Darwin

by Gamaliel Bradford

V

This humility and feeling of his own incompetence made Darwin keenly alive to the difficulties connected with his great undertaking and gave him such a clear sense of them that at times he felt incapable of solving them at all. As he says in the sixth chapter of the ‘Origin’: ‘Long before the reader has arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to him. Some of them are so serious that to this day I can hardly reflect on them without being in some degree staggered.’[283]

Take one of the most striking, if not the most crucial difficulties, one which puzzled and perplexed Darwin from the first and was made a fruitful text for criticism by his adversaries, the development of the eye. Was it to be supposed that so delicate, so complex, and so highly adapted an organ could be produced by mere accidental variation working through inheritance and the gradual survival of the fittest? And Darwin investigated and compared and reflected, until he was ready to state his position thus: ‘Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.’[284]

Sometimes the difficulties appear in themselves insignificant, yet their bearing is such as to make them of extreme importance. For example, how the useful institution of neuter insects could be developed by inheritance was a terrible problem. It ‘at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to the whole theory.’[285] Study and observation wear it away; yet it is disposed of with the candid remark: ‘I must confess, that, with all my faith in natural selection, I should never have anticipated that this principle could have been efficient in so high a degree, had not the case of these neuter insects led me to this conclusion.’[286] Or there is the coloring of the peacock’s tail, which has to be explained by extreme wrestlings of logical ingenuity. And again, as compared with these seemingly petty obstacles, there are the great questions involved in the essential tissue of the theory itself. There are the gaps, the breaks, the missing links, not only between man and his simian ancestors, but completing all the gradations between all the existing forms of development. Many and many an hour, and one may say, many a year of anxious thought did Darwin bestow on this point. He could meet it only with such eager comment as he makes after his prolonged study of the orchids: ‘In the comparatively few orchids described in this volume, so many and such plainly-marked gradations in the structure of the rostellum have been described, ... that we may well believe, if we could see every orchid which has ever existed throughout the world, we should find all the gaps in the existing chain, and every gap in many lost chains, filled up by a series of easy transitions.’[287] And there were such vast problems as sexual selection and pangenesis, which we discussed in a previous chapter, and there was even the central element of natural selection itself, which in darker moments seemed but a weak agency for sustaining the whole world: ‘If I think continuously on some half-dozen structures of which we can at present see no use, I can persuade myself that natural selection is of quite subordinate importance.’[288]

The interesting aspect of this matter of difficulty, as with other things, is Darwin’s way of meeting and facing it. There was an excitement, a stimulus, undoubtedly, a joy in attacking tough problems and conquering them. But there was also a pervading consciousness of what the difficulties were, and some have even thought an almost too pervading disposition to go out of one’s way to deal with them. As Huxley puts it: One ‘who desires to attack Mr. Darwin has only to read his works with a desire to observe not their merits but their defects, and he will find ready to hand more adverse suggestions than are likely ever to have suggested themselves to his own sharpness, without Mr. Darwin’s self-denying aid.’[289]

And there is always the appreciation, in handling the difficulties, of the danger in over-ingenuity, of the subtle possibilities of betrayal by reason ever toiling with intense ardor to arrive at its preconceived ends. ‘God knows I have never shirked a difficulty,’ said Darwin.[290] But the danger lies not only in shirking, but in the dissolving, transforming power of prejudice and enthusiasm. Here again Darwin tried to be ever on his guard: ‘I am fairly rabid on the question, and therefore, if not wrong already, am pretty sure to become so.’[291] He would not be misled, or fooled, or betrayed: ‘As I read on, I felt not a little dumbfounded, and thought to myself that whenever I came to this subject I should have to be savage against myself.’[292]

But you can never be sure that you have been savage enough, and there are moments when unexpected obstacles make you mistrust your theory, mistrust your method, mistrust your reasoning power. ‘If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory.’[293] And who knows that it cannot be proved? After months of study, a clear statement of opposing facts seems for the moment to demolish everything. ‘You give all the facts so clearly and fully, that it is impossible to help speculating on the subject; but it drives me to despair, for I cannot gulp down your continent; and not to be able to do so gives, in my eyes, the multiple creationists an awful triumph.’[294] And with his extraordinary gift of direct self-revelation, Darwin sums up the state of mind in one vivid sentence: ‘Your letter actually turned me sick with panic.’[295]

Thus there are times of discouragement and disgust. One gets to feel that one has utterly overestimated one’s work and one’s powers. One concocts ‘pleasant little stinging remarks for reviews, such as “Mr. Darwin’s head seems to have been turned by a certain degree of success, and he thinks that the most trifling observations are worth publication.”’[296] One concludes that all the years of vast labor have been given to no valid result and that one had better have cultivated one’s cabbages with health and quietness: ‘At present I feel sick of everything, and if I could occupy my time and forget my daily discomforts, or rather miseries, I would never publish another word.’[297] Such periods of depression in Darwin are peculiarly interesting, because he was by no means of a melancholy temperament, nor, in spite of his nervous weakness, was he inclined to a fretful or morbid pessimism. Yet, even with all his courage and all his patience, with all his past labor and all his victory, there were moments toward the end when the grave seemed inviting for its mere vastness of repose, without any definite prospect of anything further: ‘I am rather despondent about myself, and my troubles are of an exactly opposite nature to yours, for idleness is downright misery to me, as I find here, as I cannot forget my discomfort for an hour. I have not the heart or strength at my age to begin any investigation lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy; and I have no little jobs which I can do. So I must look forward to Down graveyard as the sweetest place on earth.’[372]