Deconstructing Darwinism- The Politics of Evolution in the 1860s

Transcription

DeconstructingDarwinism:
The Politicsof Evolutionin the 1860s
JAMES MOORE
The Open University
Faculty of A rts
Milton Keynes MK 7 6AA, England
A term like Darwinism is bound to change in the course of
time., ... and to try to turn the clock back is not likely to be
successful. ... I am quite sure that everybody will continue to
define Darwinism as the theory of evolution in which all directional change is caused by natural selection.... When it comes
to using terms that are common coin in modern science, we
cannot load them down with the uncertainties of past history.
Ernst Mayrl
One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its
use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the
prejudice which stands in the way of doing this.
Ludwig Wittgenstein2
Three decades had passed since extinguished theologians lay
round the cradle of Darwinism, strangled like the snakes beside
that of Hercules; thirty-four years, to be exact, since Thomas
Huxley committed forensic murder at Oxford before the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, grinding the local
diocesan between the facts of natural history and the supreme
Victorian value of truth-telling - or so legend already proclaimed.3 Now, with the first return of the British Association to
the fabled scene of slaughter, the bishops were in the audience,
the evolutionists at center stage. The Sheldonian Theatre was
packed. The National Anthem had been rendered. The president
1. Mayr-Greene correspondence. 1979, in John C. Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View: Essays in the History of Evolutionary Ideas (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 198 1), pp. 152, 155.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), p. 340.
3. Cf. both Thomas Henry Huxley, "The Origin of Species" (1860), in idem,
Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 24, no. 3 (Fall 1991), pp. 353-408.
? 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Pritmtedin the Netherlands.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
354
JAMES MOORE
of the Association had launched a massive assault on Darwin's
theory of natural selection for giving a conjectural, haphazard,
nonteleological account of the history of life, and a vote of thanks
for the address had been moved by one whom the president
invoked as "the greatest living master of natural science among
us.
On the evening of August 8, 1894, it thus fell to Huxley to
second a resolution by Lord Kelvin, an unanswerable critic of
Darwin for thirty years, expressing thinly veiled assent to the antiDarwinian arguments of Lord Salisbury, the late Tory prime
minister and chancellor of the University of Oxford, who had
himself, as one of his last acts of office two years earlier, recognized Huxley's eminence as a statesman of science by making him
a privy councillor. The occasion called for a degree of verbal
dexterity that those who had charged Huxley with his task knew
full well he possessed. Cloaked in his doctor-of-laws gown, which
Anglican Oxford had bestowed on him in 1885, he hauled his
faltering frame to the edge of the platform and struggled to make
himself heard. The Time's reporter did not miss a line:
As one of those persons who for many years past had made a
pretty free use of the comfortable word "evolution" (laughter),
let him remind them that 34 years ago a considerable discussion ... took place in one of their sectional meetings upon
what people frequently called the "Darwinism question," but
which on that occasion was not the Darwinism question, but
the very much deeper question which lay beneath the Darwinism
question - he meant the question of evolution. ... Darwinism
was not evolution, nor Spencensm, nor Haeckelism, nor
Weismannism, but all these were built on the fundamental
doctrine which was evolution, which they Ihadi maintained so
many years.
Huxley was adamant: all that they - he and Joseph Hooker and
Darwin's "old guard" - had fought for in the 1860s was the
mutability of species and the natural descent of existing species
Collected Essays, 9 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1893-94), 11, 52 (hereafter CE),
and William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: The .Storyof Darwin, Huxley,
and Evolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), p. 7, with J. R. Lucas, "Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter," Hist. J., 22 (1979), 313-330;
Sheridan Gilley, "The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate: A Reconstruction," in Religion and Humanism .. , ed. Keith Robbins (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 198 1), pp.
325-340; and J. Vernon Jensen, "Return to the Wilherforce-Huxley Debate,"
Brirt.J. Hist. Sci., 21 (1988), 161-179.
Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution
355
from a few primitive forms. And since the president in his address
had actually lent his authority to evolution, understood in this
sense, Huxley took "enormous satisfaction" in welcoming "so distinguished a convert" to the doctrine. Whereupon, expressing
gratitude for the president's kind remarks on Darwin's personal
character, he sat down before a cheering crowd.4
No fainting ladies, no Bibles brandished, no blood split.
Darwin's bulldog had grown long in tooth and short of voice. It
was his last public appearance before he died. Darwin's bulldog
also had long since differentiated between those worth biting and
those at whom he ought merely to bark. His guardianship of
Darwin's scientific property had become qualified and refined.
The Huxley who in April 1860, in the WestministerReview, had
been the first person anywhere to use the term "Darwinism" with
reference to the views expressed in the Origin of Species, who by
December 1862 was commending descent with modification by
any natural means, including natural selection, to a working-class
audience with the words, "I really believe that the alternative is
either Darwinism or nothing" - this was not the Huxley who in
November 1871 began to place "Darwinism" in quotation marks,
who in 1887 carefully discerned natural selection as its "quintessence," and who by 1894 could scarcely be drawn to defend
anything called "Darwinism" at all.' Older and wiser and politically more adept, Huxley had grown circumspect in his use of
words. In this essay I show how one word, "Darwinism," came to
be used in such a way that even a reputed arch-Darwinian could
dissociate himself from it.
A LOADED TERM
Within three decades a change had come about, not in Huxley's
language alone, but in the way that both the followers and the
critics of Darwin across the world referred to his theoretical
views. The expatriate German philologist Friedrich Max Muller
declared in 1878 that "the word 'Darwinism' ought either to be
sharply defined or should be replaced by 'evolution-doctrine."'
4. 'The British Association," Times, 9 August 1894, p. 6, col. 5.
5. Huxley, "Onrginof Species," p. 78; T. H. Huxley, On the Origin of Spec ies;
Or, The Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature 118621, ed. Ashley Montagu
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 137; idem, "Mr. Darwin's
Critics," Contemp. Rev., 18 (November 1871), 443-476; idem, "On the Reception of the 'Origin of Species."' in The Life and Letters of Charles !)arwin, with
an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin, 3 vols. (London: John
Murray, 1887), 11, 195 (hereafter LLD).
356
JAMES MOORE
His concern for linguistic discipline was then shared by many
others. It was Alfred Russel Wallace, the cofounder of the theory
of natural selection, who advocated it as "pure Darwinism." Asa
Gray, the first and foremost defender of natural selection in North
America, called the theory "Darwinism pure and simple, free from
all speculative accretions." And George Romanes, a more qualified defender of natural selection, nonetheless upheld its preeminence as "the Darwinism of Darwin" himself in the face of
what he called the "gross perversions" and "dogmatic" distortions
of Darwin's popularizers.6
Similarity, from the 1870s on the leading critics of Darwin and
his disciples made careful verbal distinctions. The Duke of Argyll,
an amateur naturalist and philosopher, also wrote of "Darwinism
pur et simple"; he claimed to see through Huxley's "policy of
supporting Darwinism, forensically on the one hand, and of
keeping up careful reserves against being personally committed to
it, on the other." Academic philosophers such as James Hutchison
Stirling in Britain and Borden Bowne in the United States viewed
biological evolution and Darwinism as "quite distinct things," and
Hutchison Stirling, like Argylll, pointed up the "loose Darwinianism" of Huxley.7 Theological writers of the caliber of America's
Calvinist dogmatician Charles Hodge, in his remarkable What Is
Darwinism (1874), and Britain's quixotic Catholic Arnold Lunn,
in The Flight from Reason (1930), routinely separated evolution
from Darwinism on the grounds that the latter's "vital principle,"
"formative idea," or "essence" was natural selection. Litterateurs
in the mold of Samuel Butler and George Bernard Shaw had less
6. F. Max Miiller to Prof. Noir6, February 8, 1878, in The Life and Letters of
the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Muiller, ed. Mrs. F. Max Muller, 2 vols.
(London: Longmans, Green, 1902), II, 42; Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwinism:
An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, with Some of Its Applications
(London: Macmillan, 1889), p. viii; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion: Two
Lectures ... (New York: Scribners, 1880), p. 46 (cf. pp. 80-81); George John
Romanes, Darwin, and After Darwin: An Exposition of the Darwiniain Theory
and a Discussion of Post-Darwinian Questions, 3 vols. (London: Longmans,
Green, 1892-97), I, vi, 11-12. See also F. W. Hutton, "Darwinism," in idem,
Darwinism and Lamarckism, Old and New (New York: Putnam, 1899). p. 41.
7. Duke of Argyll to F. Max Muller, February 2, 1875, in (;eorge Douglas,
Eighth Duke of Argyll, K. G., K. T. (1823-1900): Autobiography and Memoirs,
ed. the Dowager Duchess of Argyll, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1906). II,
530; Duke of Argyll, "Darwinism as a Philosophy," Good Words, 19 (1878),
330-333
(quotation on p. 169); Borden P. Bowne,
265-270,
166-173,
"Darwin and Darwinism," Hibbert J. 8 (October 1909), 123; James Hutchison
Stirling, Darwinianism: Workmen and Work (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1894),
p. 186. See also *'The Rise and Influence of Darwinism," Ediniburgl Rev., 196
(1902), 366-407.
357
indeed, for
orthodox reasons for making the same distinction
proliferating terms, as Butler did, like "Wallaceism," "Weismannism," and "Charles Darwinism" - but what allied them with
contemporary anti-Darwinian theologians and philosophers was
an aversion to natural selection as a nonteleological doctrine.8
Nor was this aversion much less evident among anti-Darwinian
naturalists of the period, who in their own way were as frank and
judicious in their choice of terminology as their Darwinian
collegues. For example, George Henslow, the botanist scion of
Darwin's Cambridge mentor, touted his own theory of evolution
by direct adaptation as "the True Darwinism," an advance on the
mere Darwinism of natural selection, which Darwin had increasingly played down. Other naturalists who lacked the personal
contact with Darwin enjoyed by the young Henslow were typically
more prepared to sever all linguistic ties with the past. Insisting
that evolution and "Darwinism" were conceptually distinct, and
that "a rigorous automatic Natural Selection is the essential idea
of Darwinism," as Vernon Kellogg explained in his unique
Darwinism To-Day (1 907), they declared that "Darwinism ...
belongs to history," that Darwinism was on its "death-bed," and.
even that a biologist's correct attitude toward Darwin should be to
work "as if he never existed."9
So far, all agreed that Darwinism was to be associated peculiarly with the author of the Origin of Species and his theory of
natural selection. But the German neo-vitalist philosopher Hans
Driesch, in a locus classicus of terminological gymnastics, dissociated Darwin and Darwinism completely:
8. Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? (New York: Scribner, Armstrong,
1874), pp. 51, 175; Arnold Lunn, The Flight from Reason: A Criticism of the
Dogmas of Popular Science (1930; rev. ed., London: Eyre and Spottiswoode,
1932), chap. 7; Samuel Butler, Evolution Old anid New; Or, The Theories of
Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, as Compared with that of Charles
Darwin (1879; 3rd ed., London: A. C. Fifield, 1911), pp. 58, 63, 360-36 1;
idem, "The Deadlock in Darwinism" (1 890), in idem, Essays on Life, Art, and
Science, ed. R. A. Streatfeild (London: A. C. Fifield, 19(18), pp. 234-340;
Bernard Shaw, Bac k to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (London:
Constable, 192 1), pp. xviii and viii-lxxxvii passim.
9. George Henslow, "The True Darwinism," Nineteenth Cent., 60 (November 1906), 795-801; Vernon L. Kellogg, Darwinism To-Day: A Discussion of
Present-Day Scientific Criticism of the Darwinian Selection Theories, together
with a Brief Account of the Principal Other Auxiliary atndAlternative Theories of
Species-Forming (London: Bell, 1907), pp. 2-3, 5-6, 15. See also William
Seton, 'Darwinism On Its Deathbed," Catholic World, 80 (December, 1904),
and W. Hall Calvert, 'Darwinism," Westminster Rev., 175 (April
348-357;
1911), 444-458.
358
JAMES MOORE
Darwin, the very type of a man devoted to science alone and
not to personal interests, - Darwin was anything but dogmatic.
... It was an outcome of this mental condition that Darwin's
polemics never left the path of true scientific discussions, that
he never in all his life abused any one who found reason to
combat his hypotheses, and that he never turned a logical
problem into a question of morality. How different is this from
what many of Darwin's followers have made out of his doctrines, especially in Germany; how far is "Darwinism"removed
from Darwin's own teaching and character!
Driesch, dropping the quotation marks around "Darwinism,"went
on to berate "dogmatic Darwinism" or "pure Darwinism," neither
of which he took to "signify the proper theoretical system of
Charles Darwin." Darwin had made "great concessions to Lamarckism"; he might, Driesch ventured, "possibly be called even a
vitalist."`
The circle has closed. From "pure Darwinism" as what Darwin
originally taught (Wallace, Gray), through "Darwinism" as what
Darwin actually taught (Romanes, Hodge), or what his grandfather taught and he himself should have (Butler), to "True
Darwinism" as what Darwin would have taught given the chance
(Henslow), and finally, to "pure Darwinism" as what Darwin
emphatically did not teach (Driesch) - the hermeneutic options
are messy enough to make a tidy-minded scholar want to take
sides. After all, who got it right? Who correctly interpreted what
Darwin said? Who understood what Darwin really meant? Who
has fair claim to represent authentic Darwinism'?
I find these questions unhistorical, and thus uninteresting.
Granted that "Darwinism" cannot mean anything one likes, the
first problem for the historian is surely not to sit as judge and jury,
but to trace what "Darwinism"has actually been taken to mean that is, how the word has been used. And to do this with any
precision, it is not sufficient to analyze the usage at a period
when, as I have illustrated, almost everyone - Driesch excepted
- held that "Darwinism" had one correct or "essential" meaning
which was somehow to be associated uniquely with Charles
10. Hans Driesch, TheScience and Philosophyof the Organism. . ., 2 vols.
(London:Adam and CharlesBlack, 1908), pp. 260-261, 270-271. Cf. idem,
The Historyand Theoryof Vitalism,trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Macmillan,
1914), pp. 138-148; and Bertram C. A. Windle, "'Darwinism'and Certain
Superstructures- Moralityand Morals,"in idem, Facts and Theories:Being a
Considerationof Some Biological Conceptions of To-day (London: Catholic
TruthSociety, 1912), pp. 135-143.
359
Darwin's theory of natural selection. For the view that "Darwinism" is thus to be assigned one correct or essential meaning
may itself be a historical artifact that requires analysis, an artifact
formed amid contingencies such as the existence after 1872 of
five minutely revised editions of the Origin of Species, Darwin's
decision to sponsor the English translation of August Weismann's
Studies in the Theory of Descent a decade later, and the publication by Francis Darwin of five volumes of his father's letters in
1887 and 1903. Certainly, as Huxley's case suggests, there is a
story to be told about the negotiation and narrowing of "Darwinism" at an earlier period, beginning about the time of the
Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860.
It is this period that I examine in the following pages, the
prehistory of a consensus about the proper attribution of "Darwinism," which lingers to this day. Ernst Mayr, perhaps the ablest
representative of this consensus in the twentieth century, is quite
right to say (as I quote in the epigraph above) that a term such as
"Darwinism" cannot be loaded down with "the uncertainties of
past history." The reason, however, as I shall show, is that
"Darwinism" is a loaded term already. One has simply to "look at
its use," in Ludwig Wittgenstein's words, "and learn from that."
A SOCIAL-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
It is striking how little effort has been expended by historians
of science in tracing the proliferation of Darwin-related vocabulary and interpreting its function in public and professional discourse. By 1864 "Darwinism," "Darwinian" as both noun and
adjective, "Darwinite," and even "Darwinically" had entered the
English language. Cognate terms were introduced into French and
German, and probably into most other western European lexica,
by the end of the decade. "Social Darwinism" first appeared in
French in 1880, in Italian in 1882, in English in 1897, and in
German as late as 1901. This is the only piece of Darwinian terminology yet to have received anything like a searching analysis."'
Its late introduction and the attending circumstances are what
11. See Donald C. Bellomy, "Social Darwinism' Revisited," Perspect. Amer.
Hist., n.s., 1 (1984), 1-129; Paul Weindling, "Theories of the Cell State in
Imperial Germany," in Biology, Medicine and Society, 1840-1940, ed. Charles
Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 102n5; and James
Moore, "Socializing Darwinism: Historigraphy and the Fortunes of a Phrase," in
Science as Politics, ed. Les Levidow (London: Free Association Books, 1986),
pp. 38-80.
360
JAMES MOORE
impelled me to look into the possibility that "Darwinism" too,
without the "Social,"might have an instructive past.
Yet others have not felt so moved. The history of Darwinism
has been written pretty consistently as the history of a concept
rather than of a term. The analyses to which it has been subjected
depend more on distinctions made by philosophers and biologists
than on those of semanticists or sociologists. "Social" Darwinism
is separated from "biological" Darwinism and biological Darwinism from "philosophical."'2 Darwinism is construed as an
"ideengeschichtliches Phanomen"; it is seen as both a "wissenschaftliche Theorie" and a "weltanschauliche Bewegung."'3 Darwinism as a scientific theory is broken down into component
doctrines of descent with modification, natural selection, and
human evolution; it is identified by "une recurrence a partir du
XXe siecle," or less obviously, by reference to its essential selective mechanism as discerned in the latter decades of the nineteenth.'4 Darwinism as a worldview is held to entail alternatively
naturalism, positivism, or materialism; on occasion it is found to
be compatible with Christianity.'5 In short, Darwinism has been so
many things to so many people that David Hull has lamented,
"Only incidentally, it seems, was it a scientific theory about the
12. Linda L. Clark, Social Darwinism in France (University, Ala.: University
of Alabama Press, 1984), pp. 3-4; Morton 0. Beckner, "Darwinism," in
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, 6 vols. (New York: Macmillan,
1967), II, 296.
13. Walter Zimmermann, "Die Auseinandersetzung mit den Ideen Darwins:
Der 'Darwinismus' als ideengeschichtliches Phanomen," in Hundert Jahre Evolutionsforschung: Das wissenschaftliche Vermichtnis Charles Darwins, ed. Gerhard
Heberer and Franz Schwanitz (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer, 1960), pp. 290-354;
Giinter Altner, ed., Der Darwinismus: Die Geschichte einer Theorie (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 198 1), pp. 1-2. Cf. Hans Querner. "Darwin,
sein Werk und der Darwinismus," in Biologismus im 19. Jahrhundert ... , ed.
Gunter Mann (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1973), pp. 10-29.
14. Alvar Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader. The Reception of
Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 18559-/872,
(Gotenburg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1958), p. 24; Yvette Conry,
L'introduction du darwinisme en France au XIXe siecle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1974). p.
425; Peter J. Bowler, The Notn-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical
Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 7-9.
15. John C. Greene, "Darwinism as a World View," in idem, Science,
Ideology, and World View (above, n. 1), pp. 128-157; Neal C. Gillespie,
Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979); Peter J. Bowler, Evolution. The History of an Idea (rev. ed.,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), chap. 7; idem, The Eclipse of
Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 9(X)()
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
361
evolution of species by chance variation and natural selection."'i6
Hull himself has recently construed Darwinism in a more
promising way. Refusing to look for some "essential"3meaning of
the word, he proposes that Darwinism, like a species in modern
biology, should be interpreted as a "historical entity." This entity
is a "conceptual system" that has evolved, "a 'lineage' in the filiation of ideas," which had its origin in a mid-Victorian social
group, the "Darwinians," who are also to be seen as an evolving
historical entity in the sense that their composition and relationships changed over time. For analytic purposes, at least, Hull
keeps his two historical entities distinct: "A scientist can be a
Darwinian without accepting all or even a large proportion of the
elements of Darwinism. Conversely, a scientist can by and large
accept the tenets of Darwinism without being a Darwinian."17
This is all very well provided one has a clear notion of what
Darwinism as a conceptual system is, or was, and who the
Darwinisms are, or were. On the latter point, Hull has useful
things to say; on the former, he is less than convincing. Thus
Jacques Roger rightly objects to Hull's intrusion into cultural
history of an explanatory model borrowed from the history of
nature: "'.. . is Stephen Gould the legitimate and unfaithful son of
George Gaylord Simpson or the natural child of Ernst Mayr?
Nobody breeds true in the cultural world, which is full of hybrids,
... hopeful and hopeless monsters, not to speak of chimeras.
There are no interspecific barriers nor Mendelian laws in cultural
genetics." "Personally," Roger goes on, "I would prefer to use the
label 'Darwinism' only for the thought of Darwin himself....
Maybe it would be better to speak of . . . 'Darwinians' for [sic]
those who understood - or believed they understood - and
accepted Darwin's ideas."II
"Maybe"? Surely there need be no doubt about it, no question
of preference. If the historian wishes to know what words such as
"'Darwinism"and "Darwinian" mean it should be necessary, I
repeat, only to look and see how they have been employed 16. David L. Hull, 'Darwinism and Historiography," in The Comparative
Reception of Darwinism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), p. 388. Cf.
Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (London: Croom Helm,
1987), where Hull's desideratum is met but without the least regard for the
semantic problem.
17. David L. Hull, "Darwinism as a Historical Entity: A Historiographic
Proposal," in The D)arwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton
University Press. 1985), pp. 778, 809.
18. Jacques Roger, "Darwinism Today (Commentary)," in Kohn, Darwinlian
Heritage, pp. 819, 820-82 1.
362
JAMES MOORE
"One cannot guess how a word functions" (Wittgenstein). Doing
so may not be easy, but it is bound to be historically more informative than using formal definitions or evolutionary analogies to sift
meanings from the past.
Hull tacitly acknowledges this point in alluding to the selfconsciousness of the early Darwinians as members of a group:
"They count as Darwinians," he states, ". . . because they took
themselves to be working in the Darwinian research program,
pledged allegiance to what they took to be 'Darwinism,' and
contributed to 'Darwinism.' . . . Although the members of a group
like the early Darwinians need not agree even over fundamentals,
they must firmly believe that such a consensus exists."'9 What this
remark clearly calls for is a historiography informed by both
semantics and sociology. If "Darwinism" is to be tackled on
strictly historical grounds, by attention to how the word itself was
used, by whom, and not least why it will be necessary to look
beyond the history of ideas as traditionally conceived.
Here Raymond Williams's approach to the vocabulary of
cultural transformation is exemplary, while some remarks by
Ludwig Fleck suggest how Williams's perspective can help us to
understand more limited semantic shifts within the lexicon of
science. Williams was interested in how the meanings inherent in
people's actual use of certain "keywords" have changed through
time. In Cultureand Society he spoke of the "general pattern of
change" as "a special kind of map" by which it is possible to investigate a changing culture. Starting with "Industry,""Democracy,"
"Class," "Art," and "Culture" itself, Williams's analysis grew to
embrace scores of terms, including "Development," "Evolution,"
"Materialism," "Naturalism," and "Realism." He selected these
terms to illustrate "both continuity and discontinuity" of meaning,
and also "deep conflicts of value and belief." "Darwinism" is not
among them, nor does Williams's treatment of "Social Darwinism"
in another context suggest that he saw it as a keyword either.2"'
Yet as exercises in "historicalsemantics,"all his terminological
discussions focus broadly and instructively "not only on historical
origins and developments but also on the present - present
19. Hull, "Darwinism as a Historical Entity," pp. 796, 798.
20. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-18550 (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1958) pp. xiii, xix; idem, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society (rev. ed., London: Fontana Press, 1988), p. 23; idem, "Social Darwinism," in The Limits of Human Nature, ed. Jonathan Benthall (New York:
Dutton, 1974), pp. 115-130.
363
meanings, implications, and relationships - as history."2' And this
is of course just the perspective in which a loaded term like
"Darwinism"must be viewed.
Fleck, in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, helps to
convert Williams's broad cultural concerns into a social history of
semantics at the local level, within a "thought collective" of
scientific literati. Here language is a potential minefield; words are
unexploded bombs, which turn into weapons as their meanings
are negotiated and defined within the thought collective. "Even a
single word," Fleck explains, "can represent a complex theory" or
".setof findings."
Whether an individual construes it as truth or error, understands it correctly or not, a set of findings meanders throughout
the community, becoming polished, transformed, reinforced, or
attenuated, while influencing other findings, concept formation,
opinions, and habits of thought. After making several rounds
within the community, a finding often returns considerably
changed to its originator, who reconsiders it himself in quite a
different light. He either does not recognize it as his own or
believes, and this happens quite often, to have originally seen it
in its present form.
In this process the simple word that originally stood for a theory,
or set of findings, becomes a slogan, and its "socio-cogitative
value" is completely altered. It no longer influences the mind
through its logical meaning - indeed, it often acts against this but rather it acquires a "magical power" and exerts a "mental
influence" simply by being used. Fleck instances terms like
"materialism,""atheism," and "vitalism,"terms of such controversial import that when one is found in a text "it is not examined
logically, but immediately makes either enemies or friends." This
gives rise within the thought collective to "new themes such as
propanganda, imitation, authority, rivalry, solidarity ... - themes
which would not have been produced by the isolated thought of
any individual.... Every epistemological theory ... that does not
take this sociological dependence of all cognition Iwhich includes
meaning] into account in fundamental and detailed manner" is,
according to Fleck, "trivial."2
21. Williams, Keywords, p. 23. Cf. Geoffrey Hughes, Words in Time: A
Social History of English Vocabulary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
22. Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1979), pp. 42-43.
JAMES MOORE
364
No brief essay could give a "fundamental and detailed" account
of the way in which the meaning of "Darwinism" was socially
dependent, even within the confines of a single decade. My
objectives are more limited, and two have now been met: first, to
evince the range of usage of "Darwinism" since the end of the
nineteenth century; and second, to place the word itself, rather
than the concept or some set of concepts to which it refers, within
a social-historical perspective.
If I have succeeded in these aims, then the peculiar mana that
circulates about Darwinism by virtue of its controverted status in
the history of modern biology should be largely dissipated.
Darwinism can take a place among, and alongside, all the other
"isms" that were first hoisted as verbal banners before newly
literate and newly franchised audiences in the middle decades of
the nineteenth century: liberalism, evangelicalism, spiritualism (all
c. 1831), Owenism (1833), socialism (c. 1837), Chartism, Puseyism, Newmanism (all 1838), Tractarianism (1840), Carlyleism
(1841), Malthusianism (1848), Secularism, vegetarianism (both
1851), altruism (1853), Positivism (1854), sacerodotalism (1861),
imperialism (c. 1870), Vaticanism (1875), and Monism (1876).
Moreover, the latter decades of the Victorian era, which saw
Darwinism emerge in biological controversy beside a variety of
new factional terms - Spencerism, Haeckelism, Weismannism,
neo-Lamarckism, neo-Darwinism - also witnessed the rise of
important verbal distinctions within other specialized and
professionalizing fields: in philosophy, for example, neo-Platonism
(1865), agnosticism (1869), hylo-idealism (1881), neo-Kantianism
(1888), pragmantism (1898), and panpsychism (1901). This
would suggest, again, that the history of Darwinism is not unlike
that of other "isms."
It would also suggest, pace Williams, that "the isolation of isms
and ists as separate words" in the nineteenth century and their
''significant transfer from theological to political controversy"' is
only a partial account of their cultural career.23 For scientists and
other professional groups also multiplied secularized religious
labels in mid-Victorian Britain. Their disputes were as much
about doctrine as those of their political and religious counterparts. Their parties, their denominations, were no less real.
Indeed, as I now intend to show in the third part of my analysis,
Darwinism was embedded from the start in political and religious
controversy; its meaning was negotiated and narrowed as a result.
By 1871 a "Darwinism" had been hammered out that stood for
23. Williams, Keywords, p. 174.
365
many of the features with which the word is associated today
but it was an ideological "Darwinism."
-
THE DARWINIAN BROAD CHURCH
Short of scrutinizing some ten thousand letters, half of them
Darwin's, and a few hundred journal articals, it would be impossible to determine with precision when "Darwinism" came into
general use and how its meaning was altered during the 1860s.
Having neither the time nor the inclination to perform this task, I
have settled for a narrower basis of induction. Just as a floor
needs to be supported by only a few well-placed joists to bear
weight, so the story I have to tell will carry conviction if undergirded by a judicious distribution of evidence. And just as a loadbearing floor has points around which the leverage is greatest,
requiring extra support, so my story has moments - the mechanical analogy breaks down - where credibility hinges particularly
on the strength of the evidence. Both criteria are fulfilled, I
believe, by the range and quality of evidence available in a handful
of Victorian "lives and letters" and in a few well-known journals
and archives. Let me sketch the contours of my story before filling
in the details from these sources.
"Darwinism" was sponsored from the outset, in the spring of
1860, by a small number of Darwin's friends and collegues.
Darwin himself did not participate directly in their public controversies, nor (so far as I am aware) did he ever use the word;24
but he abetted, inspired, and occasionally goaded his disciples
from the safety of Down House, his parsonage in rural Kent. To
them "Darwinism" stood for undifferentiated evolutionary naturalism in the anticreationist mode, a new gospel for the life
sciences and anthropology in which natural selection may or may
not have been the sole or even the most important cause of
organic development. Converts were won, alliances formed, and
within a few years Darwinism became notorious as much for the
friends it kept as for its political enemies. By 1865 the Darwinians
felt under siege. By 1869 the enemy had been recognized within.
Darwinism now had to be repackaged, its range of meaning
narrowed and controlled. Huxley realized this first and hit upon
"agnosticism" as an escape from his metaphysical detractors.
Darwin twigged shortly afterwards when faced with the most
24. Except in his posthumously published autobiography: "in Germany a
catalogue or bibliography on 'Darwinismus' has appeared every year or two"
(LLD, I, 86).
366
JAMES MOORE
formidable critic of his career, St. George Mivart. In 1871
Darwinism was born again under Darwin's own auspices as the
theory of organic evolution caused distinctively by natural selection, a scientific theory with no metaphysical or ideological entailments. Thereafter until his death Darwin insulated himself
from religious controversy, called himself an agnostic, and busied
himself with plants. Huxley forswore defending Darwinism and
devoted himself increasingly to the public career as a liberal
statesman of science for which Salisbury made him a privy
councilor in 1892. By then "Darwinism" had taken on something
like the pure scientific status that Darwin had sponsored twenty
years earlier. As such it again became a political football, this time
among biologists and other professionals who sought to lend it
ideological content by prefixing "social" to the word. This is the
basic sense of "Darwinism"that has come down to us today.
Such is my story in outline. It begins with a minority evolutionary tendency propelled by a Darwinian faction. It ends with an
ascendant evolutionary party in which the Darwinian ideological
tendency has been sequestered and defined. In the 1860s Darwinism's "socio-cogitative value" (to use Fleck's term) became
complex and problematic; its sponsors therefore sought to differentiate its proper usage from that of critics, defectors, and wouldbe allies within the "thought-collective" of evolutionary naturalists,
and among the intellectual public at large. At a crucial juncture,
"'Darwinism" became natural selection, which became "pure"
science.
The initial sponsors of Darwinism can be readily identified.
Darwin names them for us. These are the men to watch - the
inner core of the "converts"Darwin hoped to make, the appointed
"judges"of his views, the apostles of evolution he sent expectantly
into an unregenerate creationist world: Charles Lyell, a geologist,
was his father-superior in science; Joseph Hooker, a botanist, was
his oldest and closest friend outside the extended family; Thomas
Huxley, a zoologist, was chief among the "young and rising
naturalists" whom Darwin was determined to get on "our side of
the question of the mutability of species."25 All three lived and
worked in London and all had known each other since the early
1850s; all had learned of Darwin's secret research on transmutation by 1856. Lyell and Hooker stage-managed the first publication of Darwin's work in 1858 before the Linnean Society.
25. Darwin to J. Lubbock and to J. Hooker, both December 14, 118591,
LLD, II, 242, 243. See also GertrudeHimmelfarb,Darwin and the Darwinian
Revolution(1959; rev.ed., New York:W. W. Norton, 1968), chap. 12.
367
Huxley, a year later - styling himself after Thomas Carlyle's hero,
the prophet Mohammed, through whom the forces of nature
spoke - professed to have his "claws and beak" in readiness to
defend the Origin of Species.26
Darwin at this stage had a fairly Manichaean view of things.
His letters bristle with references to those "for"and "against"him,
to "our side" and "the outsiders,"' to the "battles" and "fights"
through which, he finally convinced himself, "our cause" would
"conquer" and "prevail." His hopes were pinned especially on
Hooker and Huxley, vigorous young husbands and fathers, established working naturalists, Fellows of the Royal Society, well
connected, respectively, through employment at Kew Gardens
and the Royal Institution. Between these three there was a kind of
"'masonic bond ... in being well salted in early life."'27 Each
had begun his career with a stint aboard ship as a naturalist.
Darwin valued Hooker's opinion on "any scientific subject" more
than that of "any one else in the world"; Huxley he called "my
good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel - i.e. the
devil's gospel."28 When Huxley had seen off Samuel Wilberforce
at Oxford in June 1860, and Hooker had answered the bishop
more effectively, by addressing the point at issue, Darwin praised
them both for "showing the world" that "first-rate men are not
afraid of expressing their opinion" of evolution. Huxley, six
months later, while contemplating New Year's resolutions, explained to Hooker that "the alternative, for men constructed on
the high pressure tubular boiler principle, like ourselves, is to lie
down and let the devil have his own way. And I will be torn to
pieces before I am forty sooner than see that."29
The religious language, the combativeness, and the factional
spirit among this triumvirate were self-reinforcing: they egged
each other on, wound each other up, and wallowed in mutual
admiration. "I earnestly hope it may have made some of the
26. Cf. T. Huxley to Darwin, November 23, 1859, in LLD, II, 232, with
Thomas Carlyle, On Heros, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 4th ed.
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1852), p. 96.
27. Darwin to Hooker, February 14, 118601, in More Letters of Charles
Darwin: A Record of His Work in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters, ed.
Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1903), I, 140
(hereafter MLD); quoted in Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph
Dalton Hooker, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1918), I, 161 (hereafter LLJH).
28. Darwin to Hooker, ISeptemberl 14, 118621, MLD, II, 284; Darwin to
Huxley, August 8, 118601, LLD, II, 33 1.
29. Darwin to Huxley, July 20, 118601, MLD, I, 157; Huxley to Hooker,
December 19, 1860, in Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry
Huxley, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1900), I, 222-223 (hereafter LLTH).
368
JAMES MOORE
educated mob who derive their ideas from the 'Times' reflect,"
wrote Huxley to Hooker of his review of the Origin published
there, "and whatever they do they shall respect Darwin & be
damned to them!"31"This ethos is absent for the most part from
Darwin's correspondence with Lyell and with his other early allies
Wallace and Gray, both of whom were overseas, and the
Reverend Charles Kingsley. A certain common ground, a camaraderie, was missing.
Wallace, who had inadvertently forced Darwin's hand in 1858,
was an unequivocal convert both to species mutability and to
natural selection - one of "us,"according to Darwin's letters. But
even before returning from the Orient in 1862 to live with his
mother in London, Wallace was destined to have a checkered
career. Lacking family wealth and a higher education, he perched
on the margins of scientific respectability; though producing
voluminous good work in more than one branch of natural
history, he did not achieve a Fellowship of the Royal Society until
1893. With Gray, the botany professor at Harvard, it was otherwise: thoroughly orthodox in science and religion, the master
interpreter of natural selection to the American intelligentsia, he
nevertheless continued to hold that organic evolution, even on
Darwin's principles, "leaves the argument for design, and therefore for a designer, as valid as it ever was." Kingsley, an amateur
geologist, took substantially the same view and praised the series
of articles in the Atlantic Monthly where Gray developed it at
length. Lyell, too, believed that as a "naturalist and metaphysician," Gray had grappled with the problem of design in his articles
better than "anyone else on either side of the Atlantic."3'
For his part, Darwin did not excommunicate his theological
entourage, although he differed rather more from each of them as
time passed. The little sect he had founded was not yet tightly
circumscribed. Indeed, the second edition of the Origin of Species
in 1860 incorporated a commendatory remark by Kingsley, as
30. Huxley to Hooker, November 1, 1859, Huxley Papers (Impenral College
of Science and Technology, London), 2.57-58 (hereafter HP).
31. Darwin to A. Wallace, April 6 and August 9, 1859, in James Marchant,
Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, 2 vols. (London: Cassell,
1916), I, 137, 139 (hereafter ARW); Asa Gray, Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews
pertaining to Darwinism, ed. A. Hunter Dupree (1876; Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 144; C. Kingsley to F.
Maurice 11863?1, in [Fanny Kingsley], Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, 2 vols. (London: Henry S. King, 1877), II, 171; C. Lyell to G.
Ticknor, November 29, 1860, in IK. M.] Lyell, Life, Letters, and Journals of Sir
Charles Lyell, Bart., 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1881), Il, 341 (hereafter
LLL).
369
from "a celebrated author and divine." and in 186 1 the third
edition advertised a reprint of Gray's articles as "an admirable,
and, to a certain extent, favourable Review." Darwin, it was not
generally known, had engaged in an extraordinary piece of selfpromotion. Having failed to bring out the American edition of his
book as a "joint publication," with a glowing review by Gray "at
the head," he had had Gray's articles reprinted at his own expense
and distributed to no less than one hundred naturalists, divines,
periodicals, and libraries. The pamphlet's title, the substance of
which Darwin himself had proposed, was Natural Selection Not
Inconsistent with Natural Theology.32
Ten years later he would again undertake to justify himself in
this way. Then, however, the basic issue would be: "What are the
limits of'Darwinism'?"
DARWINISM AS EVOLUTIONARY NATURALISM
"Darwinism" was thus launched by a small, heterogeneous
group of naturalists clustered about the author of the Origin oJ
Species and represented to the British public chiefly by two
pugnacious propagandists, Hooker and Huxley. It was Huxley
alone who occupied the limelight for several years, baiting bishops, settling old scores with scientific bigwigs like Richard Owen,
and generally using Darwin's book as a ideological weapon. His
article of April 1860, where "Darwinism" first appeared, opened
by calling the Origin "a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of
liberalism"; it closed with the promise that even if Darwin's
"'theoretical views ... were disproved to-morrow," the book
would still serve to extend "the domination of Science over
regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated."
Again, to workingmen in December 1862, after stating that "the
alternative is either Darwinism or nothing," Huxley declared
somewhat incongruously that "men of science do not pledge
themselves to creeds; they are bound by articles of no sort" - an
32. Morse Peckham, ed., The Originz oJ Species by Charles Darwin: A
['ariorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1959), pp. 57,
748 (183.3.:b); Darwin-Gray Correspondence, January-February 1860 and
October 1860-February 1861, in Calendar of the Letters of Charles Robert
L)arwin to Asa Gray, ed. Bert James Loewenberg et al. (1939; Wilmington, Del.:
Scholarly Resources, 1973), nos. 20, 22, 95 on the American edition of the
Origin, and nos. 32, 97. 100, 127, 132. 134 on Gray's pamphlet. These letters
are dated, summarized, and augmented in Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney
Smith, eds., A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1812-1882
(New York: Garland, 1985), nos. 2665, 2676, 2955, 2961, 3(017, 3028, 3050,
3064, 3074 (hereafter Calendar).
370
JAMES MOORE
antiestablishmentarian thought to tickle the lower orders as much
as Darwin himself admitted to being regaled by the lecture.33
Hooker meanwhile was ruminating in private. His expressions
indicate how the mood was running among the Darwinian vanguard. With the Americans tearing themselves apart over the
moral issue of slavery, Darwin heard from him that "there is a
deal in breeding, and I do not think that any but high bred
gentlemen are safe guides in emergencies such as these. ... If
there is anything at all in force of circumstances and Natural
Selection, it must arrive that the best trained, bred, and ablest man
will be found in the higher walks of life. ... Your 'Origin' has
done more to enhance the value of an aristocracy in my eyes than
any social, political or other argument." Here spoke one whose
opinion on "any scientific subject" Darwin valued more than that
of "any one else in the world." In another letter, written after an
indulgent weekend visit to Walcot Hall in Shropshire, Hooker
matched Huxley's alternative to workingmen, "Darwinism or
nothing," with one of his own: either "Blood, Blunt, Brains, land]
Beauty" must accumulate "by natural selection ... in an aristocracy," he told Darwin, "or there is no truth in Darwinism....
That's my philosophy - make the best of it till we meet."34
What was the lowest common denominator of these ideological
remarks - "Social Darwinism" to a later generation of interpreters? What intellectual platform supported Huxley's identification of Kingsley as "an excellent Darwinian" in 1860, Kingsley's
reference to himself in 1862 as a "Darwinite,"and their formation
at Cambridge in October that year (at the British Association) of
the "Thorough Club," for the "promotion of a thorough and
earnest search after scientific truth particularly in matters relating
to biology"? Darwin, whom Huxley was anxious to have join the
club, had told him in late 1859 that "Rev. C. Kingsley has a mind
to come round" - but come around to what?35 Here Darwin
33. Huxley, "Origin of Species" (above, n. 3), pp. 23, 79; idem, On the
Originof Species (above, n. 5), p. 139. Cf. T. Oldham to Huxley, April 8, 1863,
expressing thanks for "that grand though brief course of
HP 23.236-237,
lectures on Darwinism."
34. Hooker to Darwin, [March 20, 18621 and June 29, 1863, LLJH,I1, 3839, 40-41. Cf. Hooker to Darwin, September 26, 1865, LLJH, II, 64: "I do
suppose we have a pure nature, independent of conditions (and of Darwinism
applied!) but what it is we can only hope to know if we realize a future state."
35. Huxley to F. Dyster, February 29, 1860, HP 15.110-112; Kingsley to
Huxley, July 18, 1862, HP 19.205-206; "'Thorough Club"' draft regulations
Huxley to Darwin, October 9, 1862,
and invitation card, HP 31.120-121;
LLTH, I, 199; Darwin to Huxley, November 27, 118591, LLD, 1I, 282. Cf. F.
Kingsley, CharlesKingsley(above n. 31), II, 140-144.
371
himself must be seen as the standard-bearer within the group: his
expectations, his language, profoundly influenced the group's
sense of individual and collective commitment.
The issue, to Darwin, was a deeply personal one. Again and
again in the early 1860s he spoke of an individual "going with"
him - "very far," "some way," "a little way," "an inch," even "half
an inch." "Can you tell me whether you believe further or more
firmly than you did at first?" he inquired anxiously of Gray; "I
should really like to know this." Huxley worried him too. A year
after the Origin appeared Darwin felt "a little disappointed" that
his chief public defender was not "inclined to think the general
view in some slight degree more probable" than he had at first.
"This I consider rather ominous. Otherwise I should be more
contented with your degree of belief."36 The "general view" to
which Darwin referred was not "Darwinism" as it would later be
understood - that is, simply evolution by natural selection. It was
something rather more.
In the spring of 1863, when Huxley and Hooker had proved
themselves, Darwin was still looking for a clear endorsement from
Lyell and Gray. Both allowed an active role for the Creator in
natural history. Lyell's Antiquity of Man, just published, restated
Darwin's views without accepting them; its last chapter, on human
origins, was an "elaborate, obscure, and protracted exercise in
beating about the bush." Darwin despaired: "I have sometimes
almost wished Lyell had pronounced against me," he wrote Gray.
"When I say 'me,' I mean only change of species by descent. That
seems to me the turning-point. Personally, of course, I care much
about Natural Selection; but that seems to me utterly unimportant,
compared to the question of Creation or Modification."37 What
Darwin would have meant by "Darwinism," if at this stage he had
used the word, was thoroughgoing evolutionary naturalism. Hypothetical assent to species mutability was not enough; he demanded
full-blooded belief in the uniformity of nature, from microorganisms up to man. This was the bottom line.
Just how accommodating Darwinism could be in its early days
is best illustrated by the case of Huxley, whose views are often
36. Darwin to A. Gray, September 26, 118601, LLD, 1I, 345; Darwin to
Huxley, December 2, 118601, LLD, I1, 355.
37. Michael Bartholomew, "Lyell and Evolution: An Account of Lyell's
Response to the Idea of an Evolutionary Ancestry for Man," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 6
(1973), 298; Darwin to Gray, May I 1, 118631, LLD, II, 371. Darwin had just
publicized his priorities in the Athenaeum: see Paul H. Barrett, ed., The Collected Papers of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977), II, 81.
372
JAMES MOORE
taken to epitomize the word. In February 1860, as Huxley
preened himself for defending "Science versus Parsondom" in a
Royal Institution lecture on the origin of species, Darwin complained to Hooker that as an exposition of natural selection the
lecture seemed to him "an entire failure." Two months later the
article in which Huxley first used "Darwinism" was another disappointment. Darwin groaned to Lyell, 'I do not know that he
much advances the subject." In 1862 Darwin objected to Huxley
himself that many people might infer from his anniversary address
to the Geological Society "that you were dead against change of
species," though "clearly"- to Darwin - he was not.38
T'he problem was that Huxley continued to assert the Lyellian
nonprogressionist view that there were "persistent types" of life in
the geological record. Natural selection, he reckoned, was best
defended by persuading the world that the doctrine postulated no
necessary tendency to progress. And this was only one of his
three persistent heresies. Another was that natural selection could
not be regarded as a vera causa until mutually infertile breeds had
been produced by artificial selection from a common stock. Nor,
Huxley argued, was natural selection necessarily able to account
for gaps in the phylogenetic series. He attributed these to gross
mutations, remarking to Hooker that a "law of variation" was
urgently needed.39
Yet regardless of his misgivings, Huxley understood Darwin's
views full well and advanced them with increasing clarity. In
September 1864, responding to the German idealist Alfred von
Kolliker's effort to "define what we may term the philosophical
position of Darwinism," Huxley at last undertook to formulate the
correct position himself. Nonprogression, cross-sterility, saltations
all three of his heresies were evident in his review. But what
Darwin to
38. Huxley to Dyster, February 29, 1860. HP 15.110-112;
Hooker, February 14, 118601, MLD, 1, 139; Darwin to Lyell, April 10, 118601,
LLD, 11, 300 (cf. Darwin to Huxley, April 14, 1186t)1, MLI), II, 232); Darwin to
Huxley, May 10, 118621, MLD, 11,234.
39. Huxley to Hooker, September 4, 1861, LLTH. 1, 227. See Edward B.
Poulton, Charles L)arwin and the Theorv of Natural Selection (London: Cassell,
1896), chap. 18; idem, "Huxley and Natural Selection" (I 905), in Huxley
Memorial Lectures to the University of Birmingham (Birmingham: Cornish.
1914), pp. 45-5 1; Michael Bartholomew, "Huxley's Defence of Darwin," .4nn.
Sci., 32 (1975), 525-535; Adrian Desmond, Archetypes anid Ancestors: Paleontology in Victorian London, 1850-1875 (London: Blond and Briggs, 1982),
chap. 3; and Ruth Barton, "Evolution: The Whitworth Gun in Huxley's War for
the Liberation of Science from Theology," in The Wider Domaini of Evollutionlary
Thought, ed. David Oldroyd and Ian Langham (Dordrecht: Reidel. 1983), pp.
26 1-287.
373
mattered most to him was speaking "Darwinically" rather than
"teleologically": "Darwinism supposes that cats exist because they
catch mice well," not that "cats exist in order to catch mice well."
The author of the Origin of Species had "rendered a most remarkable service to philosophical thought by enabling the student of
nature to recognize, to their fullest extent, those adaptations of
purpose which are so striking in the organic world, ... without
being false to the fundamental principles of a scientific conception
of the universe." If this was "Darwinism," Darwin loved it: anyone
who failed to understand him after reading the review, he told
Huxley, "'willbe a blockhead."4"
THE DARWINIAN CLIQUE
By the autumn of 1864 it was not only Darwinism that had
begun to acquire a higher and clearer profile. There was a visible
closing of ranks and hardening of categories on every side. Tory
traditionalists - Evangelicals and High Chuchmen - had reacted
to the university reforms of the 1850s by using "ecclesiastical
terrorism" against their opponents. Liberal churchmen had
counterattacked by boldly restating their conviction that the
divine purpose in history was revealed through the free investigation of nature and Scripture. Essays and Reviews, written by seven
of these churchmen, was their manifesto. It appeared three
months after the Origin of Species, sold 22,000 copies in two
years (Darwin's title took two decades to achieve that figure), and
by 1865 elicited, astonishingly, some four hundred controversial
books and pamphlets.4"
The Origin might well have proved more disruptive if, as it was
said, there had not been "a much greater row going on about
Essays and Reviews"; but even so, the reception of the two books
was closely linked.42 The Wilberforce who in June 1860 tangled
with Huxley in his own diocese and in July savaged the Origin in
40. T. H. Huxley, "Criticisms on The Origin of Species,"' Nat. Hist. Rev.,
n.s., 4 (September 1864), 569, 570; Darwin to Huxley, October 3, 118641,LLD,
111,30.
41. M. A. Crowther, Church Embattled: Religious Controversy in MidVictorian England (Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1970), p. 38;
Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the
Challenge of Democracy, 1860-86 (London: Allen Lane, 1976), pp. 46-49;
Ieuan Ellis, Seven Against Christ: A Study of "Essays and Reviews" (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1980), pp. 1I 7, 124.
42. R. Church to A. Gray, March 28, 1861, in Life and Letters of Dean
Church, ed. Mary C. Church (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. 188.
JAMES MOORE
374
the Quarterly Review was also the bishop who, five months later,
in the same Tory organ, declared war on Essays and Reviews and
threatened its authors with persecution. In February 1861 it was
Oxford's iron first again, this time inside the velvet glove of
Canterbury, that penned the letter, signed by twenty-five bishops
and published in the Times, which rumbled litigation at the essayists. Two of these "septem contra Christum," as they were dubbed,
the Reverends Rowland Williams and H. B. Wilson, did find
themselves indicted for heresy and out of a job in June 1862.
Their case took a year to come to trial, and when they had been
convicted for loose views on the Bible and eternal punishment,
they appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council,
which in February 1864 overturned the judgment against them,
"dismissinghell withcosts."43
Wilberforce was furious, as no doubt were many of the
137,000 laymen who addressed a memorial of thanks to the
dissenters on the Committee, the archbishops of Canterbury and
York. With legal channels exhausted, churchmen now had no
recourse but to unite in public protest. Immediately, a declaration
in favor of biblical inspiration and eternal torments was got up at
Oxford, with the bishop's active support, and circulated to the
24,800 clergy of Britain and Ireland, of whom about 11,000
signed. Armed with this show of strength, Wilberforce went to the
Convocation of Canterbury and in June 1864 secured a "synodical condemnation" of Essaysand Reviews.44
Meanwhile another declaration had been prepared in London
by a few evangelical "students of the natural and physical
sciences." This reached Convocation in April that year and was
amended afterwards to state explicitly a "Fortieth Article" of
religious belief to which all Christian men of science should
subscribe. The text, alluding darkly to "some in our own times"
who used scientific researches as an occasion for impugning the
veracity of the Bible, affirmed that "it is impossible for the Word
of God, as written in the book of nature, and God's Word, written
in Holy Scripture, to contradict one another, however much they
may appear to differ." Eventually the sponsors obtained 717
signatures, but not without causing consternation in the scientific
community. At the British Association in September 1864 their
opponents were so well organized that one reporter suspected a
43. Ellis, Seven Against Christ, pp. 109-111. For the episcopal letter and its
provocation, see James Moore, ed., Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. 3, Sources
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 435-436.
44. Ellis, SevenAgainstChrist,chap.4.
375
"dangerous clique" of using "the influence of this grand Scientific
League in furtherance of heretical teachings, as a prop to the
scepticism which has of late years met with disciples even in the
ranks of duly authorized Christian Ministers."45
The truth was much worse. A dangerous clique had been at
work both outside the British Association and within; its members
had allied themselves with progressive "Christian Ministers" and
now, provoked and threatened by the marshaling of forces that
would stifle dissent, impede research, and put paid to liberal
reforms, they stood poised to unite more closely in furtherance of
the "heretical teachings" of evolutionary naturalism.
The origins of this clique must not be sought in the controversies of the early 1860s. As far back as April 1856, on the eve of
Darwin's first full disclosure of his views to Lyell, Huxley, and
Hooker, a nucleus had formed. Hooker then wrote Huxley,
I am very glad that we shall meet at Darwin's. I wish that we
could there discuss some plan that would bring about more
unity in our efforts to advance Science. As I get more and more
engrossed at Kew I feel the want of association with my brother
Naturalists
... we never meet except by pure accident and
seldom then as Naturalists - . . . it is the same thing with our
publications; they are sown broadcast over the barren acres of
Journals and other periodicals. .. . [Wlithout some recognized
place of resort that will fulfill the conditions of being a rendezvous for ourselves, an incitement to our friends to take an
interest in Nat. Hist., and at the same time a profitable intellectual resort, - we shall be ignorant of one another's whereabouts and writings.46
Whether Hooker's ideas were discussed at Down House three
weeks later is moot. But his intent was clear - to "advance
Science." So when Hooker, Huxley, and other "brother Naturalists" first met as the "X Club" in November 1864, it was not
merely to keep up old friendships or to defend themselves against
Christian conspiracies: they plotted an aggressive campaign to
45. W. H. Brock and R. M. MacLeod, "The Scientists Declaration: Reflexions on Science and Belief in the Wake of 'Essays and Reviews," Brit. J. Hist.
Sci., 9 (1976), 48; Frank A. J. L. James, "The Sacralisation of Science: The
Scientists' Declaration, 1864-5," in British Society for the History of Science and
the History of Science Society; Program, Papers, and Abstracts for the Joint
Conference, Manchester, England, 11-15 July 1988 (Madison, Wisc.: privately
printed, 1988), pp. 435-460.
46. Hooker to Huxley, [April 4, 18561, LLJH, I, 369-370.
376
JAMES MOORE
reclaim nature from theology and to place scientists at the head of
English culture. And behind them, as in 1856, stood the inspiring
genius of Darwin. Huxley later explained how it was the "strong
affection" Darwin excited in his friends that led "those ... who
had seen good reason for his views to take much more trouble in
his defence and support, and to strike out much harder at his
adversary than they would otherwise have done."47
The story of the X Club has been told too often to bear repetition here. What needs emphasis is that this quiet and informal but
well-connected circle of nine younger representatives of the
physical and biological sciences, mathematics, and philosophy,
furnished the political power base for promoting Darwinism in the
later 1860s. United by "devotion to science, pure and free,
untrammelled by religious dogmas," as one of them put it, they
eagerly anticipated "opportunities ... when concerted action on
our part may be of service."48
For five years, through all the tensions and commotions following publication of the Origin of Species and Essays of Reviews, the
X-men had dissipated their energies in ecumenical alliances that
proved on the whole ineffective. In February 1861 John Lubbock
and William Spottiswoode drew up a memorial to the authors of
Essays and Reviews, regretting the episcopal letter in the Times
and welcoming the essayists' "attempts to establish religious teaching on a firmer and broader foundation." Huxley's friend George
Busk, later of the X, added his name, as did Darwin, Lyell, and at
least half a dozen other scientific luminaries. Hooker and Huxley
refused, though they sympathized with the project. A canny
Hooker explained why: if the memorial were "signed wholly or
chiefly by men of one way of thinking, in such matters as 'Origin
of Species,' 'Age of Man,' &c. &c.," it would "countenance a belief
amongst . . . outsiders that our scientific differences influenced
our religious views."49Which of course would make a mockery of
their professional objectivity.
47. Huxley to St. G. Mivart, November 12, 1885, LLTH, II, 113.
48. J. Vernon Jensen, "The X Club: Fraternity of Victorian Scientists," Brit.
J. Hist. Sci., 5 (1970), 63. See also idem, "Interrelationships within the Victorian
539-552; Roy M. MacLeod, "The
'X Club,"' Dalhousie Rev., 51 (1971-72),
X-Club: A Social Network of Science in Late-Victorian England," Not. Rec. Roy.
Soc. London, 24 (1970), 305-322; and Ruth Barton. "The X Club: Science,
Religion, and Social Change in Victorian England," Ph.D. diss., University of
Pennsylvania, 1976.
49. Hooker to Lubbock, February 29 [sicl, 1861, LLJH. 55. For the
scientists' memorial, see Moore, Religion in Victorian Britain (above, n. 43), pp.
436-437.
377
In the event the memorial was never delivered, and the "scientific differences" surfaced in the refurbished Natural History
Review. Taken over from anti-Darwinians by Huxley, Lubbock,
Busk, and eight fellow travelers, it was the periodical they all had
been waiting for, a "mildly episcophagous" one, Huxley told
Hooker, where "you and Darwin and Lyell will have a fine opportunity if you wish it of slaying your adversaries." In January 1861
Huxley sent the first issue to Wilberforce with mock-serious
regards, calling attention to his article on human affinities with
apes. Darwin followed it with a complimentary copy of Gray's
pamphlet on natural selection and natural theology.9"
But the Naitural History Review, too, collapsed, failing to
'appeal to the masses" as Huxley wished.5' So in the autumn of
1864 the X-men began to invest their time and a good deal of
money - ?100 each from Lubbock, Spottiswoode, Huxley,
Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, and eight other shareholders - in
a weekly "Review of Literature, Science, and the Arts," The
Reader. This was probably the last attempt in mid-Victorian
England to maintain "a broad, public intellectual context" among
liberal scientists, theologians, and men of letters. Darwin, Lyell,
and Kingsley were among the journal's seventy-five eminent
named supporters; Darwin's freethinking cousin, Francais Galton,
undertook a major share of the editorial duties. Huxley became
theological editor and wrote the anonymous leader, "Science and
Church Policy," for the last issue of 1864.52
By now the X Club had been in existence for eight weeks; a
month had passed since Benjamin Disraeli, leader of the Tory
opposition, defender of the Church, stood before the Oxford
Diocesan Society in a black velvet shooting coat, with Wiberforce
in the chair, and pronounced himself "on the side of the angels";
50. Huxley to Hooker, July 17, 1860, LLTH, 1, 209; Loewenberg et al.,
Calendar (above, n. 32), no. 134. For the letter to Wilberforce of January 3,
1861 (draft in HP 227.101), see Cyril Bibby, 'The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate:
A Postscript." Nature, /76 (1955), 363; and Charles S. Blinderman, "The Oxford
Debate and After," Not. Q)uer., 202 (1957), 126-128, which also gives the
bishop's reply, January 30, 1861 (HP 29.25).
5 1. Huxley to Hooker, July 21, 1863, HP 2.120-122.
52. David Roos, "The 'Aims and Intentions' of Nature," in Victorian Science
and Victoriani Values. Literary Persp)ectives, ed. James Paradis and Thomas
Postlewait (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985), p. 164;
minutes of I st meeting, November 3, 1864, X Club Notebook, Tyndall Papers
(Royal Institution, London; hereafter TP). See also Barton, "X Club," pp. 60),
225; Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters anid Labours of Francis Galton, 3 vols. in 4
(Cambridge: at the University Press, 1914-30), II, 67-69; and Francis Galton,
Memories of My l if]e (London: Methuen, 190)8), pp. 167-168.
378
JAMES MOORE
and three weeks earlier Pius IX had issued the encyclical Quanta
cura with its appended "Syllabus of Errors" proclaiming his
hostility to "progress, . . . liberalism, and . . . modern civilization."
Huxley seized the moment and in his own self-styled "encyclical"
declared that science should annex theology and all its works. A
"slashing"piece, Hooker exulted to Darwin, destroying everything
in its path. It also helped to destroy The Reader. Vituperative
articles and editorial incompetence brought the grand experiment
to a halt within a year. The X-ponents of "Darwinism"now sought
a public platform of their own.53
THE TERRIBLE DARWINISMUS
"Darwinism" was becoming common coin by 1865 and the
Darwinians were being differentiated. This did not yet pose great
problems, but the time was soon to come. The key even affecting
public perceptions seems to have been the appearance early in
1863 of Lyell's Antiquity of Man and Huxley's Man's Place in
Nature. Lyell's book wound up in obfuscations; Huxley did little
better. He hemmed and hawed about natural selection in his usual
way - "the last position in which I wish to find myself is that of
an advocate for Mr. Darwin's or any other views; if by an
advocate is meant one whose business it is to smooth over real
difficulties, and to persuade where he cannot convince" - then,
professing faith in evolutionary naturalism, he trailed off into
glozing sentimentalities about human "nobility" and the "infinite
source of truth."54Nevertheless, in April that year the Times first
made reference to "Darwinian" human conflicts; by May the
courtly Lyell had discussed "the Darwinian theory" with the
Queen; in July, Huxley complained to Darwin about being "pestered to death in public and private because I am supposed to be
what they call a Darwinian"; and in September came the first
reference to Darwin's views in a presidential address to the British
Association.:
The question of "Darwinism"was being brought dramatically to
53. A. R. Ashwell and ReginaldG. Wilberforce,Life of the Right Reverend
Samuel Wilberforce, . . . with Selections from His Diaries and Correspondence, 3
III, 154-155; Ellis, Seven Against
vols. (London: John Murray, 1880-82),
Christ (above, n. 41), p. 136; Huxley to Dyster, January 26, 1865, HP 15.129;
Hooker to Darwin, January 1, 1865, Darwin Archive (CambridgeUniversity
Library;hereafterDAR); Barton, "X Club,"p. 225. For the divisive effect of
Huxley'sleader, see his correspondencewith George Rolleston,January1865,
HP 25.171-174,
180-184.
54. CE (above,n. 3), VIl, 149-150,155, 156.
55. Times, April 9, 1863, p. 7; Lyell to Lady Lyell, May 7, 1863, LLL
379
the fore, not on account of natural selection, but because those
who were popularly identified with Darwin's views had canvassed
naturalistic accounts of human origins. For this reason primarily,
the question did not go away. It was simple, clear, and poignant.
In early 1865 Lyell, running again with blue bloods, engaged the
Prussian princess royal in "an animated conversation on Darwinism," she being "very much au fait at the 'Origin,' and Huxley's
book, the 'Antiquity,' &c. &c." At Oxford later that year, at least
one undergraduate, disillusioned with ecclesiastical feuds and
debates about human nature, concluded that "a kind of poetical
materalism, a sort of moral or spiritual Darwinism, might be very
interesting to go in for."56
But while the public were confounding distinctions (at least the
kind that historians go in for), the Darwinians were starting to
draw lines. Darwin was exasperated with Lyell. Lyell was enamored with Gray. Gray and Darwin had reached an impasse about
design - the advertisement for Gray's pamphlet disappeared in
the fourth edition of the Origin in 1866 - and Huxley was
distancing himself from Kingsley over the soul and immortality.57
Their Thorough Club had failed, just like other Darwinian ecumenical pacts; Huxley explained to Kingsley that "except among
two or three of my scientific colleagues I find myself alone on
these subjects."58The "two or three" were no doubt Darwin and
Hooker, the pugnacious physicist Tyndall, and possibly Wallace
(of whom more anon). What united them was the nonteleological
naturalism that Huxley had distilled as the "philosophical position
of Darwinism" in October 1864, just as the X Club was being
formed. The club now became a guerilla group, hell-bent on
relaunching "Darwinism" as a party slogan before the largest
public it had known.
(above, n. 31), 11, 369; Huxley to Darwin, July 2, 1863. LLTH, I, 246; EllegArd,
Darwin and the General Reader (above, n. 14), p. 73.
56. Lyell to Darwin, January 16, 1865, LLL, 385; H. Nettleship to J. Bryce,
August 20, 1865, quoted in Harvie, Lights of Liberalism (above, n. 41), p. 45.
57. On Gray and Darwin, see the sequence of Darwin's letters, 1861-1863,
in LLD, I1, 353, 373; MLD (above, n. 27), I, 203; and Loewenberg et al.,
Calendar, nos. 46, 53. By August 1863 Darwin had worked out the metaphor of
stone fragments, which he used five years later in Variation of Animals and
Plants to distance himself from Gray.
58. Huxley to Kingsley, April 30, 1863, LLTH, I. 239. Huxley and Kingsley
grew further apart after 1865 as they took opposite sides in the racially loaded
debate over the prosecution of Jamaica's Governor Eyre. See Huxley to
Kingsley, April 12 and November 8, 1866, LLTH, I, 276, 281-282;
and
Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: Macgibbon and
Kee, 1962), chaps. 4-5.
380
JAMES MOORE
Their platform was the British Association, and their appointed
spokesman Hooker. The Byzantine and still largely unfathomed
political machinery of the Association could be manipulated easily
by small interest groups. From 1865 to 1874, when they changed
theater to the Royal Society, the X Club freedom fighters had
unparalleled influence. In 1866 and 1867 their inside agent was
T. A. Hirst, one of the Association's powerful general secretaries;
aiding him was the other secretary, Darwin's cousin Galton.
Hooker was named as lecturer to the Nottingham meeting in
1866 and became president-elect a year later.
At Nottingham the reforming president W. R. Grove glossed
the evolution issue in his opening address. (Darwin complained
that "it dealt in such generalities that it would apply to any view or
no view in particular.")Grove left Hooker "'to back him up' and
'to carry Darwinism through the ranks of the enemy.'"""Hooker's
lecture surveyed recent competing explanations of insular flora; it
argued that on either hypothesis of oceanic migration or continental extension, "the theory of the derivative origin of species"
based on "natural selection and variation" was essential. Then
came the punch line: Hooker allegorized the Association's 1860
Oxford meeting as the gathering of certain tribes of savages who,
believing that the new moon was created afresh each month,
attacked the "missionaries"who had come to them from "the most
enlightened nation of mankind" to teach them the true theory of
the moon's motions. But six years had passed, Hooker boomed,
and now the same tribes, gathered together, accepted the missionaries' theory, applauding their "presiding Sachem" for his avowal
of the "new creed." Grove had done nothing of the sort - that is,
avow "Mr. Darwin's derivative theory of species" - but Hooker
still boasted privately about how he delivered himself "to about
2,000 persons in the Theatre, and gave them a pounding about
Darwinism until they jumped from their seats."6'
In August 1868, when Hooker himself gave the presidential
59. Galton, Memories (above, n. 52), p. 213; LLTH, I, 287; Barton, -XClub," pp. 164ff; minutes of 21st-34th meetings, February 1867-June 1868, X
Club Notebook, TP (above, n. 52); Ruth Barton, "John Tyndall, Pantheist: A
Rereading of the Belfast Address," Osiris, 2nd ser., 3 (1987), 114 (and see idem,
"'An Influential Set of Chaps': The X-Club and Royal Society Politics, 186485," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 23 119901, 53-81 ).
60. Darwin to Hooker, August 30, 118661, LLD, 111,48; Hooker to Darwin,
September 4, 1866, LLJH, II, 105. On Grove, see Iwan Rhys Morus, "The
Politics of Power: Reform and Regulation in the Work of William Robert
Grove," Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1989.
61. "British Association for the Advancement of Science," J. Bot., 5 (January 1867), 29-30; Hooker to W. Macleay, lAugust 1866?1, LLJH. 1, 1)00.
381
address, he had less doubt about what "Darwinism" should mean.
Darwin's Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
had appeared in January, reminding everyone not only of the
weight of evidence on behalf of natural selection but of the readiness with which the theory could be applied to human beings.
"Everywhere," observed the Pall Mall Gazette a few weeks later,
"'Darwinism' has become a byword, which had gone far to
replace 'materialism,"' a term of virulent abuse. With controversy
seething, Hooker had his work cut out; he agonized for months
about what to say. At all times Darwin was at his elbow. Word
finally leaked that a party political pronouncement was in the
offing, and Wallace told Darwin of his hope that Hooker would
"promulgate'Darwinianism' in his address."62
Wallace was not disappointed. At Norwich Hooker opened his
scientific survey by stating that it would "infallibly drag me into
Darwinism." He did not use the word again, but in due course,
after summarizing Darwin's botanical achievements and praising
his Variation (the book "may well awe many a timid naturalist into
swallowing more obnoxious doctrines than natural selection"),
Hooker tightened its referent: the theory of natural selection, he
declared, was "an accepted doctrine with almost every philosophical naturalist" and gained "adherents rapidly." Its detractors
had been ably controverted by "Mr. Darwin's true knight, Alfred
Wallace," of whose "many contributions to philosophical biology"
it was "not easy to speak without enthusiasm." Even Sir Charles
Lyell had lately abandoned the doctrine of special creations in
the tenth edition of his Principles of Geology, and "I know,"
Hooker kindly conceded, "no brighter example of heroism, of its
kind."63
Nor was this the only way in which Darwinism came up at
Norwich in 1868. While Wallace gloated to Darwin afterwards
that "Darwinianism was in the ascendant at Norwich (I hope you
do not dislike the word, for we really must use it)," Huxley
62. Ellegard, Dairwin and the Genzeral Reader, p. 59; Wallace to Darwin,
August 16, 118681, ARW (above, n. 31), 1, 219. See the minutes of the 30th and
31st meetings, February 6 and March 5, 1868, X Club Notebook, TP (Darwin
was present at the latter); and the Darwin-Hooker correspondence afterwards,
Calendar (above, n. 32), nos. 6068 et seq., especially Darwin to Hooker, April 3,
1868, MLD, 1, 297, and Hooker to Darwin, May 20, 1868, LLJH, 11, 13-114.
It was arranged that Huxley would move the vote to thanks for Hooker's
presidential address and Tyndall second it. I owe this information to Frank
James.
63. J. D. Hooker, "Address . . . " Report of the Thirty-eighth Meetinlg of the
British Association .. . (London: John Murray, 1869), pp. lix, lxix, lxx-lxxi.
382
JAMES MOORE
reacted to the proceedings with alarm.64Something had given him
pause. Perhaps it was the Reverend M. J. Berkeley's presidential
address to the biology section, which spoke of the "extreme
results" of Darwin's theory in its application to "mental peculiarities as well as physical"; or perhaps E. B. Tylor's paper in the
same section on "language and mythology as departments of biological science," which called for the discovery "in the phenomena
of civilization ... of distinct laws." Certainly Huxley must have
noted the presidential address to the mathematics and physics
section, where his X-comrade Tyndall held out hope that the
materialist mystery of psycho-physical parallelism would "resolve
itself into knowledge at some future day" as a result of "progressive development." But whatever upset Huxley, it posed an urgent
threat, for he reported to Darwin in September 1868 on "the
terrible 'Darwinismus' which spread over the [biology] section and
crept out when you least expected it, even in Fergusson's lecture
on 'Buddhist Temples."' He added a postscript: "I am preparing
to go into opposition; I can't stand it."65
Two points may be inferred from Huxley's remark. His reference to "Fergusson's lecture on 'Buddhist temples"' (the ethnologist James Fergusson was once tipped to join the X Club and had
been advised on his lecture by Hooker66) suggests disapproval of
the extent to which some individuals at Norwich were prepared to
carry their speculations in the name of "Darwinism." Indeed,
extremist activity of this sort was also reported in the press.
"Ardent disciples" of Darwin were present "in abundance,"
observed the Anglican Guardian;they were ready to "state their
theories more boldly and push their consequences more fearlessly
than the master himself."67
But this was nothing new. Since 1864 Wallace, Galton, Lubbock, and Walter Bagehot had been hammering home the connection between "Darwinism" and sociopolitical evolution. Huxley
himself had published extensively on ethnology in the same period
and was engaged with Hooker in a Darwinian takeover of the
Ethnological Society of London, aiming to rid it of women and
dilute the racism of the competing Anthropological Society by a
64. Wallace to Darwin, August 30, 1 8681, AR W, 1, 221.
65. Report of the Thirty-eighth Meeting, pp. 6, 86, 121; Huxley to Darwin,
September 12, 1868, DAR 166.
66. Minutes of 3rd and 5th meetings, January 5 and March 2, 1865, X Club
Notebook, TP; Barton, "'Influential Set of Chaps"' (above, n. 59), p. 57; Hooker
to Darwin, May 20, 1868, LLJH, II, 114.
67. "The British Association," Guardian, 23 (September 2, 1868), 977.
383
process of amalgamation.68What was new to Huxley, since a year
or two before, was the dangerous manner in which some individuals had presented their Darwinian speculations. Here is the
second point that may be inferred from his remark. The "terrible
'Darwinismus"' was a knowing allusion to a style of scientific
discourse made familiar by no one so much as the young German
zoologist Ernst Haeckel. It was Haeckel's kind of "Darwinism"
that Huxley was preparing to oppose.
LUNAR POLITICS
For eight years Huxley and Darwin had been bombarded by
letters and reprints from the gamut of German-speaking naturalists, from Rudolph Wagner and Heinrich Bronn to Ludwig
Biichner and Carl Vogt. "Darwinismus" had cropped up in their
communications with increasing frequency since 1862 and the
term seems to have been used with no greater precision than its
English counterpart. By 1868 Darwin had come to regard the
German Darwinists as "my chief ground for hoping that our views
will ultimately prevail."69 But Ernst Haeckel posed a special
problem: his "Darwinismus"was embedded in a polemical treatise
entitled Generelle Morphologie der Organismen that he wanted
translated into English. Its two 500-page volumes landed resoundingly in Darwin's and Huxley's letterboxes in November 1866,
hard on the heels of personal visistations by the bombastic author,
who, one gathers, regaled his hosts with Teutonic outbursts and
underwent something like a religious experience in Darwin's
presence. "Were you not charmed with Haeckel?" Huxley in68. See Evelleen Richards, "Huxley and Woman's Place in Science: The
'Woman Question' and the Control of Victorian Anthropology," in History,
Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, ed. James Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 253-284.
69. Darwin to W. Preyer, March 31, 1868, LLD, III, 88. See Darwin's letters
on his German reception, 1862-1868, LLD, II, 229-230, 327, 330, 345, 357,
374, 387; and MLD, 1, 259, 304. Cf. Rudolf Wagner's early hope, expressed in
rough English to Huxley (January 4, 1863, HP 28.88), that "the diversity of our
views on the Darwinism not will trouble our scientific harmony in other matters."
Judging from the titles in the Darwin Reprint Collection (hereafter DRC) in
the Darwin Archive at Cambridge, Darwin first read about "Darwinism" in 1864
in French publications: DRC R.70 (annotated "Rubbish") and R.92. "Darwinismus" came up frequently from 1866 on, as can be seen in R.133, 136, 153, and
in the bibliography in R.160. Neither the works of Ludwig Biichner, 18621869, in the Darwin Library at Cambridge, some of which Darwin read carefully, nor Fritz Miiller's Fur Darwin discusses "Darwinismus" per se.
384
JAMES MOORE
quired of Darwin ambiguously - to which there seems to have
been no reply.7"'
Darwin struggled with the German text for a month or two
before giving up the idea of a translation. "Hardly any new facts
or detailed new views," he panned the book to Huxley. "Too
profound and too long for our English countrymen," he reported
rather less candidly to Haeckel. Huxley, who read German
fluently, was at first inclined to agree. He chuckled over the
polemical parts of the Generelle Morphololgie and told Haeckel
how "naughty"they were: "I pictured to myself the effect which a
translation ... would have upon the minds of my respectable
countrymen!""7But Huxley read the book with care and learned
how to apply evolution to his work in paleontology. His 1868
papers on dinosaurs and Archaeopteryx lithographica showed
Haeckel's influence. When the translation proposal was revived in
the middle of that year, he was receptive. The Ray Society's
council discussed the proposal at Norwich in August and agreed
in November to publish the translation, charging Huxley, a
council-member, to negotiate with Haeckel.i2 The terms Huxley
presented are a measure of the "opposition" that he had entered
into; they mark a turning point in the history of Darwinism in
Britain.
The Generelle Morphologie was a monumental achievement.
Written and printed in less than a year, it systematized all existing
70. Wilhelm Bolsche, Haeckel: His Life and Work, trans. Joseph McCabe
(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), pp. 241-243; Huxley to Darwin, November
11, 1866, LLTH, 1, 278. For interpretations of Haeckel and Darwin, see Giinter
Altner, Charles Darwin und Ernst Haeckel: Ein Vergleichnach theologischen
Aspekten ... (Zurich: EVZ-Verlag, 1966), pp. 35-73; Hans Schwarz, "Darwinism between Kant and Haeckel," J. Amer. Acad. Relig., 48 (198t)), 581-
602; Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin:The Popularizationof Darwinismin
Germany, 1860-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981);
and Jacques Roger, "Darwin, Haeckel et les Franqais," in De Darwin au
darwinisme: Science et ideologie, ed. Yvette Conry (Paris: J. Vrin, 1983), pp.
149-165.
71. Darwin to Huxley, December 22, [18661, MLD, I, 274; Darwin to E.
Haeckel, January 8, 11867], MLD, 278; Huxley to Haeckel, May 20), 1867, in
George Uschmann and Ilse Jahn, "Der Briefwechsel zwischen Thomas Henry
Huxley und Ernst Haeckel: Ein Beitrag zum Darwin-Jahr," Wiss. Z. F.-SchillerUniv. Jena, math.-nat. R. no. 1/2, 9 (1959-60), 13.
72. See Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors (above, n. 39), pp. 126-131,
156-158; Mario A. Di Gregorio, "The Dinosaur Connection: A Reinterpretation of T. H. Huxley's Evolutionary View," J. Hist. Biol., 15 (1982), 413-417;
Darwin to Huxley, June 10, 118681, HP 5.239; Huxley to Haeckel, January 21,
October 6, and November 13, 1868, in Uschmann and Jahn, "Briefwechsel," pp.
15, 17-18, 19.
385
knowledge of organic forms on the basis of "die von Charles
Darwin reformirte Descendenz-theorie,' a theory that Haeckel
believed could be traced back through Lorenz Oken and Goethe
to Lamarck."3The opus bequeathed to biology the "Stammbaum,"
or genealogical tree, as well as other now-standard terms "ontogeny," "phylogeny," and "oecology." For all these reasons
(and more) the book remains of great historic importance. But it
was also a period-piece of Naturphilosophisch syncretism. Haeckel
had learned his science from Johannes Muller and Max Schultze,
his politics from the anticlerical liberal Rudolf Virchow, and his
religion chiefly from Goethe. Darwin became Haeckel's master in
1860 just when he was enraptured by the social Radiolaria, their
colonies united by networks of protoplasm, and inspired by the
Italian Risorgimento, which held promise of German unification.74
Six years later, in the Generelle Morphologie, the elements of
Haeckel's education converged. Comparative anatomy, embryology, cytology, and natural selection; liberalism, anticlericalism,
and nationalism - all were transformed into a monistic evolutionary cosmology, the world into a manifestation of God: "Gott
ist allmachtig. ... Gott ist das allgemeine Causalgesetz. ... Gott
ist die Nothwendigkeit. Gott ist Summe aller Krafte, also auch
aller Materie."79
Here, then, is what Huxley had to face. The problem with the
Generelle Morphologie was not that "Darwinismus"got lost in the
metaphysical mrlee, or that Haeckel somehow misappropriated
the word. On the contrary, the text is perfectly clear: the "theory
of selection .. . can rightfully be called Darwinism in honour of its
original creator," Haeckel pronounced, and he used "selectionstheorie" thus consistently throughout.76 The problem for Huxley
was, rather, one of packaging: "Darwinismus" in Haeckel's book
came wrapped up in extrapolations, execrations, and other contentious comments that, however acceptable in German biological
discourse, would have been anathema in Britain. The fixity of
73. B13lsche,Haeckel, p. 188.
74. Pietro Corsi and Paul J. Weindling, 'Darwinism in Germany, France, and
Italy," in Kohn, Darwinian Heritage (above, n. 17), pp. 685-698;
Paul J.
Weindling, "Ernst Haeckel, Darwinism and the Secularization of Nature," in
Moore, History, Humanity and Evolution (above, n. 68), pp. 311-327.
75. Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: Allgemeine
Grundzuge der organischen Formen-wissenschaft, mechanisch begrundet durch
die von Charles Darwin reformirte Descendez-Theorie, 2 vols. (Berlin: Georg
Reimer, 1866), 11,45 1.
76. Ibid., 11, 166. Cf. Roger, "Darwin, Haeckel et les Fran*ais" (above, n.
70),pp. 155-156.
386
JAMES MOORE
species is called "a colossal dogma, . . . sanctified by antiquity and
empowered by blind belief in authority." The Creator-God of
Christian theology is dubbed a "gaseous vertebrate" (i.'. . eines
gasformigen Wirbel-thieres"). The "absolutely wonderful doctrinal
system" of natural selection is said to be "purely monistic" and as
such is held to entail "the definitive death" of teleology and
vitalism as well as continual spontaneous generation.77
These and other such passages - there were many - had put
the wind up Huxley when he informed Haeckel in November
1868 that the Generelle Morphologie must be "condensed to the
uttermost." One chapter contained "'anawful 'Stein des Anstosses"'
that would have to be removed. Another needed to be rewritten
lest it "make shipwreck of us at once." "We don't much mind
heterodoxy here," Huxley warned incongruously, "if it does not
openly proclaim itself as such." To obtain the offer of publication
by the Ray Society, Huxley had "had ... in a certain sense to
become responsible for your behaving yourself like a good boy!"78
Haeckel agreed to all the changes with unwonted meekness and
proposed to deliver the revised text in April 1869.79 Then the line
went dead. The Generelle Morphologie was never translated; only
a letter or two passed between Huxley and Haeckel in the next
five years. The reasons for this remain obscure, but I have little
doubt that Huxley's continuing hostility to Darwinismus was an
important factor. Besides laying down the law to Haeckel on how
he should behave before a British audience, Huxley was now at
pains to dissociate himself and "Darwinism"from monistic materialism or indeed any metaphysical worldview.8""
Christening some slime from the ocean floor Bathybius haeckelii
in a report to the biology section of Norwich was, it turned out, an
inauspicious start. For although Huxley thus repaid Haeckel's
compliment of naming the Porto Santo rabbit Lepus huxleyi, he
was immediately forced to deny that the substance, which he
regarded as living protoplasm, lent credence to the doctrine of
spontaneous generation.81 In his infamous lecture "On the Physi77. Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie, I, 90, 100, 107, 169n, 173-1 74n.
78. Huxley to Haeckel, November 13, 1868, in Uschmann and Jahn, "Briefwechsel," p. 19.
79. Haeckel to Huxley, November 18, 1868, and February 23, 1869, in
ibid., pp. 19-20, 22.
80. Cf. Huxley to Hooker, January 6, 1861, LLTH, I, 224.
8 1. Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: Or the Development of the Earth
and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Laws ... IGerman 18681, trans. E.
Ray Lankester (London: Henry S. King, 1876), I, 147; Philip F. Rehbock,
"Huxley, Haeckel, and the Oceangraphers: The Case of Bathybius haeckelii,"
387
cal Basis of Life," delivered in Edinburgh the same week he
lectured Haeckel on literary rectitude, Huxley attempted to
recover himself. He argued that while the protoplasmic theory of
life put paid to vitalism, it no more than pointed to the possibility
of spontaneous generation, and it certainly did not entail materialism, which he declared to involve "grave philosophical error."
Ontological questions to Huxley were "essentialy questions of
lunar politics," and he sent an offprint of the lecture to Haeckel,
"as it contains a criticism of Materialism which I should like you
to consider."82
But to no avail. Haeckel took Bathybius as proof of what he
had long since concluded must be the case, and throughout 1869
his views on abiogenesis were serialized in translation in the
Quarterly Journal of the Microscopical Society, where they provoked no little controversy.83 This possibly explains why Huxley
reviewed Haeckel's Naturliche Sch8pfungsgeschichte, a popularization of the Generelle Morphologie (and "perhaps the chief
source of the world's knowledge of Darwinism" in the next halfcentury), with such severity in the October issue of a general
periodical.84 It no doubt helps to account for the resolute antidogmatism of Huxley's own presidential address to the British
Association in September 1870, where he distinguished carefully
between "belief" in abiogenesis on the basis of partial evidence
and his own "expectation" that the "evolution of living protoplasm
Isis, 66 (1975), 518; Huxley to Haeckel, October 6, 1868, in Uschmann and
Jahn, "Briefwechsel," p. 18. See also Nicolaas A. Rupke, 'Bathybius haeckelii
and the Psychology of Scientific Discovery: Theory instead of Observed Data
Controlled the Late 19th Century 'Discovery' of a Primitive Form of Life," Stud.
Hist. Phil. Sci., 7 ( 1976), 5 3-62.
82. T. H. Huxley, "On the Physical Basis of Life" (1 868), CE (above, n. 3), I,
162; Huxley to Haeckel, January 10, 1869, in Uschmann and Jahn, "Briefwechsel," p. 2 1. See Gerald L. Geison, "The Protoplasmic Theory of Life and the
Vitalist-Mechanist Debate," Isis, 60 (1969), 279-284.
83. See John Farley, "The Spontaneous Generation Controversy (18591880): British and German Reactions to the Problem of Abiogenesis," J. Hist.
Biol., 5 (1972), 285-319; idem, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from
Descartes to Oparin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), chap. 5.
84. T. H. Huxley, "The Natural History of Creation . . . ," Ac ademy, I
(October 9, 1869), 13-14, and (November 13, 1869), 40-43; Erik Nordenskiold, The History of Biology, trans. Leonard Bucknall Eyre (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1928), p. 515. Cf. Darwin to Huxley, October 14, 1869, LLD, III,
1 19. For a further reaction to the book, see Stephen Jay Gould, "Agassiz's Later,
Private Thoughts on Evolution: His Marginalia in Haeckel's Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte (1868)," in Two Hundred Years of Geology in America, ed. Cecil
J. Schneer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1979), pp. 277282.
388
JAMES MOORE
from not living matter" may have once occurred. He cautioned, "I
have no right to call my opinion any thing but an act of philosophical faith."85
Yet the most notable result of Huxley's reaction to Haeckel
and Darwinismus was, I believe, his adoption of a philosophical
stance that would enable "Darwinism" to be extricated from
ontological controversies and dissociated from hostile worldviews.
I say "stance" because, although "agnosticism" could be analysed
historically and systematically, and indeed was later expounded in
this way by Huxley and others, the word itself came into existence
to serve the strategic purposes of Darwin's chief defender in the
Victorian public arena.86 Since 1867 at least, when the second
Reform Act added a million names to electoral registers, Huxley
had embarked on an ambitious crusade to educate the Christian
nation and their clergy in the methods and results of scientific
naturalism. He conducted "Sunday Evenings for the People,"
canvassed for "scientific Sunday schools," chaired the "Sunday
Lecture Society," preached and published "lay sermons," and,
when elected to the London School Board in 1870, he urged that
both science instruction and Bible-reading should be part of the
curriculum. His aim was now to persuade and convince rather
than to confront and offend - "I am . .. giving addresses to the
working men," he notified Haeckel, "and (figurez-vous!) to the
clergy" - and nothing would have been more offensive to religious audiences than a renowed Darwinian confronting them as a
materialist.87
In early 1869 the issue of philosophical identity came to a head
when Huxley agreed to join in the debates of a predominately
85. T. H. Huxley, Address to the British Assoc iation for the Advancement of
Science, delivered ... at Liverpool, September 14, 1870 (L-ondon: Taylor and
Francis, 1870), pp. 16-17.
86. See Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victori'an Unibelief
and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1987), pp. 10-22; James G. Paradis, T. H. Huxley: Man 's Place in Nature
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 100-113. Ct. Ruth Barton,
"The Creation of the Conflict between Science and Theology," in Science anid
Theology in Action, ed. Chris Bloore and Peter Donovan (Palmerston North,
N.Z.: Dunmore Press, 1987), p. 65.
87. Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors (above, n. 39), pp. 158-164; Ed
Block, Jr., "T. H. Huxley's Rhetoric and the Popularization of Victorian Scientific
Cyril Bibby, T H. Hlu{xley.
379-381;
Ideas," Vict. Stud., 29 (1985-86),
Scientist, Humanist, Educator (London: Watts, 1959), chap. 8; "Sunday Lecturc
Society Proceedings from 1869 to 1889," British Library Department of Printed
Books 4355.d.f.17; Huxley to M. Foster, April 10, 1869, HP 4.13-14; Huxley
to Haeckel, January 21, 1868, in Uschmann and Jahn, "Briefwechsel," p. 15.
389
Christian and clerical forum, the Metaphysical Society. He now
had to declare himself an adherent of something that could not
be labelled "materialist" (or indeed "spiritualist" or "Positivist");
he required a stance that would provide an Archimedan point
from which the science he was most closely associated with, now
commonly called "Darwinism," could move the Victorian world.
Therefore, six months after renouncing materialism before a
Sunday audience in the Kirk stronghold of Edinburgh, six months
after lecturing Haeckel on metaphysical proprieties, Huxley first
called himself an "agnostic." It was his way of dodging "lunar
politics" while getting on with the political tasks that he and the
X-men had set themselves. As he told the Cambridge Young
Men's Christian Association some months later, all the topics of
which he could legitimately speak as a scientist were "neither
Christian nor Unchristian, but ... Extra-christian"; they had "a
world of their own" that was "not only 'unsectarian' but ...
altogether 'secular'." ".Whateverevil voices may rage" against the
"one or two living men" whose "great thoughts ... will live and
grow" for centuries to come, growled Darwin's bulldog at the end,
"Science, secure among the powers that are eternal, will do her
work and be blessed."88
NATURAL SELECTION IN CRISIS
The specter of Ernst Haeckel - "Darwin's Dachshund," to his
detractors - and the furore at the British Association in 1868
provoked a semantic crisis for "Darwinism."But these were by no
means the only factors that kept the issue on the boil for several
years. While Huxley manned the metaphysical barricades, Darwin
was facing the uncontrolled proliferation of "Darwinism" among
his interpreters. Haeckel had been dealt with. Darwin too admonished him about making "enemies" - taking "what I said much
stronger than I had intended" - and applauded his willingness "to
omit and shorten some parts" of the Generelle Morphologie.89But
there was still George Lewes in the radical Fortnightly Review for
88. Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in
Crisis, 1869-1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), pp. 50-56; T.
H. Huxley, "On Descartes' 'Discourse Touching the Method of Using One's
Reason Rightly, and of Seeking Scientific Truth,"' Macmillan's Mag. 22 (May
1870), 79, 80.
89. Darwin to Haeckel, May 21, 1867, and November 19 118681, LLD, 111,
68, 104. Darwin's copies of Generelle Morphologie and Natuirliche Schopfungsgeschichte in the Darwin Library, Cambridge, seem to have been read extensively.
390
JAMES MOORE
1868, stating that "Mr. Darwin has reason to be proud of his
disciple" and arguing Haeckel's case inter alia for continual spontaneous generation (which Darwin thought a "quasi miracle").
There was still, by contrast, Charles Loring Brace in the North
American Review, lamenting that "Darwinism in Germany" had
become entangled with irreligion, and claiming that "Darwin himself does not share [the]extreme views of his German followers."'90
Between these poles there were all manner of former or wouldbe allies, and their opponents, who laid claim to correct religious
interpretations of "Darwinism":Gray, from whom Darwin finally
distanced himself publicly in the concluding paragraphs of the
Variation of Animals and Plants; Kingsley, who now tried in vain
to recover his in-group status by writing to Darwin of "what the
world calls Darwinism, and you and I and some others, fact and
science";9 the Reverend George Warington, who, to Darwin's
astonishment, got himself branded with "Biichnerism" by the
evangelical Victoria Institute for expounding "Darwinism 'pure
and simple,' which is Darwinism and Deity";92 the Reverend
Thomas R. R. Stebbing, a marine biologist, whom Darwin praised
for shaking "ignorant prejudices" and setting "an admirable
example of liberality" in his published lecture Darwinism;93and,
not least, the Reverends Francis Orpen Morris and James
M'Cann, whose respective pamphlets, Difficulties of Darwinism
and Anti-Darwinism, originated in outrageous presentations be90. George Henry Lewes, "Mr. Darwin's Hypotheses," Fortn. Rev., n.s., 3
(April 1, 1868), 353-373 (quotation on p. 357n), and (June 1, 1868), 611628; 4 (July 1, 1868), 63-80, and (November 1, 1868), 429-509, all in DRC
(above, n. 69) R.108 with extensive annotations ("quasi miracle" on p. 493);
Charles L. Brace, "Darwinism in Germany," reprinted from No. Amer. Rev.,
April 1870, p. 13, in DRC R.1 22 without annotations.
91. Kingsley to Darwin, December 15, 1867, in F. Kingsley, Charles
Kingsley (above, n. 31), 11,249.
92. George Warington's paper, "On the Credibility of Darwinism," with
replies and discussion, appeared in J. Trans. Vict. Inst., 2 (1867), 39-125
(quotation on p. 119; cf. 80-81, 95); a copy is in DRC R.64. See Darwin to G.
Wanngton, October 7, 118671, Royal College of Physicians (London) archives;
and Darwin to Wallace, October 12-13, 118671, AR W (above, n. 31), 1, 189.
93. Darwin to T. Stebbing, March 3, 1869, American Philosophical Society
(Philadelphia) 362 (hereafter APS). Thomas Stebbing's pamphlet, Darwinism
... (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1869), is without annotations in DRC R.106;
so also his later lecture, Darwinism: The Noachian Flood ... (London: Macmillan, 1870), in R.149. See Stebbing to Darwin, March 5, 1869, DAR 177;
APS 388, 404, 583; and Charles
Darwin's letters to Stebbing, 1871-1881,
Darwin, The Descentof Man, and Selectionin Relationto Sex, 2 vols. (London:
John Murray, 1871), Il, 376. See also Eric Mills, "Amphipods and Equipoise: A
Study of T. R. R. Stebbing," Trans. Conn. Acad. Arts Sci., 44 (1972), 238-256.
391
fore the biology section of the British Association in August
1869, where they received short shrift from the chair, occupied by
the X Club's George Busk. Both parsons caricatured Darwin, and
both baited Huxley as a materialist: to Morris he was "Professor
Protoplasm"; to M'Cann, "Darwinism" on Huxley's authority
meant "the evolution of a material man from a material basis."
Huxley troubled to answer them both; neither he nor Darwin ever
forgave them.94
Yet the use and abuse of "Darwinism" by religious controversialists in the late 1860s was merely the backdrop against which
greater dramas were being played. Although Darwin still hoped
first and foremost to convert the world to evolution, the theory of
natural selection remained vital to him, "the main but not exclusive means of modification" in successive editions of the Origin.
And natural selection was in trouble by 1868. Its opponents were
formidable; its friends, if not less numerous than before, were at
least less loyal than Darwin wished. The differences among the
Darwinians now emerged as clear distinctions. "Darwinism" was
no longer elastic enough to stand for all its former sponsors'
beliefs about evolution.
The most persistent and prestigious critics of natural selection
were physical scientists with close ties to William Thomson (later
Lord Kelvin), a sort of "Y Club" to Darwin's "X." Their hostility,
which in most cases probably had a religious origin, was symbolized powerfully in December 1864 by the passage of arms
between Huxley, newly fortified by the X Club, and the evangelical Cambridge mathematician G. G. Stokes, secretary of the
Royal Society's council, over the terms on which Darwin had been
awarded the Copley Medal.95Thomson had by then published two
important thermodynamic arguments, in 1862 and 1863, limiting
94. See F. 0. Morris, Difficulties of Darwinism: Read before the British
Association at Norwich and Exeter in /868 and 1869, with a Preface and a
Correspondence with Professor Huxley (London: Longmans, Green, 1869), pp.
iv-v, for references to "Professor Protoplasm" and "a small busybody clique" in
Section D; James M'Cann, Anti-Darwinism, . . . with Professor Huxley's Reply
(Glasgow: David Bryce, 1869), p. 31. Except for one inconsequential marginal
line, neither pamphlet, in DRC R.137 and R.138, is annotated. For Darwin's
response, see Descent of Man, 1, 63; and Darwin to J. Brodie Innes, November
27, 1878, in Robert M. Stecher, "The Darwin-Innes Letters: The Correspondence of an Evolutionist with His Vicar, 1848-1883," Ann. Sci., 17 (1961), 244.
For Huxley, see M'Cann, Anti-Darwinism, pp. 31-39; and cf. Morris, Difficulties, p. 64, with Huxley to Hooker, ISeptember 301, 1869, HP 2.138-139,
and T. H. Huxley, "On the Study of Biology," in idem, American Addresses, with
a Lecture on the Study of Biology (London: Macmillan, 1877), pp. 163-164.
95. See Hull, "Darwinism as a Historical Entity" (above, n. 17), p. 798; Colin
392
JAMES MOORE
the enormous time span over which Darwin assumed that natural
selection had worked. In April 1867 H. C. Fleeming Jenkin, an
engineer and Thomson's business partner, repeated these arguments influentially against "the Darwinians" in a "cumulative"
disproof of natural selection, drawing also on physical analogies to
show that the extent of species' variability was strictly limited.
Thomson resumed the attack in February 1868 by using physical
astronomy to bring geological speculation to heel, and a year later
his long-term collaborator, the Bible-toting Edinburgh professor
P. G. Tait, sought to reduce the time available to natural selection
by a further order of magnitude.96
Darwin was "much troubled" by the physicists' arguments. For
years Thomson hovered around him "like an odious spectre."
Huxley did little, as usual, to defend natural selection when he
replied to Thomson before the Geological Society of London that
"biology takes her time from geology.... If the geological clock is
wrong, all the naturalist will have to do is modify his notions of
the rapidity of change accordingly." When George Darwin, second
wrangler at Cambridge in 1868, impressed his father with the
authority of Thomson's calculations, Hooker didn't help much
either: "Take another dose of Huxley's . . . G. S. address," he
snapped, "and send George back to college."97
The one ally Darwin might have counted on was Lyell, his
geological timekeeper for over thirty years. In the spring of 1868
Lyell brought out the second volume of the tenth edition of his
Principles of Geology and there abandoned the doctrine of special
creations (for which Hooker would praise him at Norwich); but
otherwise the book offered Darwin cold comfort. Lyell took
natural selection to be the work of the "Supreme Creative Intelligence"; he met Thomson's thermodynamic arguments with the
A. Russell, "The Conflict Metaphor and Its Social Origins," Sci. Christ. Belief, /
(1989), 12, 19-20; M. J. Bartholomew, "The Award of the Copley Medal to
Charles Darwin," Not. Rec. Roy. Soc. London 30 (1 976), 209-218; David B.
Wilson, "A Physicist's Alternative to Materialism: The Religious Thought of
George Gabriel Stokes," Vict. Stud., 28 (1984-85),
69-96; Frank A. J. L.
James, "George Gabriel Stokes and William Thomson: Biographical Attitudes
towards Their Irish Origins," in Science in Ireland, 1800-1930: Tradition and
Reform . .. , ed. John R. Nudds et al. (Dublin: Trinity College, 1988), pp. 7582.
96. [H. C. Fleeming Jenkinl, "The Origin of Species," N. Brit. Rev., n.s., 7
(June 1867), 277-3 18; Joe D. Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth
(New York: Science History Publications, 1975), pp. 27-40, 70-86.
97. Darwin to J. Croll, January 31, 1868, MLD, II, 163; Darwin to Wallace,
July 12, 1871, ARW, 1, 168; T. H. Huxley, "The Anniversary Address of the
President," Quart. J. Geol. Soc. London, 25 (1 869), xlviii; Hooker to Darwin,
[March 7, 18691, MLD, It, 7.
393
suggestion that science might yet detect "proofs of . .. a regenerating and self-sustaining power in the works of a Divine Artificer."
Again, human evolution was fudged.98 Lyell had failed his final
test of allegiance. Like Gray and Kingsley before him, he vanished
from Darwin's inner circle; only Hooker and Huxley (despite his
foibles) remained. Wallace, Darwin's codiscoverer, also kept
closely in touch - but his moment of truth had come as well.
Wallace never wavered in his defense of natural selection.
From 1864, when he was the first to go public on its implications
for humans, until 1889, when his masterly exposition of the
theory appeared under the title Darwinism, he upheld his and
Darwin's first insight with perfect clarity and perhaps even undue
deference to his older colleague. The problem that Wallace posed
owed nothing to ill will or misunderstanding, nor were religious
prepossessions involved. Rather, what became apparent to Darwin in the late 1860s was that he and Wallace would never quite
agree over how natural selection should be applied.
Their differences were several, but one in particular caused
Darwin to lose faith in his colleague's "scientific judgment."99
Wallace, who in 1868 urged "Darwinianism" on him, stating "I
hope you do not dislike the word, for we really must use it"
Wallace, for whom Darwin then had such respect that he admitted, "to differ from you . . . actually terrifies me, and makes me
distrust myself" - this ardent defender, whom Hooker praised
before the British Association in 1868 as "Mr. Darwin's true
knight," had already concluded that some higher "Power" than
natural selection must be invoked to explain the origin of human
intellectual and moral faculties. In April 1869, when Darwin
discovered this awful fact in Wallace's review of the tenth edition
of Lyell's Principles, he stabbed exclamation marks at the text. "I
differ grievously from you and I am very sorry for it," he wrote
Wallace with an air of finality. A robust reply came at once: "My
opinions on the subject have been modified solely by the consideration of a series of remarkable phenomena, physical and
mental, which I have now had every opportunity of fully testing,
and which demonstrate the existence of forces and influences not
yet recognised by science."""'
98. Bartholomew, "Lyell and Evolution" (above, n. 37), pp. 302-303);
Burchfield, Lord Kelvin, pp. 69-70.
99. Darwin to [G. Alleni, lbefore February 21, 18791, Calen?dar(above, n.
32), no. 11 891. See Malcolm Jay Kottler, 'Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel
Wallace: Two Decades of Debate over Natural Selection," in Kohn, Darwinian
Heritage (above, n. 17), pp. 367-432.
10). Darwin to Wallace, September 23, 1868, ARW, 1, 227; Alfred Russel
Wallace, "Principles of Geology . . . ," Quart. Rev., 126 (April 1869), 359-394,
394
JAMES MOORE
Whatever the cause (a traumatic broken engagement seems
worth suggesting), in 1865, about a year after Wallace and Darwin
got onto familiar terms, Wallace had begun attending seances.
Darwin's brother-in-law Hensleigh Wedgewood knew this, and by
the end of 1866 the word was out. Wallace had publicized his
conversion to spiritualism in a plebeian "secularist magazine" and
reprinted the series, "The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural,"
for his friends.'01 Lyell, one of Wallace's frequent contacts, was no
doubt sent the pamphlet, which reinforced his own view of man's
special status. Huxley received his copy at a critical time, in the
wake of Haeckel's visit, when the issue of metaphysical decorum
loomed large. While professing to be neutral but uninterested spiritualism, if true, furnished "an additional argument against
suicide" - he could only have been reminded of the urgent
problem of packaging "Darwinism.""'2
Or if the pamphlet did not alert him, then the book Wallace
published in 1870 did the job. There Wallace claimed that "matter
is essentially force, and nothing but force"; that "all force is
probably will-force," the product of "Mind";and that this Mind like a Great Breeder, or "supernatural John Sebright," Huxley
laughed - "occasionally" used the "laws of variation, multiplication and survival"for a "special end," most notably the production
of human beings. Worse, these remarks appeared in the climactic
essay of a book prefaced by a eulogium on Darwin, rushed into
print one year ahead of his long-awaited Descent of Man, and
entitled Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection. So there
could be no question about the danger Wallace posed. Darwinism
in his hands ran every risk of being associated with a worldview
exactly the opposite of Haeckel's, but very nearly as disreputable.U"3It was another reason for Huxley and Darwin to call
themselves agnostics.
in DAR 133 (cf. MLD, 1I, 40); Darwin to Wallace, April 14, 1869, and Wallace
to Darwin, April 18, 1869, ARW, I, 243-244.
101. Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Eventsand Opinions,2
vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), I, 409-41 1; I, 275-281. Wallace
reprinted the pamphlet in his Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1874).
102. Lyell to Darwin, May 5, 1869, LLL (above, n. 31), II, 42; Wallace, My
Life I, 420-425, 433-434, and II, 280; Huxley to 'Sir," January 29, 1869, in
Reporton Spiritualismof the Committeeof the London DialecticalSociety ...
(London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1871), p. 230. See Malcolm Jay
Kottler, "Alfred Russel Wallace, the Origin of Man, and Spiritualism," Isis, 65
(1974), 145-192.
103. Alfred Russel Wallace, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, reprinted in Natural Selection and Tropical Nature: Essays on Descriptive
395
THE MIVARTIAN CHALLENGE
By mid-1869 the original phalanx of Darwinians had dwindled
to approximately three. Wallace had defected over man; Lyell,
Gray, and Kingsley never paid their dues; Haeckel had been
banned for the time being. "Darwinism" meanwhile had become a
slogan, and now returned to its first sponsors with connotations
and associations they repudiated. Far from meaning evolution in
general, as Huxley first intended it, or evolutionary naturalism in a
nonteleological mode, as he described its "philosophical position"
in 1864, Darwinism was making enemies or friends on the basis
of metaphysical interpretations that actually hindered further
acceptance of the general doctrines for which the word had stood
before. In 1868 Hooker had made a one-off bid for semantic
control by using "Darwinism" to refer directly to the theory of
natural selection. A few months later Huxley called himself an
agnostic in an effort to spare himself and Darwinism from
ontological controversy. Neither of these ploys quite worked.
There were always an awkward few who claimed to see the
reality of things - that the Darwinians themselves were metaphysicians manques. One such was St. George Mivart. It was he
who finally provoked Darwin himself to assert control of Darwinism.
Like Darwin, Mivart was a wealthy Dissenter who picked up
science at his leisure. His father owned the Mivart Hotel in
Grosvenor Square (later Claridge's) and indulged him, so his legal
training at Lincoln's Inn was a formality not a necessity. Mivart
devoted himself to nature's laws instead, studying anatomy with
Owen in the 1850s and with Huxley a decade later. From 1858 to
1863 the Huxley-Owen battles over bones and brains were part
of Mivart's education. Owen's transcendental anatomy and Darwinian descent vied for his allegiance, always with a view toward
the fraught question of "man's place in nature." In 1862 Owen
and Huxley together landed Mivart a lectureship in comparative
anatomy at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London (a post
he held - latterly as professor - for twenty-two years), but by
1864 or 1865 Mivart seemed to have chosen sides. After attending Huxley's lectures and working on primate osteology under his
and Theoretical Biology (London: Macmillan, 1891) pp. 204, 210-213; Huxley,
"Mr. Darwin's Critics" (above, n. 5), p. 444. By 1876 Wallace had gone over to
"Kelvin's camp" on the question of geochronology: see Joe D. Burchfield,
"Darwin and the Dilemma of Geological Time," Isis, 65 (1974), 316-317.
396
JAMES MOORE
guidance, Mivart began to regard himself as a card-carrying
Darwinian. On June 3, 1869, with Huxley's support, he was
elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Twelve days later Mivart
turned traitor. He went straight to Huxley and told him to his face
that he intended to pick a fight with the Darwinians for their views
on human nature and morality. Huxley was thunderstruck. He
replied grimly that "nothing so united or severed men" as questions such as these. Little did he realize that for a year or two he
had been clasping - nay, nourishing - a viper at his bosom. "14
In 1866 Mivart had read Wallace's spiritualist pamphlet and
met Haeckel, who "eloquently preached Darwinism" to him
during a long walk in the Zoological Gardens. Mivart had
attended the British Association in 1868, and there, with his
Catholic friend and fellow-student Father Roberts, he encountered the "terrible 'Darwinismus."' All these episodes left an
indelible mark. Mivart found Wallace convincing, at least in part;
Haeckel he found offensive, and the "terrible 'Darwinismus"' at
Norwich struck him, no less than Huxley, as an error to be
opposed. But Mivart's reasons were the reverse of Huxley's: he
was a Roman Catholic, a specialist in "lunar politics," steeped in
scholastic philosophy since his conversion more than twenty years
before. It was Father Roberts, his guardian angel in Huxley's
lectures, who had persuaded him of "the difficulties, or rather
impossibilities, on the Darwinian system, of accounting for the
origin of the human intellect, and above all for its ... ethical
judgments." So while Huxley was admonishing Haeckel and
becoming an artful agnostic, Mivart lay low and prepared to
attack Darwinism in his own way. Another reason, perhaps, why a
month after Mivart's apostasy Huxley wrote again to Darwin
about "the great question of 'Darwinismus' which is such a worry
to us all."'I5
Even before his lapse, Mivart had begun to publish a series of
three articles, "Difficulties of the Theory of Natural Selection," in
the Catholic journal The Month. This was a sort of controlled
explosion, a test-firing under cover of anonymity for the bombshell that would go off with Mivart's name on it when Darwin
published the Descent of Man. The series' procedure came to this:
104. St. George Mivart, "Some Reminiscences of Thomas Henry Huxley,"
Nineteenth Cent., 42 (December 1897), 988-993; Jacob W. Gruber, A Conscience in Conflict: The Life of St. George Jackson Mivart (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1960), chaps. 1-2. See also John D. Root, "Catholicism and
Science in Victorian England," Clergy Rev., 66 (1981), 138-147, 162-1 70.
105. Mivart, "Some Reminiscences," pp. 994-995; Wallace, My Life, II, 43,
300; Huxley to Darwin, July 16, 1869, LLTH, 1, 312.
397
set "Darwinism" equal to the theory of natural selection by
subtracting from it the abuses and misapprehensions of critics
inspired by the odium antitheologicum; then add up objections to
"'Natural Selection,' pure and simple," as a sufficient cause of
evolution by exploiting the divisions among the "Darwinians" and
their critics; and finally, multiply instances in which the Darwinians - notably Darwin himself - by applying natural selection
to morals and theological questions, evinced a "defect of logic"
and a "lack of philosophical ability." Here Mivart cried foul.
"Darwinism"was being used "in the interests of heterodoxy": "It is
unfair . . . to ridicule certain IreligiousJconceptions in the name of
physical science, when this objection comes in reality not from
physical science at all, but solely from a strong metaphysical antitheistic bias or conviction."'116
Copies of Mivart's articles reached Wallace and Darwin in
October 1869. Wallace thought they contained "some good criticism." Darwin, now chary of Wallace after his defection, told him
pointedly, "I wish I knew who was the author; you ought to know,
as he admires you so much; he has a wonderful deal of knowledge."""7Within a few months Darwin certainly had his answer:
Mivart began to ply him with letters avowing "sincere esteem for
the author of 'Natural Selection,"' condemning those "who make
use of that theory simply as a weapon against higher interests,"
and posing enigmas for natural selection to explain. He referred to
his view of man's "intellectual moral & religious nature" and
noted seeing in Italy "our friend Huxley's 'Man's Place in Nature'
for sale at most of the railway stations amongst a crowd of
obscenities." Darwin replied conscientiously to Mivart's letters
and may even have renewed a personal acquaintance with him
during a visit to London.' (8
But in the winter of 1870-71 the relationship began to chill.
Two books were politely exchanged, two "Darwinisms" collided.
Mivart's title, On the Genesis of Species, mimicked the Origin.
106. IMivarti, "Difficulties of the Theory of Natural Selection," Month, 11
(1869), 35-53, 134-153, 274-289 (see esp. pp. 35, 38, 39, 53, 283, 286).
107. Wallace to Darwin, October 20, 1869, and Darwin to Wallace, October
21, 1869, ARW, 1. 246, 247. Darwin's copy of the articles in DRC R.145 is
heavily annotated. In a concluding note to the reprint Mivart sided with Wallace
as the "most qualified of all men after Mr. Darwin" to discuss natural selection,
quoting long passages from Wallace's review of Lyell's Principles. Mivart also
revealed that his three-part series had been written 'in the latter part of the
spring of 1868."
108. Mivart to Darwin, April 25, 1870, DAR 171. See Mivart's other letters,
March 8 11870?1-June II, 1870, DAR 171.
398
JAMES MOORE
Darwin wrote wryly to Wallace, "What an ardent (and most justly)
admirer he is of you. His work, I doubt not, will have a most
potent influence against Natural Selection. The pendulum will
now swing against us." Mivart, by contrast, responded to a
presentation copy of the Descent of Man with renewed professions of esteem and repeated invitations for Darwin to visit him
again, when the book might be inscribed. "Our conflict lies rather
in the field of 'Philosophy' than in that of 'Physical Science,"' he
ventured reassuringly; ". . . I am more & more persuaded that it is
philosophical questions which will form the subjects of important
controversy in our immediate future."109
TURNING THE TABLES
Mivart and Darwin both saw the handwriting on the wall.
"Darwinism" was about to receive its definitive exposition as
metaphysically neutral science. Darwinism as such, the theory of
natural selection, was also to be eclipsed. For no single publication
contributed more directly or indirectly to forming the consensual
meaning of "Darwinism"that prevailed in the later decades of the
nineteenth century and survives almost unchallenged today than
Mivart'sGenesisof Species.10
The book contained little new. Its explosive ingredients were a
cumulative argument against natural selection, mounted with
juridical skill, and a shrewd caricature of Darwinism as the theory
of natural selection "pure and simple," and of the "absolute or
pure Darwinian" as one who accepts that natural selection is "the
explanation" of the origin of species. On these terms, of course,
neither Darwin nor Huxley nor perhaps anyone else was a
Darwinian, but then Mivart was not striving for accuracy; his
caricature was a shrewd polemical ploy. It enabled him to relegate
"Darwinism," a voguish and increasingly threatening word
"Teutonic Darwinians" were at the gate - to the scientific dustbin
at a time when Darwin himself was lending his name and reputa109. Darwin to R. Cooke, January 30, 118711 (copy), DAR 143; Darwin to
Wallace, January 30, 1871, ARW, I, 258; Mivart to Darwin, April 23, 1871,
DAR 171; and Mivart's other letters, January 19-31, 1871, DAR 171.
110. Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader (above, n. 14), pp. 28-29,
47-48, and passim;Peter J. Vorzimmer,CharlesDarwin: The Yearsof Controversy; The "Originof Species" and Its Critics, 1859-82 (London: University of
London Press, 1972), chap. 10; Bowler, Eclipseof Darwinism (above, n. 15), pp.
22-24; idem, Non-Darwinian Revolution (above,n. 14), pp. 72-74, 94-96.
399
tion to a theory of human nature that Mivart felt duty-bound to
oppose. "'I
Mivart's argument followed the pattern established in his
earlier articles, on which Genesis was based. Fortified by references to all the chief objections and objectors to natural selection
of the previous decade - Huxley on saltations, Thomson on time,
Wallace on human faculties, Owen's theory of "derivation" - it
culminated by ticking off Darwin and his disciples for dabbling in
metaphysics. Whereupon Mivart rested his case for theistic evolution on substantial forms, rational souls, and primary intuitions.
"The correlated physical forces go through their Protean transformations, have their persistent ebb and flow outside of the
world of WILL and SELF-CONSCIOUS MORAL BEING."' 12
Such sentiments were timely in January 1871. The Descent of
Man came out in February; the Paris Commune was set up in
March. Concerned Victorians, already habituated to evolution,
twigged and their greatest living naturalist was an intellectual
incendiary. His views would sanction the behavior of Frenchmen
as well as apes. "A man incurs a grave responsibility who, with the
authority of a well-earned reputation, advances at such a time the
disintegrating speculations of this book," thundered the Times at
Darwin in April. "Society must fall to pieces if Darwinism be
true," shrieked the Family Herald to a middle-brow audience in
May. By June, according to Herbert Spencer, philosopher of the
X Club, the magazines were full of essays "on Darwinism and
Religion, Darwinism and Morals, Philosophy and Darwinism, all
having reference to the question of mental evolution."' 'I
Then in July, Mivart reviewed the Descent of Man. Like
Wilberforce redivivus, writing anonymously in the Quarterly
Review, he exposed "the entire and naked truth as to the logical
consequences of Darwinism" before anxious Tory eyes. The book
was "calculated ... to disturb convictions reposing upon the
general consent of the majority of cultivated minds" and was likely
to produce "injuriouseffects ... on too many of our half-educated
classes." Man is a "free moral agent" with "a consciousness of an
11 1. St. George Mivart, On the Genesis of Species, 2nd ed. (London:
Macmillan, 1871), pp. 5, 22, 82, 148, 22(), 275.
112. Ibid., pp. 289, 296-297, 301, 329.
113. "Mr. Darwin on the Descent of Man," Times, April 8, 1871, p. 5, col.
5; Family Herald, May 20, 1871, p. 44, quoted in Ellegard, Darwin and the
General Reader, p. 101; H. Spencer to E. Youmans, June 3, 1871, in John Fiske,
Edward Livingston Youmans: Interpreter of Science for the People (New York:
D. Appleton, 1894), p. 267. For Darwin's interest in the Times's review, see
LLD, III, 138-139.
400
JAMES MOORE
absolute and immutable rule legitimately claiming obedience with
an authority necessarily supreme and absolute"; but Darwin's
analysis of the "social instinct" as the basis of morality furnishes
no adequate "reason why we should obey society at all." "Mr.
Darwin's errors," Mivart summed up, "are mainly due to a
radically false metaphysical system in which he seems (like so
1"4
many other physicists) to have become entangled."'
For Darwin this was the last straw - Mivart's authorship was
not in doubt. He had read all the articles about "Darwinism"and
worried about them."5 The Genesis of Species was "producing a
great effect against Natural Selection," he told Wallace, "and more
especially against me." There were also a good review of Genesis
by a friend of Gray's at Harvard, Chauncey Wright; Darwin had
considered making a pamphlet of it until Wallace advised him that
its language and argument were "very obscure." Now after
Mivart's "wonderfully clever" attack on the Descent Darwin determined to print the pamphlet regardless, even if "just to show that
someone will say a word against Mivart.""16He wrote immediately
for Wright's permission, congratulating him on his "power of
grasping other men's thoughts ... by thoroughly analyzing each
word." His review indeed represented Darwin's own views exactly:
"I agree to almost everything which you say." Darwin went on
buttering Wright up, pleading and plotting. The pamphlet would
need a title with Mivart's name in it. "Some 200 copies" could be
distributed to "all scientific journals, - to all the scientific
societies & to clubs & to all private individuals whom I can think
of as at all caring for such subjects." It would be a fillip for them
both. Wright agreed instantly and proposed a "somewhat sensational" title to boost sales. Darwin negotiated the reprint - a
sanguine 750 copies - with his publisher, John Murray, who in
September sent out a large number to "the Press" and "friends."
Mivart was not among them. "Many of my friends have received a
copy from 'Down,"' he groused to Darwin, requesting one
himself. The pamphlet arrived by return without an apology. "I
114. [St. George Mivart], "The Descent of Man . . . ," Quat. Rev., 131 (July
1871), 47-90 (quotations on pp. 47, 52, 79, 81, 89-90).
115. See the annotations in DRC R. 174 ([Mivarti, "The Descent of Man");
R.163 (A. B., "Darwinism and Religion," Macmillan's Mag., May 1871); R.164
(Frances Power Cobbe, "Darwinism in Morals," Theol. Rev., April 1871); and
R. 161 (A. Grant, "Philosophy and Mr. Darwin," Contemp. Rev., May 1871).
116. Chauncey Wright, "Art III ... ," Nor. Amer. Rev., 113 (July 1871),
63-103; Darwin to Wallace, July 9 and 12, 1871, and Wallace to Darwin, July
12, 1871, ARW, I, 264-265, 269.
401
was glad to show . . . that something could be said in my defence,"
Darwin muttered."'17
The Wright-Darwin pamphlet was not the Harvard mathematical philosopher's first or last intervention in debates over
natural selection. He had reviewed Darwin and Wallace several
times and written on the problem of phyllotaxis (the theory of the
origin and arrangement of leaves around their stems). His concern
with language was also evident. In 1868 he noted that "the word
Darwinism has become as familiar as Galvanism or Mormonism"
- comparable fads - and in 1875, the year of his death, Wright
coined the term "German Darwinism" to stand for theories of
evolution set forth "deductively, and as part of a system of metaphysics."'"'l But it was "Darwinism" understood as the theory of
natural selection "pure and simple" that concerned him in the
pamphlet. Mivart had accused "Darwinians" of metaphysical
abuses. Wright undertook to turn the tables.
His strategy was twofold. On the one hand, he maintained that
Darwin's theory represented the tradition of good, inductive,
experimental philosophy, with its roots in the Baconian ban on
speculation in final causes (which interfere "with the study .. . of
what is, by preconceptions necessarily imperfect as to what ought
to be") and the Newtonian aversion for "hypotheses, whether
metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical." On the other hand, he argued that Mivart had seriously
misapprehended natural selection because of his own immersion
in the tradition of bad scholastic metaphysics. Wright believed
that on "purely scientific grounds" Mivart and Darwin differed
117. Darwin to C. Wright, July 13-14 and 17 118711 (copies), DAR 148;
Wright to Darwin, August 1, 1871, DAR 181; Darwin to J. Murray, August 17,
118711, and September 13, 1871, John Murray Archives (London), Darwin
224-225,
226-227;
Cooke to Darwin, August 18, 1871, and Murray to
Darwin, September 22 118711, both DAR 171; Mivart to Darwin, September 26,
1871, DAR 171; Darwin to Mivart, September 27, 118711 (draft), DAR 96:102.
See also James Bradley Thayer, Letters of Chauncey Wright, with Some Account
of His Life (Cambridge, Mass.: privately printed, 1878), pp. 230-236. By the
end of October only fourteen copies of the pamphlet had been sold: Murray to
Darwin, November 1, 1187 11,DAR 171.
118. Quoted in Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism
(1949; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. 62, 258n75.
Chauncey Wright's article "German Darwinism" was reprinted in his Philosophical Discussions. . . (New York: Henry Holt, 1877), edited by Charles Eliot
Norton, whose sister-in-law married Darwin's eldest son William in the year of
publication. Norton's presentation copy in the Darwin Library, Cambridge,
shows no evidence of having been read, although on the back loose endpaper
Darwin wrote "excellent book."
402
JAMES MOORE
only in regard to "the extent to which the process of Natural
Selection has been effective in the modifications of species." But a
close reading of the Genesis of Species had convinced him that
this difference arose from Mivart's theology rather than Darwin's.
Mivart gave terms like "specific stability," "plasticity of form," and
"accidents of nature" scholastic connotations that Darwin never
dreamt of when he wrote the Origin. On the basis of such misconceptions, then, Mivart imagined that natural selection had
been discredited, making way for his alternative doctrine of
"specific genesis." "As if," Wright protested, "experimental philosophy itself, without aid from 'Darwinism,' would not reject his
metaphysical, occult, transcendental hypothesis" of abruptly
changing "substantial forms." This hypothesis might have the
virtue of simplicity compared to Darwin's, but it was not the "kind
of simplicity . .. which modern science has in view; and, consequently, our real knowledges, as well as our hypotheses are
much more complicated than were those of the schoolmen."'9
DARWINISM AS NATURAL SELECTION
Wright called his pamphlet Darwinism: Being an Examination
of Mr. St. George Mivart's "Genesis of Species." Although Wright
thought the title "somewhat sensational," Darwin sponsored it
without a qualm.120
Ten years earlier Darwin had enlisted objective authority from
abroad, from a Harvard naturalist, under the unlikely title Natural
Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology. Gray's pamphlet
had helped win friends for evolution by dispelling misconceptions
about an objectionable theory. Now Darwin was glad to have
the outside authority of Gray's Harvard protege, on whom he
bestowed the ultimate accolade of "Mathematician & sound reasoner," to help control the meaning of a problematic and increasingly objectionable word.'2' Wright's declared "special purpose"
119. Chauncey Wright, Darwinism: Being an Examiniation of Mr. St. George
Mivart's "Genesis of Species" (London: John Murray, 1871) pp. 9, 13, 15, 37,
43.
120. Cf. the slight changes from the title first given in Wright to Darwin,
August 1, 1871,DAR 181.
121. Darwin to J. Weir, October 11, 1871, quoted in Edward B. Poulton,
"Fifty Years of Darwinism," in Fifty Years of Darwinism: Modern Aspects of
Evolution; Centennial Addresses in Honor of Charles l)arwin . . . (New York:
Henry Holt, 1908), p. 33. On Gray and Wright, see A. Hunter Dupree, Asa
Gray, 1810-1888 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1959), pp. 290-299. See also John Angus Campbell, "The Polemical Mr.
Darwin," Quart. J. Speech, 61 (1975), 375-390.
403
in his essay was "to contribute to the theory lof natural selection]
by placing it in its proper relations to philosophical inquiries in
general."'22This he undertook in the manner I have described, by
turning the tables on Mivart: by holding him rather than the
Darwinians accountable for scientific abuses, by construing his
notion of natural selection to be metaphysical instead of theirs.
But Wright did much more than snatch natural selection "pure
and simple" from Mivart's grubby scholastic hands: he contributed
the name by which the theory, so conceived, should afterwards be
called. For the first time, clearly and succinctly, with the high
sanction of its author, the theory of natural selection in its vestal
scientificity became known as "Darwinism."
Semantic control is concerned with demarcation as well as
definition. By limiting the meaning of "Darwinism"in a controversial environment, by sponsoring a narrow usage, the WrightDarwin pamphlet enabled the theory of natural selection to be
sequestered from wider critical debates. This had been Mivart's
own strategy from the start, to define Darwinism as "'natural
selection,' pure and simple," with a view toward dispensing with it
as an evolutionary vera causa. Wright, in accepting Mivart's terms
of argument, simply promoted a different outcome: natural selection, purged of metaphysical misapprehensions, could be laid up
against the day when its scientificity would be corroborated. After
all, Darwin had curtailed the theory's explanatory power in
successive editions of the Origin - the sixth and last edition,
which he completed shortly after reissuing Wright's review,
contained a chapter-full of qualifications in answer to Mivart and the Descent of Man was significant more for revealing the
theory's limitations than its scope.'23 Natural selection had in fact
always meant less on the whole to the Darwinians than evolutionary naturalism, and in 1871, with "Darwinism" safely under
wraps, it became possible for them to leave natural selection to
the fates and get on with business as usual.
No sooner was the pamphlet published than the old troika
Darwin, Huxley, Hooker - hit the road. Darwin sent a copy to
Huxley personally. Huxley agreed with him that it would "do
good"; freshly inspired by Thomson's renewed attack on natural
selection in his August presidential address to the British Association, he too had felt "obliged to pitch into Mivart." By chance he
had just sent off a review, "mainly versus Mivart & the Quarterly
Review of the 'Descent' - but with some incidental touching up
122. Wright to Darwin, June 21, 1871, DAR 181.
123. See Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin (above, n. 11(0).chap. I 0.
404
JAMES MOORE
of Wallace."'24 Ecstatic, Darwin replied: "What a wonderful man
you are"; after "maturely considering" all Mivart's objections, "I
never felt so convinced of the general truth of the Origin. - The
pendulum is swinging against our side, but I feel positive it will
soon swing the other way; & no mortal men will do half as much
as you in giving it a start in the right direction, as you did at the
first commencement." Hooker too rallied Huxley on hearing of his
review. Huxley sent Darwin a duplicate proof with instructions to
relay it to "dear old Hooker." His policy had been to "strike hard
about those questions which men devoid of special scientific training can deal with." Papal infallibility had been promulgated at the
Vatican Council the year before, and to Huxley this was the
perfect pretext to jump up and down on Mivart's theology. He
said nothing as usual in defense of natural selection, although now
for the first time in Huxley's work it became the sine qua non of
"Darwinism."
l 25
Darwin was over the moon. "How you do smash Mivart's
theology.... I have been preeminently glad to read your discussion on his metaphysics, especially about reason & his definition
of it. . . . For me, this is one of [thel most important parts of the
Review." Hooker returned the proof to Darwin, burbling with
excitment: "What a wonderful Essayist he is, and incomparable
critic and defender of the faithful"; but Huxley's handling of
Wallace (who posed a worse threat for his spiritual adherence to
natural selection) was "a far, far greater service to Science."
Darwin paraphrased for Huxley: "I think Hooker is perhaps most
struck by the clear way you handle the metaphysics, & perhaps
this is the best of the best."'26
But to dispense with metaphysics was also to divorce "Darwinism" from ideology, and, as Martin Fichman has proposed,
this was an implicit outcome of the debate with Mivart that had
immediate practical consequences.'27 On Wright's interpretation,
124. Huxley to Darwin, September 30, 1871, DAR 99:39-42. Cf. Darwin
to Wright, October 28, 1871 (copy), DAR 148.
125. Darwin to Huxley, September 21, 118711, HP 5.279-282; Hooker to
Huxley, September 17, 1871, LLJH, JI, 129; Huxley to Darwin, September 28,
1871, DAR 99:43-46; Huxley's "Mr. Darwins Critics" (above, n. 5). pp. 444446, 456, 474-475. For Huxley's equivocal stance on Mivart's philosophy, see
the recollection by Huxley's student C. Lloyd Morgan in his Emergent Evolution
... (London: Williams and Norgate, 1923), pp. v-viii.
126. Darwin to Huxley, September 30, 118711, HP 5.283-284; Hooker to
Darwin, [October 2, 18711. LLJH, I1, 129-130; Darwin to Huxley, October 5.
118711,HP 5.288.
127. Martin Fichman, "Ideological Factors in the Di)ssemination of Dar-
405
"Darwinism" stood for a tradition of philosophical enquiry that
resolutely separated "what is" from "what ought to be." Similarly,
Huxley affirmed in his review that "Darwinism" as a scientific
theory remained untouched by Mivart's discussions of "theology,
philosophy, and ethics." The problem with "Darwinismus" in
Haeckel, "Darwinianism" in Wallace's hands, "Darwinism" in
Mivart's was that natural selection became a mechanism for
asserting partisan doctrines of human nature and society. Haeckel
was a monistic Prussian nationalist, Wallace a spiritualized
Owenite socialist, Mivart a transcendental Catholic Tory. In each
of their worldviews "Darwinism" was a political slogan; and the
divisive effects that a politicized "Darwinism" would have on
efforts to educate the Christian nation, obtain state funding for
research, and reorganize and realign scientific institutions, all on
the broad basis of evolutionary naturalism, were, by the time the
Descent of Man appeared, a complication that a budding scientific
statesman such as Huxley, his X Club comrades, and their inspiring genius, Darwin, could do without. The chastening of "Darwinism" in 1871, the cleansing of natural selection from every
taint of ideology, therefore represented an important forward step
in the career of science and scientists in Victorian Britain.'2
The practical consequences for Darwin were less conspicuous
but no less real than for Huxley. Far from feeling badgered by
Mivart into a "state of frustrating confusion," as has been alleged,
Darwin could detach himself from public controversy in 1872
with the sense of having had the final word. (Wright would defend
him against Mivart's review of the sixth edition of the Origin.)'29
Indeed, his so-called retirement at that date, his resolve to read
only "good" reviews that "contain new matter, or are written by
men whom I respect," and his resumption of full-time botanical
work all correlate closely with a new and steady reluctance to
winism," in Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences: Essays in Honor of I.
Bernard Cohen, ed. Everett Mendelsohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), pp. 471-485.
128. Huxley, "Mr. Darwin's Critics," p. 475. Cf. a political reading of
Darwin's remark to Hooker (July 24, 118691, MLD, 1. 313): "You must read
Huxley v. Comte; he never wrote anything so clever before and has smashed
everybody right and left in grand style." On Wallace and socialism, see John R.
Durant, "Scientific Naturalism and Social Reform in the Thought of Alfred
Russel Wallace," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 12 (1979), 39-58; and R. E. Hughes, "Alfred
Russel Wallace: Some Notes on the Welsh Connection," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 22
(1989), 401-418.
129. Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin, p. 251; Darwin to Wright, June 3, 1872,
LLD, 111,164.
406
JAMES MOORE
disclose his views on religion. Darwin's repeated excuses - he
hadn'tthoughtdeeply enough;he couldn'tmake up his mind;his
views weren'tworth expressing;he didn't have the time - need
not suggest perplexity;they equally show tenacity of purpose, a
determinationto shrug off as insoluble metaphysicalquestions,a
resolve that emergedfrom his controversywith Mivart.It was not
long beforeDarwin,too, wouldcallhimselfan agnostic.I3()
For Huxley, the first to see the politicaladvantageof adopting
agnosticismas a public philosophy, the reconstructionof Darwinism as the scientific theory of evolution by naturalselection
was a further asset in his campaignto raise the image of naturalistic science and convert a creationistworld to evolution. In
1871 Huxley's career turned a corner:official life began to lay
closer hold on him. He sat almost continuouslyon Royal Commissions for many years; he served as secretary of the Royal
Society for a decade (and later as president);he emerged as a
leader in the strugglefor educationalreform,urgingin hundreds
of lecturesto teachers,workingmen,and public audiencesup and
down the countrythat scientifictrainingshouldbe introducedinto
the generalcurriculum.He was more than once asked to standfor
Parliament.In 1871 Huxley'spolitics also changed:he broke with
Spencer's"administrative
nihilism"and supportedmoderatestate
reforms.He began to develop the view that society was in some
sense opposed, and to be opposed, to the ordinary course of
nature.'3'
130. Cf. Darwin to Hooker, September 8, 1868, MLD. I, 304 ("I am not
sure whether it would not be wisest for scientific men quite to ignore the whole
subject of religion") with the letters dating from late 1871 in Calendar 7924,
8070, 8099, 8110, 8145, 9105, 911 1. Darwin's earliest-known reference to
himself as an agnostic came in May 1879. At this time also he apparently wrote
the passage in his autobiography, "I for one must be content to remain an
Agnostic." See James Moore, "Of Love and Death: Why Darwin 'gave up
Christianity,'' in idem, History, Humanity and Evolution (above, n. 68), pp.
195-229.
131. See LLTH, 323; Bibby, T H. Huxley (above, n. 87); Oma Stanley, "T.
H. Huxley's Treatment of 'Nature,"' J. Hist. Ideas, 18 (1957), 1220-127; and
Erling Eng, "Thomas Henry Huxley's Understanding of 'Evolution,"' Hist. Sci.,
16 (1978), 291-303. Huxley composed his attack on Mivart in "Mr. Darwin's
Critics" during the same three-week period at St. Andrews in September 1871
when he wrote his critique of Spencer's politics in "Administrative Nihilism" (CE
[above, n. 31 1, 251-289). Cf. Huxley's abandonment of a major anthropological
project about this time (LLTH, II, 451) with both his presidential address in
1878 to the anthropology department of Section D of the British Association,
Report of the Forty-eighth Meeting. . . (London: John Murray, 1879), pp. 573578, and his political "Prefatory Note" to the English translation of Ernst
Haeckel's Freedom in Science and Teaching (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1879), pp.
v-xx.
407
Life in Britain did seem more than ever to be a struggle for
existence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, during the
so-called great depression, and Darwin's name was often invoked
in support of policies that would soon be denominated "Social
Darwinism." This was never Huxley's practice. The Malthusian
struggle for existence served him well as a check on inordinate
political hopes, but in his many interventions in late-Victorian
public affairs he never confused this with "Darwinism" or the
theory of natural selection.'32
"'Darwinism,"' Huxley told his Royal Highness the Prince of
Wales and other dignitaries assembled in 1885 at the unveiling of
Darwin's statue in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, was something that "in one form or another, sometimes
strangely distorted and mutilated, became an everyday topic of
men's speech" after the publication of the Origin of Species, "the
object of an abundance both of vituperation and of praise, more
often than of serious study."'33As for natural selection, it was a
theory to which Huxley never fully subscribed, although he held
that its nonteleological naturalism represented "the fundamental
principles of a scientific conception of the universe." Now in
troubled times, with scientists like himself embroiled in controversies over far-reaching questions of imperial policy and industrial reform, it was possible to bracket "Darwinism" and "natural
selection" together - both of them contentious, both misunderstood - and set them aside. The "quintessence of Darwinism" was
now natural selection. Natural selection was of such little consequence that in a famous essay celebrating "the coming of age of
the Origin of Species," Huxley could omit even to allude to the
theory. "The first thing seems to me to drive the fact of evolution
into people's heads," he excused himself to Darwin; "when that is
once safe, the rest will come easy."'34
The rest did not "come easy." Nor did it come soon. But
Huxley kept "Darwinism" out of politics, or tried to, and for his
sagacity or adroitness he was made a privy councillor in 1892.
Lesser men who lacked his circumspection still bore witness
ironically to its major premise, if the historian and political
economist James Bonar, writing a year later, is to be believed: "It
132. See Michael J. Helfand, "T. H. Huxley's 'Evolution of Ethics': The
Politics of Evolution and the Evolution of Politics," Vict. Stud., 20 (1977), 159177.
133. T. H. Huxley, "The Darwin Memorial" (1 885), CE. 11,249.
134. Huxley, "On the Reception" (above, n. 5), p. 195; Huxley to Darwin,
May 10, 1880, LLTH, II, 13.
408
JAMES MOORE
seems clear from the want of unanimity among Darwinians in
matters of Sociology and Politics that the principles of the Master
are perfectly neutral on such questions."'35
Thus on the evening of August 8, 1894, before the British
Association at Oxford, when another late great Tory leader, like
Disraeli in 1864, had declared himself "on the side of the angels"
as far as natural selection was concerned, Huxley could not
gainsay him. Natural selection had been put on ice; science and
politics met and kissed. "Darwinism was not evolution." Evolution, that "comfortable word," was the "fundamental doctrine"
that he and Hooker and Darwin's "old guard" had maintained for
"so many years," and on which Salisbury now had "put the seal of
his authority." Of "Darwinism," rather, it could be said what
Huxley afterwards remarked of "ecclesiastical conservatism and
orthodoxy" since his encounter with Wilberforce three decades
before: "E pur si muove!" 136
Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to thank Simon Schaffer, Iwan Morus, Alison
Winter, Rob Iliffe, Graham White, and other members of the
Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University for advising and encouraging me as I prepared
this essay. Frank James of the Royal Institution, Ralph Colp, Jr.,
and Adrian Desmond also gave timely help. My interest in
"Darwinism" as a conceptual and semantic problem was first
stimulated in 1977 by John Greene, to whom I remain obliged for
many things.
135. James Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy in Some of Their
Historical Relations (1893; 3rd ed., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922). p.
361. On the lesser men, see Bernard Lightman, "Ideology, Evolution and LateVictorian Agnostic Popularizers," in Moore, History, Humanity and Evolution,
pp. 285-309.
136. Huxley to L. Campbell, August 18, 1894, LLTHI, 11, 379; also the
epigraph on the title-page of Haeckel's Generelle Morphologie (above, n. 75).

Deconstructing Darwinism- The Politics of Evolution in the 1860s

Transcription

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