Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  During the same Cambridge visit, Darwin plodded off to see his old professor of geology, Adam Sedgwick, in Trinity College. Sedgwick had lost none of his animation. Well into his eighties, he walked and talked Darwin into the ground while disclosing that he had found it impossible to forgive his former pupil when the Origin of Species was published.36

  On Monday I saw Sedgwick who was most cordial & kind: in the morning I thought that his mind was enfeebled; in the evening he was brilliant & quite himself. His affection & kindness charmed us all. My visit to him was in one way unfortunate; for after a long sit he proposed to take me to the Museum; & I could not refuse, & in consequence he utterly prostrated me; so that we left Cambridge next morning, & I have not recovered the exhaustion yet. Is it not humiliating to be thus killed by a man of 86, who evidently never dreamed that he was killing me.—As he said to me “Oh I consider you as a mere baby to me.”37

  The two made their peace over the Origin. But “Cambridge without dear Henslow was not itself.”

  The inevitability of these work-based family connections was to emerge similarly in the summer of 1871. Darwin sent George and Francis to the United States for a vacation tour accompanied by a raft of introductions to all his American correspondents. The boys established valuable personal contacts for him among the transatlantic Darwinians. Furthermore, in a hotel in San Francisco, two guests saw the name Darwin in the registration book and called on them. One of the men had lunched with Darwin a year or two beforehand at Erasmus’s house in London.38

  V

  While he was writing The Descent of Man, Darwin’s growing celebrity took a fresh turn. In 1870 he received a letter from Lord Salisbury, the chancellor of Oxford University, awarding him an honorary degree, the D.C.L. (Doctor of Civil Law), the highest public honour that the university could bestow.

  He was taken aback. Oxford was the last place from which he might have expected to hear. The university was renowned for its high church religiosity and conservatism in all matters scientific. It, after all, had been the setting for Huxley and Wilberforce’s duel. Darwin’s old opponent John Phillips still ruled the Natural History Museum with a rod of iron. Holman Hunt was about to install his painting called Light of the World in Keble College chapel, and Burne-Jones his stained-glass window of Saint Catherine in Christ Church Cathedral. Hunt had “a holy horror of Darwin,” exclaimed his friend Edward Lear.39 At the same time, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, mathematics tutor at Christ Church and author of Alice in Wonderland, was drawing on the dons and internal politics of university life for inspiration. The Duchess in Alice in Wonderland was the very image of Bishop Wilberforce. “If everybody minded their own business,” she growled, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”40 In short, Darwin could not imagine an institution less likely to appreciate the cool rationalism of his work. Nevertheless he did have acquaintances in some of the new science departments, including Henry Acland, professor of medicine, George Rolleston in anatomy, and the younger Benjamin Brodie, professor of chemistry, a freethinker who refused to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles.

  It turned out that the honour came directly from Lord Salisbury, a well-known doctrinal reactionary. Yet Salisbury was also a cultivated man of the old school, widely read in the humanities, soon to become leader of the Conservative party and ultimately (after Disraeli’s death) Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister. In more incidental fashion, he was the uncle of the biologist Frank Balfour at Cambridge and a distant relation by marriage to the Allen side of the Wedgwood family. (“Will George be back for the Hatfield ball?” asked an Allen aunt after hearing of an invitation to the Salisburys’ mansion. “Lady Salisbury is recollecting her cousinhood very graciously.”) Trying to put Oxford science more firmly on the map, even though he felt that the universities should teach nothing contrary to scripture, Salisbury nominated Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall for his first batch of honorary degrees. In retrospect, it seems clear that the new rationalism was by now acceptable even to Lord Salisbury.

  But the Hebdomadal council—the ruling body of dons—erupted. Edward Pusey, the high church ritualist, took Salisbury’s proposal as an outright attack on faith. Angrily, he put forward three alternative nominees. When Benjamin Jowett opposed Pusey’s nominees solely to spite him, Henry Acland and Henry Liddon attempted to talk Pusey into accepting the original nominees. “I wish to keep clear of the question whether Darwin’s inferences are correct,” Acland told Pusey. “It is Darwin’s exceeding eminence and his character as a working man that justify and require me to beg you respectfully to pause before bringing about his rejection here.”41

  As it turned out, Pusey said he was not “against Darwin” or even science as such. He occasionally discussed evolutionary matters with Rolleston, the university professor of anatomy, and later delivered a thoughtful sermon reconciling science and revelation. It was Huxley who irritated him. He allowed himself to be persuaded about Darwin as long as Huxley’s name was dropped. The whole business was probably a fair reflection of how Huxley and Darwin were individually regarded by the theological establishment of the day—one acceptable at a pinch, the other emphatically not.42

  Huxley took mischievous delight in his rejection.

  There seems to have been a tremendous shindy in the Hebdomadal board about certain persons who were proposed; and I am told that Pusey came to London to ascertain from a trustworthy friend who were the blackest heretics out of the list proposed—and that he was glad to assent to your being doctored, when he got back—in order to keep out seven devils worse than that first!43

  Darwin’s degree was never awarded. Even though it was announced in the Daily News on 20 June 1870, Darwin wrote back to Salisbury saying that he was too ill to make the journey to Oxford for the ceremony. Since honorary degrees were awarded only in person, Darwin seemingly took a conscious decision to refuse the honour. After he received Huxley’s letter, the circumstances were probably now so fraught in his mind that his immediate reaction was to withdraw, despite Huxley’s declaration that “I wish you could have gone to Oxford, not for your sake, but for theirs.” Darwin apparently did not wish to be used as a political tool. Altogether more buoyant, Huxley took advantage of the changed situation and slipped a paragraph into Nature gloating that Darwin “declined the compliment” from Oxford.

  Some of the Oxford dons were not prepared to let Darwin get away so easily. In a previously unnoticed Hebdomadal motion, Liddon proposed that Darwin’s degree be conferred in absentia, a concession that would require a separate resolution and another vote of council. This took place. The vote was a tie, and according to the rules, not passed. In effect, Darwin’s degree was withdrawn and Salisbury was defeated.

  Darwin never expressed any regrets about turning the Oxford degree down. But he was at a loss to explain himself. When Bartholomew Sulivan, his old friend from the Beagle, wrote to congratulate him on the honour, he could only say, “I shall this autumn publish another book partly on Man, which I daresay many will decry as very wicked.—I could have travelled to Oxford, but could no more have withstood the excitement of a commemoration than I could a ball at Buckingham Palace.”44

  Huxley, on the other hand, relished rejecting the university’s Linacre professorship of anatomy when it was offered to him in 1881, and then refused the mastership of University College Oxford, because, as he patronisingly said, of his being “too busy.” But he caved in when offered an honorary degree in his own right in 1885. He accepted this with alacrity. “I begin to think I may yet be a bishop,” he purred in gratification.

  VI

  Meanwhile Darwin struggled onwards with his book. “Many interruptions,” he noted in his diary. Judging from the final product, he was trying to do too many different things. In order to show that humans were incontrovertibly members of the animal kingdom, he presented a barrage of information about the natural history of mankind drawn from a wide variety of sources. He also worked his way through the links between the mental faculti
es of animals and humans. He then discussed language, morals, and music. Most significantly, he gave his views on “sexual selection,” an important development in his schemes that accounted, as he thought, for the diverging physiques and behaviour patterns of males and females, animal or human. Towards the end, he argued that this notion of sexual selection could explain the origin of human geographical diversity, perhaps even the foundations of human civilisation itself.45 The result was a book packed with details that more or less obscured the important points he was trying to make.

  He opened the attack by stating that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.” He substantiated this with a series of cameo observations of animal behaviour, ranging from horses that knew the way home to ants that defended their property, chimpanzees that used twigs as implements, bower-birds that admired the beauty of their nests, and cats that dreamed of rabbits in their sleep.46 The domestic nature of Darwin’s observations in this area, the large doses of willing anthropomorphism, his evident delight in traditional country pursuits, and the glimpses he provided of the congenial home life of a Victorian gentleman, “these fairy tales of science,” as Frances Power Cobbe was to call them, probably went some of the way towards softening readers before he confronted them with the shock of apes in the family tree.

  A large part of his book was dedicated to discussing the animal origins of the faculties that make humans feel fully human—language, reasoning ability, morality, self-consciousness, the religious sense, memory, and imagination. “No one supposes that one of the lower animals reflects whence he comes or whither he goes—what is death or what is life, and so forth. But can we feel sure that an old dog with an excellent memory and some power of imagination, as shewn by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures in the chase? and this would be a form of self-consciousness.”47

  Explaining the power of human speech was obviously critical for him, not only because the gift of language was intrinsic to the definition of being human, but also because linguistics and comparative philology then held a leading position in academic scholarship. By the 1870s, there had developed something of an evolutionary swing in the specialist study of linguistics, where ideas about the “descent” of words were generating fruitful insights into the histories of languages.48 The imagery moved both ways. Lyell had illustrated the value of parallels between languages and the fossil record in his Antiquity of Man, and Darwin also mentioned them in various editions of the Origin of Species, praising his cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood, F. W. Farrar, and the German philologist August Schleicher for their identification of the telltale vestiges of ancient languages in words of the modern day. Groups of languages could be classified by relationship, just like species, and the presence of rudiments both in languages and species “is remarkable.” Darwin was interested to hear by letter that Haeckel had given a copy of the German translation of the Origin of Species to Schleicher in 1860, and that Schleicher reconstructed the genealogy of Indo-European languages partly in imitation of Haeckel’s evolutionary trees.49 Schleicher joked to Haeckel that philologists were much better at tracing ancestral connections between words than evolutionists were with animals.

  But the genealogy of tongues was somewhat different from the emergence of human speech. Darwin particularly wished to contest Friedrich Max Müller’s view that the faculty of language presented an insuperable barrier between animals and humans. Müller had said as much when reviewing a translation of Schleicher’s pamphlet on “Darwinism tested by the science of language” for Nature in 1870.50 Darwin had come to believe that the ability to speak must have emerged quite differently, in a gradual fashion from the social vocalisations of apes, and was developed further in early human societies through the imitation of natural sounds.

  As monkeys certainly understand much that is said to them by man, and as in a state of nature they utter signal-cries of danger to their fellows, it does not appear altogether incredible, that some unusually wise ape-like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate to his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger. And this would have been a first step in the formation of language.51

  Darwin was similarly daring when dealing with religion. Taking his cue from the cultural anthropologist Edward Tylor, he mapped out a comparative evolution of the religious sense, proposing that religious belief was ultimately nothing more than a primitive urge to bestow a cause on otherwise inexplicable natural events. At first, dreams might have given rise to the idea of spirits, as Tylor suggested, or to animism, where plants and animals seem as if they are imbued with spirits. Darwin suggested that these beliefs could easily grow into a conviction about the existence of one or more gods who directed human affairs. As societies advanced in civilisation, ethical values would became attached to such ideas. Polytheism would turn into monotheism. “Strange superstitions and customs” would give way to the “improvement of reason, to science, and our accumulated knowledge.” Darwin was careful to separate this instinctive urge to believe from any developing moral feelings. By keeping the two separate he could show the biological roots of both, circumventing critics who might argue that higher moral feelings were bestowed by a single omnipotent deity. In short, he made no secret of his view that he did not believe religion to have any rational foundations at all. Human beings have a biological need to believe, he suggested. Audaciously, he compared religious devotion to the “love of a dog for its master.”

  He cautiously tried out these views first on his more thoughtful friends and relatives, taking a chance visit to the Wedgwoods in London to consult his niece Julia (Snow) Wedgwood. “F is hard at work on the moral question of man,” said Emma in 1870, “& had talks with Snow about defining religious feeling, in which she only admitted love & reverence & left out fear, but owned she was mistaken after all. F is deeply interested in the question & I wish it was over as it absorbs him too much & he had to lie by one day.”52

  As for morality, he could not resist pointing out that the concept was only relative. Long observational experience with household pets, and no doubt with his children as well, told him that living beings had to learn the difference between “good” and “bad” behaviour—the knowledge was not innate. Members of “primitive” societies similarly held very diverse ideas about behaviour. In this he cited the way that some tribes adhere to value systems that shocked Europeans. If honey-bees ever became as intelligent as humans, he continued wickedly, unmarried females would think it a “sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.”53

  Of course, Darwin proposed this for effect rather than logical necessity, because he went on to argue that the higher human values emerged and spread only as human civilisation progressed, meaning that duty, self-sacrifice, virtue, altruism, and humanitarianism were acquired fairly late in human history and perhaps not to the same degree by all tribes or groups. Some groups displayed these qualities more than others, he noted; and it is clear that he thought there had been a progressive advance of moral sentiment from ancient societies (such as ancient Rome), which he said were “barbaric,” to the polite world that he personally inhabited. “How little the old Romans knew of [sympathy] is shewn by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions. The very idea of humanity, as far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas.” In this manner, he kept the English gentry to the front of his mind, and the mind of his readers, as representative of all that was best in nineteenth-century culture. The “higher” values were, for him, self-evidently the values of his own class and nation.

  Even the sense of duty was for him biologically based in the social instincts. “The highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive, is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts.” To be sure, Darwin praised the intrinsic nobility of this moral feeling, quoting Immanuel Kant. “Duty! Wondrous thought, that workest neither by
fond insinuation, flattery nor by any threat … whence thy original?”54 Yet he claimed even the feeling of duty might emerge from animal sources. As he described it, a monkey who voluntarily sacrificed herself for her offspring would not only ensure her children’s survival but also supply the next generation with the hereditary “gemmules” that favoured such action again. His social values came into play. Personally, he declared, he would rather be descended from a heroic little monkey that sacrificed her life than from a savage “who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.”55

  Plainly, although he rejected the outward trappings of the established Anglican religion, he subscribed wholeheartedly to its underlying values and the presumed onward march of civilisation. Like Wallace, and so many other contemporaries, he believed in the hierarchy of nations.

  Obscure as is the problem of the advance of civilisation, we can at least see that a nation which produced during a lengthened period the greatest number of highly intellectual, energetic, brave, patriotic, and benevolent men, would generally prevail over less favoured nations.56

  But in truth, he found it difficult to give an actual biological ancestry to humans. Briefly he tracked humans back as far as the Old World monkeys (Catarrhina), saying that the human species must have diverged from the original monkey stock considerably earlier than anthropoid apes, probably at a point close to now-extinct forms of Lemuridae. He further recognised the great apes as humanity’s nearest relatives. Darwin knew very little about fossil monkeys and could name only Dryopithecus, the largest fossil ape identified in the deposits of Europe at that time. He knew almost as little about fossil mankind, making only a passing reference to the Neanderthal skull, still a disputed fossil. For the second edition of The Descent of Man he asked Huxley to fill this gap with an up-to-date essay about fossil finds. He could only guess at possible reasons for human ancestral forms to have abandoned the trees, to lose their hairy covering, and to become bipedal. Nevertheless, he used Haeckel’s work in this area to push the primate line back through marsupials, monotremes, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, ending up at the ascidians, grandfathers of them all. Darwin wrote that Aleksandr Kovalevsky had informed him of his researches into vertebrate ancestry at the Zoological Station in Naples.