If I have succeeded in furthering, in some degree, by these anthropological works, the solution of the great problem of Man's place in nature, and particularly in helping to trace the definite stages in our ancestral series, I owe the success, not merely to the vast progress that biology has made in the last half century, but largely to the luminous example of the great investigators who have applied themselves to the problem, with so much assiduity and genius, for a century and a quarter—I mean Goethe and Lamarck, Gegenbaur and Huxley, but, above all, Charles Darwin. It was the great genius of Darwin that first brought together that symmetrical temple of scientific knowledge, the theory of descent. It was Darwin who put the crown on the edifice by his theory of natural selection. Not until this broad inductive law was firmly established was it possible to vindicate the special conclusion, the descent of man from a series of other Vertebrates. By his illuminating discovery Darwin did more for anthropology than thousands of those writers, who are more specifically titled anthropologists, have done by their technical treatises. We may, indeed, say that it is not merely as an exact observer and ingenious experimenter, but as a distinguished anthropologist and far-seeing thinker, that Darwin takes his place among the greatest men of science of the nineteenth century.
To appreciate fully the immortal merit of Darwin in connection with anthropology, we must remember that not only did his chief work, The Origin of Species, which opened up a new era in natural history in 1859, sustain the most virulent and widespread opposition for a lengthy period, but even thirty years later, when its principles were generally recognised and adopted, the application of them to man was energetically contested by many high scientific authorities. Even Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered the principle of natural selection independently in 1858, did not concede that it was applicable to the higher mental and moral qualities of man. Dr. Wallace still holds a spiritualist and dualist view of the nature of man, contending that he is composed of a material frame (descended from the apes) and an immortal immaterial soul (infused by a higher power). This dual conception, moreover, is still predominant in the wide circles of modern theology and metaphysics, and has the general and influential adherence of the more conservative classes of society.
In strict contradiction to this mystical dualism, which is generally connected with teleology and vitalism, Darwin always maintained the complete unity of human nature, and showed convincingly that the psychological side of man was developed, in the same way as the body, from the less advanced soul of the anthropoid ape, and, at a still more remote period, from the cerebral functions of the older vertebrates. The eighth chapter of the Origin of Species, which is devoted to instinct, contains weighty evidence that the instincts of animals are subject, like all other vital processes, to the general laws of historic development. The special instincts of particular species were formed by adaptation, and the modifications thus acquired were handed on to posterity by heredity; in their formation and preservation natural selection plays the same part as in the transformation of every other physiological function. The higher moral qualities of civilised man have been derived from the lower mental functions of the uncultivated barbarians and savages, and these in turn from the social instincts of the mammals. This natural and monistic psychology of Darwin's was afterwards more fully developed by his friend George Romanes in his excellent works Mental Evolution in Animals and Mental Evolution in Man.[150]
Many valuable and most interesting contributions to this monistic psychology of man were made by Darwin in his fine work on The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, and again in his supplementary work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. To understand the historical development of Darwin's anthropology one must read his life and the introduction to The Descent of Man. From the moment that he was convinced of the truth of the principle of descent—that is to say, from his thirtieth year, in 1838—he recognised clearly that man could not be excluded from its range. He recognised as a logical necessity the important conclusion that "man is the co-descendant with other species of some ancient, lower, and extinct form." For many years he gathered notes and arguments in support of this thesis, and for the purpose of showing the probable line of man's ancestry. But in the first edition of The Origin of Species (1859) he restricted himself to the single line, that by this work "light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history." In the fifty years that have elapsed since that time the science of the origin and nature of man has made astonishing progress, and we are now fairly agreed in a monistic conception of nature that regards the whole universe, including man, as a wonderful unity, governed by unalterable and eternal laws. In my philosophical book Die Welträtsel (1899)[151] and in the supplementary volume Die Lebenswunder (1904)[152] I have endeavoured to show that this pure monism is securely established, and that the admission of the all-powerful rule of the same principle of evolution throughout the universe compels us to formulate a single supreme law—the all-embracing "Law of Substance," or the united laws of the constancy of matter and the conservation of energy. We should never have reached this supreme general conception if Charles Darwin—a "monistic philosopher" in the true sense of the word—had not prepared the way by his theory of descent by natural selection, and crowned the great work of his life by the association of this theory with a naturalistic anthropology.
FOOTNOTES:
[127] Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, 2 vols., Berlin, 1866.
[128] Eng. transl.; The History of Creation, London, 1876.
[129] London, 1908.
[130] Munich, 1884.
[131] Die Mutationstheorie, Leipzig, 1903.