CHAPTER XI.
DARWIN"S PLACE IN THE EVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT.
To most people Darwinism and evolution mean one and the same thing.
After what has here been said, however, with regard to the pre-Darwinian evolutionary movement, and the distinction between the doctrines of descent with modification and of natural selection, it need hardly be added that the two are quite separate and separable in thought, even within the limits of the purely restricted biological order. Darwinism is only a part of organic evolution; the theory, as a whole, owes much to Darwin, but it does not owe everything to him alone. There were biological evolutionists before ever he published the "Origin of Species;" there are biological evolutionists even now who refuse to accept the truth of his great discovery, and who cling firmly to the primitive faith set forth in earlier and cruder shapes by Erasmus Darwin, by Lamarck, or by Robert Chambers.
Much more, then, must Darwinism and the entire theory of organic development to which it belongs be carefully discriminated, as a part or factor, from evolution at large, as a universal and all-embracing cosmical system. That system itself has gradually emerged as a slow growth of the past two centuries, a progressive development of the collective scientific and philosophical mind of humanity, not due in its totality to any one single commanding thinker, but summing itself up at last in our own time more fully in the person and teaching of Mr.
Herbert Spencer than of any other solitary mouthpiece. Indeed, intimately as we all now a.s.sociate the name of Darwin with the word "evolution," that term itself (whose vogue is almost entirely due to Mr.
Spencer"s influence) was one but rarely found upon Darwin"s own lips, and but rarely written by his own pen. He speaks rather of development and of natural selection than of evolution: his own concern was more with its special aspect as biological modification than with its general aspect as cosmical unfolding. Let us ask, then, from this wider standpoint of a great and far-reaching mental revolution, what was Charles Darwin"s exact niche in the evolutionary movement of the two last centuries?
Evolutionism, as now commonly understood, may be fairly regarded as a mode of envisaging to ourselves the history of the universe, a tendency or frame of mind, a temperament, one might almost say, or habit of thought rather than a definite creed or body of dogmas. The evolutionist looks out upon the cosmos as a continuous process unfolding itself in regular order in obedience to definite natural laws. He sees in it all, not a warring chaos restrained by the constant interference from without of a wise and beneficent external power, but a vast aggregate of original elements, perpetually working out their own fresh redistribution, in accordance with their own inherent energies. He regards the cosmos as an almost infinite collection of material atoms, animated by an almost infinite sum-total of energy, potential or kinetic.
In the very beginning, so far as the mental vision of the astronomer can dimly pierce with hypothetical glance the abyss of ages, the matter which now composes the material universe seems to have existed in a highly diffuse and nebulous condition. The gravitative force, however, with which every atom of the whole vast ma.s.s was primarily endowed, caused it gradually to aggregate around certain fixed and definite centres, which became in time the rallying-points or nuclei of future suns. The primitive potential energy of separation in the atoms of the ma.s.s was changed into actual energy of motion as they drew closer and closer together about the common centre, and into molecular energy or heat as they clashed with one another in bodily impact around the hardening core. Thus arose stars and suns, composed of fiery atomic clouds in a constant state of progressive concentration, ever gathering-in the hem of their outer robes on the surface of the solid globe within, and ever radiating off their store of a.s.sociated energy to the impalpable and hypothetical surrounding ether. This, in necessarily brief and shadowy abstract, is the nebular theory of Kant and Laplace, as amended and supplemented by the modern doctrine of the correlation and conservation of energies.
Applied to the solar system, of which our own planet forms a component member, the evolutionary doctrine (in its elder shape) teaches us to envisage that minor group as the final result of a single great diffuse nebula, which once spread its faint and cloud-like ma.s.s with inconceivable tenuity, at least as far from its centre, now occupied by the sun"s body, as the furthest point in the orbit of Neptune, the outermost of the yet known planets. From this remote and immense periphery it has gradually gathered itself in, growing denser and denser all the time, towards its common core, and has left behind, at irregular intervals, concentric rings or belts of nebulous matter, which, after rupturing at their weakest point, have hardened and concentrated round their own centre of gravity into Jupiter, Saturn, the Earth, or Venus.
The main central body of all, retreating ever within as it dropped in its course the raw material of the planetary ma.s.ses, has formed, at last, the sun, the great ruler and luminary of our system. Much as this primitive evolutionary concept of the development and history of the solar system has been modified and altered of late years by recent researches into the nature of comets and meteors and of the sun"s surface, it still remains for all practical purposes of popular exposition the best and simplest mental picture of the general type of astronomical evolution. For the essential point which it impresses upon the mind is the idea of the planets in their several orbits and with their attendant satellites as due, not to external design and special creation, in the exact order in which we now see them, but to the slow and regular working out of preordained physical laws, in accordance with which they have each naturally a.s.sumed, by pure force of circ.u.mstances, their existing size, and weight, and orbit, and position.
Geology has applied a similar conception to the origin and becoming of the earth"s material and external features as we now know them.
Accepting from astronomy the notion of our planet"s primary condition as a cooling sphere of incandescent matter, it goes on to show how the two great envelopes, atmospheric and oceanic, gaseous and liquid, have gradually formed around its solid core; how the hard crust of the central ma.s.s has been wrinkled and corrugated into mountain chain and deep-cut valley, uplifted here into elevated table-land or there depressed into hollow ocean bed; how sediment has slowly gathered on the floor of the sea, and how volcanic energies or lateral pressure have subsequently forced up the resulting deposits into Alpine peaks and ma.s.sive continents. In this direction, it was Lyell who princ.i.p.ally introduced into science the uniformitarian or evolutionary principle, who subst.i.tuted for the frequent cataclysms and fresh beginnings of the earlier geologists the grand conception of continuous action, producing from comparatively infinitesimal but c.u.mulative causes effects which at last attain by accretion the most colossal proportions.
Here biology next steps in, with its splendid explanation of organic life, as due essentially to the secondary action of radiated solar energy on the outer crust of such a cooling and evolving planet. Falling on the cells of the simplest green plants, the potent sunlight dissociates the carbon from the oxygen in the carbonic acid floating in the atmosphere, and builds it up with the hydrogen of water in the tissues of the organism into starches and other organic products, which differ from the inert substances around them, mainly by the possession of locked-up solar energy. On the energy-yielding food-stuffs thus stored up the animal in turn feeds and battens, reducing what was before potential into actual motion, just as the steam-engine reduces the latent solar energy of coal into visible heat and visible movement in its furnace and its machinery. How the first organism came to exist biology has not yet been able fully to explain for us; but aided by chemical science it has been able to show us in part how some of the simpler organic bodies may have been originally built up, and it does not despair of showing us in the end how the earliest organism may actually have been produced from the prime elements of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. Into this most fundamental of biological problems, however, Darwin himself, with his const.i.tutional caution and dread of speculative theorising, was not careful or curious to enter. Even upon the far less abstruse and hypothetical question, whether all life took its prime origin from a single starting-point or from several distinct and separate tribal ancestors, he hardly cared so much as to hazard a pa.s.sing speculation. With splendid self-restraint he confined his attention almost entirely to the more manageable and practical problem of the origin of species by natural selection, which lay then and there open for solution before him. Taking for granted the existence of the original organism or group of organisms, the fact of reproduction, and the tendency of such reproduction to beget increase in a geometrical ratio, he deduced from these elementary given factors the necessary corollary of survival of the fittest, with all its marvellous and far-reaching implications of adaptation to the environment and specific distinctions. By doing so, he rendered conceivable the mechanism of evolution in the organic world, thus bringing another great aspect of external nature within the range of the developmental as opposed to the miraculous philosophy of the cosmos.
Psychology, once more, in the hands of Herbert Spencer and his followers, not wholly unaided by Darwin himself, has extended the self-same evolutionary treatment to the involved and elusive phenomena of mind, and has shown how from the simplest unorganised elements of feeling, the various mental powers and faculties as we now know them, both on the intellectual and on the emotional side, have been slowly built up in the long and ever-varying interaction between the sentient organism and the natural environment. It has traced the first faint inception of a nervous system as a mere customary channel of communication between part and part; the gradual growth of fibre and ganglion; the vague beginnings of external sense-organ and internal brain; the final perfection of eye and ear, of sight and hearing, of pleasure and pain, of intellect and volition. It has thus done for the subjective or mental half of our complex nature what biology, as conceived by Darwin, has done for the physical or purely organic half; it has traced the origin and development of mind, without a single break, from its first faint and half-unconscious manifestation in the polyp or the jelly-fish to its final grand and varied outcome in the soul of the poet or the intellect of the philosopher.
Finally, sociology has applied the evolutionary method to the origin and rise of human societies, with their languages, customs, arts, and inst.i.tutions, their governmental organisation and their ecclesiastical polity. Taking from biology the evolving savage, viewed as a developed and highly gifted product of the anthropoid stock, it has shown by what stages and through what causes he has slowly aggregated into tribes and nations; has built up his communal, polygamic, or monogamic family; has learnt the use of fire, of implements, of pottery, of metals; has developed the whole resources of oral speech and significant gesture; has invented writing, pictorial or alphabetic; has grown up to science, to philosophy, to morals, and to religion. The chief honours of this particular line of enquiry, the latest and youngest of all to receive the impact of the evolutionary impulse, belong mainly to Tylor, Lubbock, and Spencer in England, and to Haeckel, De Mortillet, and Wagner on the continent.
In the sublime conception of the external universe and its present workings which we thus owe to the independent efforts of so many great progressive thinkers, and which has here been briefly and inadequately sketched out, Darwin"s work in life falls naturally into its own place as the princ.i.p.al contribution to the evolutionary movement in the special biological department of thought. Within the more limited range of that department itself, the evolutionary impulse did not owe its origin to Charles Darwin personally; it took its rise with Erasmus Darwin, Buffon, and Lamarck, and it derived from our great modern English naturalist its final explanation and definitive proof alone. But just as the evolutionary movement in astronomy and cosmical thought is rightly a.s.sociated in all our minds with the mighty theories of Kant, Laplace, and Herschel; just as the evolutionary movement in geology is rightly a.s.sociated with the far lesser yet brilliant and effective personality of Lyell; just as the evolutionary movement in the derivative sciences is rightly a.s.sociated with so many great still living thinkers; so the evolutionary movement in biology in particular rightly sums itself up in the honoured name of Charles Darwin. For what others suspected, he was the first to prove; where others speculated, he was the first to observe, to experiment, to demonstrate, and to convince.
It should be noted, too, that while to us who come after, the great complex evolutionary movement of the two last centuries justly reveals itself as one and indivisible, a single grand cosmical drama, having many acts and many scenes, but all alike inspired by one informing and pervading unity, yet to those whose half unconscious co-operation slowly built it up by episodes, piecemeal, each act and each scene unrolled itself separately as an end in itself, to be then and there attained and proved, quite apart from the conception of its a.n.a.lytic value as a part in a great harmonious natural poem of the const.i.tution of things. Though evolution appears to us now as a single grand continuous process, a phase of the universe dependent upon a preponderating aggregation of matter and dissipation of energy, yet to Kant and Laplace it was the astronomical aspect alone that proved attractive, to Darwin it was the biological aspect alone, and to many of the modern workers in the minor fields it is the human and sociological aspect that almost monopolises the whole wide mental horizon. No greater proof can be given of the subjective distinctness of parts in what was objectively and fundamentally a single broad psychological revolution of the human mind, than the fact that Lyell himself, who more than any one man had introduced the evolutionary conception into the treatment of geology, should have stood out so long and fought so blindly against the evolutionary conception in the organic world. Indeed, it was not until the various scattered and many-coloured strands of evolutionary thought had been gathered together and woven into one by the vast catholic and synthetic intelligence of Herbert Spencer that the idea of evolution as a whole, as a single continuous cosmical process, began to be apprehended and gradually a.s.similated by the picked intelligences of the several distinct scientific departments.
Observe also that the evolutionary method has invaded each of the concrete sciences in the exact order of their natural place in the hierarchy of knowledge. It had been applied to astronomy by Kant and Laplace before it was applied to geology by Lyell; it had been applied to geology by Lyell before it was applied to biology by Darwin; it had been applied to biology (in part, at least) by Lamarck and the Darwins before it was applied to psychology by Spencer; and it is only at the very end of all that it has been applied to sociology and the allied branches of thought by a hundred different earnest workers in contemporary Europe. Each stage helped on the next; each was dependent only on those that went naturally before it, and aided in turn the subsequent development of those that naturally came after it.
Nevertheless, the popular instinct which regards Darwinism and evolution as practically synonymous is to a large extent justified by the actual facts of the psychological upheaval. Darwin"s work forms on the whole the central keystone of the evolutionary system, and deserves the honour which has been thrust upon it of supporting by its own ma.s.s the entire superstructure of the development theory.
For, in the first place, Darwin had to deal with the science of life, the science where the opposition to evolutionism was sure to be strongest, and where the forces and tendencies in favour of obscurantism were sure to gather in fullest force. Every other great onward step in our knowledge of our own relation to the universe of which we form a part had been compelled indeed to run the gauntlet, in its own time, of ecclesiastical censure and of popular dislike. Those inveterate prejudices of human ignorance which sedulously hide their genuine shape under the guise of dogma masquerading as religion, had long since brought to bear their baneful resources upon the discoveries of Copernicus and the theories of Galileo, as blind, misleading, and diabolical lights, opposed to the sure and certain warranty of Holy Scripture. Newton, again, had in due time been blamed in that he boldly subst.i.tuted (as his critics declared) the bald and barren formula of gravitation for the personal superintendence of a divine Providence.
Laplace had been accused of dethroning the deity from the centre and governance of his celestial system. Around the early geologists the battle of the six days of creation had raged fiercely for nearly half a century. But all these varying modes of thought, though deemed heretical enough in their own day, had touched, as it were, but the minor ramparts and unimportant out-works of the great obscurantist dogmatic strongholds: Darwinism, by openly attacking the inmost problems of life and mind, had brought to bear its powerful artillery upon the very keep and highest tower of the fortress itself. The belief that the various stars, planets, and satellites had or had not been wisely created in their existing positions, and with their present orbits, movements, and relations accurately fore-measured, did not fundamentally affect, for good or evil, the cherished dogmas of the ordinary mult.i.tude. But the a.n.a.logous belief in the distinct and separate creation of plants and animals, and more especially of the human species, was far more closely and intimately bound up with all the current religious conceptions. It was at first supposed, not perhaps without some practical wisdom, that to upset the primitive faith in the separate creation of living beings was to loosen and imperil the very foundations of common morality and revealed religion. The "argument from design" had been immemorially regarded as the princ.i.p.al b.u.t.tress of orthodox thought. Theologians had unwisely staked their all upon the teleological dogma, and could ill afford to retire without a blow from that tenaciously defended bastion of their main position. Hence the evolutionary concept had its hardest fight to wage over the biological field; and when that field was once fairly won, it had little more to fear from banded preconceptions and established prejudices in any other portion of the wide territory it claimed for its own.
In the second place, biological evolution, firmly established by Darwin on a safe, certain, and unimpeachable basis, led naturally and almost inevitably to all the other innumerable applications of the evolutionary method, in the domains of psychology, sociology, philology, political thought, and ethical science. Hence the immediate and visible results of its promulgation have been far more striking, noticeable, and evident than those which followed the establishment of the evolutionary conception in the astronomical and geological departments. It was possible to accept cosmical evolution and solar evolution and planetary evolution, without at the same time accepting evolution in the restricted field of life and mind. But it was impossible to accept evolution in biology without at the same time extending its application to psychology, to the social organism, to language, to ethics, to all the thousand and one varied interests of human life and human development. Now, most people are little moved by speculations and hypotheses as to the origin of the milky way or the belt of Orion; they care very slightly for Jupiter"s moons or Saturn"s rings; they are stolidly incurious as to the development of the earth"s crust, or the precise date of the cretaceous epoch; but they understand and begin to be touched the moment you come to the practical questions of man"s origin, nature, and history. Darwinism compelled their attention by its immediate connection with their own race; and the proof of this truth is amply shown by the mere fact that out of all the immense variety of Charles Darwin"s theories and ideas, the solitary one which alone has succeeded in attaching to itself the public interest and public ridicule is the theory of man"s ultimate descent from a monkey-like ancestor.
Popular instinct, here as elsewhere profoundly true at core in the midst of all its superficial foolishness, has rightly hit upon the central element in the Darwinian conception which more than any other has caused its fruitful and wonderful expansion through every fertile field of human enquiry.
In short, it was Darwin"s task in life to draw down evolution from heaven to earth, and to bring within the scope of its luminous method all that is most interesting to the uninstructed and unsophisticated heart of the natural man.
The application of the evolutionary principle to the world of life, human or animal, thus presents itself as the chief philosophic and scientific achievement of the nineteenth century. Throughout the whole middle decades of the present age, the human mind in all its highest embodiments was eagerly searching, groping, and enquiring after a naturalistic explanation of the origin and progress of organic life. In the vast scheme for the System of Synthetic Philosophy which Herbert Spencer set forth as an antic.i.p.atory synopsis of his projected work, the philosopher of development leapt at once from the First Principles of evolution as a whole to the Principles of Biology, Psychology, and Sociology, omitting all reference to the application of evolution to the vast field of inorganic nature; and he did so on the distinctly stated ground that its application to organic nature was then and there more important and interesting. That suggestive expression of belief aptly sums up the general att.i.tude of scientific and philosophic minds at the precise moment of the advent of Darwinism. Kant and Laplace and Lyell had already applied the evolutionary method to suns and systems, to planets and continents; what was needed next was that some deeply learned and universally equipped biological leader should help the lame evolutionism of Lamarck over the organic stile, and leave it free to roam the boundless fields of what Mr. Spencer has sometimes well described as the super-organic sciences. For that office, Darwin at the exact moment presented himself; and his victory and its results rightly ent.i.tle him to the popular regard as the founder of all that most men mean when they speak together in everyday conversation of the doctrine of evolution.
On the other hand, the total esoteric philosophic conception of evolution as a cosmical process, one and continuous from nebula to man, from star to soul, from atom to society, we owe rather to the other great prophet of the evolutionary creed, Herbert Spencer, whose name will ever be equally remembered side by side with his mighty peer"s, in a place of high collateral glory. It is he who has given us the general definition of evolution as a progress from an indefinite, incoherent h.o.m.ogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, accompanying an integration of matter and dissipation of motion, or, as we should now perhaps more correctly say, of energy. In the establishment of the various lines of thought which merge at last in that magnificent cosmical law, it was Darwin"s special task to bring the phenomena of organic life well within the clear ken of known and invariable natural processes.
CHAPTER XII.
THE NET RESULT.
And now let us ask ourselves, in all sincerity, what was the final outcome and net result of Darwin"s great and useful life?
If Charles Darwin had never existed at all, there would still have been a considerable and expansive evolutionary movement both in biology and in its sister sciences throughout the latter half of the present century. The harvest indeed was ready, and the labourers, though few, were full of vigour. Suppose for a moment that that earnest and single-hearted Darwinian genius had been cut off by some untimely disease of childhood at five years old, all other conditions remaining as they were, we should even so have had in our midst to-day, a small philosophical and influential band of evolutionary workers. Spencer would none the less have given us his "First Principles" and the major part of his "Principles of Biology," with comparatively little alteration or omission. Wallace would none the less have promulgated his inchoate theory of natural selection, and rallied round his primordial conception the very best and deepest minds of the biological fraction.
Geology would have enforced the continuity of types; Cope and Marsh would have unearthed for our edification the ancestral forms of the evolving horse and the toothed birds of the Western American deposits.
The Solenhofen lithographic slates would still have yielded us the half-reptilian, half-avian Archaeopteryx; the tertiary deposits would still have presented us with a long suite of gradually specialised and modified mammalian forms. The Siberian meadows would have sent us that intermediate creature which Prjevalsky recognises as the half-way house between the horses and the donkeys; the rivers of Queensland would have disclosed to our view that strange lung-bearing and gill-breathing barramunda, in which Gunther discerns the missing link between the ganoid fishes on the one hand, and the mudfish and salamandroid amphibians on the other. From data such as these, biologists and palaeontologists of the calibre of Huxley, Gaudry, Geikie, Rutimeyer, and Busk, would necessarily have derived, by the aid of Wallace"s pregnant principle, conclusions not so very far remote from Darwin"s own. Heer and Saporta would have drawn somewhat similar inferences from the fossil flora of Switzerland and of Greenland; Hooker and De Candolle would have read pretty much the self-same lessons in the scattered ferns and scanty palm-trees of oceanic islands. Kowalevsky would have seen in the ascidian larva a common prototype of the vertebrate series; the followers of Von Baer would have popularised the embryological conception of the single origin of animal life. The researches of Boucher de Perthes, of Lyell, of Evans, of Boyd Dawkins, of Keller, and of Christy and Lartet, would have unrolled before our eyes, under any circ.u.mstances, the strange story of prehistoric man. On the facts so gained, Lubbock and Tylor, Schaafhausen and Buchner, would have built up their various consistent theories of human development and human culture. In short, even without Charles Darwin, the nineteenth century would not have stood still; it would have followed in the wake of Buffon and Diderot, of Lamarck and Laplace, of St. Hilaire and Goethe, of Kant and Herschel, of Hutton and Lyell, of Malthus and of Spencer. The great world never rolls down the abysses of time obedient to the nod of one single overruling t.i.tanic intellect. "If the doctrine of evolution had not existed," says Huxley, "palaeontologists must have invented it."
But Charles Darwin acted, nevertheless, the part of an immense and powerful accelerating energy. The impetus which he gave gained us at least fifty years of progress; it sent us at a bound from Copernicus to Newton; so far as ordinary minds were concerned, indeed, it transcended at a single leap the whole interval from Ptolemy to Herschel. The comparison is far from being a mere rhetorical one. A close a.n.a.logy really exists between the two cases. Before Copernicus, the earth stood fixed and immovable in the centre of the universe, with obsequious suns, and planets, and satellites dancing attendance in cycle and epicycle around the solid ma.s.s, to which by day and night they continually ministered. The great astronomical revolution begun by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, and completed by Newton, Laplace, and Herschel, reduced the earth to its true position as a petty planet, revolving feebly among its bigger brethren round a petty sun, in some lost corner of a vast, majestic, and almost illimitable galaxy. Even so, before Darwin, man stood in his own esteem the fixed point of an anthropocentric universe, divinely born and divinely instructed, with all the beasts of the field, and the fowls of the air, and the fruits of the earth specially created with a definite purpose in subservience to his lordly wants and interests. The great biological revolution, which rightly almost sums itself up in the name of Darwin, reduced man at once to his true position as the last product of kinetic solar energy, working upon the peculiar chemical elements of an evolving planet. It showed that every part of every plant and every animal existed primarily for the sake of that plant or animal alone; it unseated man from his imaginary throne in the centre of the cosmos, teaching him at once a lesson of humility and a lesson of aspiration--pointing out to him how low was the origin from which, in very truth, he first sprang, and suggesting to him, at the same time, how high was the grand and glorious destiny to which by his own strenuous and ardent efforts he might yet perchance some day attain.
That result, inevitable perhaps in the long run, from the slow unfolding of human intelligence, was immensely hastened in our own time by the peculiar idiosyncrasy and lofty personality of Charles Darwin. Without him we should have had, not only evolutionism, but also, as Wallace"s discovery testifies, natural selection itself into the bargain. But we should never have had the "Origin of Species." We should never have had that vast and enthusiastic consensus of scientific opinion through an all but unanimous thinking world, which has forced an immediate acceptance of evolutionary ideas down the unwilling throats of half unthinking Europe. The prodigious ma.s.s of Darwin"s facts, the cautious working of Darwin"s intellect, the immense weight of Darwin"s reputation, the crushing force of Darwin"s masterly inductive method, bore down before them all opposition in the inner circle of biologists, and secured the triumph of the evolutionary system even in the very strongholds of ignorance and obscurantism. Without Darwin, a small group of philosophic thinkers would still be striving to impress upon an incredulous and somewhat contemptuous world the central truths of the evolutionary doctrine. The opposition of the elders, long headed even in the society we actually know by a few stern scientific recalcitrants, like Owen and Aga.s.siz, Pictet and Dawson, Virchow and Mivart, would have fought desperately in the last trench for the final figment of the fixity of species. What is now the general creed, more or less loosely held and imperfectly understood, of hundreds and thousands among the intelligent ma.s.s, would, under such circ.u.mstances, be even yet the mere party-shibboleth of an esoteric few, struggling hard against the bare force of overwhelming numbers to ensure not only recognition but a fair hearing for the first principles of the development theory. It is to Darwin, and to Darwin almost alone, that we owe the present comparatively wide acceptance of the all-embracing doctrine of evolution.
No other man did so much or could have done so much to ensure its triumph. He began early in life to collect and arrange a vast encyclopaedia of facts, all finally focussed with supreme skill upon the great principle he so clearly perceived, and so lucidly expounded. He brought to bear upon the question an amount of personal observation, of minute experiment, of world-wide book-knowledge, of universal scientific ability, such as never perhaps was lavished by any other man upon any other department of study. His conspicuous and beautiful love of truth, his unflinching candour, his transparent fearlessness and honesty of purpose, his child-like simplicity, his modesty of demeanour, his charming manner, his affectionate disposition, his kindliness to friends, his courtesy to opponents, his gentleness to harsh and often bitter a.s.sailants, kindled in the minds of men of science everywhere throughout the world a contagious enthusiasm, only equalled perhaps among the disciples of Socrates and the great teachers of the revival of learning.
His name became a rallying-point for the children of light in every country; and what philosophers and speculators might have taken a century or two more to establish in embryo was firmly grounded, never to be overthrown, by the vast acc.u.mulations of fact and argument in the "Origin of Species," and its companion volumes.
The end of that great Darwinian revolution the world has not yet seen: in a sense, indeed, it will never see it. For the general acceptance of Darwin"s theory, which we may watch progressing around us every minute to-day, implies a complete _boulevers.e.m.e.nt_ of anthropocentric ideas, a total change in our human conception of our own relations to the world and the universe, which must work out for ever increasingly wide-reaching and complex effects in all our dealings with one another and with the environment at large. There is no department of human thought or human action which evolutionism leaves exactly where it stood before the advent of the Darwinian conception. In nothing is this fact more conspicuously seen than in the immediate obsolescence (if one may so speak) of all the statical pre-Darwinian philosophies which ignored development, as soon as ever the new progressive evolutionary theories had fairly burst upon an astonished world. Dogmatic Comte was left forthwith to his little band of devoted adherents; shadowy Hegel was relegated with a bow to the cool shades of the common-rooms of Oxford; Buckle was exploded like an inflated wind-bag; even Mill himself--_magnum et venerabile nomen_--with all his mighty steam-hammer force of logical directness, was felt instinctively to be lacking in full appreciation of the dynamic and kinetic element in universal nature. Spencer and Hartmann, Haeckel and Clifford, had the field to themselves for the establishment of their essentially evolutionary systems. Great thinkers of the elder generation, like Bain and Lyell, felt bound to remodel their earlier conceptions by the light of the new Darwinian hypotheses. Those who failed by congenital const.i.tution to do so, like Carlyle and Carpenter, were, philosophically speaking, left hopelessly behind and utterly extinguished. Those who only half succeeded in thus reading themselves into the new ideas, like Lewes and Max Muller, lost ground immediately before the eager onslaught of their younger compet.i.tors. "The world is to the young," says the eastern proverb; and in a world peopled throughout in the high places of thought by men almost without exception evolutionists, there was little or no place for the timid group of stranded Girondins, who still stood aloof in sullen antique scientific orthodoxy from what seemed to them the carmagnoles and orgies of a biological Thermidor.
At the same time, it must be steadily remembered that there are many naturalists at the present day, especially among those of the lower order of intelligence, who, while accepting evolutionism in a general way, and therefore always describing themselves as Darwinians, do not believe and often cannot even understand the distinctive Darwinian addition to the evolutionary doctrine--namely, the principle of natural selection. Such hazy and indistinct thinkers as these are still really at the prior stage of Lamarckian evolutionism. It is probable that in the future, while a formal acceptance of Darwinism becomes general, the special theory of natural selection will be thoroughly understood and a.s.similated only by the more abstract and philosophical minds. Our children will be taught as a matter of course the doctrine of development or of descent with modification; but the rationale of that descent will still remain in all likelihood always beyond the grasp of most of them: just as thousands accept on authority the Copernican astronomy, who would never even be capable of comprehending the simplest proofs of the earth"s annual movement round the sun. Thus the name of Darwin will often no doubt be tacked on to what are in reality the principles of Lamarck.
Every day, however, in spite of such half-ignorant adherents, the effects of true Darwinism are widening and deepening. One group of earnest workers is using it now as a guide to physiological, embryological, and anatomical researches. Another is employing it with zeal and skill in the field of cla.s.sificatory and physiological botany.
Yet others are working out its psychological implications, enquiring into instinct and animal intelligence, and solving by its aid abstruse problems of the human mind and the human emotions. One philosopher has brought it to bear on questions of ethics, another on questions of social and political economy. Its principles have been applied in one place to aesthetics, in another place to logic, in a third place to the origin and growth of religion. The study of language has derived new lights from the great central Darwinian luminary. The art of education is beginning to feel the progressive influence of the Darwinian impulse.
In fact, there is hardly a single original worker in any department of thought or science who has not been more or less profoundly affected, whether he knows it or whether he knows it not, by the vast spreading and circling wave of the Darwinian conceptions. All our ideas have been revolutionised and evolutionised. The new notions are abroad in the world, quickening with their fresh and vigorous germinal power the dry bones of all the sciences, all the arts, and all the philosophies.
And evolutionism is gradually though slowly filtering downward. It is permeating the daily press of the nations, and gaining for its vocabulary a recognised place in the phraseology of the unlearned vulgar. Such expressions as "natural selection," "survival of the fittest," "struggle for existence," "adaptation to the environment," and all the rest of it, are becoming as household words upon the lips of thousands who only know the name of Darwin as a b.u.t.t for the petty empty jibes of infinitesimal cheap witlings. And Darwinism will trickle down still through a thousand channels, by definite popularisation, and still more by indefinite absorption into the common thought of universal humanity, till it becomes part and parcel of the general inheritance, bred in our bone and burnt into our blood, an heir-loom of our race to all time and in all countries. Great thoughts like his do not readily die: they expand and grow in ten thousand bosoms, till they transform the world at last into their own likeness, and adapt it to the environment they have themselves created by their informing power.
Happy above ordinary human happiness, Charles Darwin lived himself to see the prosperous beginning of this great silent philosophical revolution. Harvey"s grand discovery, it has been well said, was scoffed at for nearly a whole generation. Newton"s marvellous law of gravitation was coldly received even by the gigantic intellect of Leibnitz himself.
Francis Bacon, in disgrace and humiliation, could only commend his name and memory "to foreign nations and to the next age." It is too often so with thinkers of the first and highest order: it was not so, happily, with the gentle soul of Charles Darwin. Alone among the prophets and teachers of triumphant creeds, he saw with his own eyes the adoption of the faith he had been the first to promulgate in all its fulness by every fresh and powerful mind of the younger race that grew up around him. The Nestor of evolutionism, he had lived among two successive generations of thinkers, and over the third he ruled as king. With that crowning joy of a great, a n.o.ble, and a happy life, let us leave him here alone in his glory.