On the following page Mr. Darwin says:—“Although I am fully” (why “fully”?) “convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists,” &c. I have not quoted the whole of Mr. Darwin’s sentence, but it implies that any experienced naturalist who remained unconvinced was an old-fashioned, prejudiced person. I confess that this is what I rather feel about the experienced naturalists who differ in only too great numbers from myself, but I did not expect to find so much of the old Adam remaining in Mr. Darwin; I did not expect to find him support me in the belief that naturalists are made of much the same stuff as other people, and, if they are wise, will look upon new theories with distrust until they find them becoming generally accepted. I am not sure that Mr. Darwin is not just a little bit flippant here.
Sometimes I ask myself whether it is possible that, not being convinced, I may be an experienced naturalist after all; at other times, when I read Mr. Darwin’s works and those of his eulogists, I wonder whether there is not some other Mr. Darwin, some other “Origin of Species,” some other Professors Huxley, Tyndal, and Ray Lankester, and whether in each case some malicious fiend has not palmed off a counterfeit upon me that differs toto cælo from the original. I felt exactly the same when I read Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister”; I could not believe my eyes, which nevertheless told me that the dull diseased trash I was so toilsomely reading was a work which was commonly held to be one of the great literary masterpieces of the world. It seemed to me that there must be some other Goethe and some other Wilhelm Meister. Indeed I find myself so depressingly out of harmony with the prevailing not opinion only, but spirit—if, indeed, the Huxleys, Tyndals, Miss Buckleys, Ray Lankesters, and Romaneses express the prevailing spirit as accurately as they appear to do—that at times I find it difficult to believe I am not the victim of hallucination; nevertheless I know that either every canon, whether of criticism or honourable conduct, which I have learned to respect is an impudent swindle, suitable for the cloister only, and having no force or application in the outside world; or else that Mr. Darwin and his supporters are misleading the public to the full as much as the theologians of whom they speak at times so disapprovingly. They sin, moreover, with incomparably less excuse. Right as they doubtless are in much, and much as we doubtless owe them (so we owe much also to the theologians, and they also are right in much), they are giving way to a temper which cannot be indulged with impunity. I know the great power of academicism; I know how instinctively academicism everywhere must range itself on Mr. Darwin’s side, and how askance it must look on those who write as I do; but I know also that there is a power before which even academicism must bow, and to this power I look not unhopefully for support.
As regards Mr. Spencer’s contention that Mr. Darwin leaned more towards function as he grew older, I do not doubt that at the end of his life Mr. Darwin believed modification to be mainly due to function, but the passage quoted on page 62 written in 1839, coupled with the concluding paragraph of the “Origin of Species” written in 1859, and allowed to stand during seventeen years of revision, though so much else was altered—these passages, when their dates and surroundings are considered, suggest strongly that Mr. Darwin thought during all the forty years or so thus covered exactly as his grandfather and Lamarck had done, and indeed as all sensible people since Buffon wrote have done if they have accepted evolution at all.
Then why should he not have said so? What object could he have in writing an elaborate work to support a theory which he knew all the time to be untenable? The impropriety of such a course, unless the work was, like Buffon’s, transparently ironical, could only be matched by its fatuousness, or indeed by the folly of one who should assign action so motiveless to any one out of a lunatic asylum.
This sounds well, but unfortunately we cannot forget that when Mr. Darwin wrote the “Origin of Species” he claimed to be the originator of the theory of descent with modification generally; that he did this without one word of reference either to Buffon or Erasmus Darwin until the first six thousand copies of his book had been sold, and then with as meagre, inadequate notice as can be well conceived. Lamarck was just named in the first editions of the “Origin of Species,” but only to be told that Mr. Darwin had not got anything to give him, and he must go away; the author of the “Vestiges of Creation” was also just mentioned, but only in a sentence full of such gross misrepresentation that Mr. Darwin did not venture to stand by it, and expunged it in later editions, as usual, without calling attention to what he had done. It would have been in the highest degree imprudent, not to say impossible, for one so conscientious as Mr. Darwin to have taken the line he took in respect of descent with modification generally, if he were not provided with some ostensibly distinctive feature, in virtue of which, if people said anything, he might claim to have advanced something different, and widely different, from the theory of evolution propounded by his illustrious predecessors; a distinctive theory of some sort, therefore, had got to be looked for—and if people look in this spirit they can generally find.
I imagine that Mr. Darwin, casting about for a substantial difference, and being unable to find one, committed the Gladstonian blunder of mistaking an unsubstantial for a substantial one. It was doubtless because he suspected it that he never took us fully into his confidence, nor in all probability allowed even to himself how deeply he distrusted it. Much, however, as he disliked the accumulation of accidental variations, he disliked not claiming the theory of descent with modification still more; and if he was to claim this, accidental his variations had got to be. Accidental they accordingly were, but in as obscure and perfunctory a fashion as Mr. Darwin could make them consistently with their being to hand as accidental variations should later developments make this convenient. Under these circumstances it was hardly to be expected that Mr. Darwin should help the reader to follow the workings of his mind—nor, again, that a book the writer of which was hampered as I have supposed should prove clear and easy reading.
The attitude of Mr. Darwin’s mind, whatever it may have been in regard to the theory of descent with modification generally, goes so far to explain his attitude in respect to the theory of natural selection (which, it cannot be too often repeated, is only one of the conditions of existence advanced as the main means of modification by the earlier evolutionists), that it is worth while to settle the question once for all whether Mr. Darwin did or did not believe himself justified in claiming the theory of descent as an original discovery of his own. This will be a task of some little length, and may perhaps try the reader’s patience, as it assuredly tried mine; if, however, he will read the two following chapters, he will probably be able to make up his mind upon much that will otherwise, if he thinks about it at all, continue to puzzle him.
Chapter XIII
Darwin’s Claim to Descent with Modification
Mr. Allen, in his “Charles Darwin,” [168a] says that “in the public mind Mr. Darwin is commonly regarded as the discoverer and founder of the evolution hypothesis,” and on p. 177 he says that to most men Darwinism and evolution mean one and the same thing. Mr. Allen declares misconception on this matter to be “so extremely general” as to be “almost universal;” this is more true than creditable to Mr. Darwin.
Mr. Allen says [168b] that though Mr. Darwin gained “far wider general acceptance” for both the doctrine of descent in general, and for that of the descent of man from a simious or semi-simious ancestor in particular, “he laid no sort of claim to originality or proprietorship in either theory.” This is not the case. No one can claim a theory more frequently and more effectually than Mr. Darwin claimed descent with modification, nor, as I have already said, is it likely that the misconception of which Mr. Allen complains would be general, if he had not so claimed it. The “Origin of Species” begins:—