Huxley refers to this review as “the only review I ever have had qualms of conscience about, on the grounds of needless savagery.” Darwin more mildly described it as “rather hard on the poor author.” Indeed, he confessed to a certain sympathy with the Vestiges; while Wallace, in 1845, expressed a very favourable opinion of the book, describing it as “an ingenious hypothesis, strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies.”
The strongest testimony to the value of Chambers’s work is that of Mr. A. W. Benn, who writes in Modern England, 1908, concerning the Vestiges:—
Hardly any advance has since been made on Chambers’s general arguments, which at the time they appeared would have been accepted as convincing, but for theological truculence and scientific timidity. And Chambers himself only gave unity to thoughts already in wide circulation.... Chambers was not a scientific expert, nor altogether an original thinker; but he had studied scientific literature to better purpose than any professor.... The considerations that now recommend evolution to popular audiences are no other than those urged in the Vestiges.
Herbert Spencer.
The next great name among the pre-Darwinian evolutionists is that of Herbert Spencer. About 1850 he wrote:—
The belief in organic evolution had taken deep root (in my mind), and drawn to itself a large amount of evidence—evidence not derived from numerous special instances, but derived from the general aspects of organic nature and from the necessity of accepting the hypothesis of evolution when the hypothesis of special creation had been rejected. The special creation belief had dropped out of my mind many years before, and I could not remain in a suspended state: acceptance of the only possible alternative was imperative.[[41]]
[41]. Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, 1898, II., 317.
This suspended state, the tätige Skepsis of Goethe, was just what Huxley was enjoying; in his own words, “Reversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I usually defended the tenability of received doctrines, when I had to do with the transmutationists; and stood up for the possibility of transmutation among the orthodox.”
Thus, up to the date of the publication of the Origin of Species, scientific opinion was roughly divided into two opposing camps: on one side were the classic, orthodox, catastrophic, or creationist party, who believed in the fixity of species, and that each species was the result of special miraculous creation; on the other, the evolutionists or transmutationists, who rejected special creation, and held that all species were derived from other species, by some unknown law.
It was the formulation of this unknown law that makes 1859 an epoch in the history of Anthropology.