4. Darwinian Critics
Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace
Thomas Henry Huxley
In the middle of the last century, Thomas Henry Huxley, in what is now a well-known letter, wrote to his sister that he intended to leave "his mark somewhere and it shall be clear and distinct
T.H.H., his mark." | [1] |
T. H. H. did leave his mark. Indeed, he left it all over the place, in almost canine fashion, during that century in which he so passionately acted. And his name, for better or for worse, has remained in the public mind.
Huxley is best known as Darwin's bulldog, but such an epithet scarcely captures his multifaceted and complex career.[2] For our story, such a characterization is ironic, for Huxley saw—and stated—many of the problems in approaching ethics from an evolutionary point of view. Huxley's critique, therefore, is of special interest, for in spite of any differences they may have had, he was the leading popularizer in Britain of Darwin's ideas.[3] Along with
[1] Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York: D. Appleton, 1900), 1: 69.
[2] See William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), and Cyril Bibby's two books, T. H. Huxley: Scientist, Humanist and Educator (London: Watts, 1959) and Scientist Extraordinary: The Life and Scientific Work of Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825-1895 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1972). An evaluation of Huxley's place in the world of science is found in Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850-1875 (London: Blond and Briggs, 1982), and Mario DiGregorio, T. H. Huxley's Place in Natural Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
[3] How "Darwinian" Huxley was has been discussed many times. See, for example, Michael Bartholomew, "Huxley's Defence of Darwin," Annals of Science 32 (1975): 525-535, who describes the tension with Darwinian ideas in Huxley's early thought, and Mario DiGregorio, T. H. Huxley's Place in Natural Science, who explores the ambiguity of even Huxley's more Darwinian latter years.
Darwin, he constituted the rootstock from which the basic orientation of contemporary evolutionary theory stemmed, that is, a changing world that could be understood in terms of nonteleological, mechanical, and material processes. Huxley, as previously discussed, also was a personal friend of Herbert Spencer and often advised him on biological issues. Huxley read, for example, the proofs of Principles of Biology to check that the zoological facts were correct. Their correspondence reflects a strong mutual attachment and concern. Huxley shared with Spencer, and Darwin, a broad common philosophical perspective that viewed the world primarily in scientific and material terms.
Huxley's writings portray an overall order in nature, which he found awe-inspiring. In his early works, he incorporated romantic ideas stemming from Thomas Carlyle and German philosophy when he described the cosmos, but by the 1860s, Huxley came to view nature in more empirical terms. Man was clearly part of this vision, and in three essays published under the title Man's Place in Nature (1863) he set out a view of man in the new intellectual landscape created by Charles Lyell and Darwin. Although cautiously done, the work was a polemic for accepting the idea of man's close affinity to other families in the primate order. "Thus, whatever system of organs he studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result—that the structural differences which separate Man from the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the Gorilla from the lower apes."[4]
Huxley's attempt to place man taxonomically with the higher apes shocked many Victorians and certainly annoyed the leading British comparative anatomist, Richard Owen, who believed otherwise. But Huxley was not nearly as radical as the German materialists of his day who wished to reduce man to a mere mechanical contrivance. Quite the contrary, Huxley wrote in this same work, "No one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain that whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them. No one is less disposed to think lightly of the present dignity, or de-
[4] Thomas Henry Huxley, Man's Place in Nature, in his Collected Essays (London: Macmillan, 1893-1894), 7: 144.
spairingly of the future hopes, of the only consciously intelligent denizen of this world."[5]
Although Huxley may not have been as scandalous as Ludwig Büchner, the German materialist who was standard reading for German revolutionaries and Russian nihilists, his ideas certainly stood out in Britain. Huxley's article in the Fortnightly Review, "On the Physical Basis of Life" (1869), for example, caused a sensation and was heatedly discussed for over a decade.[6] But it was more than his startling pronouncements on the material basis of life, or on the relationship of man to the higher apes, that explain Huxley's celebrity. Rather, Huxley was noted as an articulate and outspoken advocate of the new professional scientific thinking that so revolutionized the Victorian world. By the 1870s, many held that science was the most powerful method of obtaining truth, and for some, it was the only valid method. The scientific cast of mind infiltrated in all areas, from manufacturing to theology. Although competing visions existed in opposition to this technical and analytical thrust, the secular, rational approach, called scientific naturalism, steadily gained ground through the century. Huxley, along with John Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, William Kingdon Clifford, and Francis Galton, provided the leadership in popularizing the value of a scientific approach to problems.[7] Since the mid-1860s, Huxley along with Spencer and Tyndall had been part of the influential and highly distinguished dinner group, the X-Club. This small but important clique promoted their vision by lobbying the members of the major scientific societies of Britain to adopt their professional standards and by combating conservative religious opposition to science.
Huxley spent much of his career bringing the analytical and empirical approach to the British public. He was concerned with institutional reform, with educational reform, and with popular
[5] Ibid., 153.
[6] Like Tyndall's equally famous Belfast Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Huxley's materialist pronouncements have to be taken in the larger context of his other writings. Neither Tyndall nor Huxley were philosophical materialists. Huxley was very explicit in rejecting such views as unsound. He nonetheless stressed the pragmatic value of investigations of the material basis phenomena. On Tyndall, see Barton, "John Tyndall, Pantheist," 111-134.
[7] See Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974): 9.
education. Concerning the last of these, he stressed the value of a liberal education for the masses. For him, such an education was one that made wide use of science and that resulted in an intellect that "is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations."[8]
Although Huxley could be anthropomorphic in his descriptions of nature, it was the scientific method—empirical, analytical, experimental—that he contended was the main path to knowledge and the criterion for decision. Yet when it came to the matter of ethics, we see an odd tack by this proponent of rational empiricism.
Huxley did not follow Darwin in examining human morality as a problem in natural history. Not that he underrated the importance of Darwin's interest in explaining human behavior as part of a general explanation of life's evolution, but Huxley had additional concerns. He was deeply immersed in social issues, and much of his career was spent in promoting liberal reform. Although science was central to Huxley's agenda, both for its methodology and content, he viewed man's instincts from a different perspective. Human instincts may have had an adaptive value for earliest man, but human history, according to Huxley, was a story of man's efforts to go beyond his animal legacy.
Throughout his life Huxley grappled with the problem of reconciling his sense of justice with cosmic processes. In 1860, after his son, Noel, died, he wrote a long letter to the liberal clergyman Charles Kingsley outlining his views on immortality and cosmic justice. In it, he affirmed a belief that "Nature is juster than we."[9] There was an absolute justice in the system of things, and man had to surrender his will to "fact." Exactly what Huxley meant has been the subject of considerable discussion among historians. In more optimistic moods, he wrote of there being "happiness in ex-
[8] Thomas Henry Huxley, "A Liberal Education; and Where to Find It" (1868), in Huxley, Collected Essays, 3: 86.
[9] Huxley, Life and Letters, 1: 236.
cess of pain."[10] But as he grew older, Huxley seems to have regarded the forces of nature "just" in the sense of being universal and applied to all beings.
Similarly, as he aged, his optimism increasingly was overcome by pessimism concerning the condition of man.[11] Late in life, in such a mood, he wrote his major work on evolution and ethics. Although other late essays adumbrate Huxley's views, his Romanes Lecture of 1893 and its publication the following year with an extended introduction (Prolegomena) as Evolution and Ethics, in which he argued that ethical and cosmic processes were antagonistic, must have surprised his followers. By this, he meant that in man's evolutionary history a state of art emerged that stood in conflict with the state of nature. Man perfected; man replaced struggle and change with stability and permanence. Huxley also argued that in addition to a contest between cosmic forces and the struggle of society for control over nature, there was an internal conflict, between man's instincts and his moral sentiments. Since man was from the animals, he retained instincts that evolution promoted: aggression and self-preservation. Civilization was an advance from that state. Through sympathy humans had come to empathize with one another, and through our higher intuitive moral sentiments we could transcend our more primitive instincts.
In his Prolegomena, Huxley underscored the opposition of human society and its mores to the biological realm by contrasting plants in a state of nature with plants under cultivation. He did this by way of an extended metaphor (fifteen pages!) showing the opposition of cosmic and horticultural processes. Nature produced endless change and "the competition of each with all."[12] By man's art, however, this cosmic process was challenged. In place of competition, there was an elimination of the struggle for existence. The horticultural process adjusted the conditions to the needs of the plants, restricted multiplication, and molded the environment to produce the desired result. One might object that the horticul-
[10] Ibid.
[11] James Paradis in his T. H. Huxley: Man's Place in Nature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978): 86, writes of Huxley as "a man of two visions, the one filled with hope and wonder, the other dominated by a sense of futility and doom."
[12] Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, in Huxley, Collected Essays, 9: 4. (Huxley's Evolution and Ethics has been reprinted by Princeton University Press [1989] with an excellent introduction by James Paradis.)
tural process could not be in opposition to the cosmic process since art was a product of man and man was a product of nature. Huxley answered, "If the conclusion that the two are antagonistic is logically absurd, I am sorry for logic, because, as we have seen, the fact is so."[13]
Nature, therefore, was no guide for ethics. Unlike comments made in his early years that man must submit to the overall order in nature, in these late writings, he clearly expressed the divide between man and nature. "Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before."[14]
In fact, in Evolution and Ethics, Huxley argued strongly against the extension of evolutionary ideas, especially natural selection, to the formulation of ethical standards. His motives may have had their origins outside of biological concerns, as will be discussed below, but this did not diminish the startling nature of his conclusions. One, after all, would have expected Darwin's bulldog and Spencer's peripatetic friend to propose a naturalistic ethic, partly because of its compatibility with a broad slice of British (principally Calvinist) theology and partly because of his commitment to a physically deterministic universe. If man had evolved as all other species had, then should not man be understood in natural terms? What other concepts could we use without endangering the entire edifice of Huxley's interpretation of science? The drift to naturalism, so much a part of Victorian culture, was especially evident in Huxley's writings, and it is difficult to imagine him accepting any agents other than purely physical ones. Yet Huxley emphatically rejected considering society a spiritual jungle as outlined and approved by the so-called Social Darwinists and castigated by Marx. Spencer, although he condemned the excesses of laissez-faire philosophy, particularly imperialism, optimistically believed that a noninterventionist state would ultimately lead to human fulfillment. Huxley was not so sure. He strongly supported governmental reform policies both at home and abroad. Trusting to the inevitable march of progress due to natural laws was not enough. Nor, for that matter, was nature a reliable guide for conduct. Huxley argued instead that man was locked in a battle with nature. "Let us
[13] Ibid., 12.
[14] Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 80.
understand, once for all, that the ethical process of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it."[15]
Why did Huxley depart so radically from his friend Herbert Spencer and from Darwinians, like Stephen and Clifford, with whom he shared so many other opinions? Although one of the main architects of the bulwarks of evolutionary theory, Huxley was not one to accept ideas uncritically or on authority. He disagreed with Darwinians on many points and was quite late in applying Darwinian notions to his own biology.[16] Nor was he hesitant to point out to Spencer what he believed was incorrect or misleading in the latter's writing. Of greater importance, Huxley had motives linked to his social and political views that brought him into disagreement with numerous friends. Thomas Henry Huxley spent much of his life in public. He was part of a small London elite that represented the new professional scientist, and he was deeply involved in striving to reform British society. Although fundamentally committed to the pursuit of science, he was equally interested in the theological, philosophical, and social questions of the day, many of which centered around what shape the new, more secular, increasingly middle-class British society would assume. The Metaphysical Society, which met in London between 1869 and 1880 to discuss "the many problems raised anew by the growing antagonism between religion and the critical spirit of science,"[17] was one of the numerous forums in which he expressed his ideas and which put him into contact with the leading thinkers in England who were concerned with the future of Britain. Both Leslie Stephen and William Kingdon Clifford were members, as were the more orthodox Archibishop Manning and William Gladstone. Many of Huxley's essays were published in the journal Nineteenth Century, owned and edited by one of the founding members of the Metaphysical Society, Sir James Knowles.
The new critical spirit that characterized the second half of the nineteenth century, especially the decade of the 1870s, undercut many traditional beliefs, and Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic were forced to reexamine the assumptions that supported
[15] Ibid., 83.
[16] See DiGregorio, T. H. Huxley's Place in Natural Science.
[17] Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, 1869-1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947): 10.
generally accepted moral ideas. For good reasons, then, historians write of the spiritual crisis of the 1870s. Huxley was among the active thinkers of this period who believed that reform of educational and scientific institutions was necessary. His liberal politics made him uncomfortable with the conservative views of those who sought to justify a laissez-faire, noninterventionist state policy by reference to natural selection in the realm of morality and social institutions. Herbert Spencer, in particular, had argued for a free reign of natural law in the human domain that was at odds with Huxley's reforming thrust. By the time he was writing Evolution and Ethics, Huxley was upset with Spencer's ideas (as well as with Spencer) and his followers.[18] He was equally disturbed by numerous proposed alternatives. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, social unrest had given the middle class grave worries from radical reformers representing the workingmen of Britain. The American, Henry George, for example, whose Progress and Poverty (1880) was widely read and discussed on both sides of the Atlantic, questioned private ownership of land.[19] William Booth's In Darkest England, and the Way Out (1890) dismissed the value of education and other social reforms in ameliorating the plight of the poor and proposed his Salvation Army program as the better solution. Huxley wrote a series of acerbic letters to the Times which questioned the tactics and assumptions of the program.[20]
Given Huxley's concern with political issues during the time he prepared his Evolution and Ethics, it is fair to say that he had
[18] The story, as might well be imagined, is much more complicated. Spencer's and Huxley's relationship had been deteriorating since Huxley published his essay "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society" in 1888. Evolution and Ethics continued to argue against Spencer's noninterventionist view about extending the role of the state and against relying on the "cosmic process" to bring about improvement for man. Huxley also criticized the "fanatical individualism" of his day, to which Spencer took offense. However, Spencer, in rather typical fashion, did not see any contradiction to his overall theory of ethics; rather, he thought that Huxley was using material of his without acknowledgment. They were able with the help of some mutual friends, however, to patch up their personal differences. Spencer published a letter in the Athenaeum in 1893 pointing out the similarities between his ethical views and Huxley's. What he stressed was that they each thought natural selection inadequate to produce a moral sentiment. The letter was reprinted in his Various Fragments (New York: D. Appleton, 1898).
[19] Huxley wrote to Knowles, "Did you ever read Henry George's book 'Progress and Poverty'? It is more damnder nonsense than poor Rousseau's blether. And to think of the popularity of the book!" Huxley, Life and Letters, 2: 261.
[20] The letters are published in Huxley's Collected Essays, vol. 9.
ample political motivation for his antagonism to naturalistic ethics.[21] But he did not discuss those reasons, nor did he make an issue of them. Instead he focused on what he believed were the intellectual weaknesses of evolutionary ethics. Since his writings were widely read and his political motivation private, his published arguments were of greater direct historical significance for the discussion of evolutionary ethics.
What were his principal philosophical reservations? Although he could be strident and polemical, Huxley was acutely aware of the limits of human knowledge. He had read his Hume and Berkeley carefully and did not hold a simplistic, materialistic position. His famous "agnosticism" was symptomatic of a general skepticism that infused much of his work.[22] To be sure, there was what we would call today a "positivist streak" in his thought which claimed greater certainty for those ideas that could be observed or experimentally confirmed than for those that could not. But Huxley was critical of Comte's positivism and rejected the view that science held the key to understanding fully man and society. Following Hume, he also claimed that the leap from describing ethics from a natural history perspective to justifying those ethical precepts was not valid.
What mostly, however, set Huxley in later life against any evolutionary ethics was his belief that a conflict existed between man and nature. Numerous historians have explored Huxley's ambivalence toward nature and have pointed out the double conflict that concerned him, that is, the conflict between man and his environ-
[21] In a well-known article by Michael Hefland, "T. H. Huxley's 'Evolution and Ethics': The Politics of Evolution and the Evolution of Politics," Victorian Studies 20, no. 2 (1977): 159-177, Huxley's Evolution and Ethics is portrayed as a "masterpiece of concealed debate" that attempted to deny the authority of the theory of evolution to writers like Spencer who championed the individual as well as to writers like Henry George and Alfred Russel Wallace, who espoused socialistic reform, but at the same time attempted to use the authority of evolution to bolster his own political views of domestic reform via a centralized, paternalistic state, along with a liberal imperialist foreign policy. Paradis correctly rejected this thesis in his introduction to the reprint of Evolution and Ethics: "Aside from giving more political unity and credibility to Huxley's opponents than is perhaps justified, [it] is too reductive for an individual of Huxley's experience and complexity." See James Paradis and George Williams, eds., Evolution and Ethics: T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics with New Essays on Its Victorian and Sociobiological Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
[22] See D. W. Docknell, "T. H. Huxley and the Meaning of 'Agnosticism,'" Theology 74, no. 616 (1971): 461-477. Also see Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism.
ment, and the conflict within man between the instincts he had inherited and the cultural ideas that tempered them. More important, however, was the internal conflict between his vision of nature and his vision of man. Huxley was deeply committed to evolutionary theory and a physical view of life. Yet he also clung tenaciously to the idea of free will and constructed elaborate but unsuccessful attempts to account for human consciousness. As Alan Brown noted,
Huxley, like most of the theologians and philosophers whom he criticized, was troubled by the very demon he sought to drive out: he as a scientist is so concerned with causality that he cannot conceive a thorough-going materialism without what he calls "necessarianism"; however, he finds it difficult to reconcile his own conviction of the power of individual volition with what he thinks a materialistic determinism demands. He is sure that every phenomenon has its efficient cause and admits the difficulty of proving any form of spontaneity, yet he is sure of the power of the will at least in part to determine or condition human phenomena.[23]
Like many of his seventeenth-century forebears, Huxley saw the dual nature of man, but unlike them, he had no deity to account for human mind and human morality. The issue had not become fully explicit in British science until the nineteenth century because previously supernaturalism was a part of the natural history tradition. The drift to naturalism, which characterized Huxley's thought and that of his peers, created the dilemma in biology. Whereas previously natural history and natural theology had been intimately united, by the 1870s that alliance was in shambles as a result of Lyell's destruction of Bible geology, Darwin's secularizing of the question of the origin of species, and the professionalization of science. Morality had been among the foundations of Victorian religious sentiment, and when the divorce of God from his creation occurred, morality was orphaned. For a scientist of Huxley's persuasion, the evidence for God was inconclusive and hence could not stand as the font of ethical systems. But neither could he see nature as a replacement. He was left with a wholly unsatisfactory evangelical legacy of childhood: that morality was intuitive emotion. In a work on Hume (1878), Huxley wrote, "In which ever way we look at the matter, morality is based on feeling, not on
[23] Brown, The Metaphysical Society, 54.
reason; though reason alone is competent to trace out the effects of our actions and thereby dictate conduct. Justice is founded on the love of one's neighbour; and goodness is a kind of beauty. The moral law, like the laws of physical nature, rests in the long run upon instinctive intuitions, and is neither more nor less 'innate' and 'necessary' than they are."[24]
The position was problematic. As James Turner noted, Huxley held moral principles as "universally binding on grounds that he himself would have derided as wishful thinking if used to maintain a belief about God."[25] For a man who had argued for "scientific naturalism," what could "goodness is a kind of beauty" mean? How could a purposeless universe give rise to a being with valid moral intuitions that were in opposition to cosmic processes that had produced him?[26] But Huxley was not alone in his inconsistency. Victorians, like Leslie Stephen, also confessed to knowing right from wrong independent of any rational argument. As mentioned earlier, the issue was never what man ought to do but rather how those intuitions could be rationally justified. Huxley saw that Christianity provided no foundation. Unlike many of his set, he also realized that the attempt to substitute an evolutionary foundation was just as invalid. Nor did utilitarian arguments, such as John Stuart Mill's, adequately address the internal conflict that Huxley perceived. Huxley's agnosticism, although unsatisfactory, was honest. He did not claim a rational basis for the values he held most firmly, and in that sense, he has been seen as foreshadowing modern writers like Faulkner and Camus.[27]
Huxley stood on the threshold of a tradition in evolutionary biology that began to explore the dilemma of man. He had the courage to state that evolution did not solve all the attendant problems, and he explored some of the consequences of that view. Whether or not he was motivated by cryptic, imperialist notions or not, his critical mind laid out basic issues for his fin de siècle
[24] Huxley, Collected Essays, 6: 239.
[25] James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985): 223. Also see A. O. J. Cockshut, The Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought, 1840-1890 (New York: New York University Press, 1966), who describes the difficulty Victorians faced in attempting to find a substitute for Christian ethics.
[26] See Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View, which discusses the paradox in Huxley's thought.
[27] Cockshut, Unbelievers, 97-98.
audience as well as for us. Huxley's opposition demonstrates that one could be an ardent supporter of evolution, as well as scientific naturalism, and not embrace evolutionary ethics. There were also individuals who were solidly in the evolution camp but who rejected evolutionary ethics because they believed they had a firm alternative basis on which to ground their vision of man and his values. Alfred Russel Wallace exemplifies this dissenting group.[28]
Alfred Russel Wallace
Although Wallace independently formulated the concept of natural selection and continued to contribute actively to the development of evolutionary biology in important areas such as biogeography, he held different ideas concerning the nature of man than Darwin or Spencer. Unlike Huxley, Wallace's disagreement with the Darwinian picture was stated early on. In the 1860s, he advanced the opinion that natural selection had ceased to operate on the human body. As will be discussed below, Wallace modified this position twice in following years but continued to maintain that human evolution by natural selection was limited.
Wallace wrote in 1864 that with human mental and moral advance "man's physical character became fixed and almost immutable."[29] The aim of his paper was to undermine support for the position that the races of man were sufficiently different as to constitute different species, that is, the polygenesis theory of human races. The issue was highly charged, given the debates in the second half of the century over racism, slavery, and imperialism. If the races of man were different species, perhaps human moral obligations did not apply to them. Another topic Wallace addressed was why humans were so physically similar to living apes.
Wallace used a clever approach in his paper. He maintained that the evolution of man took place in two stages. During the
[28] See Turner, Between Science and Religion, for an excellent discussion of a group of British intellectuals who characterized this position.
[29] Alfred Russel Wallace, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1891): 176-177. Wallace's ideas were first presented in a talk he gave to the Anthropological Society of London, which appeared as "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection,'" in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 2 (1864): clviii-clxx. The paper was reprinted with some alterations and additions in his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870). Quotations are from the 1891 edition of Contributions.
first, natural selection operating on the earliest humans resulted in the production of different races. The second stage commenced with the development of man's mental and moral advancement, which was so powerful that his physical evolution ceased. This tack resolved both issues. Early in man's history physical differences between the bodies of living apes and man had ceased to increase because human physical traits were no longer influenced by natural selection. This similarity showed, moreover, that the conflict between the monogenesists and polygenesists was a pseudoissue. Primitive man, according to Wallace, had a single origin in the distant past but had differentiated due to selective pressures acting on widely dispersed subpopulations to produce multiple races. The moral and mental evolution of man, however, marked such a discontinuity in nature that the physical characteristics separating races were insignificant. It was man's mental and moral faculties that constituted his true "humanness."
This was not to say that all humans were equally endowed. Early brutal races died out because of their lack of social harmony, and man's mental and moral faculties were still evolving. Wallace, citing Spencer's Social Statics, described a vision of a future, better adapted, and morally perfected humanity. Unlike Spencer, however, he still regarded as primary the force of natural selection. In time, Wallace believed that
the higher—the more intellectual and moral—must displace the lower and more degraded races; and the power of "natural selection," still acting on his mental organisation, must ever lead to the more perfect adaptation of man's higher faculties to the conditions of surrounding nature, and to the exigencies of the social state. While his external form will probably ever remain unchanged, except in the development of that perfect beauty which results from a healthy and well organised body, refined and ennobled by the highest intellectual faculties and sympathetic emotions, his mental constitution may continue to advance and improve, till the world is again inhabited by a single nearly homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity.[30]
A few years later, Wallace claimed that the force of natural selection on man was limited, and historians have established that in large part he was motivated by a new interest in spiritualism.[31]
[30] Ibid., 184-185.
[31] See the excellent discussion in Malcolm Jay Kottler, "Alfred Russel Wallace, the Origin of Man, and Spiritualism," Isis 65, no. 227 (1974): 145-192. Also see Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Spiritualism was a broad movement with thousands of adherents in the nineteenth century. George Bernard Shaw, whose mother held weekly séances, mockingly commented on the popularity of spiritualism in the preface to Heartbreak House, observing that the half century before the First World War was "addicted to table-rapping, materialization séances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystalgazing and the like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether ever before in the history of the world did soothsayers, astrologers, and unregistered therapeutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did."[32] Spiritualism postulated the survival after death of the human spirit and the possible communication with these disembodied spirits. Many spiritualists were simple and unsophisticated; they attended séances for amusement or to search "for some incontrovertible reassurance of fundamental cosmic order and purpose, especially reassurance that life on earth was not the totality of human existence."[33] Other, more intellectual minds were searching for a surrogate religious faith appropriate in the modern world. A recent history of English spiritualism notes that "spiritualism appeared to solve that most agonizing of Victorian problems: how to synthesize modern scientific knowledge and time-honored religious traditions concerning man, God, and the universe."[34]
A year after his Anthropological Society of London paper, Wallace attended his first séance, and, impressed by what he saw, he began to read the spiritualist literature. He quickly was convinced of the reality of the phenomena as well as the validity of the spiritualist interpretations of them. For the rest of his life he remained a believer and became one of the main apologists in Britain for spiritualism.[35] His new beliefs altered the ideas he had about the
[32] George Bernard Shaw, Collected Plays with Their Prefaces (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972), 5: 20-21.
[33] Oppenheim, The Other World, 2.
[34] Ibid., 59.
[35] Wallace's credulity on the matter was notorious. On a trip to the United States, Wallace attended a séance where William James was also present. In his obituary notice, E. B. Poulton recounts a conversation with Josiah Royce who spoke with James after the séance. James had been quite suspicious and was surprised that Wallace had been so easily taken in. Royce quoted James, "It is a curious thing to see Wallace plunging head foremost into a flood which we Americans only allow just to wet our feet." See E. B. Poulton, "Alfred Russel Wallace, 1823-1913," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 95 (1923-1924): xxix.
origin and nature of man and mind. In an unpublished letter of 1868 to the Pall Mall Gazette, he stated,
I admire and appreciate the philosophical writings of Mr. Lewes, of Herbert Spencer and of John Stuart Mill, but I find in the philosophy of Spiritualism something that surpasses them all,—something that helps to bridge over a chasm whose border they cannot overpass,—something that throws clearer light on human history and on human nature than they can give me.[36]
In his published writings on the evolution of man up to his famous book, Darwinism (1889), however, Wallace continued to stress the empirical arguments for the limits of natural selection. He enumerated various physical traits of man in 1870, either of no use in adaptation or positively harmful, such as the general absence of hair covering man's body (especially on the back), so striking in its departure from other terrestrial Mammalia. Such a characteristic would be undoubtedly harmful to "savage man," and as evidence Wallace cited reports of voyagers who noted the common habit of "savage races" to cover their backs with skins or other protective coverings.[37] Similarly, he questioned the specialization and perfection of the hand and the presence of the organs of speech.
His study of "savages" compared to anthropoid apes and civilized man led him to the more significant conclusion that "savages" and (by inference) primitive man had a brain size in excess of any adaptive requirements: "A brain one-half larger than that of the gorilla would, according to the evidence before us, fully have sufficed for the limited mental development of the savage; and we must therefore admit that the large brain he actually possesses could never have been solely developed by any of those laws
[36] Alfred Russel Wallace Papers, British Museum, add. mss. 46439, quoted in Turner, Between Science and Religion, 88.
[37] See "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man" in his Natural Selection and Tropical Nature: Essays on Descriptive and Theoretical Biology (London: Macmillan, 1891). This paper was first published in the 1870 edition but contained ideas Wallace first suggested in 1869 in a review of new editions of two books by Charles Lyell. See Kottler, "Alfred Russel Wallace," for a discussion of this issue.
of evolution, whose essence is, that they lead to a degree of organization exactly proportionate to the wants of each species, never beyond those wants."[38] Man's brain size allowed for the potential mental sophistication that characterized civilized man. It was a developed organ that was without use for the "savage" whose languages, allegedly, lacked abstract ideas and who had no developed moral and aesthetic faculties. These latter would, indeed, be harmful to him "since they would to some extent interfere with the supremacy of those perceptive and animal faculties on which his very existence often depends, in the severe struggle he has to carry on against nature and his fellow-man."[39]
Wallace went even further. He argued that it was totally inconceivable that the capacity to form ideal conceptions of space and time, the intense artistic feeling for color, form, and composition, and the abstract notion of numbers, which makes possible arithmetic and geometry, could have "first developed, when they could have been of no possible use to man in his early stages of barbarism."[40] Contrary to what Darwin was about to publish in the Descent of Man, Wallace contended that "although the practice of benevolence, honesty, or truth may have been useful to the tribe possessing these virtues, that does not at all account for the peculiar sanctity attached to actions which each tribe considers right and more, as contrasted with the very different feeling with which they regard what is merely useful."[41]
What Wallace proposed was an innate moral sense, that "there is a feeling—a sense of right and wrong—in our nature, antecedent to and independent of experiences of utility."[42] For Wallace this moral sentiment was not accountable in Darwinian or Spencerian terms. Instead, he wrote, "The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms."[43]
[38] Wallace, "The Limits of Natural Selection," Natural Selection, 193.
[39] Ibid., 192.
[40] Ibid., 199.
[41] Ibid., 199.
[42] Ibid., 201.
[43] Ibid., 205. Oppenheim, Turner, and Kottler all point out that early in his life Wallace had been impressed by phrenology, which stressed that the mind possessed certain innate faculties, among them, the moral sense. On the development of British phrenology, which stressed the capacity of humans for improvement and leaned toward natural religion, see David De Guistino, Conquest of Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1975). Also see John D. Davies, Phrenology, Fad and Science: A Nineteenth-Century American Crusade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955; reprinted, Hamden: Archon Books, 1971).
As might be expected, Darwin was not pleased by Wallace's position. The most thorough Darwinian critique of Wallace's essay was published by the American Chauncey Wright. See his extensive review, "Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection: A Series of Essays. By Alfred Russel Wallace, Author of 'The Malay Archipelago,' etc., etc.," North American Review 111 (1870): 282-311.
Wallace still maintained that natural selection was the principal force in the evolution of nonhuman life. His overall conception of man's relationship to nature constituted a personal synthesis, and the asymmetrical juxtaposition of a chance process giving rise to plant and animal life coupled with a teleological process guiding human evolution did not trouble him. Good scientist that he was, however, he accepted criticisms of his position that natural selection could not account for certain of man's physical features. By 1889 when he published Darwinism, he modified his position accordingly. He stated,
I fully accept Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes. The evidence of such descent appears to me to be overwhelming and conclusive. Again, as to the cause and method of such descent and modification, we may admit, at all events provisionally, that the laws of variation and natural selection, acting through the struggle for existence and the continual need of more perfect adaptation to the physical and biological environments, may have brought about, first that perfection of bodily structure in which he is so far above all other animals, and in co-ordination with it the larger and more developed brain, by means of which he has been able to utilise that structure in the more and more complete subjection of the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms to his service.[44]
Natural selection, then, could account for man's physical state but not man's mental and moral faculties. Darwin's argument on the derivation of man's intelligence and moral sentiment, he wrote, "appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts."[45]
[44] Wallace, Darwinism, 461.
[45] Ibid.
There is a certain irony in Darwinism. As has been pointed out many times, Wallace was more Darwinian than Darwin in the sense of believing in the efficacy of natural selection to explain biological phenomena. But only up to man. Although he accepted the continuity that Darwin insisted on between the animal world and man, he maintained that man's moral and intellectual powers did not arise by natural selection. As one historian has dryly noted, "Darwinism presented the curious picture of fourteen chapters of neo-Darwinism followed by a last chapter of anti-Darwinism."[46]
Wallace admitted that the origin and nature of man's moral sense was a subject "too vast and complex" to be adequately treated in a short chapter. But, nonetheless, he went on to point out a few human intellectual characteristics—a mathematical faculty, musical and artistic faculty, plus a metaphysical and "peculiar faculty of wit and humour"—that were not associated with any adaptive value and that, moreover, were not uniformly present. This latter point Wallace took as significant because he believed that traits developed through natural selection were universal and relatively invariable among members of a species. The wide range of intellectual abilities suggested to him that natural selection was not their primary cause. His interpretation of these "facts" called for
the existence in man of something which we may best refer to as being of a spiritual essence or nature, capable of progressive development under favourable conditions. . . . Thus we may perceive that the love of truth, the delight in beauty, the passion for justice, and the thrill of exultation with which we hear of any act of courageous self-sacrifice, are the workings within us of a higher nature which has not been developed by means of the struggle for material existence.[47]
Wallace was convinced that he had evidence of a spiritual world and that his interpretation of the origin of man's mental and moral faculties was not based on religious belief or speculation. He had seen and verified with his own eyes tables levitate, flowers and fruits appear on bare tables, and spirits manifest themselves. In his obituary notice on Wallace, E. B. Poulton reprinted a letter that contained the following remark: "I (think I) know that nonhuman intelligences exist—that there are minds disconnected from
[46] Kottler, "Alfred Russel Wallace," 161.
[47] Wallace, Darwinism, 474.
a physical brain—that there is, therefore, a spiritual world. This is not, for me, a belief merely, but knowledge founded on the long-continued observation of facts—and such knowledge must modify my views as to the origin and nature of human faculty."[48] His attempts to persuade scientific colleagues like Huxley, however, met with no success. Huxley, in response to an invitation to join a committee organized to investigate spiritual manifestations, wrote,
I regret that I am unable to accept the invitation of the Committee of the Dialectical Society to co-operate with a committee for the investigation of "Spiritualism"; and for two reasons. In the first place, I have not time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. In the second place, I take no interest in the subject. The only case of "Spiritualism" I have had the opportunity of examining into for myself, was as gross an imposture as ever came under my notice. But supposing the phenomena to be genuine—they do not interest me. If anybody would endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better things to do. And if the folk in the spiritual world do not talk more wisely and sensibly than their friends report them to do, I put them in the same category. The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance.[49]
But Wallace had been a supporter of many unpopular ideas throughout his life. As a young man he had embraced mesmerism and phrenology and was strongly impressed by Robert Chambers's evolutionary hypothesis in the Vestiges of the Natural Creation. He also had been drawn early on to the utopian vision of Robert Owen and in spite of several decades' admiration for Spencer's writings, came to be a strong supporter of socialism.[50]
[48] Poulton, "Alfred Russel Wallace," xxviii.
[49] Huxley, Life and Letters, 1: 452.
[50] See Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), and James Marchant, ed., Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences (London: Cassel, 1916).
An interesting discussion of Wallace's social views and how they relate to his science and spiritualism is in John R. Durant, "Scientific Naturalism and Social Reform in the Thought of Alfred Russel Wallace," British Journal for the History of Science 12 (1979): 31-58.
Wallace's support of spiritualism was more than just arguing for the reality of apparitions, clairvoyance, and table turning. The spiritualists' interpretation of these "facts" provided him with a perspective from which to unify his profound sense of social justice, his belief in the moral perfectibility of man, and his commitment to the rule of law in nature. The existence of higher intelligences that guided mankind explained what biologists had not been able to understand, and an enduring spiritual life after our physical existence provided an ethical sanction for this life.[51] Wallace accepted the spiritualist view that our state of happiness after death depended on our actions in this life but that in our future spiritual life moral progress continued, holding out the optimistic promise of a continued advance after the death of our physical body.[52]
In comparison with this prodigious Victorian edifice, evolutionary ethics was a pale prop for moral sanctions. Wallace had written to Spencer in 1879,
I doubt if evolution alone, even as you have exhibited its action, can account for the development of the advance and enthusiastic altruism that not only exists now, but apparently has always existed among men. . . . If on this point I doubt, on another point I feel certain, and this is, not even your beautiful system of ethical science can act as a "controlling agency" or in any way "fill up the gap left by the disappearance of the code of supernatural ethics."[53]
Like Huxley, Wallace rejected the notion that the theory of evolution provided a basis for ethics. There was something in human nature that went beyond the quest for survival and was not to be explained in the same terms. Unlike Huxley, Wallace sought in spiritualism an explanation of this "something." The enormous popularity of spiritualism in the second half of the nineteenth century suggests that Wallace's concerns were widespread. The optimistic, progressive picture that spiritualism projected appealed to those, like Wallace, who sought justice and equity, if not in this world, then perhaps in the next.
Wallace's and Huxley's opinions on ethics show that all mem-
[51] See his Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, rev. ed. (London: George Redway, 1896), for a full discussion of the "facts" of spiritualism as well as their interpretation.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, 1: 265.
bers of the Darwin camp were not supportive of evolutionary ethics. A commitment to the theory of evolution was not, therefore, a commitment to considering human culture in the same terms as biological phenomena. Their views also demonstrate that evolutionists who were attracted to Spencer's writings did not necessarily follow him to the conclusion of his ethicopolitical argument. The field of ethics was intimately connected with views of mankind, and there were many dimensions to the topic. Political, social, and intellectual factors influenced how people approached the subject of "right living." Although evolution was suggestive and various evolutionary options dealing with ethics were elaborated, it cannot be assumed that all supporters of the theory of evolution were drawn to, or supported, evolutionary ethics.
Having now considered the major versions of evolutionary ethics in the second half of the nineteenth century and two scientists who were critics, a more thorough examination of its contemporary evaluation is in order.