Darwin

by Gamaliel Bradford

And tolerance, the mere recognition that others may be right and we wrong, even as to our most cherished theories, when it is enlightened by clearness of intelligence and warmed by sympathy, easily passes, as we have seen with Darwin in an earlier chapter, into that most delightful of all virtues, or more properly that root of all virtues, the power and the instinct of putting ourselves in others’ places, of entering into their lives. It is not quite enough to respect others’ opinions, or even to defer to them. One should go further, and endeavor to understand how they arrive at them, and to do this, one should be ever alive to the vast community of human nature, and the infinite threads and strands that bind together our hearts and the hearts of even those who appear most different from us. It is this power of comprehension, this effort at comprehension, of others’ point of view, which leads to the wonderful gentleness of tone that makes a great part of Darwin’s charm: ‘You are mistaken in thinking that I ever said you were wrong on any point. All that I meant was that on certain points, and these very doubtful points, I was inclined to differ from you.’[144] It is evident that in arguing, in discussing, Darwin always sought to understand his adversary’s position, and in order to do this, to put himself entirely in his adversary’s place.

The nature of science in itself tends to foster and encourage this disposition to enter into the lives of others, because by its abstract character and its larger aims and interests it inclines to reduce as much as possible the elements of self, and of self-interest and self-assertion. Indeed, here again it is curious to see how, when the pursuit of scientific truth rises to its highest intensity and white heat of ardor, it brings about a sort of self-abnegation, which approaches and suggests the mystical self-abandonment of Christian ecstasy. He shall leave all and follow me, says religion. And we have seen something of the same spirit in Darwin’s apparently colder declaration that the man of science should have neither wife nor child, but a heart of stone, and a brain altogether free for the vast, abstract researches which make the whole of his life.

There is indeed something almost religious in the passion with which the true scientist casts aside all personal considerations, often all considerations of comfort and ease and indolent enjoyment, in the absorbing effort to attain the pure truth which he is seeking. With what intensity of delight does one fling an old delusion behind him. As Darwin puts it: ‘To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.’[145] With what rapture does one become aware of the progress of scientific thought: ‘How grand is the onward rush of science; it is enough to console us for the many errors which we have committed, and for our efforts being overlaid and forgotten in the mass of new facts and new views which are daily turning up.’[146]

It is needless to say that thousands of others besides Darwin are infected with this rapture, and to quite the same or an even greater degree. In the dawn of scientific thought we have Lucretius, than whom none was ever more ardent, exulting in his passionate effort to dart the beams of intellectual day through the swirling, smothering mist of error and delusion. Or again, in our own time we have such excitement as is described by Pasteur, so nearly the correlative of Darwin in many ways, when he feels himself to be on the brink of discovery: ‘I was so happy that I was overcome by a nervous trembling that made it impossible for me to bring my vision again to the polarizing apparatus.’[147]

So the pursuit of pure truth, and the giving one’s life to the achievement of it, elevates, and clarifies, and chastens, almost like the pursuit of virtue, and the two tend even to merge in one another, as in Goethe’s noble saying: ‘The real love of truth shows itself in this, that one knows how to find and cherish the good everywhere.’ Or to conclude with another of Darwin’s sentences, all the more impressive for its simplicity and restraint: ‘For myself I would however, take higher ground, for I believe there exists, and I feel within me, an instinct for truth, or knowledge, or discovery, of something the same nature as the instinct of virtue and our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.’[148]

III

It seems to be of interest to consider one or two types of the scientific spirit in lines quite different from Darwin’s. There is Sainte-Beuve, to whom I have referred in earlier chapters. The great French critic was almost exactly contemporary with Darwin, being born in 1803 and dying in 1870. I do not discover that he ever mentions Darwin’s books, though he must have known something of them. In any case, he typifies admirably many of the scientific methods and qualities, the vast curiosity, the research, the labor, the patience, the passion for seeing all sides and allowing for all points of view. Only, he was concerned, not with plants and animals, not with the material, evolutionary world, but with the subtle phases and motives and passions and developments of the human spirit. He studied human life and character with endless curiosity and the results of his study are embodied in the forty volumes of portraits and in the seven solid volumes of the History of the Monastery of Port Royal, one of the most profound and searching investigations of religious psychology that has ever been made. Sainte-Beuve himself liked to compare his work with the researches of the more specific scientists. I have quoted earlier his brief statement: ‘I analyze, I herborize, I am a naturalist of souls.’[149] And elsewhere he puts it more elaborately, ‘It is absolutely as in botany for plants and in zoology for the species of animals. There is a moral natural history, with a method (as yet hardly developed), of the natural families of souls.’[150] And he loved to analyze souls of all sorts, good and bad, strong and weak, happy and unhappy, to analyze them and compare them and classify them, and bring out in them the profound common elements of human nature, under the endless play and diversity of the superficial differences.

It is peculiarly interesting to watch in Sainte-Beuve, as in Darwin, the working and the complication of the scientific spirit with the more personal elements. Sainte-Beuve made much more definite assertion than Darwin did, of sacrificing and effacing the personal life for scientific purposes. The Frenchman boasted that he mingled with all sorts of groups and associated himself with all sorts of causes and experiences, not from devotion to the things themselves, but from pure curiosity and from the passion for analyzing the working of these causes in human minds. He carried this so far that he was often accused of disloyalty to his friends and of espousing causes and then deserting them, and he himself handles the defense of the subjective attitude in such a way as to give some justification for the charge. His life, his thought, his work, were perfectly impersonal, he said, and in consequence he was epigrammatically branded with betraying all truths for the sake of truth.

On the other hand, it is very evident that some personal elements lingered about him much more than he thought or admitted. His early ambition, his undying ambition, was to be a poet. As a poet he failed, at least made no popular or conspicuous success. He saw the ardent contemporaries and close associates of his youth, Hugo, Lamartine, Balzac, Sand, Musset, making great popular reputations, while he was compelled to drag along in comparative shadow; and for all his boasted impersonality, this to a certain extent embittered him. The vast comprehension, the high intellectual impartiality, which distinguish him when he is dealing with the past, fail and shrink in a measure when he discusses contemporary work, and you cannot but feel that he is unconsciously hampered and tormented by a jealousy from which Darwin was wholly and nobly free.

But what marks Sainte-Beuve’s work most of all, as I have elsewhere emphasized, and what distinguishes him from Darwin and many other notable scientists, is the extraordinary concreteness of it. He had of course a vast background of general intellectual training and experience and of conversance with general thought and principles. But with this background always instinctively present, he devoted himself directly to the study of individuals. Only rarely does he deal in the discussion of theories of any sort, and then his handling is apt to be so complex and difficult that you feel him to be out of his element. What fascinates and absorbs him is the endless, close, minute, sympathetic study of individual men and women, and just because he is not hampered by theories, has no ends to attain nor points to prove, the study is endlessly varied, flexible, mobile, adaptable, and profoundly, inexhaustibly human. The incessant, fruitful application of scientific method has never been better exemplified than in Sainte-Beuve’s work.