like his works themselves, they must long outlive him. But his sympathetic kindliness, his ready generosity, the staunchness of his friendship, the width and depth and breadth of his affections, the manner in which “he bore with those who blamed him unjustly without blaming them in return,” these things can never so well be known to any other generation of men as to the three generations who walked the world with him. Many even of those who did not know him loved him like a father; to many who never saw his face, the hope of winning Charles Darwin’s approbation and regard was the highest incentive to thought and action. Towards younger men, especially, his unremitting kindness was always most noteworthy; he spoke and wrote to them, not like one of the masters in Israel, but like a fellow-worker and seeker after truth, interested in their interests, pleased at their successes, sympathetic with their failures, gentle to their mistakes…. He had the sympathetic receptivity of all truly great minds, and when he died, thousands upon thousands who had never beheld his serene features and his fatherly eyes felt that they had lost indeed a personal friend. Greatness is not always joined with gentleness; in Charles Darwin’s case, by universal consent of all who knew him, “an intellect which had no superior” was wedded to “a character even nobler than the intellect.”
The family gave up their first-formed plans, and the funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on April 26th. The pallbearers were:—
| SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, | |
| Mr. HUXLEY, | |
| Mr. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, (American Minister), | |
| Mr. A. R. WALLACE, | |
| The DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE, | |
| CANON FARRAR, | |
| SIR J. D. HOOKER, | |
| Mr. WM. SPOTTISWOODE, (President of the Royal Society), | |
| The EARL OF DERBY, | |
| The DUKE OF ARGYLL. |
CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN, | |
BORN 12 FEBRUARY, 1809. | |
DIED 19 APRIL, 1882. |
Of his personal appearance (in these days of multiplied photographs) it is hardly necessary to say much. He was about six feet in height, but scarcely looked so tall, as he stooped a good deal; in later days he yielded to the stoop; but I can remember seeing him long ago swinging his arms back to open out his chest, and holding himself upright with a jerk. He gave one the idea that he had been active rather than strong; his shoulders were not broad for his height, though certainly not narrow…. He walked with a swinging action, using a stick heavily shod with iron, which he struck loudly against the ground, producing as he went round the “Sand Walk” at Down, a rhythmical click which is with all of us a very distinct remembrance…. When interested in his work he moved about quickly and easily enough, and often in the middle of dictating he went eagerly into the hall to get a pinch of snuff, leaving the study door open, and calling out the last words of his sentence as he went…. In spite of his strength and activity, I think he must always have had a clumsiness of movement. He was naturally awkward with his hands, and was unable to draw at all well. This he always regretted much, and he frequently urged the paramount necessity of a young naturalist making himself a good draughtsman. He could dissect well under the simple microscope, but I think it was by dint of his great patience and carefulness…. His beard was full and almost untrimmed, the hair being grey and white, fine rather than coarse, and wavy or frizzled. His moustache was somewhat disfigured by being cut short and square across. He became very bald, having only a fringe of dark hair behind. His face was ruddy in colour, and this perhaps made people think him less of an invalid than he was…. My father was wonderfully liberal and generous to all his children in the matter of money…. He had a great respect for pure business capacity, and often spoke with admiration of a relative who had doubled his fortune. And of himself he would often say in fun that what he really was proud of was the money he had saved. He also felt satisfaction in the money he made by his books. His anxiety to save came in a great measure from his fears that his children would not have health enough to earn their own livings, a foreboding which fairly haunted him for many years.
In spite of that refusal to accept the Hand stretched forth out of the darkness, which saddens so many of the lives of our time, he seems a very attractive and noble person. The utter absence of big-wiggedness, the simplicity and the candour, the genuine delight in taking trouble and giving help, the kindness and brightness, the unworldliness and absence of elation, seem to me very charming.
If ever a man’s ancestors transmitted to him ability to succeed in a particular field, Charles Darwin’s did. If ever early surroundings calculated to call out inherited ability, Charles Darwin’s were. If ever a man grew up when a ferment of thought was disturbing old convictions in the domain of knowledge for which he was adapted, Charles Darwin did. If ever a man was fitted by worldly position to undertake unbiased and long-continued investigations, Charles Darwin was such a man. And he indisputably found realms waiting for a conqueror. Yet Darwin’s achievements far transcend his advantages of ancestry, surroundings, previous suggestion, position. He stands magnificently conspicuous as a genius of rare simplicity of soul, of unwearied patience of observation, of striking fertility and ingenuity of method, of unflinching devotion to and belief in the efficacy of truth. He revolutionised not merely half-a-dozen sciences, but the whole current of thinking men’s mental life.
There is nothing more useful to observe in the life of Darwin than its simplicity. He was the man of science as Marlborough was the soldier, and he was only that. From boyhood he refused all other ways of life and knowledge as by instinct, and in his maturity the ill health which ends the career of ordinary men only confirmed him in his own; he was always the collector, the investigator, or the theorizer…. No words can be too strong to express the lovableness of Darwin’s personality, or the moral beauty of his character…. Never was a man more alive to what is visible and tangible, or in any way matter of sensation: on the sides of his nature where an appeal could be made, never was a man more responsive; but there were parts in which he was blind and dull. Just as the boy failed to be interested in many things, the man failed too; and he disregarded what did not interest him with the same ease at sixty as at twenty. What did interest him was the immediately present, and he dealt with it admirably, both in the intellectual, and in the moral world; but what was remote was as if it were not. The spiritual element in life is not remote, but it is not matter of sensation, and Darwin lived as if there were no such thing; it belongs to the region of emotion and imagination, and those perceptions which deal with the nature of man in its contrast with the material world.
In all his work, and in every effort of his life, Darwin underestimated his services to science. His modesty was proverbial, and even on subjects of which he was the acknowledged master, he would, with a rare and delightful sense of justice, express the opinion that some one else might have produced greater results with the matter at command Darwin was a firm believer in a First Cause. He was in theory an agnostic, in practice an orthodox Christian of the broadest type. Honourable in the smallest things in life, thoughtful to others, doing as he would be done by, sensitive for others to an extreme that was often an injustice to himself, kind, lovable, ready to help the young, charitable, and possessed of extreme modesty,—such was the greatest naturalist of the age, a hero of heroes, a model for all men; and when we remember that for forty years of this life there was not one day without its physical suffering, we can understand the true greatness of his nature…. Upon introduction I was at once struck with his stature (which was much above the average, and I should say fully six feet), his ponderous brow, and long white beard—the moustache being cut on a line with the lips and slightly brown from the habit of snuff-taking. His deep-set eyes were light blue-gray. He made the impression of a powerful man reduced somewhat by sickness. The massive brow and forehead show in his later photographs, but not so conspicuously as in a life-size head of him when younger, which hung in the parlour. In the brief hours I then spent at Down, the proverbial modesty and singular simplicity and sweetness of his character were apparent, while the delight he manifested in stating facts of interest was excelled only by the eagerness with which he sought them from others, whether while strolling through the greenhouse or sitting round the generously spread table. Going to him as a young entomologist with no claim on his favour, he seemed to take delight in manifesting appreciation.
His passion for shooting and hunting led him into a sporting, card-playing, drinking company, but science was his redemption. No pursuit gave him so much pleasure as collecting beetles, of his zeal in which the following is an example: “One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”
If I were asked what traits in Mr. Darwin’s character appeared to me most remarkable during the many exercises of his intellect that I was privileged to bear witness to, they would be, first, his self-control and indomitable perseverance under bodily suffering, then his ready grasp of difficult problems, and, lastly, the power of turning to account the waste observations, failures, and even blunders of his predecessors in whatever subject of enquiry. It was this power of utilising the vain efforts of others which in my friend Sir James Paget’s opinion afforded the best evidence of Darwin’s genius. Like so many men who have been great discoverers, or whose works or writings are proofs of their having intellects indicating great originality, he was wont to attribute his success to industry rather than ability. “It is dogged that does it” was an expression he often made use of…. Referring to his disregard when possible of his bodily sufferings, I remember his once saying to me that his sleepless nights had their advantages, for they enabled him to forget his hours of misery when recording the movement of his beloved plants from dark to dawn and daybreak…. In arguing he was ever ready with repartee, as I many times experienced to my discomfiture, though never to my displeasure; it was a physic so thoughtful and kindly exhibited…. I was describing to him the reception at the Linnean Society, where he was unable to be present, of his now famous account of “The two forms or dimorphic condition of Primula,” for which he took the common primrose as an illustration. On that occasion an enthusiastic admirer of its author got up, and in concluding his éloge likened British botanists who had overlooked so conspicuous and beautiful a contrivance to effect cross-fertilisation to Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell,” to whom
| “A primrose on the river’s brim | |
| A yellow primrose was to him, | |
| And it was nothing more.” |
I remember him as the most courteous, simple, and retiring of men, wholly unconscious, it would seem, of his own vast reputation, and of such painful delicacy of bodily frame and of such intense nervous sensitiveness, that he could not endure conversation even within his family circle for more than a limited time.
Origin of Species, 1859
I have just finished your volume and right glad I am that I did my best with Hooker to persuade you to publish it without waiting for a time which probably could never have arrived, though you lived to the age of a hundred, when you had prepared all your facts on which you ground so many grand generalizations. It is a splendid case of close reasoning and long-sustained arguments throughout so many pages, the condensation immense, too great, perhaps, for the uninitiated, but an effective and important preliminary statement which will admit, even before your detailed proofs appear, of some occasional useful exemplifications, such as your pigeons and cirripdes, of which you make such excellent use.
I am a sinner not to have written you ere this, if only to thank you for your glorious book—what a mass of close reasoning on curious facts and fresh phenomena—it is capitally written, and will be very successful. I say this on the strength of two or three plunges into as many chapters, for I have not yet attempted to read it. Lyell, with whom we are staying, is perfectly enchanted, and is absolutely gloating over it.
I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. Parts of it I admired greatly, parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore; other parts I read with absolute sorrow, because I think them utterly false and grievously mischievous. You have deserted—after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth—the true method of induction, and started us in machinery as wild, I think, as Bishop Wilkins’s locomotive that was to sail with us to the moon. Many of your wide conclusions are based upon assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved, why then express them in the language and arrangement of philosophical induction?
We began Darwin’s book on “The Origin of Species” to-night. Though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive, from want of luminous and orderly presentation.
The best part, I think, is the whole, i. e. its plan and treatment, the vast amount of facts and acute inferences handled as if you had a perfect mastery of them…. Then your candour is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties…. The moment I understood your premises, I felt sure you had a real foundation to hold on…. I am free to say that I never learnt so much from one book as I have from yours.
Even when Darwin, in a book that all the scientific world is in ecstasy over, proved the other day that we are all come from shell-fish, it didn’t move me to the slightest curiosity whether we are or not. I did not feel that the slightest light would be thrown on my practical life for me, by having it ever so logically made out that my first ancestor, millions of millions of ages back, had been, or even had not been, an oyster. It remained a plain fact that I was no oyster, nor had any grandfather an oyster within my knowledge; and for the rest, there was nothing to be gained, for this world, or the next, by going into the oyster-question, till all more pressing questions were exhausted! So—if I can’t read Darwin, it may be feared I shall break down in Mrs. Duncan.
In the name of all true philosophy we protest against such a mode of dealing with nature, as utterly dishonourable to all natural sciences, as reducing it from its present lofty level of being one of the noblest trainers of man’s intellect and instructors of his mind, to being a mere idle play of the fancy, without the basis of fact or the discipline of observation. In the “Arabian Nights” we are not offended as at an impossibility when Amina sprinkles her husband with water and transforms him into a dog, but we cannot open the august doors of the venerable temple of scientific truth to the genii and magicians of romance…. Such assumptions as these, we once more repeat, are most dishonourable and injurious to science; and though, out of respect to Mr. Darwin’s high character and to the tone of his work, we have felt it right to weigh the “argument” again set by him before us in the simple scales of logical examination, yet we must remind him that the view is not a new one, and that it has already been treated with admirable humour when propounded by another of his name and of his lineage. We do not think that, with all his matchless ingenuity, Mr. Darwin has found any instance which so well illustrates his own theory of the improved descendant under the elevating influences of natural selection exterminating the progenitor whose specialties he has exaggerated as he himself affords us in this work. For if we go back two generations we find the ingenious grandsire of the author of “The Origin of Species” speculating on the same subject, and almost in the same manner with his more daring descendant Mr. Darwin writes as a Christian, and we doubt not that he is one. We do not for a moment believe him to be one of those who retain in some corner of their hearts a secret unbelief which they dare not vent; and we therefore pray him to consider well the grounds on which we brand his speculations with the charge of such a tendency. First, then, he not obscurely declares that he applies his scheme of the action of the principle of natural selection to MAN himself, as well as to the animals around him. Now, we must say at once, and openly, that such a notion is absolutely incompatible not only with single expressions in the word of God on that subject of natural science with which it is not immediately concerned, but, which in our judgment is of far more importance, with the whole representation of that moral and spiritual condition of man which is its proper subject-matter.
Interesting facts and idle fancies have seldom been combined in physical researches, and when such an alliance has been formed, the value of new facts has often compensated for the errors of their application. There are many cases, indeed, in the history of science, where speculations, like those of Kepler, have led to great discoveries in the very attempts which they suggested in order to establish or to refute them. It is otherwise, however, with speculations which trench upon sacred ground, and which run counter to the universal convictions of mankind, poisoning the fountains of science, and disturbing the serenity of the Christian world. Such is doubtless the tendency of Mr. Darwin’s work on the origin of species. Trained in a less severe school than that of geometry and physics, his reasonings are almost always loose and inconclusive: His generalizations seem to have been reached before he had obtained the materials upon which he rests them: His facts, though frequently new and interesting, are often little more than conjectures; and the grand phenomena of the world of life, and instinct, and reason, which other minds have woven into noble and elevating truths, have thus become in Mr. Darwin’s hands the basis of a dangerous and degrading speculation…. Had Mr. Darwin written a work on the change of species, as determined by observation and experiment, without any other object but that of advancing natural science, he would have obtained a high place among philosophical naturalists. But after reading his work, in which the name of the Creator is never distinctly mentioned, we can hardly believe that scientific truth was the only object the author had in view. Researches, conducted under the influence of other motives, are not likely to stand the test of a rigorous scrutiny; and some of Mr. Darwin’s not unfriendly critics have produced ample evidence that the idol of speculation has been occasionally worshipped at the expense of truth.
The “Origin of Species” made an epoch. The product of an immense series of tentative gropings, it formed the turning-point of an entirely new series; concentrating as in a focus the many isolated rays emitted by speculative ingenuity to illuminate the diversified community of organic life, it propounded an hypothesis surpassing all its predecessors in its congruity with verifiable facts, and in its wide-reaching embrace. Because it was the product of long-continued though baffled research, and thereby gave articulate expression to the thought which had been inarticulate in many minds, its influence rapidly became European; because it was both old in purpose and novel in conception, it agitated the schools with a revolutionary ferment. No work of our time has been so general in its influence.
The book had hardly been published when it was found that a great crisis had been reached in the history of science and of thought. The importance of Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” regarded as a mere historical fact, is of at least as much importance to the world as Comte’s publication of his theory of historical development. In these pages we are considering Darwin’s theory and his work merely as historical facts. We are dealing with them as we might deal with the fall of a dynasty or the birth of a new state. The controversy which broke out when “Origin of Species” was published has been going on ever since, without the slightest sign of diminishing ardor. It spread almost through all society. It was heard from the pulpit and from the platform; it raged in the scientific and unscientific magazines. It was trumpeted in the newspapers; it made one of the stock subjects of talk in the dining room and smoking room; it tittered over the tea-table…. Dr. Darwin’s work was fiercely assailed and passionately championed. It was not the scientific principle which inflamed so much commotion; it was the supposed bearing of the doctrines on revealed religion. Injustice was done to the calm examination of Darwin’s theory on both sides of the controversy. Many who really had not yet given themselves time even to consider its arguments cried out in admiration of the book, merely because they assumed it was destined to deal a blow to the faith revealed in religion. On the other side, many of the believers in revealed religion were much too easily alarmed and too sensitive. Many of them did not pause to ask themselves whether, if every article of the doctrine were proved to be scientifically true, it would affect in the slightest degree the basis of their religious faith. To this writer it seems clear that Dr. Darwin’s theory might be accepted by the most orthodox believer without the firmness of his faith moulting a feather. The theory is one altogether as to the process of growth and construction in the universe, and, whether accurate or inaccurate, does not seem in any wise to touch the question which is concerned with the sources of all life, movement, and being. However that may be, it is certain that the book made an era not only in science, but in scientific controversy, and not merely in scientific controversy, but in controversy expanding into all circles and among all intelligences. The scholar and the fribble, the divine and the school-girl, still talk and argue and wrangle over Darwin and the origin of species.
Many of you will be familiar with the aspect of this small green-covered book. It is a copy of the first edition of the “Origin of Species,” and bears the date of its production—the 1st of October, 1859. Only a few months, therefore, are needed to complete the full tale of twenty-one years since its birthday. Those whose memories carry them back to this time will remember that the infant was remarkably lively, and that a great number of excellent persons mistook its manifestations of vigorous individuality for mere naughtiness; in fact there was a very pretty turmoil about its cradle. My recollections of the period are particularly vivid; for, having conceived a tender affection for a child of what appeared to me to be such remarkable promise, I acted for some time in the capacity of a sort of under-nurse and thus came in for my share of the storms which threatened the very life of the young creature…. Those who have watched the progress of science within the last ten years will bear me out to the full, when I assert that there is no field of biological inquiry in which the influence of the “Origin of Species” is not traceable; the foremost men of science in every country are either avowed champions of its leading doctrines, or at any rate abstain from opposing them; a host of young and ardent investigators seek for and find inspiration and guidance in Mr. Darwin’s great work; and the general doctrine of evolution, to one side of which it gives expression, obtains, in the phenomena of biology, a firm base of operations whence it may conduct its conquest of the whole realm of Nature.
The “Origin of Species” was published in 1859. An educated and unprejudiced reader, who has not become familiar with natural history and reads the book in leisurely fashion, must come to the conclusion that it is a conspicuously clever performance, that it abounds in facts, that the conclusions drawn from these facts are moderate, and that there is no particular reason why such a book should set the whole world on fire. From beginning to end Mr. Darwin’s most famous volume does not contain one rash statement, one dazzling remark, one specially bold conclusion, and least of all an observation to which a good lawyer, a respectable theologian, or a poet could object; while even a layman cannot help observing that Mr. Darwin knew far better than do most naturalists how to look at the living organisms of nature, and how to survey a whole field of which most men cultivate but a small part and reveal nothing save fragments and isolated facts. Those who are familiar with Humboldt’s writings can hardly fail to notice that Mr. Darwin is simpler, less pedantic, less obstrusively erudite, less mysterious and mystical, far less pretentious, more amiable, more attractive, more accurate, and far more poetical,—the latter because his detail is so exquisite.
The book itself was one of the greatest, the most learned, the most lucid, the most logical, the most crushing, the most conclusive, that the world had ever yet seen. Step by step, and principle by principle, it proved every point in its progress triumphantly before it went on to demonstrate the next. So vast an array of facts so thoroughly in hand had never before been mastered and marshalled in favor of any biological theory. Those who had insight to learn and understand were convinced at once by the cogency of the argument; those who had not were overpowered and silenced by the weight of the authority and the mass of the learning.
Not only gave a better account of the evidence for the development of species than had ever been given before, but showed the fallacy of the adverse argument from hybridism, and, above all, gave a lucid explanation of how progress had been brought about by means of natural selection…. In ten years almost all naturalists were converted; in twenty years the doctrine had spread far beyond natural science into the dominions of ethics and psychology; and, a little more than twenty-two years after the publication of his book, Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey, near the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton, literary men and theologians uniting with philosophers and naturalists to do honour to the memory of one of the greatest observers and thinkers that the world has ever seen.
The root of the error lies, indirectly rather than directly, with Mr. Darwin. In 1859, through the publication of the “Origin of Species,” he offered to the world what purported to be the final clue to the course of living Nature. That clue was the principle of the Struggle for Life. After the years of storm and stress which follow the intrusion into the world of all great thoughts, this principle was universally accepted as the key to all the sciences which deal with life. So ceaseless was Mr. Darwin’s emphasis upon this factor, and so masterful his influence, that, after the first sharp conflict, even the controversy died down. With scarce a challenge the Struggle for Life became accepted by the scientific world as the governing factor in development, and the drama of Evolution was made to hinge entirely upon its action. It became the “part” from which science henceforth went on “to reconstruct the whole,” and biology, sociology, and theology, were built anew on this foundation.
Incomparably the greatest work which the biological sciences have seen.
The influence of this book ranks it with the treatises of Copernicus and of Newton, with the “Contrat Social” and the “Wealth of Nations.” It is doubtful if any other book, in all the history of modern thought, has been so far-reaching in its influences, or productive of such immense intellectual results. There is a difference, not merely of degree but almost of kind, between the intellectual processes of the men who lived before Darwin and those who have grown to manhood during the period in which the evolutionary leaven has been working in men’s minds.
Descent of Man, 1871
In the “Descent of Man” Darwin dealt at length and boldly with that subject on which he had hitherto deemed it well to be reticent. He presented man as a co-descendent with the catarhine, or “down-nostrilled” monkeys, from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, and probably a climber of trees. Nay he traced back the claim of descent until he found, as the progenitor of all the vertebrate animals, some aquatic creature provided with gills, hermaphrodite, and with brain, heart and other organs imperfectly developed. The treatise in which this view is presented falls in no respect behind Mr. Darwin’s other great work in closeness of reasoning and grasp of facts. The portion of the work—more than one-half—bearing on sexual selection, if somewhat less satisfactory and conclusive, forms yet a most important contribution to the wide subject of the genesis of species.
On the moral and social side, the ultimate importance of the “Descent of Man” upon the world’s history can hardly be overrated by a philosophic investigator. Vast as was the revolution affected in biology by the “Origin of Species,” it was as nothing compared with the still wider, deeper, and more subtly-working revolution inaugurated by the announcement of man’s purely animal origin. The main discovery, strange to say, affected a single branch of thought alone; the minor corollary drawn from it to a single species has already affected, and is destined in the future still more profoundly to affect, every possible sphere of human energy. Not only has it completely reversed our entire conception of history generally, by teaching us that man has slowly risen from a very low and humble beginning, but it has also revolutionized our whole ideas of our own position and our own destiny, it has permeated the sciences of language and of medicine, it has introduced new conceptions of ethics, and of religion, and it threatens in the future to produce immense effects upon the theory and practice of education, of politics, and of economic and social science. These wide-reaching and deep-seated results began to be felt from the first moment when the Darwinian principle was definitely promulgated in the “Origin of Species,” but their final development and general acceptance was immensely accelerated by Darwin’s own authoritative statement in the “Descent of Man.”
The “Descent of Man” of which Mr. Darwin was kind enough to give me a copy before publication, inspired me with the deadliest alarm. His new theory therein set forth, respecting the nature and origin of conscience, seemed to me then, and still seems to me, of absolutely fatal import.
General
I first read Darwin’s “Journal” three or four years back, and have lately re-read it. As the journal of a scientific traveler, it is second only to Humboldt’s “Personal Narrative;” as a work of general interest, perhaps superior to it. He is an ardent admirer and most able supporter of Mr. Lyell’s views. His style of writing I very much admire, so free from all labour, affectation, or egotism, yet so full of interest and original thought.
Ah, that I could begin to study nature anew, now that you have made it to me a live thing, not a dead collection of means. But my work lies elsewhere now. Your work, nevertheless, helps mine at every turn. It is better that the division of labour should be complete, and that each man should do only one thing, while he looks on, as he finds time, at what others are doing, and so gets laws from other sciences which he can apply, as I do, to my own.
My recent studies have made me more adverse than ever to the new scientific doctrines which are flourishing now in England. This sensational zeal reminds me of what I experienced as a young man in Germany, when the physio-philosophy of Oken had invaded every centre of scientific activity; and yet, what is there left of it? I trust to outlive this mania also. As usual, I do not ask beforehand what you think of it, and I may have put my hand into a hornet’s nest; but you know your old friend Agass., and will forgive him if he hits a tender spot.
This largeness of knowledge and readiness of resource render Mr. Darwin the most terrible of antagonists. Accomplished naturalists have levelled heavy and sustained criticism against him—not always with the view of fairly weighing his theory, but with the express intention of exposing his weak points only. This does not irritate him. He treats every objection with a soberness and thoroughness which even Bishop Butler might be proud to imitate, surrounding each fact with its appropriate detail, placing it in its proper relations, and usually giving it a significance which, as long as it was kept isolated, failed to appear. This is done without a trace of ill-temper. He moves over the subject with the passionless strength of a glacier; and the grinding of the rocks is not always without a counterpart in the logical pulverization of the objector.
I have been translating into Spanish a sketch of Mr. Darwin’s life—no, not your Mr. Darwin, certainly, you foolish little person, but his father. Not that I like science any better than I ever did. I hate it as a savage does writing, because he fears it will hurt him somehow; but I have a great respect for Mr. Darwin as almost the only perfectly disinterested lover of truth I ever encountered. I mean, of course, in his books, for I never had the pleasure of seeing him.
The sole innovation of Darwinism upon this doctrine of evolution consisted in attempting to strip from it all proof of the incessant creative action of a designing mind, by reducing it to a blind mechanical process, necessarily resulting from inherent mudborn energies and productive power, and this attempt, resting solely upon the two unfounded assumptions of a battle for life and of the necessary survival of the higher organisms over the lower ones in that contest, it has now been shown, must be regarded as an ignominious failure. Yet the very making of this attempt contributed much to the speedy and joyful acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis in certain quarters. It was the pepper which made the dish palatable to Huxley, Haeckel & Co.,—that is, to those English and German naturalists whose previous bias in favor of materialism and fatalism indisposed them to recognize anywhere any proofs of the being of a God.
I am not likely to take a low view of Darwin’s position in the history of science, but I am disposed to think that Buffon and Lamarck would run him hard in both genius and fertility. In breadth of view and in extent of knowledge these two men were giants, though we are apt to forget their services. Von Bär was another man of the same stamp; Cuvier, in a somewhat lower rank, another; and J. Müller another. “Colossal” does not seem to me to be the right epithet for Darwin’s intellect. He had a clear rapid intelligence, a great memory, a vivid imagination, and what made his greatness was the strict subordination of all these to his love of truth.
Notwithstanding the extent and variety of his botanical work, Mr. Darwin always disclaimed any right to be regarded as a professed botanist. He turned his attention to plants doubtless because they were convenient objects for studying organic phenomena in their least complicated forms; and this point of view, which, if one may use the expression without disrespect, had something of the amateur about it, was in itself of the greatest importance. For, from not being, till he took up any point, familiar with the literature bearing on it, his mind was absolutely free from any prepossession. He was never afraid of his facts or of framing any hypothesis, however startling which seemed to explain them. However much weight he attributed to inheritance as a factor in organic phenomena, tradition went for nothing in studying them. In any one else such an attitude would have produced much work that was crude and rash. But Mr. Darwin—if one may venture on language which will strike no one who had conversed with him as overstrained—seemed by gentle persuasion to have penetrated that reserve of nature which baffles smaller men. In other words, his long experience had given him a kind of instinctive insight into the method of attack of any biological problem, however unfamiliar to him, while he rigidly controlled the fertility of his mind in hypothetical explanations by the no less fertility of ingeniously-devised experiment. Whatever he touched he was sure to draw from it something that it had never before yielded, and he was wholly free from that familiarity which comes to the professed student in every branch of science, and blinds the mental eye to the significance of things which are overlooked because always in view.
No man of his time has exercised upon the science of Geology a profounder influence than Charles Darwin…. In fine, the spirit of Mr. Darwin’s teaching may be traced all through the literature of science, even in departments which he never himself entered. No branch of research has benefited more from the infusion of this spirit than geology. Time-honoured prejudices have been broken down, theories that seemed the most surely based have been reconsidered, and when found untenable, have been boldly discarded. That the Present must be taken as a guide to the Past, has been more fearlessly asserted than ever. And yet it has been recognized that the Present differs widely from the Past, that there has been a progress everywhere, that Evolution and not Uniformitarianism has been the law by which geological history has been governed. For the impetus with which these views have been advanced in every civilized country, we look up with reverence to the loved and immortal name of Charles Darwin.
Mr. Darwin’s latest books belong to a period in which, having lived to witness the complete success of his great work, he has employed his time in recording the results of his researches on many subsidiary points, of no little interest and importance. The treatises on the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, on the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants, on Insectivorous Plants, on Cross and Self Fertilization, on the Different Forms of Flowers, and on the formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms should be read as models of sound scientific method by every one who cares to learn what scientific method is. They may be counted, too, among the most entertaining books of science that have ever been written; and the points that have been established in them, taken in connection with Mr. Darwin’s previous works, make up an aggregate of scientific achievement such as has rarely been equaled…. On the Sunday following Mr. Darwin’s death, Canon Liddon, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Canons Barry and Prothero, at Westminster Abbey, agreed in referring to the Darwinian theory as “not necessarily hostile to the fundamental truths of religion.” The effect of Mr. Darwin’s work has been, however, to remodel the theological conceptions of the origin and destiny of man which were current in former times. In this respect it has wrought a revolution as great as that which Copernicus inaugurated and Newton completed, and of very much the same kind.
Unambitious and unassuming, he has never thrust himself before the public, nor sought for honours and emoluments. He worked for the love of science and of truth, careless of his own reputation if only he could impart to others that which his own mind had grasped so firmly and analysed so accurately. As a naturalist, not even his greatest enemies will deny him the meed of praise. No other man could have drawn so much knowledge from a single scientific voyage, and the works consequent upon his connection with the expedition of the Beagle would have stood out as monuments of vast genius and unparalleled industry, even had he never written those better known and much criticised books which have made his name the war-cry of opposing factions.
One of the most notable men of the age—among scientific men doubtless the most notable…. Whatever judgment posterity may pronounce upon his genius and his work, we may say that no other naturalist ever made an impression at once so deep, so wide and so immediate. The name of Linnæus most invites comparison; but the readers and pupils of Linnæus over a century ago were to those of Darwin as tens are to thousands, and the interest of the subjects discussed were somewhat in the same ratio. Humboldt, who, like Darwin, began with research in travel, and to whom the longest of lives, vigorous health, and the best of opportunities were allotted, essayed similar themes in a more ambitious spirit, enjoyed equal popularity, but left no great impression upon the thought of his own day and ours. As a measure of contemporary celebrity, one may note that no other author that we know of ever gave rise in his own active life-time to a special department of bibliography. Dante-literature and Shakespere-literature are the growth of centuries; but Darwinismus had filled shelves and alcoves and teeming catalogues, while the quiet but unremitting investigator was still supplying new and even novel subjects for comment. Note, also, that the terms which he chose as the catch-word of his theory and more than one of the phrases by which he illustrated it, less than twenty-five years ago, have already in their special meanings been engrafted into his mother-tongue, and even into other European languages, and are turned to use in common converse with hardly any sense of strangeness.
A conqueror greater than Alexander, who extended the empire of human knowledge.
In no country of the world, however, England not excepted, has the reforming doctrine of Darwin met with so much living interest or evoked such a storm of writings, for and against, as in Germany. It is therefore only a debt of honor we pay, if at this year’s assembly of German Naturalists and Physicians we gratefully call to remembrance the mighty genius who has departed, and bring home to our minds the loftiness of the theory of nature to which he has elevated us. And what place in the world could be more appropriate for rendering this service of thanks than Eisenach, with its Wartburg, this stronghold of free inquiry and free opinion! As in this sacred spot 360 years ago Martin Luther, by his reform of the church in its head and members, introduced a new era in the history of civilisation, so in our days has Charles Darwin, by his reform, of the doctrine of development, concerned the whole perception, thought, and volition of mankind into new and higher courses. It is true that personally both in his character and influence, Darwin has more affinity to the meek and mild Melanchthon than to the powerful and inspired Luther. In the scope and importance, however, of their great work of reformation, the two cases were entirely parallel, and in both the success marks a new epoch in the development of human mind.
It is well known that Mr. Darwin’s theory on the Origin of Species has been accepted in Germany more widely, with more absolute faith, and with more vehement enthusiasm, than in the country of its birth. In Germany, more conspicuously than elsewhere, it has itself become the subject of developments as strange and as aberrant as any which it assumes in the history of Organic Life. The most extravagant conclusions have been drawn from it—invading every branch of human thought, in Science, in Philosophy, and in Religion. These conclusions have been preached, too, with a dogmatism as angry and as intolerant as any of the old theologies. It is the fate of every idea which is new and fruitful, that it is ridden to the death by excited novices. We cannot be surprised if this fate has overtaken the idea that all existing animal forms have had their ancestry in other forms which exist no longer, and have been derived from these by ordinary generation through countless stages of descent.
Darwin seems to me to be the Copernicus of the organic world.
His name has given a new word to several languages, and his genius is acknowledged wherever civilisation extends. Yet the very greatness of his fame, together with the number, variety, and scientific importance of his works has caused him to be altogether misapprehended by the bulk of the reading public. Every book of Darwin’s has been reviewed or noticed in almost every newspaper and periodical, while his theories have been the subject of so much criticism and so much dispute, that most educated persons have been able to obtain some general notion of his teachings, often without having read a single chapter of his works,—and very few, indeed, except professed students of science, have read the whole series of them. It has been so easy to learn something of the Darwinian theory at second-hand that few have cared to study it as expounded by its author. It thus happens that while Darwin’s name and fame are more widely known than in the case of any other modern man of science, the real character and importance of the work he did are as widely misunderstood.
Darwin: Socrates?
Dæmon (Socrates): Who else should greet thee here than he whose spirit guided thee thine earth-life through? Thou knewest it not; but all men saw thy method was Socratic. Thy natal star was mine that beamed upon thee in the Abbey church. Thy Nemesis and I are one. ’Twas my familiar spirit speaking through the course of Nature’s evolution from the moner to the man, pointing the way of truth through mundane matter to the substance of soul that clothes thy spirit now in brightness. This, thy Dæmon, is the Love of Truth.
Aside from their scientific value, the works of Darwin have a broad human interest, and are therefore not to be overlooked by the literary man. They add to our knowledge of nature, not after the manner of the closest naturalist, but after the manner of the great explorers and discoverers. It is mainly vital knowledge which he gives us. What a peculiar human interest attaches to the results of his observations upon the earth-worm and the formation of vegetable mould; to his work upon the power of movement in plants; to his discovery of the value of cross-fertilization in the vegetable kingdom, to say nothing of the light which he has thrown upon the origin of species and the descent of man. Of course, all kinds of knowledge are not equally valuable; all knowledge does not alike warm and enlighten us; but there is much in Darwin that warms and enlightens us. Contact with such a broad, sane, sincere spirit, is of itself of the highest value. Indeed, to ignore Darwin is not only to ignore modern science; it is to ignore one of the broadest and most helpful minds of the century. And then to object to him upon such whimsical grounds as Ruskin does—namely, “because it is every man’s duty to know what he is, not to think of the embryo he was,” and also “because Darwin has a mortal fascination for all vainly curious and idly speculative persons”—is a piece of folly that it would be hard to match even in the utterances of this prince of caprice.
His style has been much praised; on the other hand, at least one good judge has remarked to me that it is not a good style. It is, above all things, direct and clear; and it is characteristic of himself in its simplicity, bordering on naïveté, and in its absence of pretence. He had the strongest disbelief in the common idea that a classical scholar must write good English; indeed, he thought that the contrary was the case. In writing, he sometimes showed the same tendency to strong expressions as he did in conversation.
Never, perhaps, did a biography give such an unmixedly pleasing impression both of its hero and of his friends. In these hundreds of unstudied letters there is not a sentence which we could wish otherwise written; nor are the surrounding group of correspondents unworthy of the central figure. In this respect their various theoretical opinions seem to make little difference; but we soon feel that it is not from a chosen company of men such as these that we can argue as to the ultimate influence of any belief or disbelief upon the mass of mankind. Ignorant and prejudiced critics are the only villains in the tale, and even their howling comes to us faint as the woolfish sounds which Æneas heard across the waters as he steered safe by Circe’s isle. How different from the restless bitterness of Carlyle, who makes us feel that he is struggling alone to retain reason and humanity among the crowding bears and swine!—from the sad resolve of George Eliot, who seems ever to be encountering the enchantress with the sprig of moly, herself half doubtful of its power! And linked with this peace of conscience there is a boyish yet a steadfast happiness; a total freedom from our self-questioning complexities—from the Welt-Schmerz which, in one form or other has paralysed or saddened so many of the best lives of our times. Can we get nearer to the source of this tranquility? Can we detect the prophylactic which kept the melancholy infection at bay?
Evidence is not wanting that at times he had misgivings that his own intellect was not competent to judge of the facts he had collected, and that he was biased by long brooding over a certain kind of thoughts. He feared, at times, that he might be only a “crank” following an ignis-fatuus. “How awfully flat I shall feel,” he writes, “if when I get my notes together on species, etc., the whole thing explodes like an empty puff-ball!” But he felt that competent judges were at hand, at least three of them, on whose verdict the theory could stand or fall so far as he was concerned. Darwin realized that if he could convince Lyell, Hooker, and Huxley, the battle was won. If these three great minds gave assent, the truth must be there. For the rest of the scientific world, especially for the younger and more observant of his fellow-workers, the adoption of the theory of descent would be only a question of time. Nothing in the history of science is more remarkable than the calm patience and humility with which Darwin awaited the verdict of posterity on the main question involved in his theory of the origin of species.
What is the relation of Agassiz to Darwin—of Agassizian development to Darwinian evolution? I answer, it is the relation of formal science to physical or casual science. Agassiz advanced biology to the formal stage; Darwin carried it forward, to some extent at least, to the physical stage.
The publication of the “Life and Letters” of the late Mr. Charles Darwin by his son, has thrown light upon some points of Darwin’s opinions and character which till now were obscure, and has re-awakened an interest in his well-known theory of “natural selection” which had begun somewhat to flag…. The influence which Mr. Darwin has exercised over men’s minds with respect to this question is probably greater than that of any writer since St. Paul.
The conception of evolution has penetrated every department of organic science, especially where it touches man. Darwin personally, to whom belongs the chief place of honour in the triumph of a movement which began with Aristotle, has been a transforming power by virtue of his method and spirit, his immense patience, his keen observation, his modesty and allegiance to truth; no one has done so much to make science—that is to say, all inquiry into the traceable causes or relation of things—so attractive.
Nobody can value more than I do the significance for the general student of the splendid achievement of Darwin; but it was a splendid achievement for humanity at large because the age was ripe for the extension of the historical conception far beyond the boundaries of humanity proper…. If you can conceive Darwin’s knowledge of natural history, his investigations, and his marvelous induction that led to the principle of natural selection, with all its consequences, if, I say, you can conceive all this transferred to the last century, some properly informed naturalist might, no doubt, have been convinced; but the world at large could have found no place for the doctrine. It would have been to them only one oddity the more in nature, or rather in speculation. They would have called it Darwin’s paradox, and would have banished it into the realm of curiosities. It was coming into an historical age, that made Darwin’s book so great a prize, and the idea of natural selection so deeply suggestive to philosophy…. With the one exception of Newton’s “Principia,” no single book of empirical science has ever been of more importance to philosophy than this work of Darwin’s.
One of the noblest and yet humblest of the high priests of inductive science.
The name of Charles Darwin will ever be pre-eminent among the immortal coterie of commanding thinkers who have made the nineteenth century the most notable epoch in the history of scientific thought and attainment. The influence of his careful and patient research and the logical deductions which he gave mankind in his masterly volumes have changed, to a great extent, the current of a world’s thought. Not that Darwin alone accomplished this, for never was a king surrounded by more loyal knights than was this great man environed by giant thinkers who nobly fought for the thought he sought to establish, against the combined opposition of established religious and scholastic conservatism. But the important fact must not be overlooked that had it not been for the years of patient observation and research, which enabled Mr. Darwin tangibly to demonstrate the truth of many important contested questions, the splendid philosophical presentations of Spencer, the important labors of Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, and other scarcely less vigorous thinkers would have only been sufficient to arouse a fierce war, which even a century might not have settled in favor of the bold innovators. Hence Mr. Darwin will ever stand as the great apostle of evolutionary thought, vaguely foreshadowed by Buffon, St. Hilaire, and Erasmus Darwin, and boldly outlined by Lamarck.
In the first place, with regard to merely historical accuracy, it appears to me undesirable that naturalists should endeavor to hide certain parts of Darwin’s teaching, and give undue prominence to others. In the second place, it appears to me still more undesirable that this should be done—as it usually is done—for the purpose of making it appear that Darwin’s teaching did not really differ very much from that of Wallace and Weismann on the important points in question. I myself believe that Darwin’s judgment with regard to all these points will evidently prove more sound and accurate than that of any of the recent would-be improvers upon his system; but even apart from this opinion of my own, it is undesirable that Darwin’s views should be misrepresented, whether the misrepresentation be due to any unfavorable bias against one side of his teaching, or to sheer carelessness in the reading of books.
A great merit of his writings lies in the amount of his facts, and in the moderation with which he states them. But his results, though gaining acceptance, are still matter of dispute. There is little charm in his style; the charm lies in the originality and boldness of his theories, and the interest of his subject. He is probably the most eminent man of science of the century.
His educational history, his thoroughness, his scientific honesty, his logical power, his power of minute observation and broad generalization, the greatness of the problems with which he dealt, and the profound influence of his views upon the thought of the world, all conspire to make him a model, in the study of scientific method. Some of his views have been rejected, and many may be profoundly modified by more accurate knowledge, but these things will in no way affect the value of Darwin as a type of what education should accomplish, and how it must accomplish it.
The style of Darwin attempts no ornateness, and on the other hand it is not one of those extremely simple styles which are independent of ornament and to which ornament would be simply a defacement. But it is very clear; it is not in the least slovenly; and there is about it the indefinable sense that the writer might have been a much greater writer, simply as such, than he is, if he had cared to take the trouble, and had not been almost solely intent upon his matter. Such writers are not so common that they should be neglected, and they may at least stand in the Court of the Gentiles, the “provincial band” of literature.
A man who has effected a greater revolution in the opinions of mankind than anyone, at least since Newton, and whose name is likely to live with honor as long as the human race moves upon the planet.
The style of Darwin’s writing is remarkable for the absence of all affectation, of all attempt at epigram, literary allusion, or rhetoric. In this it is admirably suited to its subject. At the same time there is no sacrifice of clearness to brevity, nor are technical terms used in place of language. The greatest pains are obviously given by the author to enable his reader to thoroughly understand the matter in hand. Further, the reader is treated not only with this courtesy of full explanation, but with extreme fairness and modesty. Darwin never slurs over a difficulty nor minimizes over it. He states objections and awkward facts prominently, and without shirking proceeds to deal with them by citation or experiment or observation carried out by him for the purpose. His modesty towards his reader is a delightful characteristic. He simply desires to persuade you as one reasonable friend may persuade another. He never thrusts a conclusion nor even a step towards a conclusion upon you, by a demand for your confidence in him as an authority, or by an unfair weighting of the arguments which he balances, or by a juggle of word-play. The consequence is that though Darwin himself thought he had no literary ability, and labored over and rewrote his sentences, we have in his works a model of clear exposition of a great argument, and the most remarkable example of persuasive style in the English language—persuasive because of its transparent honesty and scrupulous moderation.
As a philosopher who regards evolutionism in some form as affording the most hopeful method of approaching the mystery of existence, I am inclined to hold that when historical perspective has cleared away the mole-hills we have made into mountains, it will be here that will be found Darwin’s most momentous and enduring service to knowledge and to mankind.
Darwin’s books owe comparatively little to the graces of style. He wrote slowly, and confesses to have found composition difficult. It was not therefore to the literary quality of his work, but to the interest attaching to the numberless observations of facts that he recorded, and the startling nature of the speculations to which they led him, that the extraordinary success of his books was due.
The greatest of Victorian natural philosophers…. He is one of the great artificers of human thought, a noble figure destined, in utter simplicity and abnegation of self, to perform one of the most stirring and inspiring acts ever carried out by a single intelligence, and to reawaken the sources of human enthusiasm. Darwin’s great suggestion, of life evolved by the process of natural selection, is so far-reaching in its effects as to cover not science only, but art and literature as well; and he had the genius to carry this suggested idea, past all objections and obstacles, up to the station of a biological system the most generally accepted of any put forth in recent times.
Darwin, though a specialist of genius, and a specialist on a great scale, was still, after all, a specialist. And he never claimed to bring the world a new cosmical philosophy; it was enough for him to introduce one new hypothesis, linking together all forms of life, and to see this hypothesis conquering mind after mind, until the whole civilized world seemed to bow to its discoverer. Darwin dealt with the evolution of species, Spencer has dealt with the evolution of the universe.
