Part 5

He returned to this subject in what we believe to be his last published essay, namely, his “Social Environment and Moral Progress” of 1913, wherein he considers the so-called “feministic” movement and future of woman:

The foregoing statement of the effect of established natural laws, if allowed free play under rational conditions of civilization, clearly indicates that the position of woman in the not distant future will be far higher and more important than any which has been claimed for or by her in the past.

While she will be conceded full political and social rights on an equality with men, she will be placed in a position of responsibility and power which will render her his superior, since the future moral progress of the race will so largely depend upon her free choice in marriage. As time goes on, and she acquires more and more economic independence, that alone will give her an effective choice which she has never had before. But this choice will be further strengthened by the fact that, with ever-increasing approach to equality of opportunity for every child born in our country, that terrible excess of male deaths, in boyhood and early manhood especially due to various preventable causes, will disappear, and change the present majority of women to a majority of men. This will lead to a greater rivalry for wives, and will give to women the power of rejecting all the lower types of character among their suitors.

It will be their special duty so to mould public opinion, through home training and social influence, as to render the women of the future the regenerators of the entire human race.

In closing this review of a great life, we cannot refrain from reflecting on the pendulum of scientific opinion. The discovery of a great truth such as the law of selection is always followed by an over-valuation, from which there is certain to be a reaction. We are in the midst of such a reaction at the present time, in which the Darwin-Wallace theory of natural selection is less appreciated than it will be in the future when there comes a fresh readjustment of scientific values.

It is well to remember that we may not estimate either the man of science or his conclusions as of our own period, but must project ourselves in imagination into the beginnings of his thought and into the travails of his mind, considering how much larger he was than the men about him, how far he was an innovator, breaking away from the traditions of his times, how far his direct observations apart from theory are true and permanent, and how far his theories have contributed to the great stream of biological thought.

Our perspective has covered a long, honorable span of sixty-five years into the beginnings of the thinking life of a natural philosopher whose last volume, “The World of Life,” of the year 1911, gives as clear a portrayal of his final opinions as that which his first essay of 1858 portrays of his early opinions.

We follow the cycle of his reflection beginning with “adaptation” as the great mystery to be solved; in the middle and sanguine period of life, “adaptation” is regarded as fully explained by natural selection; in the closing and conservative period of life “adaptation” is again regarded in some of its phases as entirely beyond human powers of interpretation, not only in the evolution of the mental and spiritual nature of man, but in such marvellous manifestations as the scales of butterflies or the wings of birds.

From our own intellectual experience we may sympathize with the rebound of maturity from the buoyant confidence of the young man of thirty-five who finds in natural selection the entire solution of the problem of fitness which has vexed the mind and aroused the scientific curiosity of man since the time of Empedocles. We have ourselves experienced a loss of confidence with advancing years, an increasing humility in the face of transformations which become more and more mysterious the more we study them, although we may not join with this master in his appeal to an organizing and directing supernatural principle. Younger men than Wallace, both among the zoologists and philosophers of our own time, are giving a somewhat similar metaphysical solution of the eternal problem of adaptation, which still baffles and transcends our powers of experiment and of reasoning.

Photographed by his son, Leonard Darwin

CHARLES DARWIN ]

CHARLES DARWIN 1809–1882

I met Darwin in Huxley’s laboratory and my impression of his personality is described in the address on the Life and Works of Darwin, which was delivered at Columbia University on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, as an introduction to a series of nine lectures on Charles Darwin and his influence in science. The fact that Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day, February 12, 1809, brought together these two great men, so widely different in their vocations, so similar in their reverence for the truth, in their simplicity and directness of life.

The address at the Darwin Centenary at Cambridge was delivered at the request of my American colleagues, in reply to the reception of the delegates. It was strictly limited as to time, presenting the problem of speaking of Darwin to the men who knew him personally, who recalled almost every detail of his life—to sum up in comparatively few words the outstanding facts of his influence. The form of this address is therefore quite in contrast to the preceding tribute, which was without time limitation.

LIFE AND WORKS OF DARWIN

Columbia University is celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Darwin, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the “Origin of Species.” In the year 1809 many illustrious men were born, among them Darwin and Lincoln, one hundred years ago today, February 12. So widely different in their lives, Darwin and Lincoln were yet alike in simplicity of character and of language, in love of truth, in abhorrence of slavery, and especially in unconsciousness of their power. Both were at a loss to understand their influence over other men. “I am nothing and truth is everything,” once wrote Lincoln. In concluding his autobiography Darwin wrote:

With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that I should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points. My success as a man of science has been determined as far as I can judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. Of these, the most important have been the love of science, unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject, industry in observing and collecting facts, a fair share of invention as well as of common sense.

Lincoln’s greatest single act was his death-blow to slavery. Man had been fighting for centuries for freedom, in labor, in government, in religion, and in mind. It is certainly notable that the final victory for bodily liberty was won during the very years which witnessed the final emancipation of the mind. I do not see that Darwin’s supreme service to his fellow men was his demonstration of evolution—man could have lived on quite as happily and perhaps more morally under the old notion that he was specially made in the image of his Maker. Darwin’s supreme service was that he won for man absolute freedom in the study of the laws of nature; he literally fulfilled the saying of St. John, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

When we look back upon the very recent years of 1858–59, the years of revolution, we see that we were far from free either to study nature or reason about it. Our intellectual chains were from the forges of theology both catholic and protestant. The Bible was read as a revelation of physical law rather than as an epic of righteousness and spiritual law. Theology while in power was itself in a most critical position, in a cul-de-sac of antagonism to reason and common sense, and this despite the warnings of Augustine and of Bacon. As early as the fifth century the wise theologian of Numidia had said:

Leave questions of the earth and the sky and the other elements of this world to reasoning and observation. Perceiving that you are as far from the truth as the east from the west the man of science will scarce restrain his laughter.

Similarly, the great founder of the inductive method observed:

Do not excite the laughter of men of science through an absurd mixture of matters human and divine. Do not commit the consummate folly of building a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis or on the Book of Job.

It is difficult for the college student in this day of liberty, if not of license, to realize that, in the words of Lowell:

We breathe cheaply in the common air thoughts that great hearts once broke for.

When, in 1844, Darwin communicated to the botanist Hooker under promise of secrecy his outline of evolution, he well knew the opprobrium it would bring, for he subsequently added (1846):

When my notes are published I shall fall infinitely low in the opinion of all sound naturalists, so this is my prospect for the future.

From the borders of Poland in 1543, or just three centuries earlier, Copernicus had published his “Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies” and thus fired the first shot in a three hundred years’ war for freedom to observe nature. In 1611 the telescope of Galileo demonstrated the truth of the Copernican law that the earth moves around the sun; and the most impressive object today in Florence is the model of the finger of this great astronomer as he held it up before the examiners of the Inquisition, with the words, “It still moves.”

As time advanced the prison gave way to the milder but effective weapons of ostracism and loss of position. In biology Linnæus, Buffon, Lamarck, St. Hilaire, in turn discovered the evidences of evolution, but felt the penalty and either recanted or suffered loss of position. The cause of supernaturalism had never seemed stronger than in 1857; the masterly works of Paley and Whewell had appeared; the great series of Bridgewater Treatises to demonstrate the wisdom and goodness of God in the special creation of adaptations had just been closed; men of rare ability, Cuvier, Owen, Lyell and Agassiz, were on the side of special creation; yet at the very time this whole system of natural philosophy was rotten at the foundation because it was not the work of free observation.