Darwin

by Gamaliel Bradford

I

Independently of his actual scientific work and discoveries, Darwin is in so many respects one of the finest types of the scientific spirit, that it seems natural to conclude a study of him with a summary of the most important elements of that spirit, its admirable and broadly valuable qualities and its limitations, as illustrated in Darwin himself and in others as compared with him.

CHARLES DARWIN
About 1854

The basis and fundamental motive of the scientific spirit is simply and naturally curiosity, the endless and often merely wayward desire to know and to find out facts, of all sorts. When the mind begins to shake itself clear of the immediate, engrossing pressure of mere subsistence, its first impulse is to learn something about the surrounding universe and about itself. And this impulse is not solely for utility, for the immense practical advantage which such knowledge evidently brings with it. There is the instinct of occupation and distraction, the effort to escape ennui and idleness and to fill one’s thoughts with outward diversity that they may not be dragged and weighed down by one’s own particular cares and troubles. There is the instinct of emulation, the desire to excel others in knowledge, if one cannot in wealth, or in success of practical achievement.

These are the motives of the collector, and in a sense the scientist is a collector of facts, as others collect coins, or stamps, or china, or old furniture. The impelling motives of curiosity and excellence are much the same. There are people who gather and assort clippings from the newspapers, for the mere collecting instinct of it, gather them on all sorts of subjects, with the scientist’s obscure impulse to accumulate knowledge even if they do not use it.

We are too apt to associate science exclusively with the study of nature, and in this way the thought of the scientific spirit is altogether too much restricted. Its real field is as vast as that of human interests, and scientific methods and scientific purposes apply as much to philology, to history, to religion, to the general movements of human society, as to the curious consideration of animals and plants and stones and chemical elements.

But if mere curiosity is to become truly scientific, it must be broadened and deepened into research. That is, the simple collection of facts must be systematized by a definite object and method. The mere garnering of one fact and another here and there, though it often has its great and singular charm, is apt to degenerate into aimlessness and futility. It must be guided and solidified by the sense of working toward some particular conclusion which will give all the facts coherence and significance. In other words, the relation of the facts must be studied, as well as the facts themselves, they must be coördinated and subordinated, till their real depth of meaning is revealed. How nicely does Darwin indicate the proportionate connection between theory and observation in the following passage: ‘Let theory guide your observations, but till your reputation is well established, be sparing in publishing theory. It makes persons doubt your observations.’[127]

Two of the supreme elements of research are completeness and correctness. It is true that final completeness can rarely be obtained in this world, but the important thing is to aim at it, to leave no stone unturned, no nook unsearched, to gather every possible fact from every possible source, before one allows oneself to deduce positive conclusions, or conclusions that even approach positiveness. And besides the completeness, one should test one’s position from every aspect, to insure its being, so far as possible, correct. No one but the trained scientific thinker appreciates thoroughly the vast possibility of error, or is sufficiently aware how apt error is to intrude its subtle and treacherous working into the most careful investigations and the most logically buttressed theories. In one of his immensely suggestive casual phrases Darwin remarks, ‘The history of error is quite unimportant.’[128] This may be true enough as regards the abstract progress of science, but assuredly the history of error is of the highest interest to the curious student of the human mind.

But neither curiosity nor even the ardor of research will go very far, unless backed up by a habit of enormous and persistent industry. It is not the showy spurts that count, the bursts of application for a few weeks or months. It is the long, assiduous unbroken labor, such as thousands of scientists are giving in hundreds of laboratories, without prospect of distinction, without hope of immediate reward, simply from pure love of the work itself. And this toil is expended not only on the practical inventions, which are expected to produce comparatively quick and often astonishing commercial results, but on pure science, abstract investigation of speculative problems, which even if solved, will not change the practical conditions of life in the slightest degree. Although Darwin sometimes questioned the wisdom of spending so many years on his petty barnacles, he knew that the work was immensely valuable to him in the pure discipline of labor. At any rate it taught him a profound and sincere respect for those who were doing such work steadily, cheerfully, unendingly, without looking to anything else whatever: ‘He would never allow a depreciatory remark to pass unchallenged on the poorest class of scientific workers, provided that their work was honest, and good of its kind.’[129]

There are times when labor is attractive, when you feel like it and like nothing else, and are ready to plunge into it with a furious zeal. There are other times when you are dispirited and discouraged, when the labor seems worthless and the effort impossible, or when you have a sheer desire to drop it altogether and go play. Sir Walter Scott, one of the great workers of the world, tells us that if any one set him a task to do, even agreeable in itself, the result immediately was an unbounded desire to do something else. The real spirit of industry shows in sticking through these periods of discouragement and distraction, and the worker who accomplishes is he who does not heed them. It is one of the striking things about Darwin that he kept up work all his life in this spirit, in spite of all limitations and obstacles, and as a pure amateur in the best sense of the word. It is true that he himself points out what a benefit it was to him not to be professionally tied to any duties: ‘If I had any regular duties, like you and Hooker, I should do nothing in science.’[130] But it is also true that few men with plenty of money, with plenty of temptation to amusement of every sort, would have stuck to their chosen work with the ardor and also the long, persistent system, which Darwin kept up to the end.

For patience is as necessary to the true scientist as industry. When you think you are getting new facts, discoveries that will startle the world and perhaps affect the practical living of millions, there is a natural impulse to proclaim them, there is haste, eagerness, the desire for reward, for recognition, for material success. Or, there is the fear of anticipation, that some one else may be working on the same lines, and get in before you, and all your glory will be taken away. These considerations must be banished altogether. The slow, deliberate processes of nature must be accepted and awaited. If it takes years to develop the experiments that will, or that even may, lead to the desired results, then you must accept the years, unhurrying, unworrying, with the assurance that the work will be done in the end and that it makes no difference to the world or to the future, whether it is done by you or by another.

And with the patience goes caution, the determination not to state results until you have confirmed them, not to overstate or give them forms that are misleading. In practical life, the necessity of acting at once often makes caution a dangerous luxury, and those who hesitate and debate too long are apt to arrive too late or not at all. A certain amount of chance and hazard must be taken and accepted. But the beauty of these larger intellectual realms of scientific thought is that you can wait calmly till all doubt and error are eliminated. The lesson of moderation is hard to learn. The best and the most careful never feel that they have learned it thoroughly: ‘The subject has begun to interest me to an extraordinary degree,’ says Darwin; ‘but I must try not to fall into my common error of being too speculative. But a drunkard might as well say he would drink a little and not too much.’[131] And elsewhere, after years had weighted his work with the teachings of experience, he sums up what seems to him one of the supreme needs of science, if not the supreme need: ‘Forgive me for suggesting one caution; as Demosthenes said, “Action, action, action,” was the soul of eloquence, so is caution almost the soul of science.’[132]

Also, when you are testing so widely and carefully, and making sure of your foothold before every step you take, you come to realize the vast possibilities of different points of view. The one thing that the true scientist dreads is fixity, positiveness. Nature is forever mobile and flexible, and those who would follow nature and study her and interpret her must welcome and imitate her flexibility. They must be at all times ready to recognize the different aspects and phases of the same fact or group of facts, and willing to accept different conclusions with the changing and shifting light in which the facts are viewed. As Professor Whitehead puts it, admirably: ‘Science is even more changeable than theology. No man of science could subscribe without qualification to Galileo’s beliefs, or to Newton’s beliefs, or to all his own scientific beliefs of ten years ago.’[133] As I read in an excellent article in a field of scientific research very different from Darwin’s, that of philology and the emendation of classical texts: ‘In emending these passages we should adopt Pasteur’s method of investigation—exhaust every combination which it is possible for the mind of man to conceive.’[134]

This impartiality, this breadth of view, this readiness to consider, if not to accept, all conjectures and all theories, is comparatively easy, when one is indifferent. If the motive of one’s investigation is mere curiosity, and one has no doctrine to establish, no thesis to defend, open-mindedness is facile and natural. But the scientific man instinctively forms theories, and when once a theory is formed, there comes the human impulse to maintain it, and to consider only those arguments and even those facts that will bear one out. As we have seen, it is here almost more than anywhere that Darwin’s example is of abiding value. No man could be more attached to a theory than he was to his. Yet he was determined, so far as human nature is capable of it, to keep his mind open and not to let his preconceptions color his observation or his reasoning. Huxley’s statement of the matter is indisputably correct when he speaks of Darwin’s ‘sagacity, his untiring search after the knowledge of fact, his readiness always to give up a preconceived opinion to that which was demonstrably true.’[135] And Darwin, in another of his simple, striking phrases, condenses all that open-mindedness means, and the difficulty of it and the rarity (italics mine): ‘If you argue about the non-acceptance of Natural Selection, it seems to me a very striking fact that the Newtonian theory of gravitation, which seems to every one now so certain and plain, was rejected by a man so extraordinarily able as Leibnitz. The truth will not penetrate a preoccupied mind.’[136]

Finally, among these more impersonal elements of the scientific spirit, a high place should be accorded to the quality of being ready to admit one’s ignorance. In this age of universal ignorance, most people who think are more or less aware of their deficiency, but as we are naturally more appreciative of our own lack than of that of others, the first impulse is a desperate effort to conceal it. Perhaps of all states of mind one of the most hostile to the scientific spirit and most incompatible with it, is pedantry, and one of the most essential elements of pedantry is precisely this disposition to conceal one’s ignorance, to make the most determined attempt to hide from others the fact that we are as helpless and as groping and as uncertain as they are. This is apt to be the vice of the teaching profession, though so many teachers are gloriously exempt from it. The pedagogue is inclined to think, I believe quite wrongly, that if he once lets his scholars see that there is anything he does not know, they will lose confidence in him forever, whereas nothing establishes their confidence so much as to appreciate his willingness to enter into their difficulties and to admit that the difficulties are human and his own.

At any rate, the true man of science begins by admitting the vastness of the regions that he has not entered and can never enter, the illimitable fields of knowledge that he has not the time or the training to explore. And no man was ever more notable in this admission than Darwin. There is the general recognition of the limits of human knowledge and human capacity for knowledge: ‘The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man’s ignorance.’[137] There is the recognition of the hardening of the mental arteries, so to speak, by which our flexibility is so greatly impaired and against which we cannot guard enough: ‘nearly all men past a moderate age, either in actual years or in mind, are, I am fully convinced, incapable of looking at facts under a new point of view.’[138] Further, there is not only the sense of general intellectual impotence, but the admission that, even in one’s own special line, there is much that one must necessarily miss, much that must, if not invalidate one’s conclusions, at least render them dubious and incline one to the extremest modesty in asserting them. No doubt the peculiar nature of Darwin’s work, which obliged him to touch upon all sorts of very different scientific fields, accentuated this modesty of attitude, but no one can question that it was inborn: ‘There are so many valid and weighty arguments against my notions, that you, or any one, if you wish, on the other side, will easily persuade yourself that I am wholly in error, and no doubt I am in part in error, perhaps wholly so, though I cannot see the blindness of my ways.’[139] When one goes after the truth in that spirit, one is much more likely to find it, and at any rate to teach the world valuable lessons, whether one finds it or not.