Madame Clémence Augustine Royer was born at Nantes, France, April 21, 1830, of an old Catholic family. When she reached a suitable age she was sent to school at the Sacré Cœur, where she received the most of her education. Very shortly after coming out of the convent she abandoned the religious doctrines they had tried to inculcate in her there, and, like so many young persons, was attracted to poetry. But her literary efforts as a whole received very little attention, and she would never have been successful if she had only teased the Muse. Happily, she applied herself, about 1850, to more serious studies, and went to England, where she spent several years and acquired a thorough knowledge of the language of Shakespeare. She removed thence to Switzerland, and there found her definite vocation. The natural sciences, philosophy, and political economy from that time engaged her attention.
The opening of Madame Royer's course of lectures to women on logic at Lausanne in the winter of 1859 and 1860 attracted much notice. The first lecture was published under the title of an Introduction to Philosophy, and brought most flattering praise to the author from contemporary students. In an animated style the disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the apostle of bold and ingenious ideas, was already beginning to declare herself. In the meantime she collaborated on the journal The New Economist, which the historian and sociologist Pascal Duprat had just founded.[41]
At the close of 1860, the Canton of Vaud having opened a competition on the Principles of Taxation, "the little lady with a straw hat," as her neighbors familiarly called her, handled the subject so thoroughly that her memoir, entitled Théorie de l'Impôt et Dime sociale (Theory of the Impost and Social Tithe, 1862), won her the honor of dividing the prize with Proudhon. While not all the ideas set forth in this work were new, she took care at least to co-ordinate the systems of her predecessors, to select from the one and the other of them what was good in them, and to condense into a homogeneous whole works which were scattered hither and thither. But we will pass over these books of her youth to dwell more at large on that part of her work which will assure Madame Royer an honorable place among the most zealous promoters and ablest defenders of the Darwinian theories.
Her first effort in this line was to translate into French, in 1862, the Origin of Species of the great English naturalist, preceding the work with a preface which in itself alone constituted an excellent summary of the doctrine of evolution. She pointed out the results which logically follow from the transformist theory. She did not conceal from herself that in doing thus she would be the object of attacks from the immobilist and ecclesiastical parties still so numerous thirty years ago in all civilized countries; but she flattered herself, too, and with just reason, that she would furnish the liberals and progressives of France with a powerful weapon. In this introductory chapter she characterized the original and strong personality of Darwin in appropriate terms, saying: "While he has not the brilliant qualities of a Cuvier as a writer or a professor, he is at least a worthy heir of the profoundly philosophical science of the two Geoffroys Saint-Hilaire ... one of those workmen who cut their stone with an indefatigable courage. But there are also thicker and heavier stones, without beauty or apparent grace, which are designed to be hidden at the base of an immense edifice, like the massive columns with which the architects of the middle ages decorated the crypts of their Gothic cathedrals. It is truth in the rough. He does not impose his condition, but communicates it and proves it. If it is certain, he affirms it; when he supposes, he says so; when he doubts, he acknowledges it." She then passes to the exposition of Darwinism as responding to one of the noblest aspirations of the mind, the preliminary step to the accounting for the world of organized beings, as astronomy, physics, and geology have explained the origin of inanimate substances. In effect, the illustrious Englishman, connecting the domain of botany and zoölogy with the action of second causes, sought first to comprehend the genesis, and then the evolution, in the same way that astronomers and geologists teach us concerning the origin of our globe and the successive phases through which its surface has passed.
Not only did Madame Clémence Royer initiate us into transformism. In her masterly introduction she went still further. Carrying the exposition to its final consequences, she provoked a useful revolution in the ideas then current. She dared to say what many men of science would only have left to be inferred. Her translation, revealing the name of Darwin to the French public, who hardly knew of it at that period, gave the occasion for a very active conflict between the partisans of "creationism" and the Nantese philosophy. The success of this work was so great as to induce her to complete her preface by publishing a few years afterward a work wholly her own, Origine de l'Homme et des Sociétés (Origin of Man and Societies, 1870), which, being her best production, deserves a special analysis. With the assistance of documents collected by the most famous anthropologists, Madame Royer reconstitutes the history of the primitive ages of mankind, and after studying its origins and development she seeks for the bonds that connect the great human family with the rest of living Nature; and finally forecasts its future from its past.
In the first part she takes up the question of the origin of life and of its transformations upon the earth. The living species are grouped around man, who is the topmost shoot of the gigantic "tree of life." Two laws regulate the transmission of life—the law of heredity and the law of variability. The former assures the continuation of the type, and the latter variety in its modifications. The organic kingdom as a whole oscillates between these two contrary rules which fix limits each upon the other and which suffice to explain the successive appearance through the ages of different forms of life. The organic individual is thus the solution of a problem in algebra set to Nature. Atavism is the constant quantity, and the force of variation is the perpetually changing unknown factor. The problem is therefore complex, but the principles to which the variable is subject resolve themselves into a series of partial laws which are deduced from an aggregate of observations, and which, according to our author, one may summarize as he goes.
Most of the variations reveal themselves in the embryo during the fætal period. But after its birth the young product is affected not only by the ambient medium, but also by the consequences of the reproductive act. The latter, in fact, having impressed the initial movement upon its organism, reacts incessantly against the modifying influences of the ambient, and atavism prevails as always the resultant unless important accidents come in to change the course.
It is only necessary to add a few experimental considerations to complete a rapid sketch of the laws of variability. First, correlation of growth: Homologous organs tend to vary in the same direction, and together. Are the fingers joined or divided? The hand follows similar variations. Then there is a compensation of growth which prevents the excess of the preceding rule; when one organ is developed, another is atrophied. Also vital competition. Every organized being must be in harmony with the conditions of its existence or it will not subsist; the monster may appear, but will not live. Lastly, by virtue of natural selection, the individual must likewise possess the means of perpetuating its species. Otherwise, a series of transformations will come to pass in the course of successive generations, improving the organism and adapting it more and more to the exigencies of its habitat. The least prolific species of to-day fulfill these conditions so well that they of themselves alone would cover the surface of the earth if their multiplication was not checked by that of other species. But as only a limited quantity of life is possible on our planet, the less well-adapted organisms perish. The struggle therefore produces a selection. It is hence presumed that in the same species only varieties manifesting tendencies in most complete harmony with the method of their existence will be preserved, all the intermediate varieties being destroyed. Consequently, if we push the doctrine of Darwin to its extreme limits, we arrive at the idea, now rejected, that in the beginning only a single germ arose at one point on the globe. All the analogies, on the other hand, lead us to suppose that the earth was fruitful over its entire surface.
This leads us to inquire how life appeared on the earth. The debate between the heterogenists and the panspermists has been long vain, because the question has been laid before them in insoluble terms. In order to resolve it, therefore, we must take ourselves back in thought thousands of thousands of centuries in the past. A thin crust of red-hot lava, hardly solidified, extended over the incandescent nucleus of our globe. An eternity then passed before the fiery sphere was forever confined within its coffin of granite. The metalloids dominant in this chaos of affinities and repulsions were then floating in an irrespirable atmosphere along with a mass of aqueous vapors. At the end of many millions of years, the waters definitely took their place around the globe. But who can ever tell what useless abortions, to be destroyed as soon as they were created, arose in these oceans saturated with anomalous substances? The first germs of life doubtless arose from the thick proliferous stratum which was developed under the pressure of a dense atmosphere in contact with liquids still warm, incessantly traversed by electric currents of unimaginable intensity. It was a sprout that arose everywhere at once. But in those innumerable spontaneous efforts, continued during the enormous length of time required to purify the atmosphere from its acrid vapors and the seas from their foreign matters, only a small number of these germs achieved a beginning of vegetation. This, according to Madame Royer's theory, was the way life began on the globe.
The author next examines the complete series of the phases of evolution gone through by the species, and then the development of the mental faculties, the chief feature of difference which in the view of some thinkers creates a gap between man and the rest of the animal kingdom. She demonstrates that the primary qualities of mind are identical in all living creatures, even in those of least development. The intelligence of man is simply superior to the mental organism of the animal. This is, however, only a relative superiority, not differing in nature from the animal's intelligence, but only in form and intensity.