By Gamaliel Bradford

DARWIN. Illustrated.
A NATURALIST OF SOULS.
THE SOUL OF SAMUEL PEPYS. Illustrated.
DAMAGED SOULS. Illustrated.
AMERICAN PORTRAITS. Illustrated.
A PROPHET OF JOY.
PORTRAITS OF AMERICAN WOMEN. Illustrated.
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN. Illustrated.
UNION PORTRAITS. Illustrated.
CONFEDERATE PORTRAITS. Illustrated.
LEE THE AMERICAN. Illustrated.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

DARWIN

Ch. Darwin (signature)

DARWIN

BY
GAMALIEL BRADFORD
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1926

COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY GAMALIEL BRADFORD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

TO
MARSHALL LIVINGSTON PERRIN
WHO TAUGHT ME TO WRITE
AND TO THINK

On se lasse de tout sauf de comprendre

Sainte-Beuve (from Virgil?)

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

DARWIN

CHRONOLOGY

CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN

Born, Shrewsbury, February 12, 1809.

At Edinburgh University, 1826.

At Cambridge, 1827-1831.

Absent with the Beagle, 1831-1836.

Married Emma Wedgwood, January 29, 1839.

Settled at Down, in Kent, 1842.

‘The Origin of Species’ published, November 24, 1859.

‘The Descent of Man’ published, February 24, 1871.

Died, Down, April 19, 1882.

DARWIN

CHAPTER I
THE OBSERVER

I

Any formal life of Darwin should be written by a thoroughly trained and equipped scientist, and indeed no such life could be better than that written by Darwin’s son forty years ago. But one who, without special scientific qualifications, is profoundly interested in the characters and souls of men, all men, may perhaps be justified in making an intimate study of a man whose influence upon other men, for good and evil both, has been enormous, and who was himself one of the simplest, purest, noblest, most candid, most lovable, most Christian souls that ever lived.

By an extraordinary coincidence Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, on the same day, February 12, 1809, on which Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky. Darwin belonged to an excellent old English family on his father’s side and his mother was one of the Wedgwoods, of ceramic fame. His paternal grandfather, Erasmus, was a physician, a poet, and a scientist. Darwin’s father was an able and successful physician. He would have liked his son to be the same, but the son had not the taste for it. Failing medicine, the church was considered, but seemed equally unpromising. Education at Edinburgh and at Cambridge did not yield very much. In those days the classics were the basis and this boy had little interest in the classics. He liked field sports and outdoor life. Above all, he liked animals and plants, liked to observe and to describe them, and to record his observations, and this interest grew more and more absorbing.

CHARLES DARWIN AS A CHILD
With his sister Catherine

In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, Darwin obtained the position of naturalist on the government ship, Beagle, and for five years he was absent from England, exploring the southern hemisphere and carefully recording his observations on every sort of scientific subject, which were later published in his printed journal. Soon after his return home, he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a noble and charming woman, and a little later, in 1842, he settled at the small village of Down, in the county of Kent, and made his home there until his death in 1882. He inherited a considerable property, which was later increased from his books. He had a large family of sons and daughters, ten in all, and his life was half chronic invalidism and half intense devotion to scientific study and thought, or rather, the two elements were inextricably intertwined.

As a result of his observations on the Beagle, Darwin became possessed with the idea, which of course had occurred to various thinkers before him, from the Greeks to Lamarck, that life had not been created in distinct manifold forms, but had developed in all its variety, including even man, from a few forms, or even from one. To entertain the idea in the abstract was comparatively simple; but to explain the process of development was the puzzle, until Darwin hit upon what seemed to him the clue in what he called ‘natural selection,’ or, as Spencer termed it, ‘the survival of the fittest.’ For twenty years Darwin patiently worked out experimental proof of this theory, and then in 1859 he published ‘The Origin of Species,’ a book which is generally admitted to be one of the most important in the whole history of science. During the remaining twenty years of his life he devoted himself to endless further experiment, and the results were embodied in numerous volumes, chief among which was ‘The Descent of Man.’ His views were from the first the subject of fierce controversy, and in many details they are still so, and will continue to be. But it may safely be said that in the scientific world the evolution of life, or more technically, modification by descent, which is so inseparably associated with Darwin’s name, is an accepted principle, and Darwin himself had the great and satisfying triumph of living until this acceptance was perceived to be general, if not universal. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to the last resting-place of Newton.

The basis, or at any rate one of the most fundamental elements of Darwin’s character, was the instinct and habit of observing the external world, and we can best approach him by considering this habit in others and in him. It is astonishing how little most of us see. We live in a world of shadows and dream outlines, piecing out reality by convenient abstractions, which pass in memory like worn current counters, with little resemblance to actual fact. A tree to us is vaguely a tree: the structure of its bark, the shape of its leaves do not enter our world. A man and a woman are simply—a man and a woman. Unless we are specially called upon to do so we do not note details of feature or gesture or garment. This vagueness, this abstraction of vision, is what Théophile Gautier referred to in his celebrated phrase, ‘I am a man for whom the visible world exists.’[1] And he amplified his idea by saying that of twenty-five persons who come into a room, twenty-four will go out and not be able to tell you the color of the wall-paper, whereas he could tell that and pretty much everything else. To such an observing temperament life is a matter of visual detail, of sensuous detail of every kind.

There are people who look out and people who look in, and of course there are all sorts of degrees between the two extremes. Some people are wholly preoccupied with their own inner life, their thoughts, their emotions, their experiences. It is only by the pressure of necessity that they force themselves into connection with the world about them, and then it is under protest, and their thoughts leap back, as by a spring, to internal matters, as soon as the pressure is removed. Others live in the swift, diverting movement of the external world and lose their own destiny and almost their identity in the play of it. ‘Let me alone to observe till I turn myself into nothing but observation,’ says the old poet.[2] The observation may be for a serious scientific purpose. It may be for endless entertainment and pure, inexhaustible delight. As Sterne has it: ‘What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything and who, having eyes to see what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can fairly lay his hands on.’[3]

As there are some persons who naturally observe, so there are some who observe certain things, and not others. Women are apt to be more acute observers than men: their senses are more keen and their minds less preoccupied. But their vision is usually limited to the things that interest them. A woman will go into a friend’s house and tell you every detail of furnishing, will describe the friend’s dress with finished minuteness. But she may take a walk through the fields and not be able to remember a single flower or insect. On the other hand, very great scientists will not miss a spider in the grass, but the color of a ribbon may escape them.

From another point of view observation may be deliberately exclusive. A trained observer may find that general vision distracts him, and that to follow up his special object it is necessary to put all other sights and sounds out of consideration entirely. Bradford Torrey used to say, and no doubt it is the experience of all naturalists, that if he went to look for a special flower, he saw flowers only, and was quite oblivious to birds, while on bird days a rare blossom might be passed unnoticed.

Naturally the most common matter of observation, the one which is more or less forced upon the attention of all of us, is humanity. We may be indifferent to trees and stones, but our pleasure, our labor, our existence depend upon a more or less constant study of the human beings whose existence interlocks at every point with ours. Therefore, from the earliest times of record there have been profound observers of humanity, persons who have examined the human aspect and the human heart, as read through that aspect, with the most persistent zeal and the most unwearying delight. In the vivid phrase of one of the most acute of these, ‘I glutted myself with observation.’ And even those of less gormandizing tendency find the analysis of the human subject one of the most inexhaustible pleasures that this world affords. All through the study of Darwin I shall have occasion to refer to one of Darwin’s contemporaries who in a different line of research was an equally brilliant and significant exemplification of the scientific spirit, Sainte-Beuve. As Darwin devoted years upon years to patient investigation of the secrets of the natural world, so Sainte-Beuve with the same patience, the same labor, the same infinite and ever-varied curiosity, probed human hearts, all sorts of human hearts, and portrayed them with unfailing accuracy and sympathy. He said of himself, using the strictly scientific expression: ‘I analyze, I herborize, I am a naturalist of souls.’[4]

But in dealing with Darwin we are in the main concerned with the field of so-called natural science, with the varying aspects of the material world, which we are apt to sum up under the term, nature. General observation of this world is, of course, also as old as man. Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, all ancient records, contain scientific facts of importance and interest to-day. Sophocles and Vergil had an exquisite sense of the exact beauty of birds and flowers. The vision of Chaucer and Shakespeare was as acute as that of Gautier, so far as they chose to employ it. At the same time we must recognize that with the middle of the eighteenth century a new interest in nature arose. The literature of Rousseau and Cowper, of Keats and George Sand, reflected the external world in a far different fashion from anything before imagined, and Linnæus, Cuvier, and many others laid the foundations of modern scientific study, which the nineteenth century developed until it overshadowed every branch of learning both for theoretical abundance and for practical utility.

It must of course be recognized that in many cases the observation of nature is not practiced for the pure pleasure of it, but serves some ulterior object or interest. There is first the obvious practical gain from such observation. Agriculture has undergone a complete revolution in the last hundred years, and this revolution has been brought about by the various developments of scientific research. Darwin’s vast investigations showed the intimate connection between the theories of the scientist and the practical experiments of the breeder.

On the other side there is the observation of the artist. Ruskin pointed out long ago, how fine, how subtle, how delicate was the vision of the great painters, how perfect their skill in rendering the exact sense impression of natural objects. In the same way, it is not often considered what wealth of accurate record we have in the poets and novelists. Gautier, for whom the visible world existed, was a poet. He saw shapes and contours and colors, saw them to render them in words that interpreted as perfectly as words can. The great French novelists who followed Gautier and learned from him were in the same way admirable observers and recorders. Darwin himself did not scorn to use the observation of the English novelist Mrs. Oliphant and he refers to her as ‘an excellent observer.’[5]

But there is such a thing as observation for the pure love of it, which is used neither to improve the breed of chickens or tomatoes, nor to make effective and salable copy, nor even to generate and sustain theories about the organization of the cosmos. There is a pure, inexhaustible delight in just living with the insects and the birds, in merging one’s own existence, one’s own soul in the mysterious abundance and ecstasy of the universal life, without thought of any ulterior object to be achieved in any way whatsoever. White of Selborne felt nature in this fashion. So did Richard Jefferies. So did the French naturalist and observer, Fabre. I know few works that have more of the charm of personal delight than Bates’s ‘Naturalist on the Amazons,’ a book which I have read and re-read and shall read again. Bates was interested in the Darwinian theories and worked at them. But his passion for the forest life was quite independent of any theories and it is expressed with an engaging, absolute simplicity, without the slightest pretence at literary ornament or effect.

Our supreme American example of this life in nature, and perhaps the supreme example anywhere, is Henry Thoreau. Thoreau had his speculations, and some persons relish them. But it seems as if no other human being had ever left the record of such complete self-abnegation in the external world as Thoreau’s. His soul not only turns to that of the birds and flowers, it is that of the birds and flowers, and he is never, never making observations to serve a purpose. He is simply existing in the universal existence for the joy of it: ‘I have given myself up to nature; I have lived so many springs and summers and autumns and winters as if I had nothing else to do but live them, and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for me; I have spent a couple of years, for instance, with the flowers chiefly, having none other so binding engagement as to observe when they opened; I could have afforded to spend a whole fall observing the changing tints of the foliage. Ah, how I have thriven on solitude and poverty!’[6]

II

Of the numerous records of simple natural observation and experience few are more charming than Darwin’s ‘Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle,’ in which he notes what he saw and heard by land and sea during those years of adventure in the southern hemisphere. All through this book, as indeed in all his books, it is evident that the instinct and habit of observing were inborn and constant, and all those who write about Darwin make this instinct at least the foundation of his scientific eminence.

THE BEAGLE LAID ASHORE FOR REPAIRS AT RIVER SANTA CRUZ, PATAGONIA

Asa Gray, who had given his life to botany, writes: ‘What a skill and genius you have for these researches! Even for the structure of the flower of the Ophyrideæ I have to-night learned more than I ever knew before.’[7] Professor Osborn says, more generally: ‘Rare as were his reasoning powers, his powers of observation were of a still more distinct order. He persistently and doggedly followed every clue; he noticed little things which escaped others; he always noted exceptions and at once jotted down facts opposed to his theories.’[8] And the editors of Darwin’s letters put the whole matter with concise effectiveness in speaking of ‘that supreme power of seeing and thinking what the rest of the world had overlooked, which was one of his most striking characteristics.’[9]

Darwin’s own comments on observation are frequent and most interesting. Little inclined as he was to self-praise, in the charming autobiographical sketch which begins the ‘Life,’ he frankly states his merits in this regard: ‘I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully. My industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and collection of facts.’[10] Exact, systematic, patient study of what is actually seen seems to him the basis of all great scientific work, and he repeatedly emphasizes the importance of it. ‘It is well to remember that Naturalists value observations far more than reasoning.’[11] Again, ‘I have come not to care at all for general beliefs without the special facts. I have suffered too often from this.’[12] And observation is not only a duty, it is a delight. The arrangement of facts, the deduction of theories from them, thought, reasoning, argument, these are labor and pain. But to watch the insects and the flowers, by long and careful attention to make them yield all their secrets, this is no labor, but an exquisite diversion, which never fails: ‘A naturalist’s life would be a happy one if he had only to observe, and never to write.’[13]

It is evident, further, that Darwin’s observation was by no means confined to natural science, but was quick, acute, and constant in all the different phases and interests of life. Naturally his books deal with little besides his scientific work, but the record of the Beagle shows interest and appreciation of many things outside of this work altogether. An eye so carefully trained could not fail to distinguish and perceive all sorts of minute points that others would pass over. His readiness to note other things besides those he was looking for shows in the piquant comment on wide experimenting: ‘It may turn out a mare’s nest, but I have often incidentally observed curious facts when making what I call “a fool’s experiment.”’[14]

It is especially curious to note Darwin’s observation of himself. To be sure, he disclaims any philosophical study in this regard: ‘I have never tried looking into my own mind.’[15] Nevertheless, whether he tried or not, he was curiously alive to what went on there, and he records what he finds with the singular candor which appears in his treatment of his own affairs as well as of others. The very hesitation with which he speaks of self-analysis increases the value of his results: ‘If I can analyze my own feelings (a very doubtful process).’[16] And when he does make a statement, it is all the more reliable and all the more far-reaching from the moderation and reserve with which it is advanced.

In one field quite remote from what is usually considered natural science, that of physiognomy and expression, Darwin’s observation is especially interesting, though of course he connected this line of research, as so many others, with his general scientific theory. His book on ‘The Expression of the Emotions’ is one of the most entertaining and profitable of all for the general reader, and it is instructive to note, how early, how persistently, and how faithfully he collected memoranda on this comparatively collateral issue. The use of what was immediately about him, of his own personal experience in daily living, is especially significant in this regard. For the study of expression he felt that unconsciousness in the subject was a prime requisite. Hence the study of infants, who were perfectly indifferent to your investigations, was peculiarly profitable, and almost from the moment his children were born, Darwin began to make notes on their expressions of pain and pleasure, all the little subtle indications of desire and need, which mothers use instinctively but which fathers are not commonly apt to register as scientific data. The curious paper, published in Mind, called ‘The Biography of a Child,’ gives many of Darwin’s notes on this subject, and repeated references in ‘The Expression of the Emotions’ show what fruitful use he made of those notes at a later period. The minuteness with which he observed and reflected is well shown in this passage on childrens’ crying: ‘I ought to have thought of crying children rubbing their eyes with their knuckles, but I did not think of it, and cannot explain it. As far as my memory serves, they do not do so whilst roaring, in which case compression would be of no use.... I wish I knew more about the knuckles and crying.’[17]

The observation not only records the larger and more violent manifestations of passion, but is constantly on the watch for those trifling signs of feeling which appear and flit away in trivial social intercourse. Take this account of an animated conversation: ‘Another young lady and a youth, both in the highest spirits, were eagerly talking together with extraordinary rapidity; and I noticed that, as often as the young lady was beaten, and could not get out her words fast enough, her eyebrows went obliquely upwards, and rectangular furrows were formed on her forehead. She thus each time hoisted a flag of distress; and this she did half-a-dozen times in the course of a few minutes.’[18]

Nor is he content with his own observations, but in this, as in wider researches, he perpetually appeals to his friends for assistance, opens their eyes and sharpens their wits, to see and record matters which they would assuredly never have thought of for themselves. Note the care and tact with which he makes his requests: ‘I beg you, in relation to a new point for observation, to imagine as well as you can that you suddenly come across some dreadful object, and act with a sudden little start, a shudder of horror; please do this once or twice, and observe yourself as well as you can, and afterwards read the rest of this note, which I have consequently pinned down.’[19]

It is, however, in the regions of natural science more particularly so-called that Darwin’s observation is inexhaustibly rich, varied, exciting, and suggestive. He himself puts it very simply and effectively, when he says, ‘I was born a naturalist.’[20] At the age of ten his curiosity was intensely stimulated by the varying aspects of insects and he considered the desirability of collecting them. In one of his letters, Darwin gives an amusing illustration of this youthful enthusiasm for collecting. One day he had caught two most interesting beetles and was holding one in each hand, when he discovered a third, ‘a sacred Panagæus crux-major!’ ‘I could not bear to give up either of my Carabi, and to lose Panagæus was out of the question; so that in despair I gently seized one of the Carabi between my teeth, when to my unspeakable disgust and pain the little inconsiderate beast squirted his acid down my throat, and I lost both Carabi and Panagæus.’[21]

The delight of observation, which began in childhood, continued to old age, and increased instead of weakening. When he was fatigued and worn with writing and theorizing, when illness tormented him and weakness rendered more concentrated effort impossible, it was a relief to turn to the simple contemplation of facts, and the budding and fading of flowers and the varied activity of insects offered at all times diversion and contentment. Sometimes he dwells upon the larger aspects of such contemplation, the joy of discovery, the excitement of finding what has never been found before. Again and again in his southern voyages this excitement appears: ‘In these wild countries it gives much delight to gain the summit of any mountain. There is an indefinite expectation of seeing something very strange, which, however often it may be balked, never failed with me to recur on each successive attempt.’[22] Or the pleasure may come in what seem the humblest, smallest things, in what is to ordinary persons negligible, or even repulsive. One of Darwin’s most attractive books, perhaps with ‘The Expression of the Emotions,’ the most attractive from the casual reader’s standpoint, is that in which he gathers together the results of his study of earthworms, a study which had continued through years of patient and thoughtful investigation of a subject which, even from the naturalist’s point of view, would not seem one of the most fruitful or engaging.

The fundamental principal of all scientific observation is accuracy, and no one knew this better than Darwin. No one understood better than he the subtle, treacherous influences that are always at work, distracting, impairing, and distorting exact and lucid vision. There is the danger of seeing what we are accustomed to see and therefore think we see. There is the danger of seeing what others have seen and described before us. There is the supreme danger of seeing what we wish to see, what accords with some preconceived theory or dogma. Against all these dangers Darwin tried to be ever on his guard, and he is constantly warning others of them and emphasizing the importance of pure accuracy and the enormous difficulty of it. ‘Good heavens, how difficult accuracy is!’[23] Among all the merits of the scientist he values accuracy highest, the instinct and the ability to record facts correctly: ‘I value praise for accurate observation far higher than for any other quality.’[24] And especially in one admirable passage he stresses and reiterates both the difficulty and the value: ‘Accuracy is the soul of Natural History. It is hard to become accurate; he who modifies a hair’s breadth will never be accurate.... Absolute accuracy is the hardest merit to attain, and the highest merit.’[25]

Among the various elements of accuracy, that of statement, as well as of observation, is of course of the utmost importance, yet is too apt to be overlooked. Even those who are careful in their actual observing, may in their report of their observations be much less so. Words are misleading and inadequate things, and the tricks they have played with scientific accuracy have been deplorable. There is the strange ease of mere misstatement. There is the natural tendency to overstate. There is the tendency to clarify verbally what in fact is more or less confused or the opposite difficulty of making verbally clear what the senses may perceive with singular lucidity.

Here again Darwin is constantly on the watch. Memory is misleading and accounts based upon it are apt to be untrustworthy: ‘I foolishly trusted to my memory, and was much annoyed to find how hasty and inaccurate many of my remarks were.’[26] Words are inadequate, blundering, they will not render the finer, more delicate shades: ‘A difference may be clearly perceived, and yet it may be impossible, at least I have found it so, to state in what the difference consists.’[27] One cannot be too careful, too scrupulous, about one’s statements, or too anxious to correct them, when one has made a mistake. And Darwin gets up in the middle of the night and arouses a slumbering friend to explain that, after all, he felt the sense of the sublime more fully in the forests of Brazil than on the top of the Cordilleras.[28]

When one is so mistrustful of one’s own records one cannot always accept implicitly the narratives of others. Darwin is eager to get the accounts of other observers, and is singularly deferential to their opinions. At the same time he is gently and watchfully critical, and knows well how to estimate the ability of those with whom he deals. One of the most interesting remarks upon the skill of his methods in obtaining information, and one that every one who reads him carefully will confirm, is Sir William Turner’s comment upon ‘his care in avoiding leading questions.’[29]

And if Darwin was insistent upon accuracy in records, he was also extraordinarily thorough and exact in mathematical matters and measurement. He speaks of abstract mathematics as having been one of the neglected elements of his education,[30] but he shunned no amount of pains and toil in calculating, wherever he felt it necessary to work out his results. In his books which record the investigation of detail there is an almost incredible amount of slow and careful research involving exact counting and weighing and measuring. ‘I was compelled to count under the microscope above 20,000 seeds of Lythrum salicaria,’ he says casually in one instance,[31] and there are innumerable others of the same kind. In all these calculations the possibility of error haunts him and he does his best to eliminate it, yet still the possibility is there: ‘Although I always am endeavoring to be cautious and to mistrust myself, yet I know well how apt I am to make blunders.’[32] If he blundered, what shall be said of some of us? Most interesting and characteristic is the trait, pointed out by his son, that he assumed with singular naïveté the absolute accuracy of the instruments that came to him: ‘He had great faith in instruments, and I do not think it naturally occurred to him to doubt the accuracy of a scale or measuring glass.’[33] Yet further, ‘it was characteristic of him that he took scrupulous pains in making measurements with his somewhat rough scales.’[34]

As he was exact and particular in calculation and measurement, so he shrank from no amount of detail, did not hesitate to carry his investigations to the last point of minuteness, whenever the full and solid breadth of result demanded it. Apparently nothing escaped him. It was not only what he was looking for, but he noted and seized oddities and exceptions for their larger bearing and for future profit. As his son says, ‘A point apparently slight and unconnected with his present work is passed over by many a man almost unconsciously with some half-considered explanation, which is in fact no explanation. It was just these things that he seized on to make a start from.’[35] Thus, on any subject that came up, his memory or his notes could almost always be appealed to. As Sir Thomas Farrer puts it, ‘What interested me was to see that on this as on almost any other point of detailed observation, Mr. Darwin could always say, “Yes, but at one time I made some observations myself on this particular point; and I think you will find, etc., etc.”’[36]

To appreciate this minuteness and thoroughness, it is necessary to examine the less known and less popular books, such as the ‘Cross and Self Fertilization’ and the ‘Different Forms of Flowers.’ In these one is overwhelmed with Darwin’s persistence in examining and noting trivial details. And perhaps most impressive of all is to turn over the pages of the two immensely solid volumes on Cirripedes. For many years Darwin devoted himself to the study of these unexciting barnacles, sometimes wearying, sometimes rebelling, but always keeping at his task until he had completed it. He himself sometimes wondered whether such prolonged toil at mere description was wholly worth while; but Huxley believed that the mental discipline was of the greatest possible profit to Darwin’s later work. In any case the exhaustive thoroughness of it is indeed exemplary. How far this goes may be suggested by one quotation out of many: ‘I cannot too strongly impress on any one intending to study this class, not to trust to external characters; he must separate and clean and carefully examine the internal structure and form of the compartments and more especially of the opercular valves.’[37] And the examination, in Darwin’s case, applied to hundreds of specimens of minute barnacles gathered and sent to him from all parts of the world.

It is hardly necessary to emphasize the enormous amount of labor implied and involved in all these self-imposed tasks of Darwin. Although circumstances compelled him to give a large part of his life to repose, he was by nature a worker. It is true that he sometimes speaks jokingly of his idleness: ‘I have been of late shamefully idle, i.e., observing instead of writing, and how much better fun observing is than writing.’[38] But as Huxley well points out, Darwin generally means by idleness ‘working hard at something he likes when he ought to be occupied with a less attractive subject.’[39] And Darwin’s own more serious comment is, ‘I am a pretty man to preach, for I cannot be idle, much as I wish it, and am never comfortable except when at work.’[40] He complains of fatigue, he forces himself to seek recreation, relaxation; but even when his body is at rest, his mind tends to work, refuses to stop working, finds its only real relief in change of occupation and thought.

And as the labor is impressive, so is the patience. The man was naturally nervous, restless, eager. He wanted results, like the rest of us. Yet after he had conceived a theory which he thought destined to subvert the whole realm of science, he waited twenty years for the thorough observation and testing necessary to put the theory into even tentative form. Of all the great scientific qualities perhaps patience is the most essential and the most difficult, and surely patience never had a more supreme exemplar than Charles Darwin. Sometimes even his enduring persistence is temporarily shaken: ‘My cirripedial task is an eternal one; I make no perceptible progress. I am sure that they belong to the hour-hand, and I groan under my task.’[41] But though he may groan, he never yields. As his son admirably says of him: ‘He used almost to apologize for his patience, saying that he could not bear to be beaten, as if this were rather a sign of weakness on his part.... Perseverance seems hardly to express his almost fierce desire to force the truth to reveal itself. He often said that it was important that a man should know the right point at which to give up an inquiry. And I think it was his tendency to pass this point that inclined him to apologize for his perseverance, and gave the air of doggedness to his work.’[42] The intensity of such patience is best appreciated by those who all their lives have scamped and hurried and slighted and touched a thousand things without ever going to the bottom of a single one.

III

Nothing illustrates better the patience of Darwin, and of course also of hundreds of other scientists who are working as he worked in unknown laboratories all over the world, than the process of simple waiting so often necessary to obtain results. Nature demands time, often enormous time, and the brevity of human life and the evanescence of human opportunity mean nothing to her. The careful working out of scientific investigation requires the study of successive generations, sometimes of many, the sowing of the seed and the gathering of the blossom, the close observation of the individual from conception to death, which can be carried on only through long periods of time. The observer must keep a dozen lines of study in his mind, must maintain them side by side, and must be always ready to turn from one to the other, as some new development arises that demands his attention. It was in this phase of long, renewed, continued, enduring watchfulness that Darwin was preëminent. As well appears in his son’s record: ‘I think it was all due to the vitality and persistence of his mind—a quality I have heard him speak of as if he felt that he was strongly gifted in that respect. Not that he used any such phrases as these about himself, but he would say that he had the power of keeping a subject or question more or less before him for a great many years.’[43] Very little examination of Darwin’s books is required to show how amply and constantly this power was exercised.

And to give such patience and taste for continuity their full effect there is needed almost a passion for system, for orderly arrangement, and the habit of putting not only things but thoughts in their proper places, so that they can be called upon at the right moment in the right way. Darwin himself describes his elaborate method of indexing the books that he read and the notes that he made, so that whenever he wished to deal with any special subject, he could turn at once to material bearing upon it: ‘Before beginning on any subject I look to all the short indexes and make a general and classified index, and by taking the one or more proper portfolios I have all the information collected during my life ready for use.’[44]

Such systematic habits of working both demand and imply an orderly and economical use of time. Owing to his limitations of health, Darwin’s working time was extremely limited, but he made the most of it. Every usable hour was allotted, and the utmost profit and result were extracted from it. No doubt such sense of pressure is in itself not very beneficial to health, but it means an immense amount of work accomplished. The time was employed thriftily as well as intelligently: ‘He saved a great deal of time through not having to do things twice.’[45] And everywhere there is the feeling of the value of minutes which is indicated in Dante’s saying,

Chè’l perder tempo, a chi più sa, più spiace.[46]

Or as Darwin himself expresses it: ‘A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.’[47]

Still another element of observation richly illustrated in Darwin, and closely connected with the patience and the continuity, is the element of comparison. Observation by itself, the mere accumulation of curious detail, does not get us very far. Observations must be bound together, one with another, they must be connected and related, intertwined into results and conclusions, often remote and far-reaching, or they do not begin to attain all their possible significance. In Darwin’s own phrase: ‘As you say, there is an extraordinary pleasure in pure observation; not but what I suspect the pleasure in this case is rather derived from comparisons forming in one’s mind from allied structures.’[48] This more elaborate process of comparison, however, leads us at once to the methods of deliberate experiment for a special purpose, and will therefore be more fully and naturally considered in the next chapter.

As to the more practical side of observation, one is largely impressed with all the difficulties and drawbacks of it, when pursued on any considerable scale, and certainly Darwin’s life affords abundant illustration of these, some peculiar to himself and some of a more general nature which beset most naturalists more or less.

There are the difficulties that always attend extensive field and outdoor work. In a voyage such as that of the Beagle, in a small sailing ship a hundred years ago, there were the elements of actual danger. Darwin was the last person to enlarge upon his courage in meeting these or in disregarding them. Of his childhood he says: ‘I remember how very much I was afraid of meeting the dogs in Barker Street, and how at school I could not get up my courage to fight: I was very timid by nature.’[49] But repeated experiences during the voyage of the Beagle make it evident that the timidity was overcome by a calm and intelligent comprehension of conditions and necessities. Perhaps the most interesting illustration is Darwin’s attitude toward an earthquake in South America: ‘I have had ill luck, however, in only one little earthquake having happened. I was lying in bed when there was a party at dinner in the house; on a sudden I heard such a hubbub in the dining-room; without a word being spoken, it was devil take the hindmost and who should get out first; at the same moment I felt my bed slightly vibrate in a lateral direction. The party were old stagers, and heard the noise which always precedes a shock; and no old stager looks at an earthquake with philosophical eyes.’[50]

Worse perhaps than the specific, exceptional dangers were the constant annoyances and discomforts. Food was often insufficient, ill-prepared, and indigestible. Cold was wearing and heat was wearing. There was exposure to all sorts of weather, there was the torment of insects, there was endless, inescapable fatigue, which could not be remedied or avoided, but just had to be borne and forgotten in the excitement of great or even little objects to be attained. Glimpses here and there, never unduly emphasized, show what these trials were and how they were met: ‘The road, from some recent rain, was full of little puddles of clear water, yet not a drop was drinkable. I had scarcely been twenty hours without water, and only part of the time under a hot sun, yet the thirst rendered me very weak. How people survive two or three days under such circumstances, I cannot imagine.’[51] To put up with discomforts during a camping trip of a few weeks or months is one thing. To endure them constantly for five years implies a very pretty enthusiasm for the cause of science.

Besides these external drawbacks to observation, there are others more subjective and personal. A minor aspect of these has interested me, because it shows such a delightful mixture of human feeling and scientific curiosity. As we shall have occasion to amplify later, Darwin was remarkable for tenderness, for sympathy, for affectionate and kindly interest, not only in humanity generally and in animals, but especially in those directly connected with him. Yet his investigations of expression led him, forced him, to a calm and cold-blooded analysis of situations and emotions which at the same time made the strongest appeal to his sympathies. All through his children’s infancy he pursued the practice of making notes on them, yet it is most curious to trace the play of personal emotion in combination with the abstract research, and the working of this well appears in his son’s remark: ‘It was characteristic of him that (as I have heard him tell), although he was so anxious to observe the expression of a crying child, his sympathy with the grief spoiled his observation.’[52] A more impersonal example is his careful record as to a woman whom he studied in a railway carriage, watching with minute attention the movement of her depressores anguli oris, which appeared to indicate extreme distress: ‘As her countenance remained as placid as ever, I reflected how meaningless was this contraction, and how easily one might be deceived. The thought had hardly occurred to me when I saw that her eyes suddenly became suffused with tears almost to overflowing and her whole countenance fell. There could now be no doubt that some painful recollection, perhaps that of a long-lost child, was passing through her mind.’[53] And so instances of intense individual suffering became generalized into typical cases of scientific record.

Far more important, however, in Darwin’s career, as a drawback to scientific observation, than any intrusions of subjective sympathy, were the bitter, persistent limitations of physical illness and weakness. During a very large part of his life he was tormented by nervous indigestion, manifesting itself, under any strain, in persistent nausea. This first appeared in the ever-returning and unconquerable sea-sickness which made all his southern voyages a misery. When the ocean was at all boisterous the malady prostrated him, and those who know how absolutely prostrating sea-sickness is will appreciate the positive heroism which enabled him to prosecute his journey and his researches with such a handicap.

After his return to England the trouble continued to hound and haunt him through all his later years. He never could work for more than a small portion of the day. The excitement of visitors always upset him. There were long periods when any work was impossible and often an absorbing investigation had to be laid aside altogether just at the most critical point, laid aside so completely that not only actual labor but even thought was prohibited. The idleness which he detested was forced upon him for a very large part of his days and hours and the spirit framed for such constant and intense activity was obliged to discipline itself to the most irksome and profitless repose.

It made no difference in the intensity or the persistence of his scientific preoccupations. Perhaps if he had abandoned his pursuits altogether and had contented himself with an indolent and externally diversified existence, he might have enjoyed reasonable health. But he would not yield for a moment. His whole soul was in the studies, the pursuits, the investigations that enthralled and inspired him, and life without them would have been inconceivable. ‘We have come here for rest for me, which I have much needed; and shall remain here for about ten days more, and then home to work, which is my sole pleasure in life.’[54] That is the constant note. In the midst of his travels he wrote home: ‘My mind has been since leaving England, in a perfect hurricane of delight and astonishment, and to this hour scarcely a minute has passed in idleness.’[55] The body might lag and drag and harass and torment, but the spirit lived in just such a hurricane of excitement and enthusiasm always.

IV

It must be recognized that even in the pure habit of observation for itself, whether in the natural world or otherwise, there is a charm for those who are born for it. Curiosity is a natural instinct with most of us, and there is inexhaustible entertainment in letting the spirit lie fallow within, while the external world plays upon it with an endless succession of picturesque incidents and highly colored circumstance. At the same time, and especially in the realm of nature, it is astonishing what a difference even a little knowledge makes. Most of us walk through the fields and woods like blind men, utterly oblivious of all the fascinating secrets which await our eyes and ears if we were only alive to them. As one who has always delighted in solitary wood walks merely for their associative beauty, I at least can bewail the deplorable ignorance as to plants and birds and insects which makes it impossible for me even to interrogate them intelligently. Lack of time or natural indolence have prevented my accumulating the knowledge which would put all these things in their proper relations and make them tell a story which the trained and expert observer instantly and instinctively reads in them. It is comforting to find even Darwin complaining of the same ignorance and the same blindness, when he gets into surroundings that are strange to him. Thus in his earlier voyaging, he notes: ‘One great source of perplexity to me is an utter ignorance whether I note the right facts, and whether they are of sufficient importance to interest others.’[56] And again even more vividly: ‘It is positively distressing to walk in the glorious forest amidst such treasures and feel they are all thrown away upon one.’[57]

Then with the coming of a little knowledge the observation is enriched, transfigured, glorified. Hear what Thoreau says of even the apparently dry and profitless acquisition of nomenclature: ‘With the knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of the thing. That shore is now more describable and poetic even. My knowledge was cramped and confined before, and grew rusty because not used—for it could not be used. My knowledge now becomes communicable and grows by communication.’[58] Knowledge in one branch amplifies and steadies observation in that branch. Knowledge of many branches connects them and makes each one throw light on all the others. Record of others’ observations or of your own through several years give each new year double significance and fruitfulness. As Thoreau again puts it: ‘I soon found myself observing when plants first blossomed and leafed, and I followed it up early and late, far and near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the town and into the neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty miles in a day.’[59] If your attention gets fixed upon some special point to be elucidated, every walk you take, and almost every step brings out some development which you did not consider or imagine before. In short the enrichment of knowledge doubles, triples, quintuples your vision, since it teaches you what to look for, and even while it sometimes betrays, teaches you what to see.

But if mere general scientific knowledge is so stimulating and so enlarging in the realm of observation, how infinitely more fruitful is the Darwinian view of the interrelated development of all life including that of man. Whatever may be said, whatever we may have to say later, of the injurious action of this view upon the status of man himself, there can be no question as to the transforming, magical effect of it upon the study of the natural world. Before the evolutionary attitude, the observation of plants and animals was at best a mere gratification of curiosity. The proper study of mankind was man, and the investigation of birds and insects was only distraction and diversion. But the instant it appeared that all the threads of life were intertwined and that in disentangling even the slightest of them you might be getting the clue to the riddle of the whole, all was changed. When it comes to be felt that the history of man, of his instincts, of his passions, of his powers, of his future, of his fate, is written in his past, and that past is to be studied, if at all, in the history of the humblest creatures who are animated by the same mysterious impulse of life that moulds and governs him, the interest of natural observation is increased a thousandfold. It is not exaggerating to say that the study of natural history is an entirely different pursuit since Darwin from what it was before.

It is evident that Darwin himself was constantly and immensely impressed by the profound significance thus added to scientific research. A passage in his earlier note-books shows how the idea was beginning to take hold of him: ‘If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death, suffering and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor—we may be all melted together.’[60]

A striking concrete illustration of the community of life, even in the humblest forms, appears in the book on earthworms and suggests Emerson’s poetical version of the same idea,

‘And striving to be man the worm

Mounts through all the spires of form:’

‘It may be well to remember how perfect the sense of touch becomes in a man when born blind and deaf, as are worms. If worms have the power of acquiring some notion, however rude, of the shape of an object and of their burrows, as seems to be the case, they deserve to be called intelligent; for they then act in nearly the same manner as would a man under similar circumstances.’[61] While a celebrated passage in ‘The Origin of Species’ develops the idea abstractly, by implication at least placing man at the apex of the whole: ‘As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.’[62]

Wallace said of his great friend and competitor, ‘Again, both Darwin and myself had what he terms “the mere passion of collecting”.... I should describe it rather as an intense interest in the mere variety of living things.’[63] The simple observer is carried away, absorbed, ravished by the delight and the fascinating play of this variety of living things, but how far more absorbing and inexhaustible does the delight become when we feel that in studying this universal play of life we are every moment probing the depths of our own souls.

CHAPTER II
DARWIN: THE THINKER

I

Mere observation of the natural world, varied, fascinating, inexhaustible as it is, affords only the material for science. Observed facts must be built up, woven together, ordered, arranged, systematized into conclusions and theories by reflection and reason, if they are to have full bearing on life and the universe. Knowledge is the accumulation of facts. Wisdom is the establishment of relations. And just because the latter process is delicate and perilous, it is all the more delightful. The lofty scorn of the true philosopher for mere perception is well shown in Royer Collard’s remark: ‘There is nothing so despicable as a fact.’ Which does not prevent philosophers or any one else from making facts the essential basis of all discussion of relations. Darwin’s own comments on the general connection between the two are always interesting: ‘I have an old belief that a good observer really means a good theorist,’[432] and again: ‘About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colors. How odd it is that any one should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.’[433]

It is supposed to be one of the chief functions of education to develop this faculty of relating facts to each other and to train and strengthen the reasoning powers. Darwin did not feel that education did much for him in this line, at any rate in the scientific directions which were of especial interest to him. He believed that his academic discipline was largely wasted. Making Latin verses did not appeal. More general lines of current information attracted him very little, and he seemed at times oddly ignorant of what the ordinary educated man is expected to know. Thus his son records that he once asked Hooker where ‘this place Wien is where they publish so many books.’[434] He read vastly in all that concerned his own work, but that very fact prevented his keeping up with daily interests that were remote from it. His own comment on his university experience is bitter: ‘During the three years which I spent at Cambridge my time was wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned, as completely as at Edinburgh and at school.’[435] And he believed that he had learned everything that to him was worth learning pretty much by his own efforts: ‘I consider that all I have learnt of any value has been self-taught.’[436]

DOWN HOUSE FROM THE GARDEN

With this sort of discipline behind him, it is of great interest to examine his general attitude toward the connection of reasoning and fact. To some of us the controversy between induction and deduction has always seemed rather profitless. The Baconian insistence upon the absolute necessity of fact as the basis of all solid theory is of course indisputably just. But to talk of proceeding from abstract theory to the investigation of fact seems as barren as to wander aimlessly in unassorted realms of fact without the assistance of theory. It is comforting, therefore, to find so clear and systematic a thinker as Huxley unwilling to identify his processes with either complete induction or deduction: ‘Those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and any one who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of nature,” that is, by the invention of hypotheses which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with; and not unfrequently, in spite of a long career of usefulness, turned out to be wholly erroneous in the long run.’[437]

Now Darwin obviously finds himself in precisely the uncertainty between inductive and deductive methods that Huxley here indicates. His instincts were naturally hostile to abstract theory, which used facts as playthings to substantiate soaring conjecture. He says in regard to one scientific author: ‘I am not convinced, partly I think owing to the deductive cast of much of his reasoning; and I know not why, but I never feel convinced by deduction, even in the case of H. Spencer’s writings.’[438] And he speaks even more specifically concerning Spencer himself: ‘I always feel a malicious pleasure when a priori conclusions are knocked on the head; and therefore I felt somewhat like a devil when I read your remarks on Herbert Spencer.’[439] Early and late he emphasized that ‘no one has a right to speculate without distinct facts.’[440] Yet at the same time he urges and reiterates that the mere collection of facts, without some basis of theory for guidance and elucidation, is foolish and profitless: ‘I am a firm believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation.’[441]

The truth is, the importance of imaginative power in the equipment of a great scientist is often underestimated. Exact and watchful vision is the first necessity; but it does not go far, or not farthest, except as it has behind it the thoughts that wander through eternity, the vast and questing genius that is perpetually on the lookout for causes and explanations and is eager to evolve theory from the sure and substantial but inanimate basis of fact. Even Thoreau almost deplores his intense preoccupation with the fascinating business of observing: ‘Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone. I feel that I am dissipated by so many observations.... I have almost a slight, dry headache as the result of all this observing.’[442] Theory, speculation, must be perpetually checked and restrained by the precision of systematic logic, but the accurate eye and the careful finger need to be supplemented by the eternally active mind.

As to the activity of Darwin’s mind there can be no question whatever. He not only saw, but he thought incessantly. If you compare the Beagle Journal with the Journal of Thoreau, you see at once how much more quick and ready the English naturalist is with speculation and conjecture. The smallest fact is apt to set him off on a train of theory, where Thoreau simply records, or possibly compares, and passes on. How significant is the brief comment of Asa Gray, in regard to some botanical point which as a specialist in that line he should have been the first to develop: ‘That is real Darwin. I just wonder you and I never thought of it. But he did.’[443] And he not only thought himself, he had the rarer and more valuable faculty of making others think. His mind was so intense and so magnetic in its constant activity that all those who came into contact with it were impelled and fired to work double on speculation of their own. ‘You stimulate my mind,’ says Gray again, ‘far more than any one else, except, perhaps Hooker.’[444]

On this point of intellectual fertility, as on his other scientific qualifications, it is most interesting to hear Darwin himself. The mental activity was present early and late, and it does not appear that the exuberance of youth especially emphasized it or that it tended to increase with the later desire to develop and elaborate his special theories. He himself says in the Autobiographical sketch: ‘I am not conscious of any change in my mind during the last thirty years, excepting in one point: ... I think that I have become a little more skillful in guessing right explanations and in devising experimental tests; but this may probably be the result of mere practice, and of a larger store of knowledge.’[445]

The quick intelligence was always working, sometimes wearily, sometimes eagerly, but working, unless absolute physical prostration forbade. When he is too exhausted, he complains: ‘Facts compel me to conclude that my brain was never formed for much thinking.’[446] But if so, he certainly lived contrary to his nature. He tells us that he cannot resist forming hypotheses on every subject.[447] Sometimes he bewails the tendency, realizing its drawbacks and dangers. Sometimes he gives way to it, recognizing its charm: ‘It is delightful to have many points fermenting in one’s brain.’[448] Speculation is fascinating. Theory gives form and texture to the fleeting drift and confusion of fact. Yet even when one indulges with most enthusiasm, a touch of humor shows that the satisfaction must be tempered with a certain lack of entire confidence: ‘That is a splendid fact about the white moths; it warms one’s very blood to see a theory thus almost proved to be true.’[449]

For the wonder and the interest of Darwin is, that, with such an eager and perpetual bent toward theorizing, he could keep the bent so fully under control. As Karl Pearson puts it, generally: ‘Hundreds of men have allowed their imagination to solve the universe, but the men who have contributed to our real understanding of natural phenomena have been those who were unstinted in their application of criticism to the product of their imaginations.’[450] Surely no man applied such criticism more carefully, more conscientiously, more constantly than Darwin. He analyzes his own position and sees the dangers of it: ‘Living so solitary as I do, one gets to think in a silly manner of one’s own work.’[451] He sees constantly how theory interferes and warps the judgment: ‘I have not a doubt that before many months are over I shall be longing for the most dishonest species as being more honest than the honestest theories.’[452] The possibility of error haunts him, torments him, and he knows well how apt his own speculative disposition is to mislead: ‘What you hint at generally is very, very true: that my work will be grievously hypothetical, and large parts by no means worthy of being called induction, my commonest error being probably induction from too few facts.’[453] As a consequence he was ever on his guard against being led astray. The tempting little demon of hypothesis might be luring round the corner: ‘It is as difficult not to form some opinion as it is to form a correct judgment.’[454] But whatever opinion was formed must be corrected, must be adjusted, must be tested, by the cold and rigid measure of fact. As he says himself, ‘I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it.’[455] And one who knew him well and had studied him carefully says the same thing with equal emphasis: ‘His long experience had given him a kind of instinctive insight into the method of attack of any biological problem, however unfamiliar to him, while he rigidly controlled the fertility of his mind in hypothetical explanations by the no less fertility of ingeniously devised experiment.’[456]

In regard to this matter of speculative freedom and the tendency to let imagination run wild, it is interesting to watch Darwin’s comments on the general methods of others. The excess of abstinence he indeed deplores, recognizing that a man’s extreme caution may prevent him from theorizing enough: ‘How many astronomers have labored their whole lives on observations, and have not drawn a single conclusion.’[457] But the danger on the other side is so great and so ruinous that it cannot be enough insisted on, and indeed at times it makes all generalization suspicious and almost a thing to be eschewed: ‘I look at a strong tendency to generalize as an entire evil.’[458] At any rate, the theorist must never forget the subjective element, that his preconceptions and prejudices are apt to warp his judgment and distort his vision, till the keenest of observers and the sanest of thinkers may go astray: ‘the firmest conviction of the truth of a doctrine by its author seems, alas, not to be the slightest guarantee of truth.’[459]

The profit and the lesson of all which must be constantly borne home to oneself: ‘When I think of the many cases of men who have studied one subject for years, and have persuaded themselves of the truth of the foolishest doctrines, I feel sometimes a little frightened, whether I may not be one of these monomaniacs.’[460]

To appreciate fully Darwin’s combination of mental activity and fertility with moderation and restraint, it is well to place him between two extreme types of thinkers. On the one hand, there is the born essential reasoner, and logician, Spinoza, for instance, or Hegel, or Darwin’s own contemporary, Spencer, the man who to a greater or less extent takes fact for his foundation, but who by nature and temperament delights to weave an elaborate web of logical theory, rigid and perfect in its appearance of systematic deduction, but too apt in the end to treat facts with indifference if not disrespect. I like especially in this regard to compare Darwin with Lucretius. The De Rerum Natura is one of the most striking, enthralling examples of what I should call passionate thinking. Theoretical problems take hold of Lucretius like the ecstasies of love. He tears and wrenches at the roots of thought, determined to make them yield to the delving vigor of his eager search. Now Darwin has a broad and constant curiosity, his interest may well be called enthusiasm, and he himself uses the term passion for it: ‘Hence it has come to be a passion with me to try to connect all such facts by some sort of hypothesis.’[461] Yet in no phase of his nature should I be inclined ever to employ the general word, ‘passion,’ and it seems to me that every page of Lucretius is stamped with a devouring ardor different from anything Darwin knew.

On the other hand, over against these furious reasoners, I should set Darwin’s close contemporary, Sainte-Beuve, who, as I said in the previous chapter was, in some aspects, as admirable a representative of the scientific spirit as Darwin himself. The endless curiosity, the unlimited observation of fact, as embodied in the human subject, have never been more richly exemplified than in the great French critic. But Sainte-Beuve was no reasoner in the larger sense. He did not even avoid reasoning from mistrust: he had no taste for it, and when he dealt with it, it was always charily and with extreme reserve. He delighted to study and portray individuals and to allow those individuals, as it were, to classify themselves and so to point the way to general results.

Between these two extremes Darwin stands, as one who used reasoning to the fullest extent for the interpretation of fact, yet at the same time always stuck closely and rigidly to the fact itself, and would not allow it to be for an instant distorted by the reasoning process.

II

The supreme means for keeping theory on a basis of fact is of course unfailing, persistent, ever-varied experiment. In the preceding chapter we have seen observation lead naturally to experiment; but experiment is observation guided, directed, and illuminated by theory. And assuredly no scientist ever had the love and the habit of experiment more firmly fixed than Darwin. The explanation of phenomena was all very well in its place, essential, absorbing, but he would have agreed absolutely with Aristotle as to the proper ordering of the process: ‘After this we shall pass on to the discussion of causes. For to do this when the investigation of the details is complete, is the proper and natural method, and that whereby the subject and the premises of our argument will afterwards be rendered plain.’[462] The fascination of experiment in itself was endless and almost sufficing: ‘The love of experiment was very strong in him,’ says his son, ‘and I can remember the way he would say, “I shan’t be easy till I have tried it,” as if an outside force were driving him.’[463] There was a sense of adventure about it, of discovery, and he loved to try things that seemed almost fantastic and absurd: ‘If you knew some of the experiments (if they may be so-called) which I am trying, you would have a good right to sneer, for they are so absurd even in my opinion that I dare not tell you.’[464] And more concisely and vividly: ‘I am like a gambler and love a wild experiment.’[465] The best comment on which is the excellent remark of Professor Castle: ‘Most advances in practical affairs are made by those who have the courage to attempt what others with good reason think unattainable. When such attempts have succeeded, the world simply revises its classification of things attainable and unattainable, and makes a fresh start.’[466]

The first thing in regard to experiment is conditions. There are of course rough and elementary experiments, involving only simple principles, which do not require minute care in detail. But in many cases the nicest and most delicate preparation and adjustment are indispensable to ensure reliable results. The extensive equipment of modern laboratories was not at Darwin’s command, and though he had considerable financial resources, he could not afford the unlimited outlay of commercial research. Thus, we read of one of Mr. Burbank’s trials: ‘Forty thousand blackberry and raspberry hybrids were produced and grown until the fruit matured. Then from the whole lot a single variety was chosen as the best.... All others were uprooted with their crop of ripening berries, heaped up into a pile twelve feet wide, fourteen feet high, and twenty-two feet long, and burned. Nothing remained of this expensive and lengthy experiment, except the one parent plant of the new variety.’[467] Darwin could hardly work on any such elaborate scale as this. Yet, as one turns over his vast record of experiment, one is astonished to see how thorough and painstaking was his effort to avoid accidents and to provide for disturbing contingencies. Take, for instance, as a minor but significant illustration, his account of the difficulty in carrying out the specific fertilization of certain plants: ‘In making eighteen different unions, sometimes on windy days, and pestered by bees and flies buzzing about, some few errors could hardly be avoided. One day I had to keep a third man by me all the time to prevent the bees visiting the uncovered plants, for in a few seconds’ time they might have done irreparable mischief. It was also extremely difficult to exclude minute Diptera from the net.’[468]

Another vital consideration as to experiment, is that it should be kept impersonal. In most cases, if one is to experiment fruitfully and satisfactorily, there should be some special object in view, some particular point to be rejected or confirmed. Unless you know just what you are looking for, you are apt not to see. Again and again in Darwin’s book on Orchids, as in many of the others, we read that he made investigations and got no results, simply because he did not have in mind theoretical possibilities. When he had reasoned out what ought to happen or might happen, he often found that it did. The danger of this method is obvious. When the experimenter is so desperately anxious to see something, unless he is most carefully trained and disciplined, he will see it. It is not to be supposed that Darwin always escaped this danger, but few men have been more prepared for it or more ready to allow for it than he. His confession of prejudice, his recognition of the importance of certain points in his general theory and of his unwillingness to have anything interfere with them are among his greatest charms: ‘I remember well the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over.... The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick.’[469]

We have already enlarged under observation on the essential quality of accuracy, and it may simply be added that accuracy is doubly important in all experiments for a theoretical purpose. Accuracy, complete, detailed, mathematical exactitude, was Darwin’s hobby, and the minuteness of his record constantly exemplifies it.

Also, to confirm their accuracy experiments have to be repeated. Goethe remarks with justice that it is not necessary to travel all over the world to make sure that the sky is everywhere blue,[470] and no doubt there are repetitions that are vain and superfluous. But many difficult and delicate researches have to be gone over again and again that the minutest detail may be complete; and the process may involve months of tedious delay. Darwin’s unfailing care, both to repeat and to avoid repetition, is well indicated in his son’s comment: ‘Although he would patiently go on repeating experiments where there was any good to be gained, he could not endure having to repeat an experiment which ought, if complete care had been taken, to have succeeded the first time.’[471] Here too, one cannot appreciate how immense and thorough his experimentation was without looking through such books as the ‘Animals and Plants under Domestication’ or ‘The Power of Movement in Plants.’ The endless repetition of slightly varied combinations to test a difficult or remote conclusion makes one feel how persistent and inexhaustible the patience was. And after all the years of repeated and varied research and investigation he writes the almost pathetic epilogue six months before his death: ‘I wish that I had enough strength and spirit to commence a fresh set of experiments, and publish the results, with a full recantation of my errors when convinced of them.’[429]

Finally, experiments have to be not only made, but recorded, and the accuracy, so essential with all scientific observation, is above all essential here, since the omission of a link in the record may be ruinous to the continuity of the logical chain. It is peculiarly characteristic of Darwin that he wanted the record of error and mistake as well as of success. ‘I remember,’ says his son, ‘how strongly he urged the necessity of keeping the notes of experiments which failed, and to this rule he always adhered.’[430] The value of preserving and comparing apparently insignificant and meaningless notes is sometimes brought out, as in a special case of orchids: ‘I had given up the case as hopeless, until summing up my observations, the explanation presently to be given, and subsequently proved by repeated experiments to be correct, suddenly occurred to me.’[431] Long experience of his own mistakes and failures induces extreme scepticism as to the results of others: ‘The difficulty is to know what to trust.’[352] Even when he has taken the greatest pains, the scepticism often lingers and forces him to repeat although with an identical result: ‘Notwithstanding the care taken and the number of trials made, when in the following year I looked merely at the results, without reading over my observations, I again thought that there must have been some error, and thirty-five fresh trials were made with the weakest solution; but the results were as plainly marked as before.’[353] And thus the long series of packed, closely printed volumes forms an amazing record of a life of zealous, persistent, curious experimentation from beginning to end.

III

Now let us look a little more closely at the stuff and quality of Darwin’s logical processes, considered as such. He himself often complains of the slowness and difficulty of his thinking. It is hard for him to arrange his thoughts, he says, hard for him to get them into the lucid and effective order which carries conviction with it, almost enforces conviction by the power of its own movement. He says of one of his critics: ‘He admits to a certain extent Natural Selection, yet I am sure does not understand me. It is strange that very few do, and I am become quite convinced that I must be an extremely bad explainer.’[354]

It is worth while to note the comments of Huxley, as one of Darwin’s staunchest friends and supporters, on his reasoning faculty and processes. When Romanes lauds Darwin’s colossal intellect, Huxley is inclined to protest: ‘Colossal does not seem to me to be the right epithet for Darwin’s intellect. He had a clear, rapid intelligence, a great memory, a vivid imagination, and what made his greatness was the strict subordination of all these to the love of truth.’[355] Elsewhere Huxley adds: ‘Exposition was not Darwin’s forte—and his English is sometimes wonderful. But there is a marvelous dumb sagacity about him and he gets to truth by ways as dark as those of the Heathen Chinee.’[356] Of ‘The Origin of Species’ Huxley writes: ‘It is one of the hardest books to understand thoroughly that I know of.’[357] And again, more amply: ‘Long occupation with the work has led the present writer to believe that “The Origin of Species” is one of the hardest of books to master, and he is justified in this conviction by observing that although the “Origin” has been close on thirty years before the world, the strangest misconceptions of the essential nature of the theory therein advocated are still put forth by serious writers.’[358] Critics less friendly to Darwin than Huxley have spoken still more strongly.

I feel that Huxley’s judgment is too severe. It is true that Darwin had not the admirable gift of logical, lucid exposition which made Huxley himself one of the most luminous of scientific writers. But even when Darwin’s reasoning is most complex and difficult, there is a notable quality of sincerity and single-mindedness, which wins and retains your confidence. He seems somehow to have an exceptional power of taking you into his mental processes, and to make you think and see and feel as he does. If you feel that he may be wrong, it is because he feels that he may be wrong himself.

It is profitable to examine a little more in detail some illustrations of Darwin’s scientific theorizing. The great central doctrine of evolution, with its buttressing support of natural selection, will fill our next chapter, but there are several lesser developments of speculation which deserve notice. I need hardly say that we are not in any way discussing the validity of the theories in the abstract, but simply Darwin’s fashion of framing, holding, and sustaining them.

There is first the theory as to the formation of coral reefs. At an early period in his career Darwin conceived the idea that these reefs were produced by the subsidence of the ocean bed and the steady building up of the coral insects toward the surface. He himself admits that this theory was the most deductive of all that he ever urged and the least founded in the beginning upon a wide and careful investigation of fact. Alexander Agassiz, who, after extensive research, was not disposed to accept it, wrote: ‘Darwin’s observations were all theoretical, based upon chartographic study in his house, a very poor way of doing, and that’s the way all his coral reef work has been done.’[359] And the theory has met with strenuous opposition from many quarters, though one critic says in regard to it: ‘Be it true or not, be it a competent explanation or not, no matter. In influence on geology it has been as far-reaching as the doctrine of natural selection has been on biology.’[360] But Darwin himself clung to it to the end, meeting objections with vast ingenuity and reiterating his positions with ampler and more penetrating arguments. Yet through all the persistence there is the readiness at any moment to see the other side. ‘I must still adhere to my opinion, that the atolls and barrier reefs in the middle of the Pacific and Indian Oceans indicate subsidence, but I fully agree with you that such cases as that of the Pellew Islands, if of at all frequent occurrence, would make my general conclusions of very little value. Future observers must decide between us.’[361] And he writes frankly to Alexander Agassiz: ‘If I am wrong, the sooner I am knocked on the head and annihilated so much the better.’[362]

Another instance of Darwin’s zeal and ingenuity in reasoning is the theory of sexual selection, devised to meet some difficulties in his general argument. Many animals have certain so-called secondary sexual characteristics, that is, characteristics affecting one sex only yet not directly involved in the reproductive process. Darwin believed that these characteristics were largely developed through the working of natural selection upon the basis of the preference of one sex for individuals of the other for mating purposes. That is to say, the splendor of the male peacock’s tail made him more attractive to the female and therefore more successful with her. There were numerous and obvious difficulties in this view, as the assumption of a fine æsthetic sense in comparatively lowly organized creatures, and it was energetically disputed from the start. Wallace, Darwin’s ardent fellow-thinker and coadjutor, was anything but favorable to it. Yet Darwin’s faith was never really shaken. He persisted to the end, making new experiments and investigations, and meeting his adversaries’ contentions with vast and varied resource. In ‘The Descent of Man’ he wrote: ‘For my own part I conclude that of all the causes which have led to the differences in external appearance between the races of man, and to a certain extent between man and the lower animals, sexual selection has been the most efficient.’[363] Nevertheless, it is fascinating to see him reveal the doubt and the questioning that were inwrought with conviction in his mind. He writes to Wallace: ‘I grieve to differ from you, and it actually terrifies me and makes me constantly distrust myself.’[364] Again: ‘You will be pleased to hear that I am undergoing severe distress about protection and sexual selection; this morning I oscillated with joy towards you; this evening I have swung back to my [old] position, out of which I fear I shall never get.’[365] And he sums up the process with a general remark of the largest and most fruitful bearing: ‘I sometimes marvel how truth progresses, so difficult is it for one man to convince another, unless his mind is vacant. Nevertheless, I myself to a certain extent contradict my own remark, for I believe far more in the importance of protection than I did before reading your articles.’[366]

Still another example of theorizing is the doctrine of pangenesis. Darwin’s general theory of evolution which dealt so much with heredity, was closely complicated with the difficulty of understanding how one minute reproductive cell could transmit by inheritance all the complicated variety of organs and functions in a highly developed plant or animal. To meet this difficulty he devised the explanation of pangenesis (he doubts about the name, because ‘my wife says it sounds wicked, like pantheism’),[367] that is, the idea that the primitive cell contains a great number of gemmules, each transmitting and originating some particular organ with its varied functions. Here again the theory, as Darwin conceived it, did not find general acceptance, though in some respects it surprisingly anticipates the results of the latest modern research. But the interesting thing is to see the ardor with which its inventor worked it out and the elaborate argument with which he carries it through the latter part of the great work on ‘Animals and Plants under Domestication.’ It is difficult, he admits. He does not blame any one for disputing it, or for rejecting it, or even for laughing at it. ‘The hypothesis of Pangenesis, as applied to the several great classes of facts just discussed, no doubt is extremely complex, but so are the facts.’[368] And then he lets his imagination range more widely than usual in contemplating possible deductions and consequences: ‘No other attempt, as far as I am aware, has been made, imperfect as this confessedly is, to connect under one point of view these several grand classes of facts. An organic being is a microcosm—a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and numerous as the stars in heaven.’[369] Yet here again he introduces the inevitable reservation and in his Autobiographical Sketch he says: ‘Towards the end of the work I give my well-abused hypothesis of Pangenesis. An unverified hypothesis is of little or no value; but if any one should hereafter be led to make observations by which some such hypothesis could be established, I shall have done good service.’[370]

It seems sometimes surprising that, with this marked bent towards abstract speculation, which it was so difficult to control, Darwin should have been always so indifferent to philosophical thought on the ultimate questions of the universe. He admits that he knew little of metaphysics and cared little for them. But this again is instructive as to the peculiar balance of his temperament. He liked to speculate, but he would not speculate for a moment without a firm foundation of fact. His feet must be based first on the solid tangible earth. Then if his head would not reach the clouds, he would keep out of them.

IV

It will be profitable to consider more in detail some specific elements of Darwin’s reasoning. In the first place, we have seen everywhere and in all connections that his propensity to eager theorizing was tempered with an unfailing sense of doubt and mistrust. He was indeed always disposed to act in the spirit of Weisman’s remark: ‘When we are confronted with facts which we see no possibility of understanding save on a single hypothesis, even though it be an undemonstratable one, we are naturally led to accept the hypothesis, at least until a better one can be found.’[371] And he recognized fully the force of the comment which Huxley makes on a phrase of Goethe, to the effect that doubt must not be blighting or destructive, but fruitful and stimulating: ‘Goethe has an excellent aphorism defining that state of mind which he calls “Thätige Skepsis”—active doubt. It is doubt which so loves truth that it neither dares rest in doubting nor extinguish itself by unjustified belief.’[64] At the same time, the doubt was there, was temperamental, and could not be altogether extinguished, even when the rush of the logical impetus was fullest. One beautiful expression of it among many is, ‘When you say you cannot master the train of thoughts, I know well enough that they are too doubtful and obscure to be mastered. I have often experienced what you call the humiliating feeling of getting more and more involved in doubt the more one thinks of the facts and reasoning on doubtful points.’[65] The truth is, that Darwin had in a high degree the quality, often so hampering to the man of practical action, but invaluable to the thinker, of getting outside of himself and his own point of view and criticizing it as if it were the standpoint of some one else. He himself indicates this forcibly in connection with returning to one’s ideas after an interval: ‘The delay in this case, as with all my other books, has been a great advantage to me; for a man after a long interval can criticize his own work, almost as well as if it were that of another person.’[66] Some men can.

Another characteristic of Darwin’s mental processes is his way of meeting difficulties. The born reasoner is apt to slur over obstacles and objections, to devote himself with endless ingenuity to eliminating them rather than facing them squarely. Darwin was ingenious enough, but he did not dodge difficulties. Instead of doing so, his propensity was, if anything, to make them and seek them. It was said of Pasteur, so like Darwin in many points: ‘No adversary of M. Pasteur had formulated this argument; but M. Pasteur, who had within himself an ever-present adversary, always on the watch and determined to yield only to the force of accumulated evidence, himself raised the objection.’[67] So Darwin. As he himself records, and no thinker ever laid down a more significant principle or one more revealing for his own mental constitution: ‘I had, also, during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones.’[68] And the intense consciousness of objections and difficulties appears even more vividly in the sentence: ‘I cannot too strongly express my conviction of the general truth of my doctrines, and God knows I have never shirked a difficulty.’[69]

The recognition of obstacles and complications constantly popping up from everywhere naturally necessitated endless revision and recasting. Here again, the habitual reasoner, having once set his mould is reluctant to alter it. Not so Darwin. There are indeed times when even he rebels and declares that it will be more fruitful to follow new paths than to be perpetually adjusting the old. But in general his readiness to alter and reconstruct is unlimited. He revises and works over his books. In doing so he showed his characteristic disposition to accept and defer to the judgment of others. How charming is his daughter’s account of this: ‘He was always so ready to be convinced that any suggested alteration was an improvement, and so full of gratitude for the trouble taken. I do not think that he ever used to forget to tell me what improvement he thought that I had made, and he used almost to excuse himself if he did not agree with any correction. I think I felt the singular modesty and graciousness of his nature through thus working for him in a way I never should otherwise have done.’[70] There is no better way to appreciate the extent and the persistence of Darwin’s revision than to make even a cursory comparison of the first and the last editions of the ‘Origin.’ Almost every page shows minor or considerable changes, and while some are no doubt mere matters of language, many have a bearing, however slight, on the trend of the reasoning, deepening, or strengthening, or clarifying it.

It is profitable also to watch Darwin’s attitude towards argument, the direct interchange of view by those who take different sides of a case and are at once eager to advance their own and to detect the flaws in their opponent’s. It is very evident that he was not a quick and natural arguer, as was Huxley, for instance. His son says: ‘He used to say of himself that he was not quick enough to hold an argument with any one, and I think this was true. Unless it was a subject on which he was just then at work, he could not get the train of argument into working order quickly enough.’[71] And Darwin confesses the same thing with his unfailing, charming naïveté, in a letter to Hooker: ‘I am astonished at your success and audacity. It is something unintelligible to me how any one can argue in public like orators do. I had no idea you had this power.’[72]

Arguments haunted him, agitated him, disturbed him. Active discussion was apt to be followed by a broken night, filled with the things that might and should have been said and were not. Even of a conversation quite remote from his scientific interest he says: ‘Your slave discussion disturbed me much; but as you would care no more for my opinion on this head than for the ashes of this letter, I will say nothing except that it gave me some sleepless, most uncomfortable hours.’[73]

The gift I have before suggested, of getting outside of your own position and judging it as another would, while it benefits the results of argument, is most hampering in the process, since one finds oneself stating one’s adversary’s case sometimes more forcibly than he does himself. Darwin often repeats the principle I have quoted earlier, of recognizing and recording objections, and he sums up his method in regard to his main theory: ‘I have for some time determined to give the arguments on both sides (as far as I could) instead of arguing on the mutability side alone.’[74]

Yet in spite of all the strain and effort of argument, he liked it and believed in it. In the concluding chapter of the ‘Origin’ he says: ‘This whole volume is one long argument.’[75] It certainly is. Elsewhere he says of a personal conversation: ‘I was particularly glad of our discussion after dinner; fighting a battle with you always clears my mind wonderfully.’[76] To get the mind clear, to illuminate and elucidate the complicated tangles of thought and theory, that was always the object, and if verbal battles helped it on, they were welcome.

But if he liked sincere, earnest argument, he detested controversy, the bitter war of excited personal feelings bent rather on achieving an individual triumph than on proving an abstract theory. He condemned and deplored the injury to science inevitably wrought by such disputes and had nothing but disgust for the manifestations of temper that were bound to accompany them: ‘I went the other evening to the Zoölogical Society, where the speakers were snarling at each other in a manner anything but like that of gentlemen.’[77]

When his own views were involved in bitterness, as, alas, they too often were, he expressed the keenest regret: ‘I often think that my friends ... have good cause to hate me, for having stirred up so much mud, and led them into so much odious trouble. If I had been a friend of myself, I should have hated me.’[78] He early made up his mind to keep out of quarrels if possible, and he congratulated himself on the whole on his success: ‘I rejoice that I have avoided controversies, and this I owe to Lyell, who many years ago, in reference to my geological works, strongly advised me never to get entangled in a controversy, as it rarely did any good and caused a miserable loss of time and temper.’[79]

Thus, whenever it was possible, he shunned dispute, and if, by any chance, haste and eagerness involved him in a mistaken cause, he bitterly regretted his blunder and was ready to acknowledge it with the utmost frankness. One of the most striking cases of this is that of the parallel roads of Glen Roy, as to which Darwin had developed a geological theory which he asserted with a good deal of conviction. A careful consideration of his opponent’s arguments, obliged him to recognize that he was completely in the wrong, and he gave up, though with a pang: ‘I am very poorly to-day, and very stupid, and hate everybody and everything. One lives only to make blunders.’[80] His acknowledgment of his error was ample and complete.

It was his natural frankness in admitting his mistakes and endeavoring to rectify them which made Darwin so attractive and engaging. Goethe complains of the disposition of many people to reiterate a misstatement because they have once made it.[81] Such reiteration did not appeal to Darwin in the least. Sometimes he was irritated and annoyed by the attitude of his adversaries, and he expressed the annoyance with the same outspokenness that he gave to other things; but there was never any attempt to conceal his blunders or to maintain his own positions simply because they were his.

Indeed, in this regard, as in all others, what distinguished him was a singular and charming candor. It is this which makes his letters so attractive and so revealing. They are not great literary letters. They are always written in haphazard fashion and with the utmost casual directness. But few correspondences of literary men or of any others reveal the man with such clear and winning amplitude. He opens his heart and leads you right into it without the least pretence of self-revelation, but simply as if he were thinking aloud to you, as he is. Take, for instance, among a bewildering mass of illustrations, his confession of the sense of inferiority in regard to Spencer: ‘I feel rather mean when I read him: I could bear, rather enjoy feeling that he was twice as ingenious and clever as myself, but when I feel that he is about a dozen times my superior, even in the master art of wriggling, I feel aggrieved.’[82] Or this other acknowledgment to Hooker: ‘How candidly and meekly you took my Jeremiad on your severity to second-class men. After I had sent it off, an ugly little voice asked me, once or twice, how much of my noble defence of the poor in spirit and in fact, was owing to your having not seldom smashed favorite notions of my own. I silenced the ugly little voice with contempt, but it would whisper again and again.’[83] The sense, the atmosphere, of a pervading candor, was what Huxley expressed so excellently when he spoke of Darwin’s having ‘a certain intense and almost passionate honesty by which all his thoughts and actions were irradiated, as by a central fire. It was this greatest and rarest of endowments which kept his vivid imagination and great speculative powers within due bounds ... which made him accept criticisms and suggestions from anybody and everybody, not only without impatience, but with expressions of gratitude sometimes almost comically in excess of their value.’[84]

For the honesty and the candor not only led him to admit his own mistakes, but made him singularly ready to recognize the merits of others, and to tolerate not only their views but even their dogmatic assertion of them. He made mistakes all the time, and yet he knew that he was sincere and lofty in purpose. Why should not others be the same? Why should not their theories be right and his wrong? ‘It matters very little to any one except myself, whether I am a little more or less wrong on this or that point; in fact, I am sure to be proved wrong on many points.’[85] Of one who did not agree with him he could say: ‘I know nothing of him excepting from his letters: these show remarkable talent, astonishing perseverance, much modesty, and what I admire, determined difference from me on many points.’[86] And how winning is his defense of blunderers, of those who do poor work which is not all poor: ‘Shall you think me very impudent if I tell you that I have sometimes thought that ... you are a little too hard on bad observers; that a remark made by a bad observer cannot be right; an observer who deserves to be damned you would utterly damn. I feel entire deference to any remark you make out of your own head; but when in opposition to some poor devil, I somehow involuntarily feel not quite so much.’[87]

The truth is, that Darwin’s tolerance was based, as all real tolerance is apt to be, on the vast and haunting sense of his own ignorance. Again and again he repeats and emphasizes how little he knows, how little any one knows, and how petty, imperfect, and inadequate are the efforts of any and all of us to penetrate the veil of shrouding mystery which involves the deepest secrets of life. To probe this mystery the vague and flickering torch of reason is all that is given to us. And those who are most conversant with reason and make most use of it mistrust it most. When the far surer guidance of instinct fails us, reason is our only support, and we must employ it not only for the larger speculative purposes, but for the practical decisions. At its best, it is a bright and splendid instrument, incredibly keen and penetrating, and able to accomplish miracles in the hands of those who manipulate it skillfully. But it is an instrument as delicate as it is bright, and it loses point and edge, unless constant pains are taken to keep it in working condition. Also, it cuts both ways, and every way, and to even the expert manipulator, perhaps to him most of all, it is apt to be difficult, dangerous, treacherous.

There is the subtle, unfathomable connection of reason with our wishes, desires, and prejudices. A clever Frenchman said that reason was given us to enable us to justify the gratification of our passions, and when we see how the devices of logic may be used to work from any premises to any conclusion, one feels the force of the Frenchman’s view.

No one was more aware than Darwin of these dangers and difficulties of reason, or of the endless possibilities of deception when one gives oneself up to that enchanting and deluding siren. He often emphasizes his distress and almost despair at finding himself making deductions quite different from those which others draw from the same facts. ‘It is really disgusting and humiliating to see directly opposite conclusions drawn from the same facts.’[88] And again: ‘Nothing is so vexatious to me, as so constantly finding myself drawing different conclusions from better judges than myself, from the same facts.’[89] And yet again: ‘I hate beyond all things finding myself in disagreement with any capable judge, when the premises are the same.’[90]

These comments make us see clearly what Darwin’s relation to reason was. Few thinkers have been so ready, so fertile, so abundant, so ingenious, yet at the same time so sober, so restrained and controlled.

With this analysis of his observation and his thought we are ready to take up the supreme interest of Darwin’s life, the dramatic study of the conception, elaboration, promulgation, and triumph of his evolutionary theory.

CHAPTER III
DARWIN: THE DISCOVERER

I

The word ‘evolution’ is so popularly accepted and so generally employed in connection with Darwin’s theories that it will never be displaced; but it is not wholly satisfactory, because it always suggests progress from a lower to a higher and hence involves a difficult and invidious definition of terms. Some such phrase as ‘descent with modification’ would probably be more exact. But whatever the term used, to associate it as a scientific theory or discovery exclusively with Darwin or any other one man would be absurd. The natural hypothesis of earlier thinkers was that divine creative power, in whatever shape, had established the different forms of life on the earth pretty much as they exist to-day. But those who looked more deeply, were inclined to surmise, in view of the close and evident bonds of kinship between all living things, that variety had developed from comparative unity and that the vital impulse, having first appeared in elementary forms, became gradually elaborated into more and more complicated organisms. The vast pains that Darwin took to substantiate this view, together with his particular explanation of how the process came about, have forever bound up the idea of evolution with his name, but he did not originate it nor did he claim to have done so.

The various hints and manifestations of earlier evolutionary theory are admirably elucidated in Professor Osborn’s ‘From the Greeks to Darwin.’ The vast curiosity and reflection of Aristotle anticipated here, as everywhere, and some of his sentences have a striking evolutionary bearing: ‘Variety in animal life may be produced by variety of locality.’[389] ‘Locality will differentiate habits also; for instance, rugged highlands will not produce the same results as the soft lowlands.’[390] And Empedocles suggests Darwin’s views even more directly. Under the régime of Biblical and Christian tradition evolutionary thought naturally made little progress. But with the greater freedom of the eighteenth century, notions of modification by descent again appeared. In England Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, the botanical poet, speculated curiously on the subject, and there were various other intimations, notably in Chambers’s ‘Vestiges of Creation,’ while Darwin himself felt that he was much influenced by the geological theories of Lyell. In Germany Goethe became profoundly interested in the metamorphoses of life. Especially in France Buffon and St.-Hilaire led up to the ‘Philosophie Zoologique’ of Lamarck, which propounded the theory of modification in a very definite form, and suggested the mode in which the modification was accomplished. Lamarck’s idea was that plants and animals, by an inborn, vital impulse, adapted themselves to their environment, and that these adaptations were transmitted by inheritance. Thus wading birds acquired webbed feet and the neck of the giraffe was elongated in its effort to obtain its food from the branches of the trees. The great stumbling-block of this theory has always been the difficulty of proving that acquired adaptations are inherited.[A]

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Investigators have of course worked constantly and persistently upon this point and I find Professor William McDougall quoted in a Boston Herald editorial of August 16, 1926, as saying: ‘Species may change and undergo evolution through the efforts of the individual parents to adapt themselves to conditions.’

What is of interest to us, however, is Darwin’s attitude toward his more immediate predecessors, Buffon, Lamarck, Chambers, etc. This attitude has been a matter of much comment by Samuel Butler and others and it is not perfectly easy to understand. That Darwin in his earlier thinking as well as in his later was influenced by previous investigators is evident enough, for instance in touches like that in the ‘Voyage of the Beagle’: ‘Nature by making habit omnipotent, and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate and productions of his miserable country.’[391] Also, his frequent comments show that he knew what had been written before him and had profited by it, and in the later editions of the ‘Origin’ he took some pains to acknowledge the obligation. Yet his tone in his letters is by no means respectful and of Lamarck especially, who had done the most, it is difficult for him to speak without a sneer. Thus, in 1844 he writes: ‘Heaven forefend me from Lamarck nonsense of a “tendency to progression,” “adaptations from the slow willing of animals,” etc.! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so.’[392] Again, a little later: ‘With respect to books on this subject, I do not know any systematical ones, except Lamarck’s which is veritable rubbish.’[393] And later still, in 1859, he writes to Lyell: ‘You often allude to Lamarck’s work; I do not know what you think about it, but it appeared to me extremely poor; I got not a fact or idea from it.’[394]

Various explanations of Darwin’s treatment of Lamarck have been offered. One at least, that of a disposition to run down a predecessor from jealousy, we may exclude as absolutely as is possible with poor human nature. Everything we know of Darwin in other connections justifies us in doing this. Professor Osborn, after referring to ‘the disdainful allusions to him [Lamarck] by Charles Darwin (the only writer of whom Darwin ever spoke in this tone)’[395] observes that ‘it is very evident from all Darwin’s criticisms of Lamarck, that he had never studied him carefully in the original.’[396] But against this view we have to set Darwin’s own comment (italics mine): ‘What I consider, after two deliberate readings, as a wretched book, and one from which (I well remember my surprise) I gained nothing.’[397] It is true that Darwin, as in the quotation above as to ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals,’ apparently misinterpreted Lamarck’s view of the self-adaptation of the individual to its environment into the absurd assumption that animals and even plants deliberately willed their own evolutionary progress; but on the other hand Darwin all his life and especially in his later period wavered toward Lamarck’s adaptation theories. It has been suggested that in Darwin’s university years French thought and French scientists were distinctly in disfavor and that Darwin imbibed an enduring dislike of them.[398] Darwin himself hints that he may have been influenced by a prejudice in favor of his grandfather as Lamarck’s predecessor. But it seems more probable that he disliked Lamarck because he regarded him as a theorist and speculator who did not found his argument on a sufficiently broad basis of fact, whereas Darwin toiled for years at observation and experiment before he gave his theory to the world at all. This explanation is indicated in Darwin’s remark to Lyell: ‘As for Lamarck, as you have such a man as Grove with you, you are triumphant; not that I can alter my opinion that to me it was an absolutely useless book. Perhaps this was owing to my always searching books for facts.’[399] In any case one cannot help wishing that Darwin had spoken of a man so prominent and so highly esteemed as Lamarck a little differently.

II

Darwin first began to be interested in the idea of modification by descent during his voyage on the Beagle and in the year 1837.[400] In his earlier years he had been satisfied with the conventionally orthodox theological and scientific conception of the creation of distinct species, and all his youthful work had been on the basis of this view. Such phrases as the note, written in 1834, in Valparaiso: ‘It seems not a very improbable conjecture that the want of animals may be owing to none having been created since this country was raised from the sea,’[401] are obviously significant of the earlier attitude. But as he observed more widely and became more and more impressed with the infinite diversity of forms and the delicacy of shading with which they pass into each other, the conviction grew that the possibilities of development were unlimited, and that individual differences might pass into varieties and these again into species, making the origin of varied life far simpler and more unified than had ever been imagined. And such an evolutionary process seemed much more in accord with general natural laws than the abrupt appearance of fixed, highly organized forms in sudden sufficiency. As he says, ‘the subject haunted me,’ and from a very early period he began making notes and memoranda of all observations that might bear for—or against—the gradual modification of species.

A PAGE FROM A NOTEBOOK OF 1837

The difficulty was to imagine just how the process of modification was brought about, and until he could get some light on this point, his enthusiasm for the general idea was chilled and baffled. As we have seen, Lamarck’s view, that living beings directly adapted themselves to their surroundings and then transmitted these adaptations to their descendants, seemed at least inadequate, and Darwin felt that the theory must have some more solid basis, if it was to prevail at all. He set his mind to work for months and months, and he applied the intellectual method which he himself has so admirably defined in a letter to his young son: ‘I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever—much cleverer than the discoverers—never originate anything. As far as I can conjecture, the art consists in habitually searching for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs.’[402]

Searching for the cause and meaning of everything which occurred, he at last achieved the discovery he was looking for, and so knew what is assuredly one of the greatest of spiritual delights. Largely by watching and studying the results of deliberate human selection with plants and animals, he was led to his great principle of natural selection, that is, assuming the tendency in all living beings to vary individually, that in the intense struggle for existence those variations which are beneficial and help the organism to live and prosper will be preserved and transmitted. The causes of variation, whether spontaneous or to be found in environment, Darwin never pretended entirely to explain. Of the principle of natural selection, or as Spencer phrased it in a form which Darwin admitted to be in some respects more satisfactory, ‘the survival of the fittest,’ perhaps its discoverer has given no better statement than the sentences in the second volume of the great work on ‘Plants and Animals under Domestication’: ‘To consider the subject under this point of view is enough to strike one dumb with amazement. But our amazement ought to be lessened when we reflect that beings almost infinite in number, during an almost infinite lapse of time, have often had their whole organization rendered in some degree plastic, and that each slight modification of structure which was in any way beneficial under excessively complex conditions of life has been preserved, whilst each which was in any way injurious has been rigorously destroyed. And the long-continued accumulation of beneficial variations will infallibly have led to structures as diversified, as beautifully adapted for various purposes, and as excellently coördinated, as we see in the animals around us. Hence I have spoken of selection as the paramount power, whether applied by man to the formation of domestic breeds, or by nature to the production of species.’[403]

It is not to be supposed that the first grasp of evolution through variation and natural selection could have carried with it the full foresight of the enormous changes, mental, moral, and spiritual, that such a theory was likely to produce. Still, a mind so keen and active as Darwin’s was bound to catch some suggestion of those changes. For instance, the astonishing and deadly ease with which the old workings of Providential adaptation and design slipped under the new light into mere operations of mechanical law could not fail to foreshadow the philosophical and theological upheaval that was sure to follow. A spirit trained in the conventional atmosphere of the early English nineteenth century must necessarily have regarded such an upheaval with a certain amount of question, awe, and even dismay; and Darwin indisputably had something of these feelings mingled with the triumphant joy of discovery.

It is profoundly characteristic of the man that he did not hasten to fling the discovery to the world, to get the immediate excitement and glory, leaving discussion and substantiation to come afterwards. He was so hesitant, so doubtful of his own methods and his own powers, that he delayed even to commit his conjectures to writing in his note-books, lest they should become hardened and distorted by the prejudice of statement and so misleading. His one idea was to get confirmation, by every line of study and experiment, and for twenty years he toiled with deliberate patience before he was willing to make the attempt to put his results into publishable shape.

And all the time there was the chance, perfectly present to his mind, that death might prevent him from ever making the discovery known. And all the time there was the chance that in the world of scientific thought that was seething about him some one else might anticipate him and propagate the idea, perhaps in a form less convincing and less substantial than he would be able to give it. Just as he was getting to the stage of preparation which he had aimed at, exactly this thing seemed likely to happen. In June 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace, a scientist of standing and ability, with whom Darwin had corresponded, sent him a paper largely anticipating Darwin’s ideas on natural selection, so largely that Darwin wrote of it to Lyell: ‘I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had my MS. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract; ... so all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.’[404] And he even doubted whether he should make his views public at all, for fear of depriving Wallace of credit: ‘I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.’[405] The difficulty was adjusted, however, by friends, and a joint paper by Darwin and Wallace both, was read at the meeting of the Linnæan Society on July 1, 1858, giving the world the first inkling of what natural selection was to mean. Sir Joseph Hooker wrote prophetically of this meeting: ‘The interest excited was intense, but the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists, before armoring. After the meeting it was talked over with bated breath.’[406]

The relation between Darwin and Wallace in regard to priority of discovery is one of the finest things in the whole history of science. There was no jealousy, no bitterness, no acrimony, but instead a full recognition of each others’ achievements, and a sympathetic understanding which ripened into a helpful and unbroken friendship. Wallace’s statement of the matter long after Darwin’s death, is as noble in its unselfishness as words can make it: ‘But what is often forgotten by the press and the public is that the idea occurred to Darwin in 1838 ... nearly twenty years earlier than to myself, and that during the whole twenty years he had been laboring collecting evidence from the vast mass of literature of biology, of horticulture, and of agriculture.... Such being the facts of the case, I should have had no cause for complaint if the respective shares of Darwin and myself ... had been henceforth estimated as being roughly proportioned to the time we had each bestowed upon it ... that is to say, as twenty years to one week.’[407] Darwin’s summary, more general, is equally worthy of both: ‘I hope it is a satisfaction to you to reflect—and very few things in my life have been more satisfactory to me—that we have never felt any jealousy towards each other, though in one sense rivals. I believe that I can say this of myself with truth, and I am absolutely sure that it is true of you.’[408]

The first promulgation of the Darwinian ideas, with those of Wallace, was therefore made in July, 1858. In the following year, November, 1859, ‘The Origin of Species’ was published. Darwin himself regarded this book as a mere preliminary sketch, requiring to be supported and buttressed by confirmatory evidence of all sorts. But it at once overwhelmed the world, and has always been looked upon since as the cardinal statement of the theory. As Huxley said of it, ‘It is doubtful if any single book, except the “Principia,” ever worked so great and so rapid a revolution in science, or made so deep an impression on the general mind.’[409] And innumerable quotations could be drawn from other sources to the same effect.

III

The study of the complication of motives that prompts a man like Darwin, and many others, to reveal and establish a great scientific discovery in spite of violent opposition is profoundly curious and profitable. It seems to me that a main element in these motives, with the scientist, as with the artist and the politician and the actor and the preacher and the athlete alike, is ambition. As Darwin himself expresses it: ‘The action of unconscious selection, as far as pigeons are concerned, depends on a universal principle in human nature, namely on our rivalry, and desire to outdo our neighbors. We see this in every fleeting fashion, even in our dress.’[410] And again: ‘Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness.’[411] The concrete essence of ambition is the desire for fame, to have one’s efforts, one’s powers, one’s achievement, one’s ego, recognized, appraised, established by the applause and commendation of one’s fellow-men. And surely this desire in itself is a natural and even a laudable one, leading, as it does, to most useful and enduring accomplishment. The drawback is that the thirst for glory is so enticing, so overmastering, that it seduces men into strange and dubious methods of obtaining it. Glory, or notoriety, is got so often by base means, the trickster and the charlatan can so often snatch its rewards and laurels from honest labor and even from genius divinely endowed, that sincere and earnest spirits are impelled to disclaim the pursuit altogether, and to insist, perhaps with genuine self-deception, that fame as a motive hardly enters into their struggle at all. This contention is maintained the more easily, since it is evident that other motives, and those most powerful, do enter in. There is the restless, ever active disposition of human nature to be doing something, almost no matter what. To work, to create, to achieve, is to live. Nothing else can properly be called life. To have done great things, to be doing them, makes you feel that you exist, and why should you vex yourself with what other men think of them? Then for the scientist there is the sheer delight of adding one grain of truth to the slow accumulation of the centuries, as for the artist there is the splendid sense of having created something beautiful. You know it, you feel it: what do the others matter? And there is further the rich reward of believing, or hoping, that you are doing even a little to help or to enlighten your fellow-men, whether they are ever aware of it or not. Few things are more soothing or cheering to the soul than that. So that there have been thinkers and there have been artists who have said, and perhaps sincerely thought: ‘I care not if some other man gets the credit of my work altogether. So the work is done, and I have done it, and know that I have done it, and it endures, and is worthy to endure, what does the name or the glory of it matter?’ There are many who have said this, there may be some who have meant it; but surely there are few who have tried to do great things, and have not longed for the human recognition of them; and why should they not?

It is peculiarly interesting to trace the play of these motives in Darwin, because here, as everywhere, he has such an extraordinary, intimate frankness of revelation. The love of fame was strong in him, and he knew it. He tells us of his childhood: ‘Some other recollections are those of vanity—namely, thinking that people were admiring me, in one instance for perseverance and another for boldness in climbing a low tree, and what is odder, a consciousness, as if instinctive, that I was vain, and contempt of myself.’[412] Of his earlier scientific years he writes: ‘I was also ambitious to take a fair place among scientific men ... whether more ambitious or less so than most of my fellow-workers, I can form no opinion.’[413] At a much later period he still recognizes the same stimulus: ‘Without you have a very much greater soul than I have (and I believe that you have), you will find the medal a pleasant little stimulus; when work goes badly, and one ruminates that all is vanity, it is pleasant to have some tangible proof, that others have thought something of one’s labors.’[414] And how charming is the frank admission that he hates to have glory snatched away from him: ‘I always thought it very possible that I might be forestalled, but I fancied that I had a grand enough soul not to care; but I found myself mistaken and punished.’[415] Certainly in him the tranquil appreciation that there was a something of inborn power can hardly be set down to the inferiority complex, and inborn power does yearn for outward applause: ‘Looking back, I infer that there must have been something in me a little superior to the common run of youths, otherwise the above-mentioned men, so much older than me and higher in academical position, would never have allowed me to associate with them.’[416]

Yet with the passage of years and the growing sense of the futility and injustice of popular reputation, Darwin was more and more disposed to disclaim all interest in it. The desire for glory, he admits, is a universal human motive, and a natural one; but there are others of as much, if not more account: ‘You do me injustice when you think that I work for fame; I value it to a certain extent; but, if I know myself, I work from a sort of instinct to try to make out truth.’[417] To the very end it is clear that the sale of his books and the public discussion of his ideas are pleasant to him, perhaps more pleasant than he recognizes. But assuredly no man can be said to be unduly hungry for the laudation of the mob who waits patiently for twenty years before making public his claims to it. And it is certain that never under any circumstances would Darwin have descended to court it by base means or false pretences. As he himself sums up the whole matter, speaking of his youth: ‘All this shows how ambitious I was; but I think I can say with truth that in after years, though I cared in the highest degree for the approbation of such men as Lyell and Hooker, who were my friends, I did not care much about the general public. I do not mean to say that a favorable review or a large sale of my books did not please me greatly, but the pleasure was a fleeting one, and I am sure that I have never turned one inch out of my course to gain fame.’[418] We certainly have here no extreme or morbid case of notoriety-seeking.

IV

Thus, in 1859, ‘The Origin of Species’ startled the world with the theory of evolution through natural selection, a theory which immediately raised a storm that in some of its aspects is still raging. It is occasionally urged that Darwin’s reputation and success had an element of good fortune in them, that, as with so many discoveries, he simply happened to express and as it were crystallize general ideas that were vaguely present to many and needed only a vigorous expositor to give them universal acceptance. Doubtless there is a measure of truth in this view. Yet it must not be forgotten how much Darwin’s character, his tact and reasonableness, his persistent energetic logic, above all the enormous industry and fidelity of his research entered into his final triumph. His own comment on this matter of the timeliness of his theories is exceedingly interesting: ‘It has sometimes been said that the success of the “Origin” proved “that the subject was in the air,” or “that men’s minds were prepared for it.” I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species.... I tried once or twice to explain to able men what I meant by Natural Selection, but signally failed. What I believe was strictly true is that innumerable well-observed facts were stored in the minds of naturalists ready to take their proper places as soon as any theory which would receive them was sufficiently explained.’[419]

In any case, the evolutionary theory, when first propagated, was bitterly attacked, both by scientists and by others. Darwin’s personal friends, and some of the younger men, who were less hardened in conservatism, supported him, though with more or less hesitation and reserve. But scientists of the older school, trained in established traditions, were generally most unfavorable. Some of them brought up the innumerable difficulties of which Darwin himself was only too well aware. Others resorted to the usual weapons of abuse and sarcasm. Owen in England and Agassiz in America represented perhaps the strongest conservative views. To them the Darwinian system was merely a passing heresy, which could not stand for a moment against the array of facts and arguments which they could bring from their vast experience and observation of the natural world.

The hostility of religious circles, aroused by the ‘Origin’ and increased by the later books, especially ‘The Descent of Man,’ was fiercer and less discriminating than that of the scientists. Perhaps the acme of it was reached in the savage interchange in which the Bishop of Oxford asked Huxley whether he ‘was related by his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side to an ape’ and Huxley retorted that a man had no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grandfather, but if he were to feel shame, it would be for an ancestor ‘who not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.’[420]

This sort of thing was by no means agreeable to Darwin, and he repeatedly refers to the pain and distress it caused him. For example: ‘I have just read the “Edinburgh,” which without doubt is by ——. It is extremely malignant, clever, and I fear will be very damaging. He is atrociously severe on Huxley’s lecture, and very bitter against Hooker. So we three enjoyed it together. Not that I really enjoyed it, for it made me uncomfortable for one night; but I have got quite over it to-day. It requires much study to appreciate all the bitter spite of many of the remarks against me; indeed I did not discover all myself.... It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which —— hates me.’[421]

What interests us is the attitude of Darwin in all the aspects of the struggle, and we find everywhere manifested and illustrated the mental and spiritual qualities which we have analyzed generally in the preceding chapters. Long and cruel as the controversy was, that large, tranquil disposition could not be warped or embittered, or substantially shaken in its kindly serenity.

And first there is the candor, the readiness to admit mistakes and errors, and to recognize the force and significance of an opponent’s view and arguments. Darwin himself complains humorously of a weakness in this regard: ‘My God, is not the case difficult enough, without its being, as I must think, falsely made more difficult? I believe it is my own fault—, my d——d candor.’[422] But, damned or not, it is a quality worth admiration. As Professor Osborn excellently puts it: ‘If he were living, ... he would be in the front line of inquiry, armed with matchless assemblage of fact, with experiment verification, and not least with incomparable candor and good-will. This bequest of a noble method is hardly less precious than the immortal content of “The Origin of Species” itself.’[423]

This is the language of an admirer. But it is curious to see how with critics and opponents

‘To some kind of men

Their graces serve them but as enemies.’

Thus, even Alexander Agassiz, who was much more favorably disposed to evolution and to Darwin than was his father, remarks on this point of candor: ‘I was somewhat surprised in Darwin’s Life to see the element of wishing his cause to succeed as a cause brought out so prominently. The one thing always claimed by Darwin’s friends had been his absolute impartiality to his own case. Certainly his correspondence with Hooker, Huxley, and Gray shows no such thing.’[424] And others, distinctly more hostile, are much more severe, declaring that Darwin’s passionate eagerness to prove his point was quite incompatible with any real fairness or breadth. But surely there is misunderstanding here. Any one can be impartial who is perfectly indifferent, and when you care not which side triumphs, there is no merit in seeing the justice of both. The charm and the interest of Darwin are precisely that he was devoted to his own theory, that it was the effort of his life to prove it, and yet that at the same time he could and did look for all the facts against it and even go to excess in allowing weight to the objections that could be opposed to him.

And as the candor was all the more notable because of the enthusiasm, so it was notable because it did not spring from a cold temperament, or an incapacity for natural human anger and indignation. Darwin enlarges, perhaps unduly, on his heat of temper in youth; and in age, though his control and his patience got the better of this, still the sparks would fly when unjust and unreasonable attack annoyed and irritated him. Thus, he cries out in regard to Owen: ‘You would laugh if you could see how indignant all Owen’s mean conduct about E. Columbi made me. I did not get to sleep till past 3 o’clock.’[425] And again, ‘If Owen wrote the article “Oken” and the French work on the Archetype ..., he never did a baser act.... You are so good a Christian that you will hardly understand how I chuckle over this bit of baseness.’[426] When an adversary, not content with rational argument, resorted to personal attack: ‘I care not for his dull, unvarying abuse of me, and singular misrepresentation. But at p. 244 he in fact doubts my deliberate word, and that is the act of a man who has not the soul of a gentleman in him.’[427]

But, however at moments indignation might get the better of him, Darwin, as we have already seen, rarely allowed himself to be drawn into anything approaching controversy. Intelligent argument with those who had reasonable objections might be profitable, but where was the use of contending with those whose object was not to convince but to prevail? ‘I do so hate controversy,’ he cries, ‘and feel I shall do it so badly.’[428] And elsewhere he writes, more generally: ‘All that I think is that you will excite anger, and that anger so completely blinds every one, that your arguments would have no chance of influencing those who are already opposed to our views.’[349]

With this general attitude, it is interesting to find Darwin, in one of his few temptations to sharp retort, checked and repressed by the great fighter Huxley. Darwin submits the draft of a crisp letter, asking Huxley to criticize, and the latter suggests omissions: ‘Though Thomson deserved it and more, I thought it would be better to refrain. If I say a savage thing, it is only “Pretty Fanny’s way”; but if you do, it is not likely to be forgotten.’[350] Huxley and other friends also restrained Darwin in perhaps the most annoying of his controversial affairs, that with Samuel Butler over the translation of Krause’s Life of Erasmus Darwin. It is not necessary for us to attempt to unthread the complicated tangle of this dispute, since we may start with the confident assumption that both men were perfectly sincere in their good intentions. The curious may read the whole story in the Life of Butler by Henry Festing Jones, and it is pleasant to find that the biographers of Butler and of Darwin were able to come together and by comparing unprinted documents straighten out the difficulty to their mutual satisfaction.

With his fellow-workers, those who were following the same lines of research from the same general point of view, Darwin’s relations were most cordial and sympathetic. There was no jealousy, no rivalry, no undue sensitiveness. We have indeed seen that in his treatment of his predecessors, notably Lamarck, there was a suggestion of what in any one else might be taken for a jealous attitude. But all the dealings with Wallace nobly refute the possibility of any such suggestion. And at all times and under all circumstances Darwin was ready to recognize and to proclaim the merits and achievements of those who were laboring beside him. When there was any question of priority in an idea or a discovery, he refused to assert himself unduly: ‘I have always had a strong feeling that no one had better defend his own priority. I cannot say that I am as indifferent to the subject as I ought to be, but one can avoid doing anything in consequence.’[351] When a scientist, whether known or unknown, applied to him for assistance or suggestion, he was always ready to supply it, so far as was in his power. Above all, he was appreciative, almost to excess, of any assistance that was rendered to him, and his gratitude to his friends for supporting and sustaining him and forwarding his views is touching in its naïve earnestness. To Huxley, to Hooker, to Lyell, to Gray, to Häckel, to a dozen others, he speaks with enthusiastic acknowledgment of their efforts and their contributions, and, as Huxley points out, he was ready to bestow almost the same gratitude for services that in themselves appeared to be absurdly insignificant.

For he had a singular humility, most notable and appealing in a man of such distinguished power and achievement. ‘A mind conspicuous for its powerful humility and strong gentleness,’ is Huxley’s vivid characterization.[278] Again and again he expresses distrust of his powers, sense of inadequacy and incompetence, keen consciousness of limitation. Such phrases as the following from the book on Orchids, are constantly recurring: ‘To any one with more knowledge than I possess, it would be an interesting subject to trace the gradations between the several species and groups of species in this great and closely-connected order.’[279] Sometimes the expression of humility is direct. ‘Any one with ordinary faculties, if he had patience enough and plenty of time could have written my book.’[280] Sometimes there is a humorous assertion of the contrary which is quite as significant: ‘I should rather think there was a good chance of my becoming the most egotistical man in Europe. What a proud preëminence!’[281] Occasionally the profession of humility is so extreme, as in the sentence in regard to Owen, ‘The Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book has been talked about; what a strange man to be envious of a naturalist like myself, immeasurably his inferior!’[282] that critics disposed to find fault have discerned something of affectation in it. It is of the nature of the deepest humility always to expose itself to such accusations as this; but surely no one can study Darwin carefully, can be familiar with his work in all its aspects, and not set him down as one of the most sincerely humble spirits that ever lived.

V

This humility and feeling of his own incompetence made Darwin keenly alive to the difficulties connected with his great undertaking and gave him such a clear sense of them that at times he felt incapable of solving them at all. As he says in the sixth chapter of the ‘Origin’: ‘Long before the reader has arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to him. Some of them are so serious that to this day I can hardly reflect on them without being in some degree staggered.’[283]

Take one of the most striking, if not the most crucial difficulties, one which puzzled and perplexed Darwin from the first and was made a fruitful text for criticism by his adversaries, the development of the eye. Was it to be supposed that so delicate, so complex, and so highly adapted an organ could be produced by mere accidental variation working through inheritance and the gradual survival of the fittest? And Darwin investigated and compared and reflected, until he was ready to state his position thus: ‘Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.’[284]

Sometimes the difficulties appear in themselves insignificant, yet their bearing is such as to make them of extreme importance. For example, how the useful institution of neuter insects could be developed by inheritance was a terrible problem. It ‘at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to the whole theory.’[285] Study and observation wear it away; yet it is disposed of with the candid remark: ‘I must confess, that, with all my faith in natural selection, I should never have anticipated that this principle could have been efficient in so high a degree, had not the case of these neuter insects led me to this conclusion.’[286] Or there is the coloring of the peacock’s tail, which has to be explained by extreme wrestlings of logical ingenuity. And again, as compared with these seemingly petty obstacles, there are the great questions involved in the essential tissue of the theory itself. There are the gaps, the breaks, the missing links, not only between man and his simian ancestors, but completing all the gradations between all the existing forms of development. Many and many an hour, and one may say, many a year of anxious thought did Darwin bestow on this point. He could meet it only with such eager comment as he makes after his prolonged study of the orchids: ‘In the comparatively few orchids described in this volume, so many and such plainly-marked gradations in the structure of the rostellum have been described, ... that we may well believe, if we could see every orchid which has ever existed throughout the world, we should find all the gaps in the existing chain, and every gap in many lost chains, filled up by a series of easy transitions.’[287] And there were such vast problems as sexual selection and pangenesis, which we discussed in a previous chapter, and there was even the central element of natural selection itself, which in darker moments seemed but a weak agency for sustaining the whole world: ‘If I think continuously on some half-dozen structures of which we can at present see no use, I can persuade myself that natural selection is of quite subordinate importance.’[288]

The interesting aspect of this matter of difficulty, as with other things, is Darwin’s way of meeting and facing it. There was an excitement, a stimulus, undoubtedly, a joy in attacking tough problems and conquering them. But there was also a pervading consciousness of what the difficulties were, and some have even thought an almost too pervading disposition to go out of one’s way to deal with them. As Huxley puts it: One ‘who desires to attack Mr. Darwin has only to read his works with a desire to observe not their merits but their defects, and he will find ready to hand more adverse suggestions than are likely ever to have suggested themselves to his own sharpness, without Mr. Darwin’s self-denying aid.’[289]

And there is always the appreciation, in handling the difficulties, of the danger in over-ingenuity, of the subtle possibilities of betrayal by reason ever toiling with intense ardor to arrive at its preconceived ends. ‘God knows I have never shirked a difficulty,’ said Darwin.[290] But the danger lies not only in shirking, but in the dissolving, transforming power of prejudice and enthusiasm. Here again Darwin tried to be ever on his guard: ‘I am fairly rabid on the question, and therefore, if not wrong already, am pretty sure to become so.’[291] He would not be misled, or fooled, or betrayed: ‘As I read on, I felt not a little dumbfounded, and thought to myself that whenever I came to this subject I should have to be savage against myself.’[292]

But you can never be sure that you have been savage enough, and there are moments when unexpected obstacles make you mistrust your theory, mistrust your method, mistrust your reasoning power. ‘If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory.’[293] And who knows that it cannot be proved? After months of study, a clear statement of opposing facts seems for the moment to demolish everything. ‘You give all the facts so clearly and fully, that it is impossible to help speculating on the subject; but it drives me to despair, for I cannot gulp down your continent; and not to be able to do so gives, in my eyes, the multiple creationists an awful triumph.’[294] And with his extraordinary gift of direct self-revelation, Darwin sums up the state of mind in one vivid sentence: ‘Your letter actually turned me sick with panic.’[295]

Thus there are times of discouragement and disgust. One gets to feel that one has utterly overestimated one’s work and one’s powers. One concocts ‘pleasant little stinging remarks for reviews, such as “Mr. Darwin’s head seems to have been turned by a certain degree of success, and he thinks that the most trifling observations are worth publication.”’[296] One concludes that all the years of vast labor have been given to no valid result and that one had better have cultivated one’s cabbages with health and quietness: ‘At present I feel sick of everything, and if I could occupy my time and forget my daily discomforts, or rather miseries, I would never publish another word.’[297] Such periods of depression in Darwin are peculiarly interesting, because he was by no means of a melancholy temperament, nor, in spite of his nervous weakness, was he inclined to a fretful or morbid pessimism. Yet, even with all his courage and all his patience, with all his past labor and all his victory, there were moments toward the end when the grave seemed inviting for its mere vastness of repose, without any definite prospect of anything further: ‘I am rather despondent about myself, and my troubles are of an exactly opposite nature to yours, for idleness is downright misery to me, as I find here, as I cannot forget my discomfort for an hour. I have not the heart or strength at my age to begin any investigation lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy; and I have no little jobs which I can do. So I must look forward to Down graveyard as the sweetest place on earth.’[372]

VI

The recognition and the accumulation of difficulties naturally involved modification of views. Indeed any really vital theory is bound to develop and modify itself with the vitality of the man who holds it. And Darwin was as vital as any man, and his theories as vital as any ever were. No man ever recognized more fully than he the desirability, the necessity of modification: ‘I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand.’[373] He groans over the burden and difficulty of perpetual correcting: ‘I am grieved to hear that you think I must work in the notes in the text; but you are so much better a judge that I will obey.’[374] Again: ‘It is only about two years since last edition of Origin, and I am disgusted to find how much I have to modify, and how much I ought to add.’[375] Nevertheless, as the successive editions of the ‘Origin’ and the other books show, he continued to add and to alter and to correct, to the very end. The minute, thoughtful, and far-reaching character of these alterations shows well in the concluding sentence of the eleventh chapter of the ‘Origin,’ which in the first edition read, ‘old forms having been supplanted by new and improved forms of life produced by the laws of variation still acting round us and preserved by natural selection,’ and later, ‘old forms having been supplanted by new and improved forms of life, the products of Variation and the Survival of the Fittest.’

Besides revision in detail, there was of course always a tendency to larger modifications of the general theory. Ingenious and far-reaching as natural selection was, the difficulties connected with it were so immense, that the loyalty of even its discoverer at times necessarily wavered, or perhaps we should say better, his enthusiasm heated and cooled. Moreover, natural selection depended upon variation, and variation to Darwin was always an inexplicable puzzle, for which no solution or too many might be found. Disinclined as he was to accept or even to respect his predecessors, Buffon and Lamarck, Darwin in later years, when the pressure on natural selection became fiercer, seemed to turn more to the adaptive solutions of these predecessors. As Professor Morgan puts it: ‘Despite the contempt with which Darwin referred to Lamarck’s theory, he himself, as we have seen, often made use of the principle of the inheritance of acquired characters, and even employed the same illustrations cited by Lamarck.’[376] And Professor Osborn indicates admirably the gradual process of the change which took place in Darwin’s attitude: ‘Starting with some leaning towards the theories of modification of Buffon and Lamarck, he reached an almost exclusive belief in his own theory, and then gradually inclined to adopt Buffon’s and then Lamarck’s theories as well, until in his maturest writings he embraced a threefold causation in the origin of species.’[377] The drift towards Lamarck is well shown in a passage of a letter to Galton, written in 1875: ‘If this implies that many parts are not modified by use and disuse during the life of the individual, I differ widely from you, as every year I come to attribute more and more to such agency.’[378] At the same time, to the very end natural selection remained in Darwin’s mind not only the quintessence of his theorizing, but the prime agent by which modification had been accomplished. In ‘The Descent of Man’ he explains and in a manner excuses any earlier undue insistence upon it, but also reiterates his firm faith in its great, if not omnipotent efficacy: ‘If I have erred in giving to natural selection great power, which I am very far from admitting, or in having exaggerated its power, which is in itself probable, I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.’[379]

VII

So through the sixties and seventies the battle for evolution went merrily on, and before Darwin’s death in 1881 it was evident that the scientific world was largely converted and still more evident that the theory had taken solid hold upon the popular mind. Even in the sixties Charles Kingsley could write to F. D. Maurice: ‘The state of the scientific mind is most curious; Darwin is conquering everywhere, and rushing in like a flood, by the mere force of truth and fact.’[380] Darwin himself was no aggressive fighter, though perhaps his quiet, persistent, logical statement of facts went further than fighting. But he had fighting followers, and they pushed his cause with an energy and dogmatism which he himself could hardly have manifested. In England Spencer gave the theory the metaphysical and philosophical sanction and support which Darwin was not equipped to render, and the brilliant, ardent eloquence of Huxley paralyzed opponents with incisive argument and stinging ridicule. In America Asa Gray, the great botanist, was a convert from the beginning and a most helpful disciple, and his aid was peculiarly welcome to Darwin, because Gray’s eager orthodoxy was useful in conciliating many whose prejudices would naturally have been most adverse. Darwin repeatedly spoke of Gray as understanding his ideas better and expounding them more effectively than almost any one. John Fiske was also a valuable champion from the more philosophical side. In Germany Weisman and Häckel were the most prominent apostles, and immensely effective, though, with thorough-going Teutonic logic, they were ready to push conclusions to lengths that were not always acceptable to Darwin himself.

The amount of popular interest is probably best shown in the extensive sale of Darwin’s books. ‘The Origin of Species’ was successful at once. It went through edition after edition, in Darwin’s lifetime six in all, and was translated into numerous foreign languages. The later books, even those of a more technical character, sold like popular fiction, and the last one, on the apparently uninviting subject of earthworms, found many readers everywhere.

Darwin was of course quite conscious of his growing triumph. Even hostility, animosity, execration, painful as they might be, afforded evidence of power and achievement. And he would not have been human, had he not relished the varied testimony of respect and admiration which came to him from every quarter. His natural distrust of himself was so great that it was hard for him to believe in success, even when it came, and before it came, he deprecated any attempt to discount it: ‘Please do not say to any one that I thought my book on Species would be fairly popular, and have a fairly remunerative sale (which was the height of my ambition), for if it prove a dead failure, it would make me the more ridiculous.’[381] Yet, however one might shrink and distrust oneself, to enter a great scientific meeting and have every one present rise to do one honor was undeniably agreeable. And, with his unfailing frankness, Darwin admits that praise was pleasant, and one could not have too much of it, provided one felt that it was in a measure deserved: ‘You pay me a superb compliment, and as I have just said to my wife, I think my friends must perceive that I like praise, they give me such hearty doses.’[382] Also, with equal frankness, he makes it plain in his autobiographical sketch that he realizes how great the success was and that it implied a certain prospect of permanence: ‘My books have sold largely in England, have been translated into many languages, and passed through several editions in foreign countries. I have heard it said that the success of a work abroad is the best test of its enduring value. I doubt whether this is at all trustworthy; but judged by this standard my name ought to last for a few years.’[383] When he died, he was unquestionably rated as one of the very first, if not the first, among the scientific men of his time.

And it is equally unquestionable that his reputation has rather increased than diminished ever since. ‘“Before and after Darwin” will always be the ante et post urbem conditam of biological history,’ says Professor Osborn.[384] Naturally Darwin’s theories have been criticized and attacked and largely modified by later investigations and discoveries. To Darwin himself variation, as the basis of natural selection, was the difficult, inexplicable point, and the experiments of Mendel, the mutation theory of De Vries, and many other lines of research have put the subject of variation in a new light. Natural Selection has been and will be the subject of controversy, both as to its working and as to the extent of its efficacy. Darwin’s inimitable caution left the way open for all these investigations, as is so well indicated in the excellent sentence of Professor Whitehead: ‘Darwin’s own writings are for all time a model of refusal to go beyond the direct evidence and of careful retention of every possible hypothesis.’[385]

Yet, after fifty years of discussion and argument, Darwin’s main positions hold their own with extraordinary tenacity. In the very latest word on the subject Professor Parker says: ‘It is to the credit of Charles Darwin and his body of able supporters that the scientific world was finally brought to accept the principle of descent with modification and natural selection as the means whereby it was accomplished.’[386] Professor Conklin affirms that: ‘The only scientific explanation of such adjustment or fitness is Darwin’s principle of natural selection of the fit and elimination of the unfit, and it is eloquent testimony to the greatness of Darwin that more and more this great principle is being recognized as the only mechanistic explanation of adaptation.’[387] And Professor Osborn is equally emphatic: ‘In my opinion natural selection is the only cause of evolution which has thus far been discovered and demonstrated.’[388] While from a more abstractly philosophical point of view the emphatic recently written words of Professor Ralph Barton Perry, give ample support to the general Darwinian position: ‘In truth there is no gulf between man and the animal. We cannot deny to the latter sensibility, memory, and intelligence. The facts which prove it would fill volumes.... The animal has feelings of mother love, attachment, and devotion. It differs from us in degree only; its “soul” is to ours what the bud is to the flower and fruit.’[234]

But, independent of all agreement or disagreement with Darwin’s theories, the striking thing is the consensus of scientists in praise of the man, and the recognition of his effort and method and life as a model for all scientific workers. It is rare that praise is so unalloyed, so persistent, and so complete. In this connection it is interesting to compare the nature of the glory of the poet, Shakespeare, for example, with that of the scientific writer. Shakespeare is not only remembered, he is read. Every successive generation takes up his plays for themselves, reads into them its own passions and experiences, and thus makes them a perennial possession of humanity, quite independent of their author. The works of Darwin, or of any other scientist, have no such enduring value for actual perusal. The curious study them for historical record. But for the mass of mankind and even of scientists, a large part of them has entered into universal knowledge and may be read in any textbook, and the remainder has become obsolete and of no value except for what it meant in an earlier day. The scientist’s name becomes detached from the work, even though he remains great because he did it. Yet the name, in spite of being thus detached, perhaps all the more because it is detached, shines like a star through century after century.

CHAPTER IV
DARWIN: THE LOSER

I

At different times Darwin commented on the gradually increasing absorption of his life by scientific pursuits and on the consequent atrophy of other intellectual and spiritual interests, which in earlier days had meant a good deal to him. In other words he was illustrating the favorite text of Sainte-Beuve, ‘All longings fail except that to understand.’ Sometimes he expresses this loss with terse vigor: ‘It is an accursed evil to a man to become so absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.’[309] Or again: ‘It is a horrid bore to feel as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf for every subject except Science. It sometimes makes me hate Science, though God knows I ought to be thankful for such a perennial interest, which makes me forget for some hours every day my accursed stomach.’[310] And elsewhere he analyzes it with more elaborate regretful curiosity: ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry or listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use.’[311]

THE STUDY AT DOWN

Having recently had occasion to make a somewhat extended study of Darwin’s remarkable contemporary the evangelist D. L. Moody, I have been struck by this similarity of lack of general interest in both of them. Darwin was of course a far better educated man fundamentally than Moody. But in both, their very bigness and power made the one engrossing passion—about as different in the two cases as can be imagined—dwarf and drive out the varied distractions and desires which relieve and stimulate the curiosity or the indolence of more ordinary men. So far as Darwin is concerned, with the exaggeration natural to reminiscence, he perhaps somewhat overestimated both the original aptitude and the later atrophy. But it is exceedingly instructive to trace his relation to the various occupations and experiences of life outside of the scientific.

Take first the external human interests, other than purely social. In the larger movements of history Darwin seems not to have been particularly well versed or to have concerned himself very much with them. Of course, in relying upon his volumes of published letters as evidence, we must remember that those volumes were naturally edited with a view in the main to scientific pursuits, and therefore it is to be expected that other interests should figure less conspicuously. Still the testimony, both positive and negative, to the unimportance of those interests is very decided. As to this matter of history, Darwin himself tells us that he read the historians in his youth. He even insists that when he had lost æsthetic pleasures, ‘books on history, biographies, and travels ... and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did.’[312] Of his earlier life he records that ‘I used to sit for hours reading the historical plays of Shakespeare, generally in an old window in the thick walls of the school.’[313] Perhaps on this Shakespearean basis, he retains, with many other English conventions, that of reverence for rank, though no more natural democrat ever lived, and he makes gentle fun of himself for his snobbishness: ‘I have the true English reverence for rank, and therefore liked to hear about the Princess Royal.’[314]

Nevertheless, in his letters and in his books, you get the sense that the great currents of development in Europe and in the world were not familiar to his thought. With the unfailing candor, he admits this: ‘I believe your criticism is quite just about my deficient historic spirit, for I am aware of my ignorance in this line.’[315] And an acute and sympathetic analyst of his work, points out that it suffered to some extent from the deficiency. The tendency to extend evolutionary analogies from the individual to society was partly Darwin’s fault, says this critic, because of his ‘embarking upon the discussion of social and moral matters, in “The Descent of Man”; matters concerning which he was little better informed than any other non-specialist.’[316]

In contemporary politics it was not to be expected that Darwin should have much immediate concern. One can hardly imagine a man less likely to choose an active political career, or on the whole less adapted to it, though the tact which enabled him to deal successfully with his fellow-scientists would no doubt have been helpful in more practical spheres. There are occasional glimpses of his taking some part in local interests, and for a time at any rate he attended to the judicial duties which we so generally associate with the English country squire: ‘I attended the Bench on Monday, and was detained in adjudicating some troublesome cases one and one half hours longer than usual, and came home utterly knocked up, and cannot rally.’[317]

Darwin would not have been an Englishman, if he had not entertained political opinions of some sort. He could not pretend to escape the tradition so strongly planted in the blood of the race. He does indeed resent the suggestion that politics are more important than science: ‘Did you see a sneer some time ago in the Times about how incomparably more interesting politics were compared with science even to scientific men?... Jeffrey, in one of his letters, I remember, says that making an effective speech in Parliament is a far grander thing than writing the grandest history. All this seems to me a poor short-sighted view.’[318] But he has been brought up a Whig, a Liberal, and Whig prejudices are inherent in his system. This was true in the early days of the Beagle voyage: ‘The Captain does everything in his power to assist me, and we get on very well, but I thank my better fortune he has not made me a renegade to Whig principles.’[319] And it remained true to old age. When answering a questionnaire in 1873, he described himself as ‘Liberal or Radical,’[320] but the radicalism was of a very conservative and English order.

The Whig partisanship even shows itself in quite normal fashion in hatred of the Tories, and on this head the tolerant and kindly scientist expresses himself with a rather amusing bitterness: ‘Thank God, the cold-hearted Tories, who, as J. Mackintosh used to say, have no enthusiasm, except against enthusiasm, have for the present run their race.’[321] But these outbursts are not to be taken very seriously.

There are occasional glimpses of interest in current public men and current public affairs. Lord Bryce gives a striking account of a visit which Gladstone paid to the great thinker. Darwin’s comment was, ‘he seemed to be quite unaware that he was a great man, and talked to us as if he had been an ordinary person like ourselves.’ On which Bryce remarks: ‘The friend who was with me and I could not but look at each other and exchange covert smiles. We were feeling toward Darwin just as he had felt toward Gladstone.’[322] During the early portion of the Franco-German War Darwin’s sympathy, like that of many Englishmen, was with Germany: ‘I have not yet met a soul in England who does not rejoice in the splendid triumph of Germany over France: it is a most just retribution against that vainglorious, war-liking nation.’[323] But the struggles of party politics, as they went on about him, aroused little attention and little ardor.

There was, however, one political event of his time that called forth Darwin’s keen sympathy and extended comment, and that was the American Civil War. As is well known, English opinion was much divided on this question, and the prejudices of the upper class, at any rate among the more conservative, were in favor of the South. Although Darwin was by no means confident that the North would win, he was strongly on that side from the start, and his numerous letters to Asa Gray show how decided his feeling was.

The feeling was not based on the abstract political and constitutional considerations that appealed to Americans, but on Darwin’s rooted, bitter antipathy to the system of slavery in any form. When he was in South America with the Beagle, he had plenty of opportunity to watch the working of human servitude, and it disgusted and repelled him beyond measure. ‘To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate.... Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal.’[324] As a result of these experiences and many others, Darwin imbibed a detestation of slavery and slave-holders which lasted through life, and which led him to oppose them where he could, whether in England or America.

The hostility to slavery was based even more deeply on an intense hatred of cruelty, barbarity, and the infliction of physical suffering of any sort. The dislike of such suffering was so keen that from the start it incapacitated Darwin for the medical profession, which his father would have been glad to see him follow. He could not bear the sight of blood, and fled from an operation with disgust. Ill-treatment of animals was especially tormenting to him, and he interfered to prevent it, when he could: ‘He returned one day from his walk pale and faint having seen a horse ill-used, and from the agitation of violently remonstrating with the man.’[325]

With such a general sensibility, Darwin’s attitude towards vivisection is extremely curious. Knowing as he did the importance of animal experiment, he could not possibly range himself on the side of the anti-vivisectionists. But he supported every effort to have humanity legally emphasized and rigidly insisted upon. The nature of his feeling in the matter appears clearly in a passage of ‘The Descent of Man’: ‘Every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless the operation was fully justified by an increase of our knowledge, or unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.’[326]

In sociological questions of a broader bearing, which made no such immediate appeal to his susceptibilities, Darwin took much less interest. Now and then some special point arouses him. He was excited about any attempt to interfere with the marriage of cousins, because he had married his cousin and had in consequence largely investigated the subject.[327] He was decidedly opposed to the English tradition of primogeniture, and felt its unfairness. On the land-question he writes to Wallace: ‘I see you are going to write on the most difficult political question, the land. Something ought to be done; but what, is the rub.’[328] In the same spirit of remoteness and uncertainty, he writes also to Wallace in regard to Henry George’s ‘Progress and Poverty’: ‘I will certainly order “Progress and Poverty,” for the subject is a most interesting one. But I read many years ago some books on political economy, and they produced a disastrous effect on my mind, viz., utterly to distrust my own judgment on the subject, and to doubt much every one else’s judgment. So I feel sure that Mr. George’s book will only make my mind worse confounded than it is at present.’[329] But it is clear that the remoteness did not imply contempt or cynical disregard, merely a feeling of complete inability and diffidence in regard to economic problems, and one is slow to condemn this state of mind, when one thinks that such problems are usually dealt with and solved, if it can be called so, by those in whose equipment freedom from diffidence is the most aggressive and impressive instrument.

II

With artistic and general æsthetic matters, Darwin, at any rate in later years, was even more indifferent than with political. It is true that his scientific investigations sometimes involved the abstract analysis of æsthetics: ‘I agree with what you say about beauty. I formerly thought a good deal on the subject, and was led quite to repudiate the doctrine of beauty being created for beauty’s sake.’[330] The theory of sexual selection, as presented in ‘The Descent of Man,’ necessitated a good deal of discussion of the susceptibility to color and form and to music. But such æsthetic discussion has nothing whatever to do with æsthetic enjoyment.

One thing may be said in regard to Darwin; with art as with everything else, he was absolutely free from pretense. He says of one writer, ‘The pretentiousness of her style is extremely disagreeable, not to say nauseous to many persons.’[331] Anything artificial, anything affected, was peculiarly repugnant to him, and never under any circumstances would he have pretended to admire or to appreciate a work of art that really left him cold. Indeed it was partly his intense wish not to appear to feel what he did not feel that made him inclined to underestimate his artistic pleasure as compared with the raptures of those who exclaimed conventionally over what they neither understood nor enjoyed.

Nevertheless, it seems unquestionable that art in its varied forms hardly afforded Darwin the delight and solace that it brings to many persons. The theater he cared little for at any period of his life. The effort, fatigue, and constraint outweighed the charm. Mrs. Darwin, who was a lover of average plays, though she found Shakespeare tedious and said so with something of her husband’s candor, is quite anxious on the subject: ‘The real crook in my lot I have withheld from you, but I must own it to you sooner or later. It is that he has a great dislike of going to the play, so that I am afraid we shall have some domestic dissensions on that head.’[332] Later she takes him to see Macready in ‘Richelieu’ and hopes that he is getting converted, but there are no signs that the hopes were finally realized.

With the plastic arts the case is somewhat better. There is little reference to architecture. One passage in a letter seems to suggest the feeling of cathedral grandeur, but the æsthetic quickly turns into the scientific bearing: ‘Possibly the sense of sublimity excited by a grand cathedral may have some connection with the vague feelings of terror and superstition in our savage ancestors, when they entered a great cavern or gloomy forest.’[333] As regards pictures, his son thinks that he did keep up his love of them to a certain extent.[334] His biographer remarks: ‘His love of pictures as a young man is almost a proof that he must have had an appreciation of a portrait as a work of art, not as a likeness.’[335] And the biographer adds, with entire justice: ‘This way of looking at himself as an ignoramus in all matters of art, was strengthened by the absence of pretence, which was part of his character.’[336] The immediate recognition of a Salvator Rosa scene in one of the Beagle experiences shows an acquaintance with painting in its different forms and periods.[337] Yet pictures make a different showing in Darwin’s letters from what they have in Edward FitzGerald’s, for instance.

The form of art which meant most to Darwin and into which he seemed to enter with the nearest approach to ecstasy was music. Here again, there is a good deal of theoretical discussion, which at times appears of a nature to dampen emotional enjoyment. But there can be no question that with Darwin as a young man the emotional enjoyment was there, and sincere, and profound, even at times overmastering. He does indeed confess that his musical ear was not fine or perfect: ‘I am so utterly destitute of an ear, that I cannot perceive a discord, or keep time and hum a tune correctly; and it is a mystery how I could possibly have derived pleasure from music.’[338] But it is manifest that he did derive such pleasure, and went out of his way to seek it: ‘I also got into a musical set.... From associating with these men, and hearing them play I acquired a strong taste for music, and used very often to time my walks so as to hear on week days the anthem in King’s College Chapel.’[339]

The love was for good music, too, not by any means for what was trashy or cheap. He liked Beethoven and Händel, had the natural instinct for the high and fine, in this as in other matters. Mrs. Darwin took him to classical concerts and he responded much more heartily than to the theater. He liked to have his wife and his sisters play to him, and when he was absent with the Beagle, he wrote: ‘I hope your musical tastes continue in due force. I shall be ravenous for the pianoforte.’[340]

And the enjoyment was not merely perfunctory, but went deep, and took hold of the nerves. ‘At the end of one of the parts, which was exceedingly impressive, he turned round to me and said, with a deep sigh, “How’s your backbone?” He often spoke of coldness or shivering in his back on hearing beautiful music.’[341] The references to this thrill, this tension of nervous musical excitement, occur occasionally even in Darwin’s more scientific works.

And then there is the recurring doubt, the mistrust of one’s sincerity, the desperate dread of sentimental convention in these artistic matters: ‘This gave me intense pleasure, so that my backbone would sometimes shiver. I am sure that there was no affectation or mere imitation in this taste, for I used generally to go by myself to King’s College, and I sometimes hired the chorister boys to sing in my rooms.’[342]

But, affectation or not, the musical enthusiasm vanished, and the encroaching, all-absorbing growth of the scientific preoccupation crowded it out. Indeed, any one who is susceptible to musical delight, appreciates how elusive it is, how much it depends upon favorable conditions and surroundings, and how peculiarly its delicate and subtle quality is subject to erasure by distractions of a different order. And Darwin’s comment on the disappearance of his pleasure in music is: ‘I have said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight.... I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure.’[343]

With the enjoyment of beauty in literary forms, Darwin’s sense of loss was quite as keen as with music. Of the higher and finer elements of style and imagination there is little evidence that he was conscious. Such consciousness would not seem very compatible with his remark about Buckle: ‘To my taste he is the very best writer of the English language that ever lived, let the other be who he may.’[344]

In this connection it is interesting to consider Darwin’s own style, as it appears in the vast mass of his production, running probably, letters and all, to over two million words. In this mass there are occasional passages of appealing beauty or startling effectiveness, for example, the charming sentence, written in age, ‘I should very much like to see you again, but you would find a visit here very dull, for we feel very old and have no amusement, and lead a solitary life,’[345] or the much earlier passage: ‘This letter is a most untidy one, but my mind is untidy with joy.’[346]

But Darwin, in writing, would have bestowed no thought or care on such qualities as these. He had a great discovery to give to the world. His one desire was to give it accurately, lucidly, and in a form that would convince, and it was his despair that he thought nature had not endowed him with the gifts for doing this. He envies the admirable literary skill of Huxley and Spencer and deplores his own inability to get his thoughts and ideas into a shape that would force mankind to read and understand them: ‘I do not believe any man in England naturally writes so vile a style as I do.’[347]

Which is a gross exaggeration and belongs to the humility so manifest in other and more important matters. It is true that there are curious lapses from mere formal correctness, as in the rather attractive misuse of ‘like,’ which occasionally occurs: ‘Few have observed like you have done.’[348] It is true, also, that Darwin had not the swift and eloquent vigor of Huxley, which has sometimes virile energy enough to make force of statement appear like truth of fact. But no one, I think, can read Darwin at all widely without getting to feel a singular charm in the absolute simplicity of his manner of expressing himself. To be sure, Huxley suggests that the very simplicity is sometimes misleading: ‘A somewhat delusive simplicity of style, which tends to disguise the complexity and difficulty of the subject.’[275] But when so many writers make simple subjects difficult, it would surely be ungracious to complain of one who makes a difficult subject simple. As I have before suggested, Darwin’s perfect candor, his absolute sincerity, his intense and obvious effort to have you think with him, seem to take the place of great literary qualities and to give his prose a revealing directness which is quite lacking to some who are more highly skilled.

Especially is this the case with the correspondence, where finish and technical perfection are of less importance than the power of spontaneous spiritual contact. In maintaining this contact there are few letter-writers who can surpass Darwin, and his four solid volumes, technical and scientific as they are, have a singular and persistent appeal to those who have a taste for that kind of writing.

As to his own personal enjoyment of literature, one form of it at least continued to attract him to the very last, and that was fiction. Relief from the strain of his scientific labors was best found in stories which distracted and absorbed: ‘He was extremely fond of novels,’ says his son, ‘and I remember well the way in which he would anticipate the pleasure of having a novel read to him, as he lay down, or lighted his cigarette. He took a vivid interest both in plot and characters, and would on no account know beforehand how a story finished; he considered looking at the end of a novel as a feminine vice.’[276] Darwin himself confirms this statement: ‘Novels, which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed.’[277] He enjoyed Miss Austen, he adored Scott, and cites the Laird of Redgauntlet’s facial peculiarity in the book on Expression. He did not like realism, even in the mild form practiced by George Eliot, and he wished things and people to be agreeable: ‘A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class, unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman, all the better.’[197]

But for the higher orders of literature, the loss was indubitable, and Darwin himself makes it very emphatic. He tells us that in his youth he enjoyed poetry. Shakespeare was his favorite reading. He read Thomson and Byron, and he got much pleasure from ‘Paradise Lost’: ‘Formerly Milton’s “Paradise Lost” had been my chief favorite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single volume, I always chose Milton.’[198] The solid evidence of this enjoyment is the frequent reference to poetical reading in Darwin’s books. Even in connection with strictly scientific topics he is apt to introduce some citation from the poets which not only proves his point, but shows his familiarity.

Yet in later years all this poetical interest disappeared, and Darwin bewails the disappearance deeply. Shakespeare, who had touched and stirred him, ceases to awaken any emotion, rings merely hollow and empty: ‘Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.’[199]

A clever writer in the Popular Science Monthly some years ago endeavored to prove that here, as in other things, Darwin’s humility much exaggerated his defects, and that his natural poetical sympathy was greater than he recognized. This writer urges Darwin’s early enjoyment and his constant, apt, and accurate quotation to establish the thesis: ‘By his unconscious confession and the evidence of his written works, his mind was leavened with poetic feeling; all through his mature life he is ready with quotation when the occasion calls; and the very poignancy of his regret for the loss of poetry witnesses to his poetic endowment.’[200] But the contention though ingenious, is exaggerated. Darwin’s quick intelligence was interested in the substance of Shakespeare and Milton and other poets and prose writers. But it seems to me impossible that any one who had really felt the high stimulus of the splendor of Shakespeare’s imagination could ever have lost it to any such extent as Darwin deplores with obvious sincerity. Sainte-Beuve had as wide and varied a scientific curiosity as Darwin’s. But he said when he was well over fifty, ‘I rarely write about poetry, precisely because I have loved it so much and because I still love it more than anything else.’[201] Goethe’s old age was filled with scientific preoccupations, yet the glory of poetry was more to him than any possible science.

III

The most interesting point of all in connection with these æsthetic matters is that Darwin, for all his intimate contact with nature and all his scientific study, apparently did not feel much of the rapture and ecstasy that natural beauty affords to many who have often little or no scientific knowledge. Here, more than in any other field, there is of course a riot of convention and pretense, and thousands prate of clouds and sunsets and bird-song who have no more real feeling for these things than they have for any other form of æsthetic development. Nevertheless, the ecstasy has been recorded and rendered by too many persons whose gift of expression is as impressive as their sincerity is indisputable, to be neglected or overlooked. It is worth while to examine more closely into some of the elements of this imaginative enjoyment of the natural world.

To begin with, there is the delight of simple perception, the excitement, the inexplicable thrill that goes with color and form and sound and movement, with the nodding of a blossom and the quiver of a butterfly, the

‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’

And no doubt this enjoyment is frequently too subtle, too delicate, too elusive, too evanescent to be put in words, and it comes to many who could never find the words to convey it. Something of its high intensity may be suggested by Cowper’s brief and poignant phrase: ‘O! I could spend whole days and moonlight nights in feeding upon a lovely prospect. My eyes drink the rivers as they flow.’[202]

The secret of the enjoyment must lie mainly in obscure processes of association, hints and suggestions of buried joy and sorrow, which go down deep into the roots of subconscious memory. But at any rate it is true that such enjoyment is bound up far more with simple scenes and home surroundings than with the remote or the picturesque or what Darwin so often refers to as the sublime. The hurrying tourist, who rushes about the world in search of some higher mountain or rougher glacier or wilder valley is not the one who feels the secret charm of nature, but rather he who strolls in lonely, quiet fields or woods that he has always known and loved. The return of violets in early spring, the song of thrushes in summer twilights, these are the things that bring tears, that come full charged with the weight of all that Cowper means when he writes of

‘Scenes that soothed

Or charmed me young, no longer young I find

Still soothing and of power to charm me still.’[203]

And it is in this matter of association that the poets most of all help us. It is they who can disentangle the subtle threads of emotion and thought that have twined themselves about the simple impressions of the natural world, and who in turn can interweave a tissue of still more splendid imaginative glory with all our sight and all our hearing. It is Shakespeare with his

‘Daffodils

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty.’

it is Keats, with his

‘Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,’

or his,

‘Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves,’

who store our souls with memories that vibrate at the sight of daffodils and violets and stars.

And the imagination goes further yet, interpenetrates the whole of nature, transforms it, makes it a living, sentient unity, wholly unlike the dead multiplicity on which the scientist exercises his ingenious research. Take Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and compare it with Darwin’s book on Earthworms. The Darwin has its fascination: it makes you long to spend your days watching and testing and measuring the tiny creatures who are forever making over the surface of the globe. But the Emerson transfuses all this natural world with thought, with creative human intelligence, dissolves it, moulds it, re-creates it, tosses and turns it till it seems a ball and a trifle for the overmastering soul of man to produce or abolish as it will. Or again, with Wordsworth, there is the sense of animating life in nature, the dim, impersonal personality, which is for ever passing and repassing through the endless manifestations that are all the scientist can count or measure,

‘A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts.’

And as there is the sense of this profounder life in nature, this deeper, mysterious unity, back of all the varied shift and change, so there is the passionate desire to be at one with that unity, to lose one’s miserable, insignificant, turbulent, tormenting I in that vast, illimitable, measureless All. There is the thirst of Shelley’s ‘Adonais’:

‘That sustaining love,

Which, through the web of being blindly wove

By man and beast and earth and air and sea,

Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

The fire for which all thirst.’

There is Byron’s cry:

‘I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that about me, and to me

High mountains are a feeling.’[204]

And with the realization that the longing cannot be satisfied, that we are forever imprisoned within the insuperable barriers of this petty I, from which there is no escape, comes a bitter revolt of despair, or a profound melancholy of questioning. It is Obermann, with his, ‘There, in the peace of night, I questioned my uncertain destiny, and this inconceivable universe, which, containing everything yet does not contain my desires.’[205] Or, as an American contemporary has expressed the deep suggestion of the earnest stars: ‘O Lyra, I have gazed at you, until I could not tell your brightness from my own eyes. I have gazed at you till my soul left my body, and circled with you through the stars; but there is something which I am and you are not, something which will not let me rest....

‘Infinite Intelligence! Infinite Beauty! Either make me what thou art, take me to thyself, or free me from this passion which I cannot gratify and cannot destroy. Make me as other men are, toilers and forgetters, seeking yesterday in to-day, and to-day in to-morrow, and illusion always; or fulfill for me the hope which the waters whisper, which I can feel throbbing forever in the heart of thy world.’

Of all this in Darwin nothing whatever, nothing, nothing. It may indeed be said that with nature, as with other things, many people have feelings and experiences that they do not express or try to express. But persons who cherish such experiences with the natural world usually have a more constant regard and interest for the expression of them in others than Darwin had. Any such melancholy or passionate longing as is suggested above one would of course not expect in him. There was no natural melancholy in his temperament. He was depressed and discouraged when things went badly, yet in the main his disposition was even and serene. But his enjoyment of natural scenes and objects, which is indisputable and proved by his own testimony and that of others, would seem to have been generally of a rather superficial character, and certainly not to have partaken of the nature of passion. How far, far different is his touch from that of Lucretius, for example.

Darwin enjoyed picturesque surroundings and novel experiences. He enjoyed the beauty of flowers, their color and shape. His son’s account of this is very charming: ‘I used to like to hear him admire the beauty of a flower; it was a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and color. I seem to remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in; it was the same simple admiration that a child might have.’[206] Occasionally, also, there are scattered hints which seem to suggest a deeper feeling. There is the description of the hour in Moor Park: ‘At last I fell asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.’[207] Yet even here, ‘as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw,’ is the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth. There is the still intenser bit in the ‘Beagle’: ‘Neither plant nor bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a chorus of the Messiah.’[208] And there is the striking touch in the early letter to Henslow: ‘The delight of sitting on a decaying trunk amidst the quiet gloom of the forest is unspeakable, and never to be forgotten,’[209] which at least suggests Obermann in the Forest of Fontainebleau.

But these rare and scattered intimations serve only to bring out the different nature of the habitual attitude, and it is clear enough that such æsthetic element as there was gradually faded in the growing absorption of the scientific ardor. It cannot be denied that in the main Darwin’s interest in nature was intellectual, not emotional.

IV

As with sociology and with æsthetic experience, so, and even more, with God and the things of God, Darwin’s limitations are profoundly interesting, and if the loss was less, because there was less to lose, it was nevertheless, in all its aspects significant. Here again, as with æsthetic emotion, it must be remembered that men do not utter all they feel, and those who feel most sometimes utter least. But it so happens that circumstances obliged Darwin to be very explicit about his religious views and experiences, so that we are justified in assuming that we have access to pretty much all there was.

It must never be forgotten that Darwin grew up in the thoroughly conventional atmosphere of the English Church. Neither his father nor his grandfather was an active believer, but the immense tradition of staid decorum, from which the English upper middle class rarely escapes, was all about his boyhood, and left an indelible mark on it. To appreciate how haunting and oppressive the atmosphere was, one should read ‘A Century of Family Letters,’ edited by Darwin’s daughter. The flavor of established religious propriety is so overwhelming that one wonders how Darwin could ever have shaken himself intellectually free from it.

Mrs. Darwin was a wise and a charming woman, and she was invaluable to her husband, but, oh, she was English. She took a proper wifely interest in Darwin’s scientific adventures, and was sometimes of assistance to him. She had her anxieties about the animosity of his critics and also about the drift of his speculations, and her daughter implies that in later years these speculations effected a change in the mother’s religious beliefs.[210] But I relish very much this lovely passage of solicitude for the husband’s eternal welfare, written in the year of the publication of the ‘Origin’: ‘I am sure you know I love you well enough to believe that I mind your sufferings, nearly as much as I should my own, and I find the only relief to my own mind is to take it as from God’s hand, and to try to believe that all suffering and illness is meant to help us to exalt our minds and to look forward with hope to a future state. When I see your patience, deep compassion for others, self-command, and above all gratitude for the smallest thing done to help you, I cannot help longing that these precious feelings should be offered to Heaven for the sake of your daily happiness.’[211] Also, Mrs. Darwin was a careful observer of that augustly hideous institution, the Victorian Sunday: ‘I remember she persuaded me,’ writes a reminiscent relative, ‘to refuse any invitation from the neighbors that involved using the carriage on that day, and it was a question in her own mind whether she might rightly embroider, knit, or play patience.’[212] It strikes me as peculiarly delightful that the Sabbath should be treated with such reverence in the house of one who was to do more than any one else to smash the God of the Sabbath altogether.

So it is evident that Darwin grew up with a strong religious habit. There was even serious talk of his entering the church, till his hopeless lack of vocation made it clearly impossible. The net of religious inheritance and circumstance was woven closely about him and in the early days he recognized himself as in general orthodox enough. I like particularly the reply he made to his Catholic friends in South America, who conjured him to see the light: ‘Why do you not become a Christian—for our religion is certain?’ ‘I assured them I was a sort of Christian.’[213] A sort of Christian! Isn’t that charmingly characteristic? You can imagine millions of fanatics to-day howling, ‘What sort of Christian?’

One thing at least is certain: Darwin never was cynical or mocking in his attitude toward religion. Without the least trace of affectation or cant, he always spoke of the church and the clergy and religious practice with respect, and with the same gentle tolerance that he displayed towards those who differed from him in any line. Peculiarly significant in this regard are his references to the missionaries with whom he came into contact on his southern voyage. He was at first disposed to speak of them without enthusiasm, to say the least, and Admiral Sullivan, who was with him on the Beagle, tells of his scepticism about missionary work, ‘his conviction that it was utterly useless to send missionaries to such a set of savages as the Fuegians.’[214] Many years later Darwin was entirely converted, and, as usual, did not hesitate to say so: ‘He wrote me that he had been wrong and I right in our estimates of the native character, and the possibility of doing them good through missionaries; and he requested me to forward to the Society an enclosed cheque for £5, as a testimony of the interest he took in their good work.’[215] Other passages could be adduced to the same effect.

And the religious training and the constant presence of high-minded and earnest living and meaning people about him had established in Darwin a secure habit of morals and a vivid activity of conscience. He might subject the moral habit in theory to cold analysis, ‘The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection.’[216] But the analysis did not in the least affect his own personal instinct of right and upright living.

It is not only that there is no appearance or record of irregularity of conduct of any kind. But, much more than this, there is repeated evidence of the nicest scrupulousness and a tender conscience which would not be surpassed in the most devout and anxious Christian. It was perhaps ‘a sort of Christian,’ but assuredly not a bad sort, who, as I have before mentioned, got up in the middle of the night to correct a fancied misstatement, not about a scientific fact, but about an æsthetic experience.[298] And a clerical friend records a similar incident, equally striking: ‘On one occasion, when a parish meeting had been held on some disputed point of no great importance, I was surprised by a visit from Mr. Darwin at night. He came to say that, thinking over the debate, though what he had said was quite accurate, he thought I might have drawn an erroneous conclusion, and he would not sleep till he had explained it.’[299] With the members of his own family there was the same scrupulous, tender anxiety not to do or say anything unjust or unkind. After some quite warrantable and reasonable outburst of indignation over the levity of one of his sons, ‘The next morning at seven o’clock he came to my bedroom and said how sorry he was that he had been so angry and that he had not been able to sleep; and with a few kind words he left me.’[300] This ‘sort of Christian’ is perhaps not even yet so common as might be wished.

On the other hand, when we come to the more intimate, personal aspects of the religious life, Darwin’s record appears to be largely negative, and what earlier traces there are gradually disappear. Take prayer. Here again, in the study of Expression, we have the scientific analysis, of prayer as an attitude at any rate: ‘Hence it is not probable that either the uplifting of the eyes or the joining of the open hands under the influence of devotional feelings, are innate or truly expressive actions, and this could hardly have been expected, for it is very doubtful whether feelings, such as we should rank as devotional, affected the hearts of men, whilst they remained during past ages in an uncivilized condition.’[301] Also, there are other occasional references to the external aspects of religious petition, as in the Beagle Journal: ‘He prayed as a Christian should do, with fitting reverence, and without the fear of ridicule or any ostentation of piety.’[302]

But to prayer as a personal experience I find only one single allusion. When Darwin was a boy, he was a good runner, often took part in races, and was often successful. His explanation of his success at that time is interesting: ‘When in doubt I prayed earnestly to God to help me, and I well remember that I attributed my success to my prayers and not to my quick running, and marveled how generally I was aided.’[303] This recalls the youthful experience of Moody, who was caught under a fence rail and could not move, but put up earnest prayers to God, and then was able to lift the rail quite easily.

Prayer played a very different part in Moody’s later life from what it did in Darwin’s, so far as any tangible evidence goes. It is true that probably a good many men pray whom one would never suspect of doing so. I had an old friend, who had been brought up devoutly but had been a Unitarian for years, rarely going to church, apparently indifferent to religion, and discussing speculative, ultimate problems with annihilating freedom. Yet he told me, in an outburst of confidence, that every night, when he went to bed, he repeated, in substance, if not in words, the prayers that he had learned at his mother’s knee. ‘I don’t know what it means,’ he said; ‘I don’t know whether there is a God, or whether He hears me, or what I want of Him; but I pray.’ And I, who had not prayed for thirty years, heard him with amazement. Nevertheless, I do not believe that Darwin repeated ‘Now I lay me’ to the end, or prayed for triumph with evolution as he had prayed for triumph in the foot-race.

The question of a future life seems to have had as little actuality for Darwin as that of prayer, and we have more explicit evidence on the point, because correspondents were always writing for a statement of his beliefs. He never committed himself to any complete assertion of disbelief. On the contrary, he is quite ready to admit some forcible positive arguments: ‘Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.’[304] Yet the difficulties seem insuperable, and he is hardly able to accept any definite belief: ‘Many persons seem to make themselves quite easy about immortality ... by intuition; and I suppose I must differ from such persons because I do not feel any innate conviction upon such points.’[305]

The supreme test as to the future is the death of those we love and the thought of our own death. In 1851 Darwin lost a little daughter whom he loved tenderly. His intimate letters at that time have affectionate and pathetic references to her; but there is not one word in them to indicate the slightest hope of ever meeting her again. When he himself was close to the end, mentally clear but with no prospect of recovery, his calm words were: ‘I am not the least afraid of death.’[306]

As to the question of God, Darwin’s statements are as elaborate as in regard to immortality, and for the same reason, because eager inquirers were determined to find out where he stood. In early life, while he still believed in the theory of special creations, he accepted the deistic view without hesitation: ‘Many years ago, when I was collecting facts for the “Origin,” my belief in what is called a personal God was as firm as that of Dr. Pusey himself.’[307] As the years went on, the working out of his theories involved a profound change, but still he never at any time admitted an absolute disbelief or a militant atheism. He goes over and over the old, old arguments. How could an omnipotent God, who desired the good of all his creatures, inflict upon the travailing creation such an infinity of misery? Again, there is the puzzle of design and providential interference. He is reluctant to believe that this vast and ordered whole came together by mere chance; yet he debates with Asa Gray the possible providence in the fall of a sparrow: ‘An innocent and good man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t and don’t. If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament.’[308] Nor does the Pantheistic solution appeal much more than the anthropomorphic one. Darwin is constantly personifying Nature, with a capital N; but he is careful to specify that he does this for convenience, and that Nature means only the sum of natural laws in their eternal working, not any mysterious force of Divinity. The Pantheistic solution also creates as many puzzles as it solves. So the conclusion is, to leave all such questions as hopeless and insoluble, beyond the intelligence of man so completely that it does not seem intended that he should grapple with them. And Darwin at least was satisfied to weigh and measure and experiment and let God go.

It does not appear that he felt the need and the longing and the desire that torture some of us. Like some other men, perhaps like many others, the life of this world, the work of this world, the pleasure of this world, the interest of this world, were enough for him, and the other world might simply wait its turn. And as in beginning this chapter I compared the evangelist Moody with the scientist Darwin in their extreme limitation of interests, so at the end I would compare them again to bring out the enormous difference. To Darwin the mere fact of life in the universe and the endless curiosity about it were enough. Whether God was there or not was a matter that could not be settled and need not be discussed. To Moody both life and the universe were nothing without God.

CHAPTER V
DARWIN: THE LOVER

I

If Darwin was not conspicuous as a lover of God, he was at least notable in every way as one who loved his fellow men. He liked to meet people, liked to talk with them, liked to have them about him. He was interested in humanity, enjoyed the contact of it, and felt in others the warm throb of a heart that beat as kindly and sympathetically as his own. Men, women, and children were drawn to him and recognized a friend.

Of his personal appearance the chief impression that comes to us is naturally in age. He was tall and powerfully built, and in his youth must have been attractive to look at, though there is no definite record of this. In later years his aspect was dignified without being severe. ‘His face is massive,’ writes Norton to Ruskin, with ‘little beauty of feature, but much of expression.’[235] What seems to have chiefly impressed observers was the eyes and the look in them. Professor Osborn says: ‘The impression of Darwin’s bluish-gray eyes, deep-set under overhanging brows, was that they were the eyes of a man who could survey all nature.’[236] And Bryce agrees: ‘The feature which struck one most was the projecting brow with its bushy eyebrows, and deep beneath it the large gray-blue eyes with their clear and steady look. It was an alert look, as of one accustomed to observing keenly, yet it was also calm and reflective. There was a pleasant smile which came and passed readily, but the chief impression made by the face was that of tranquil, patient thoughtfulness, as of one whose mind had long been accustomed to fix itself upon serious problems.’[237]

There is general testimony as to Darwin’s ready hospitality and eager kindliness in greeting all those who came into his household. There was no reserve or assumption of dignity, but a perfectly natural and cordial desire and disposition to make every one feel at home. I do not know any more impressive witness to this charm of manner than Leslie Stephen, who was certainly not a man to be unduly carried away. Stephen speaks of ‘the charm which no one to whom I have ever spoken failed to perceive in his presence and in his writings.’[238] And he elsewhere dwells upon it more elaborately: ‘He was in town for a few days and most kindly called upon me. You may believe that I was proud to welcome him, for of all eminent men that I have ever seen he is beyond comparison the most attractive to me. There is something almost pathetic in his simplicity and friendliness. I heard a story the other day about a young German admirer whom Lubbock took to see him. He could not summon up courage to speak to the great man; but, when they came away, burst into tears. That is not my way; but I sympathize to some extent with the enthusiastic Dutchman.’[239]