IV
It will be profitable to consider more in detail some specific elements of Darwin’s reasoning. In the first place, we have seen everywhere and in all connections that his propensity to eager theorizing was tempered with an unfailing sense of doubt and mistrust. He was indeed always disposed to act in the spirit of Weisman’s remark: ‘When we are confronted with facts which we see no possibility of understanding save on a single hypothesis, even though it be an undemonstratable one, we are naturally led to accept the hypothesis, at least until a better one can be found.’[371] And he recognized fully the force of the comment which Huxley makes on a phrase of Goethe, to the effect that doubt must not be blighting or destructive, but fruitful and stimulating: ‘Goethe has an excellent aphorism defining that state of mind which he calls “Thätige Skepsis”—active doubt. It is doubt which so loves truth that it neither dares rest in doubting nor extinguish itself by unjustified belief.’[64] At the same time, the doubt was there, was temperamental, and could not be altogether extinguished, even when the rush of the logical impetus was fullest. One beautiful expression of it among many is, ‘When you say you cannot master the train of thoughts, I know well enough that they are too doubtful and obscure to be mastered. I have often experienced what you call the humiliating feeling of getting more and more involved in doubt the more one thinks of the facts and reasoning on doubtful points.’[65] The truth is, that Darwin had in a high degree the quality, often so hampering to the man of practical action, but invaluable to the thinker, of getting outside of himself and his own point of view and criticizing it as if it were the standpoint of some one else. He himself indicates this forcibly in connection with returning to one’s ideas after an interval: ‘The delay in this case, as with all my other books, has been a great advantage to me; for a man after a long interval can criticize his own work, almost as well as if it were that of another person.’[66] Some men can.
Another characteristic of Darwin’s mental processes is his way of meeting difficulties. The born reasoner is apt to slur over obstacles and objections, to devote himself with endless ingenuity to eliminating them rather than facing them squarely. Darwin was ingenious enough, but he did not dodge difficulties. Instead of doing so, his propensity was, if anything, to make them and seek them. It was said of Pasteur, so like Darwin in many points: ‘No adversary of M. Pasteur had formulated this argument; but M. Pasteur, who had within himself an ever-present adversary, always on the watch and determined to yield only to the force of accumulated evidence, himself raised the objection.’[67] So Darwin. As he himself records, and no thinker ever laid down a more significant principle or one more revealing for his own mental constitution: ‘I had, also, during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones.’[68] And the intense consciousness of objections and difficulties appears even more vividly in the sentence: ‘I cannot too strongly express my conviction of the general truth of my doctrines, and God knows I have never shirked a difficulty.’[69]
The recognition of obstacles and complications constantly popping up from everywhere naturally necessitated endless revision and recasting. Here again, the habitual reasoner, having once set his mould is reluctant to alter it. Not so Darwin. There are indeed times when even he rebels and declares that it will be more fruitful to follow new paths than to be perpetually adjusting the old. But in general his readiness to alter and reconstruct is unlimited. He revises and works over his books. In doing so he showed his characteristic disposition to accept and defer to the judgment of others. How charming is his daughter’s account of this: ‘He was always so ready to be convinced that any suggested alteration was an improvement, and so full of gratitude for the trouble taken. I do not think that he ever used to forget to tell me what improvement he thought that I had made, and he used almost to excuse himself if he did not agree with any correction. I think I felt the singular modesty and graciousness of his nature through thus working for him in a way I never should otherwise have done.’[70] There is no better way to appreciate the extent and the persistence of Darwin’s revision than to make even a cursory comparison of the first and the last editions of the ‘Origin.’ Almost every page shows minor or considerable changes, and while some are no doubt mere matters of language, many have a bearing, however slight, on the trend of the reasoning, deepening, or strengthening, or clarifying it.
It is profitable also to watch Darwin’s attitude towards argument, the direct interchange of view by those who take different sides of a case and are at once eager to advance their own and to detect the flaws in their opponent’s. It is very evident that he was not a quick and natural arguer, as was Huxley, for instance. His son says: ‘He used to say of himself that he was not quick enough to hold an argument with any one, and I think this was true. Unless it was a subject on which he was just then at work, he could not get the train of argument into working order quickly enough.’[71] And Darwin confesses the same thing with his unfailing, charming naïveté, in a letter to Hooker: ‘I am astonished at your success and audacity. It is something unintelligible to me how any one can argue in public like orators do. I had no idea you had this power.’[72]
Arguments haunted him, agitated him, disturbed him. Active discussion was apt to be followed by a broken night, filled with the things that might and should have been said and were not. Even of a conversation quite remote from his scientific interest he says: ‘Your slave discussion disturbed me much; but as you would care no more for my opinion on this head than for the ashes of this letter, I will say nothing except that it gave me some sleepless, most uncomfortable hours.’[73]
The gift I have before suggested, of getting outside of your own position and judging it as another would, while it benefits the results of argument, is most hampering in the process, since one finds oneself stating one’s adversary’s case sometimes more forcibly than he does himself. Darwin often repeats the principle I have quoted earlier, of recognizing and recording objections, and he sums up his method in regard to his main theory: ‘I have for some time determined to give the arguments on both sides (as far as I could) instead of arguing on the mutability side alone.’[74]
Yet in spite of all the strain and effort of argument, he liked it and believed in it. In the concluding chapter of the ‘Origin’ he says: ‘This whole volume is one long argument.’[75] It certainly is. Elsewhere he says of a personal conversation: ‘I was particularly glad of our discussion after dinner; fighting a battle with you always clears my mind wonderfully.’[76] To get the mind clear, to illuminate and elucidate the complicated tangles of thought and theory, that was always the object, and if verbal battles helped it on, they were welcome.
But if he liked sincere, earnest argument, he detested controversy, the bitter war of excited personal feelings bent rather on achieving an individual triumph than on proving an abstract theory. He condemned and deplored the injury to science inevitably wrought by such disputes and had nothing but disgust for the manifestations of temper that were bound to accompany them: ‘I went the other evening to the Zoölogical Society, where the speakers were snarling at each other in a manner anything but like that of gentlemen.’[77]
When his own views were involved in bitterness, as, alas, they too often were, he expressed the keenest regret: ‘I often think that my friends ... have good cause to hate me, for having stirred up so much mud, and led them into so much odious trouble. If I had been a friend of myself, I should have hated me.’[78] He early made up his mind to keep out of quarrels if possible, and he congratulated himself on the whole on his success: ‘I rejoice that I have avoided controversies, and this I owe to Lyell, who many years ago, in reference to my geological works, strongly advised me never to get entangled in a controversy, as it rarely did any good and caused a miserable loss of time and temper.’[79]
Thus, whenever it was possible, he shunned dispute, and if, by any chance, haste and eagerness involved him in a mistaken cause, he bitterly regretted his blunder and was ready to acknowledge it with the utmost frankness. One of the most striking cases of this is that of the parallel roads of Glen Roy, as to which Darwin had developed a geological theory which he asserted with a good deal of conviction. A careful consideration of his opponent’s arguments, obliged him to recognize that he was completely in the wrong, and he gave up, though with a pang: ‘I am very poorly to-day, and very stupid, and hate everybody and everything. One lives only to make blunders.’[80] His acknowledgment of his error was ample and complete.
It was his natural frankness in admitting his mistakes and endeavoring to rectify them which made Darwin so attractive and engaging. Goethe complains of the disposition of many people to reiterate a misstatement because they have once made it.[81] Such reiteration did not appeal to Darwin in the least. Sometimes he was irritated and annoyed by the attitude of his adversaries, and he expressed the annoyance with the same outspokenness that he gave to other things; but there was never any attempt to conceal his blunders or to maintain his own positions simply because they were his.
Indeed, in this regard, as in all others, what distinguished him was a singular and charming candor. It is this which makes his letters so attractive and so revealing. They are not great literary letters. They are always written in haphazard fashion and with the utmost casual directness. But few correspondences of literary men or of any others reveal the man with such clear and winning amplitude. He opens his heart and leads you right into it without the least pretence of self-revelation, but simply as if he were thinking aloud to you, as he is. Take, for instance, among a bewildering mass of illustrations, his confession of the sense of inferiority in regard to Spencer: ‘I feel rather mean when I read him: I could bear, rather enjoy feeling that he was twice as ingenious and clever as myself, but when I feel that he is about a dozen times my superior, even in the master art of wriggling, I feel aggrieved.’[82] Or this other acknowledgment to Hooker: ‘How candidly and meekly you took my Jeremiad on your severity to second-class men. After I had sent it off, an ugly little voice asked me, once or twice, how much of my noble defence of the poor in spirit and in fact, was owing to your having not seldom smashed favorite notions of my own. I silenced the ugly little voice with contempt, but it would whisper again and again.’[83] The sense, the atmosphere, of a pervading candor, was what Huxley expressed so excellently when he spoke of Darwin’s having ‘a certain intense and almost passionate honesty by which all his thoughts and actions were irradiated, as by a central fire. It was this greatest and rarest of endowments which kept his vivid imagination and great speculative powers within due bounds ... which made him accept criticisms and suggestions from anybody and everybody, not only without impatience, but with expressions of gratitude sometimes almost comically in excess of their value.’[84]
For the honesty and the candor not only led him to admit his own mistakes, but made him singularly ready to recognize the merits of others, and to tolerate not only their views but even their dogmatic assertion of them. He made mistakes all the time, and yet he knew that he was sincere and lofty in purpose. Why should not others be the same? Why should not their theories be right and his wrong? ‘It matters very little to any one except myself, whether I am a little more or less wrong on this or that point; in fact, I am sure to be proved wrong on many points.’[85] Of one who did not agree with him he could say: ‘I know nothing of him excepting from his letters: these show remarkable talent, astonishing perseverance, much modesty, and what I admire, determined difference from me on many points.’[86] And how winning is his defense of blunderers, of those who do poor work which is not all poor: ‘Shall you think me very impudent if I tell you that I have sometimes thought that ... you are a little too hard on bad observers; that a remark made by a bad observer cannot be right; an observer who deserves to be damned you would utterly damn. I feel entire deference to any remark you make out of your own head; but when in opposition to some poor devil, I somehow involuntarily feel not quite so much.’[87]
The truth is, that Darwin’s tolerance was based, as all real tolerance is apt to be, on the vast and haunting sense of his own ignorance. Again and again he repeats and emphasizes how little he knows, how little any one knows, and how petty, imperfect, and inadequate are the efforts of any and all of us to penetrate the veil of shrouding mystery which involves the deepest secrets of life. To probe this mystery the vague and flickering torch of reason is all that is given to us. And those who are most conversant with reason and make most use of it mistrust it most. When the far surer guidance of instinct fails us, reason is our only support, and we must employ it not only for the larger speculative purposes, but for the practical decisions. At its best, it is a bright and splendid instrument, incredibly keen and penetrating, and able to accomplish miracles in the hands of those who manipulate it skillfully. But it is an instrument as delicate as it is bright, and it loses point and edge, unless constant pains are taken to keep it in working condition. Also, it cuts both ways, and every way, and to even the expert manipulator, perhaps to him most of all, it is apt to be difficult, dangerous, treacherous.
There is the subtle, unfathomable connection of reason with our wishes, desires, and prejudices. A clever Frenchman said that reason was given us to enable us to justify the gratification of our passions, and when we see how the devices of logic may be used to work from any premises to any conclusion, one feels the force of the Frenchman’s view.
No one was more aware than Darwin of these dangers and difficulties of reason, or of the endless possibilities of deception when one gives oneself up to that enchanting and deluding siren. He often emphasizes his distress and almost despair at finding himself making deductions quite different from those which others draw from the same facts. ‘It is really disgusting and humiliating to see directly opposite conclusions drawn from the same facts.’[88] And again: ‘Nothing is so vexatious to me, as so constantly finding myself drawing different conclusions from better judges than myself, from the same facts.’[89] And yet again: ‘I hate beyond all things finding myself in disagreement with any capable judge, when the premises are the same.’[90]
These comments make us see clearly what Darwin’s relation to reason was. Few thinkers have been so ready, so fertile, so abundant, so ingenious, yet at the same time so sober, so restrained and controlled.
With this analysis of his observation and his thought we are ready to take up the supreme interest of Darwin’s life, the dramatic study of the conception, elaboration, promulgation, and triumph of his evolutionary theory.