The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  § The eventual collapse of Napoleon’s empire left Hegel unfazed; he simply switched his loyalties back to Prussia and ended his days extolling its monarch, Frederick William III, as the new “world historical individual.” That particular king proved a disappointment. However, Hegelians and their offspring continued to look for such a figure, the charismatic embodiment of “substantive rationality and immediate actuality,” from Mussolini and Hitler to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.

  ‖ The phrase, in fact, was not his but the poet Heinrich Heine’s. Nor was “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” (Louis Blanc) or “The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains” (Jean-Paul Marat) or “Workers of the world, unite!” (Karl Schapper). And it was Blanc, a French Socialist, who first coined the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat.

  a Called A System of Logic, it tried to argue that all correct inference flows from induction—that is, from sensory experience. Even the classic example of deductive reasoning, “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal,” derives its truth, Mill argued, from our noticing that individuals we know die, which leads us to conclude that eventually all men will die, including Socrates. Modern logicians are not so easily convinced. However, A System of Logic was an instant bestseller when it was published in 1843, and copies appeared in virtually every bookshop in London: proof of what a literate public really looks like.

  b See chapter 4.

  c Explaining why fell to a coterie of Mill followers on the Continent, the so-called Austrian school of economists. See chapter 29.

  d One of those was Thomas Macaulay, who felt Mill’s worries about excessive conformity in modern democratic society were misplaced compared with the threat of a collapse of any intellectual standard. “He is really crying ‘fire,’ ” Macaulay wrote in his journal, “in Noah’s flood.”

  “If [the] individual cannot propagate he has no issue—so with species.” Charles Darwin (1809–82)

  Twenty-five

  THE SCALE OF NATURE: DARWIN, EVOLUTION, AND ARISTOTLE’S GOD

  The fundamental principles of all nature are change and motion; he who does not recognize this truth does not recognize nature herself.

  —Aristotle, Physics, Book III, Chapter 1

  All nature exists in a state of perpetual improvement.

  —Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia (1794–96)

  That night they made camp.

  They pulled their lancha up on the beach and started their campfire, the smoke rising in the twilight while vampire bats circled in the trees overhead. It was their third day out from San Fernando as they paddled along the sluggish Apure River. The brown water was sometimes so shallow that the lancha would get stuck on a sandbar and the natives would have to get out and push it off. All around them was the forest: a thick green canopy that hung over the river, while monkeys screamed and strange birds called from the branches of cedar, mahogany, mimosa, and brazilwood.1

  The gringo had samples of all of them in his bag, along with herbs, fruits, bugs, and butterflies. There were also rocks and mineral samples, together with his three constant companions: his notebook, his compass, and his sextant, which he used to chart their course until he reached his final goal.

  It had been a strenuous day, and they slept a deep, dreamless sleep. In the morning the gringo set off again on foot, observing and writing in his notebook. After a few hours he circled back to camp, where he caught a whiff of breakfast being cooked on the campfire. Before the full steaming heat of the day set in and the inevitable armies of mosquitoes descended (“persons who have not navigated the great rivers of equinoctial America,” he would later write, “can scarcely conceive how the multitude of these little animals can render vast regions almost uninhabitable”),2 he decided to wander along the shore to the sandbar where the day before they had caught a glimpse of sleeping crocodiles.

  An insect buzzed over his head, and he brushed it away. He had stopped to examine an interesting agglomeration of mica embedded in the sand when he realized he was standing on the footprint of a jaguar. It was a fresh footprint.

  He rose slowly and glanced to his right. There in the foliage, under the shade of a ceiba tree, was a large adult jaguar. He had once seen a tiger in the Frankfurt Zoo, but this was no zoo. When the jaguar turned its luminescent green eyes in his direction, he felt the blood drain from his face and his heart pound in his chest.

  He forced himself to remember the advice the Indians had given him about an encounter like this: Don’t run; don’t show any fear. I must turn and then calmly, deliberately retrace my steps. Do nothing to startle the jaguar, or that might be the last thing I ever do.

  Step by gingerly step, the gringo moved back toward camp. A monkey screamed overhead, startling him. “How often was I tempted to look back in order to assure myself that I was not pursued!” he remembered later.3 Finally, after fifty yards or so, he did turn back. The jaguar was still there, motionless, but its attention was on a herd of capybaras crossing the river farther downstream. Its mind was on breakfast, and suddenly so was the gringo’s.

  He arrived back at camp and breathlessly told his story to the natives and his assistant, a French doctor named Aimé Bonpland. The men laughed and shook their heads.

  “Why do you do it, Señor Humboldt?” one of the natives later asked him. “How is it possible to believe that you have left your own country to come to this river to be devoured by mosquitoes, and measure lands you do not own?”4

  Why? Alexander von Humboldt only smiled in reply. It was a question he had heard often during his days in Brazil. If he had wanted to formulate a short but complete answer, he would have said: I am here to read the Book of Nature.5 I am here to see it in all its forms, colors, and powers; to hear it in the cries of the sapajous, the moans of the alouatta apes, the cries of the curassow, the parraka; to study it in the trees and plants and the myriad butterflies and mosquitoes: and yes, even in the eyes of the jaguar. I am here to trace that great underlying harmony that pulls all of God’s creation, including its plants and animals and rivers and mountains and unseen magnetic currents and the distant stars and planets, into one single cosmos. For Alexander von Humboldt, the friend of Goethe and Schiller, feeling that overarching harmony was the very essence of the sublime.6

  The next day, they reached their goal. The brackish waters of the Apure rounded a tree-lined bend and Humboldt found himself gazing across a vast expanse of water. Under a heavy leaden sky, wind stirred the distant trees. A strong current suddenly seized their boat as whitecap waves washed up to the gunwales of the lancha. The natives grabbed their paddles to help steady the boat. They were in the flow of the mighty Orinoco River.

  Over the next several days, Humboldt would watch natives hunting monkeys with blowguns and would test the voltage of electric eels.7 He would make a series of readings of the earth’s electromagnetic field, which in the next decade would become the basis of a new scientific law.* He would also chart the exact geographic position where the Orinoco flowed into the headwaters of the Amazon River, thus forcing every map around the world to be changed.

  When after three years in Latin America he finally returned to Europe in the summer of 1804, he wrote an account of his journeys called Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. It would inspire a new generation of naturalists and botanists and zoologists, and one English teenager in particular. He was a medical student at the University of Edinburgh and the son of a wealthy doctor. His father had decided young Charles would make a better clergyman instead and had sent him to Cambridge. There, in his last year, he read Humboldt’s book and became enchanted by its picture of rain forests and tropical sunsets and strange plants and beasts. “It stirred up in me a burning zeal,” Charles Darwin remembered, “to add even the most humble contribution, to the noble structure of Natural Science.”8

  Darwin’s contribution would be far from humble and would reach far beyond natural science. It
would change forever the way we thought not only about the natural world, but about our own social universe—even the meaning of human life. Darwin took his original inspiration from Humboldt’s dream of uncovering the hidden interrelations that bound all nature, both living and nonliving, into one constantly changing system. The German naturalist was “like another sun,” Darwin would tell a friend in 1831, “who illumines everything I behold.”9 That spring he himself reached Brazil, on his own voyage with a small navy surveying vessel called HMS Beagle.

  There Darwin realized that the light from Humboldt’s work was only the reflection of another, more distant luminous influence. This had been a man walking on a sunlit beach on the isle of Lesbos many centuries before, who stooped to pick up a tiny mollusk and wondered what was inside.

  The eighteenth century had seen an enormous flourishing of the physical sciences, especially physics and astronomy. Pierre-Simon Laplace and Leonhard Euler raised Newton’s mechanics to a level of exquisite mathematical precision, like a finely made Swiss watch. Astronomers like Frederick William Herschel made almost daily discoveries with their new advanced telescopes, which both expanded and confirmed Newton’s picture of the universe and his theory of universal gravitation.

  The natural sciences, however, hung back. Zoology, botany, and “natural history” (what we call biology) was still stuck at the starting line of Aristotle’s definition of science, that of classification. Their classifications according to species and genus had become very sophisticated, thanks to the great Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78). It’s the basic system we still use. Thanks to hundreds of naturalists who collected biological specimens for zoos and botanical gardens and medical researchers, there was plenty of observation and description of the world’s life forms, or what Linnaeus had dubbed “the system of nature.” Still, no one had yet found a satisfactory structure for explaining how everything fit together—certainly nothing remotely close to what Newton had done for the physical sciences.

  With the expansion of Europeans to every part of the globe, from Latin America to the South Pacific, the sheer variety of plants and animals they found was astounding. Humboldt alone brought back no less than sixty thousand botanical specimens from his Latin American trip; more than one in ten were completely unknown to European researchers.10 The new discoveries forced botanists and zoologists to toss out the old ways of thinking about their disciplines—including Descartes’s mechanics and Aristotle’s vital principles, which had somehow hung on into the 1600s—without offering a clue as to how to construct a sure new way.

  The ongoing study of physiology and anatomy did yield a lot of useful information about function and organic structure, especially within related species. But there was nothing that helped to relate botany to zoology the way physics was now intimately related to astronomy; in fact, physiology was considered part of physics.11 Certainly there was nothing that passed that ultimate test of an exact Newtonian science, the power of prediction. John Michell had predicted the existence of binary star systems three decades before Herschel found one with his telescope in 1796.12 But who had ever been able to predict the existence of a new marine animal or mammal, let alone explain what caused them to come into existence?

  In 1800, the life sciences seemed doomed to be a science of observation and description only. They offered no explanatory power and no possibility of arriving at precise laws to explain why embryos become one animal instead of another; or how vertebrates are related to invertebrates or horses to pigeons—let alone elephants to elephant grass. John Locke had even concluded it was impossible. The study of living nature, he decided, could never be raised to the level of genuine knowledge like Newton’s Principia, because it offered no route to mathematical certainty.13

  It had been Alexander von Humboldt’s mission to change that mind-set. Before he died in 1859, Humboldt’s great gift to his fellow naturalists was to tell them that what their work lacked in deductive Euclidean precision was more than made up for in buzzing, blooming real life. What they were observing and classifying weren’t just birds or plants or mineral samples. They were students of empirical reality in all its vivid richness and diversity. Beneath this seemingly infinite variety lurked clues of a vast underlying interlocking system.

  Why was Humboldt so confident the secret of the system could be cracked? Because man was part of that system of nature himself. He carried its laws not only in the makeup of his mind but in his heart and feelings. Humboldt’s Romanticism was expressed not through poetry or a paintbrush, but with a notebook, compass, and specimen jar. “A book on nature,” he wrote, “should produce the impressions that she herself elicits … in a vivid language that will stimulate and elicit feelings,” including a sense of the sublime.14 Wordsworth had said, “When we dissect we murder.” Humboldt replied: When we dissect we discover a living part of ourselves.

  But where to start? Curiously enough, there was a clue on the very island where Humboldt did some of his most exacting research and where a statue to Humboldt still stands in its capital city. This was the island of Cuba, where three hundred years earlier a man in a drab brown friar’s cowl had forced the West to confront the way it thought about human nature, reason, and the history of mankind.

  Born around 1474, Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas had two lives. The first was as a Spanish planter on a freshly conquered Cuba, where he received a royal grant of land tenure (encomienda) in 1513. Las Casas proceeded to rule over his Indian serfs with a brutality that was not unusual in the early years of the Spanish conquest of the New World but was unusual for a man of the Church—in fact, a Dominican friar.

  All that ended one Sunday in 1514, when a fellow Dominican priest refused to give Las Casas communion because of his sadistic treatment of his Indians. The refusal plunged Las Casas into a severe emotional crisis, after which he gave up his encomienda and began his second life: as the devoted protector of the Indians in Cuba, dedicated to altering their servile status under the Spanish Empire.

  That empire had grown with astonishing speed. In 1519–21 Hernán Cortés and a handful of men had conquered the Aztecs, destroying their great cities and toppling their temples. Francisco Pizarro and an even smaller band of conquistadors did the same to the Incas, while Spanish settlers overran the islands of the Caribbean. Less than thirty years after the death of Columbus, Europeans had spread devastation and disease across the southern lands of the New World, reducing the native population to barely a fraction of its pre-conquest size: perhaps 1.5 million died in Mexico alone.15 The Spanish Crown had introduced the encomienda system to keep the remainder working as virtual slaves, and to extract the wealth from lands that reached from the southern tip of South America to California and New Mexico.

  The process of building this vast empire and extracting its wealth, however, had left a nagging doubt. By 1550, the Spanish were asking themselves a classic Platonic question: Our empire might be great, but is it just? Spain’s canon lawyers framed the issue slightly differently. By what right did the king of Spain claim sovereign rule over a people and land more than three thousand miles away?

  The issue was considered so grave and pressing that a church council was called to resolve it, at Valladolid in 1550. With King Charles V himself presiding, Spanish churchmen assembled to hear a debate on the moral and legal status of the New World’s indigenous peoples. Arguing the Crown’s case was Juan de Sepúlveda, brilliant canon lawyer, humanist, and “one of the best trained minds of his time.”16 Traveling across the Atlantic to argue the other side was Las Casas.

  He was now seventy-five, but still sharp and vigorous. He was the acknowledged champion of the belief that native Americans not only were capable of being baptized and received into the Church (many clergymen argued otherwise), but had deserved the same rights as Spaniards—including the right to govern themselves without Spanish rule. He had forced an end to the encomienda system in 1542. Now he aimed to dissolve the Spanish Empire itself.

  Sepúlveda rose to spe
ak first. The centerpiece of his argument was drawn from Aristotle’s assertion in Book I of the Politics that some peoples are slaves by nature because they lack the reason needed to live in society and thus require a master to supply it.† The Indians of the New World, Sepúlveda insisted, were such a people. Their heathen religion and customs such as human sacrifice, cannibalism, and incest (the Inca emperors married their sisters to perpetuate their royal lineage) marked them as barbarians whom God “has willed to lack reason” and therefore doomed to perpetual servility.

  “How can we doubt,” Sepúlveda said, “that these people, so uncivilized, so barbaric, so contaminated with so many sins and obscenities,” are “as children to adults” and unfit to govern themselves? Therefore, conquest and rule by a civilized nation like Spain was not only just but actually for their own good: a classic argument for imperialism, then and later.17

  Whatever is, must be right. Sepúlveda’s arguments were an example of how Aristotle could be applied to justify a status quo, regardless of its obvious shortcomings. Las Casas, however, threw Aristotle right back at him, together with an appeal to natural law that he borrowed from the most famous member of his order: Saint Thomas Aquinas.18

  Las Casas pointed out that far from being natural slaves, the natives before the conquest showed every one of the characteristics that Aristotle defined as the basis of the good life. They had lived in large cities; they had a regular system of government that conformed to the norms of natural law; they had an established language and religion and laws of marriage; they even (contrary to Sepúlveda’s assertions) had a sense of private property. They also had a sophisticated grasp of mathematics—that classic measure of rationality—and astronomy, and had built monuments that were the equal of the Pyramids of Egypt.19