Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

31

The Rise of History, Pre-history and Deep Time

In May 1798 one of the most extraordinary expeditions in the history of ideas set out from Toulon, in France. No fewer than 167 chemists, engineers, biologists, geologists, architects, painters, poets, musicians and doctors were gathered together, referred to as savants by the 38,000 troops also collected in the southern French port. Like the troops, the savants didn’t know where they were headed, for their young commanding officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, had kept the destination secret. The average age of the savants was twenty-five, the youngest fourteen, but there were also well-known figures among the group which included: Pierre-Joseph Redouté, the flower painter, Gratet de Dolomieu, the geologist after whom the Dolomite mountains are named, and Nicholas Conté, a prominent chemist and naturalist.¹

In fact, they were bound for Egypt, where Napoleon, hailed by Victor Hugo as ‘the Muhammad of the West’, landed at Alexandria on a ship called L’Orient. The venture was a mixture of colonialism and cultural/intellectual adventure. Bonaparte’s avowed aim was not merely conquest, he said, but to synthesise the wisdom of the pharaohs with the pieties of Islam and to that end everything the Armée did in Egypt ‘was explained and justified in precise Koranic Arabic’. Alongside the Armée, the savants were let loose to study the Middle Eastern world. The results of their endeavours were in many ways astounding. Conditions were harsh and they were forced to improvise. Conté invented a new kind of pump, and a new kind of pencil, without graphite. Larrey, a surgeon, turned himself into an anthropologist and made notes on the relations between the mixed population of Jews, Turks, Greeks and Bedouin. Every ten days or so they published a periodical, partly to keep the troops amused, partly to record their own activities and discoveries. Debates were organised by Napoleon himself, as a form of sophisticated entertainment for the savants, where questions of government, religion and ethics were aired.² Most important, in the long run, the savants collected material for what would become The Description of Egypt, twenty-three large volumes, each page of which was one metre square (the metre, remember, being a new measure) and published over the following twenty-five years. Many things were explored in the Description. It began with a one-hundred-plus-page introduction by Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, secretary of the Institut de l’Égypte, which Napoleon had set up in some secrecy. Fourier made it clear that the French saw Egypt as ‘a centre of great memories’, a focal point between Asia, Africa and Europe (as Alexandria had been in earlier ages) and as such was ‘saturated with meaning for the arts, sciences and government’, and of which great things were expected in the future. The Description went on to outline new fauna and flora, new chemical substances, which existed naturally in Egypt, new geological features. But what most caught the imagination of many of the savants – turning them into the world’s first Egyptologists – and then proved especially popular among the public back home, were the archaeological treasures, of such size and in such abundance that everyone who came into contact with them was entranced. Doubly so when a big block of granite was found at Rosetta, where a contingent of soldiers was clearing a piece of land which they intended to turn into fortifications. This stone bore three texts, one in hieroglyphics, one in a demotic, cursive form of Egyptian, and one in Greek. It promised the possibility that hieroglyphics would soon be deciphered. (See Chapter 29 above.)³

One could say that archaeology in the West began with this expedition and that we have Napoleon to thank for it. In fact, in the realm of ideas, we have Napoleon to thank for rather more than this. After his return from Egypt, he went on to mount a campaign against Germany and this too was, indirectly, no less beneficial. By the turn of the nineteenth century, some two thousand self-governing German-speaking units that had survived the Thirty Years War had been reduced to around three hundred. This was still a lot by the standards of elsewhere but, in 1813, and led by Prussia, the Germans managed at last to defeat Napoleon, in the process learning the virtues of order and respect for rules that was to pay so handsomely thereafter.⁴ This was an important step on the road to unification, which finally was to arrive in 1871.

Thought in the eighteenth century in the fragmented kaleidoscope of small German-speaking states had lagged well behind other countries – behind Holland, Belgium, Britain and France – both in terms of political freedom, trading success, scientific advance and industrial innovation. This had been brought home by Napoleon’s rapid advances before his final defeat. The nineteenth century would see the rise of Germany, not just politically but also intellectually. Until Napoleon cut his swathe through Europe, roughly speaking in the second decade of the century, the German universities had been notable by their absence. In the 1700s, only Göttingen could lay claim to any academic distinction. However, stung into action by Napoleon’s campaigns, and example, which humiliated many Germans, the Francophile Prussian minister Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who had spent time in Paris prior to the rise of Napoleon, took it upon himself to push through a number of administrative reforms that had a profound effect on German intellectual life. In particular, Humboldt conceived the idea of the modern university, not merely as colleges which trained the clergy, doctors and lawyers – the traditional format – but as places where research was a primary activity. In parallel with this, Humboldt introduced the practice whereby high school teachers in Germany must have a degree in order to teach. This linked the universities to schools much more directly than hitherto and helped spread the ideal of scholarship, based on original research, throughout German-speaking society. The PhD, a higher degree based on original research, was introduced. German intellectual life was transformed and before long the effects were felt across Europe and in north America.⁵

This was the start of the golden age of German intellectual influence, which was only brought to an end by the ravages of Adolf Hitler following 1933. These developments were felt first at the University of Berlin (later the Humboldt University). Among the notable thinkers there were Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in philosophy, Bartold Georg Niebuhr in history and Friedrich Karl Savigny in jurisprudence. But it was more than just names. New disciplines were invented, which went beyond the traditional breakdown into law, medicine and theology. For example, specialisations such as philosophy, history, chemistry and physiology all came into being at that time and deepened and proliferated.⁶ The idea of specialisation itself took on a new force as a new literature – history for historians, chemistry for chemists – evolved. As Roger Smith has pointed out, this was when the difference first emerged between specialist literature and a general readership. As Smith also says, these new academic disciplines did not yet include sociology or psychology, which began in a far more practical way, as a result of observations away from the universities, in prisons, asylums or workhouses.⁷

Hegel was partly responsible for the rise of history. In his book The Philosophy of History, he advanced the view that the ‘divine will’ unfolds over time, as the universe reveals itself, and so history is in effect a description of this divine will. For him, this meant that theology was to be replaced by history as the way to apprehend the ultimate truths. On his account, man was not a passive creature, an observer of history, but in all senses a participant, a creator, or co-creator of it, in co-operation with the divinity. Hegel’s famous theory as to how history moves forward – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – and his concept that, at certain critical times, ‘world historical figures’ (like Napoleon) emerge, to distil and personify the central arguments of an age, was for many the most satisfying concept about the past, and how it leads to the present.⁸

But it wasn’t only Hegel. We have already encountered the discipline that also helped to spark the revival in historical studies in Germany – philology, the comparative science of languages. Even in the nineteenth century, the classical languages maintained a certain position, even though language studies had been transformed by Sir William Jones’ observations about the links between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek (covered in Chapter 29). Jones’ insights had had the impact they did because, in those days, far more people had an acquaintance with the classics, not least because doctoral theses – even in the ‘hard’ sciences – had to be written in Latin. In schools, there was an emphasis on Greek and Latin because of the part the classical authors had played in the development of logic, rhetoric and moral philosophy. The initiative of William Jones, and the subsequent discovery and translations of the ancient Indian scriptures, transformed not only philology, but the study of all texts. The most important effort in this regard took place first at Göttingen in the late eighteenth century, when the text of the Bible itself came under critical scrutiny. In time this had a profound effect on theology and meant that, in the early part of the nineteenth century, philology became the central discipline in the new universities, at least so far as the humanities were concerned.⁹

Humboldt himself was particularly interested in philology. He had formed a friendship with Condillac in Paris, and the Frenchman had helped overturn the standard idea that language had originated in a single God-given tongue, from which all other languages were descended. With Condillac, Humboldt shared the view that languages had evolved, reflecting the different experiences of different tribes and nations.¹⁰ Language, Humboldt concluded, was ‘mental activity’, and as such it reflected the evolutionary experience of mankind.¹¹ So this is how philology and history came to form a central part of university scholarship, which would grow in importance throughout the nineteenth century. Combined with the Oriental renaissance, philology made India a fashionable area of study for a while and the analyses of language changes seemed to indicate that four waves of people had migrated from the original homeland, via the Middle East, to Europe. This is no longer the accepted view, but it proved important because it was in the context of this debate that Friedrich Schlegel, in 1819, first used the word ‘Aryan’ to describe the original Indo-European peoples. This idea was badly mangled by later ideologues.¹²

In Humboldt’s reformed German university system, by far the most controversial and yet influential form of historical/philological scholarship was textual criticism of the Bible and associated documents.¹³ As the world had opened up, thanks to the Oriental renaissance and Napoleon’s travels, in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, more and more early manuscripts had been discovered (in Alexandria, and in Syria, for example), manuscripts that varied in interesting and instructive ways, which not only taught scholars how early ideas had varied, but proved helpful in perfecting dating techniques. Philologists-turned-historians, like Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), were pioneers in the critical inspection and dating of primary sources.

In particular, attention turned to the New Testament. Exegesis, the interpretation of the meaning of the text, was nothing new, as we saw in Chapter 25. However, the new German philologists were much more ambitious: with the new techniques at their disposal, their first achievement was to accurately date the gospels, the effect of which was to throw a new light on the inconsistencies in the different accounts, so that their overall reliability began to be questioned. It is important to say that this did not occur overnight, nor was it deliberate. Originally, scholars such as F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) had merely wished to distil a reasonable trajectory for the biblical narrative, one that could be accepted by any rational person. In the process, however, so much doubt was cast on the texts themselves that Jesus’ very existence as a historical figure began to be undermined and this risked sabotaging the very meaning of Christianity.¹⁴ The most controversial of all the Germanic textual bombshells was The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, published in 1835 by David Strauss (1808–1874). Strauss was much influenced by German romanticism – he wrote a romantic tragedy that was performed, and took a great interest in magnetic and hypnotic cures. In this way he acquired an understanding of God as immanent in nature, but not as someone who would intervene in the course of history.¹⁵ Strauss thus used history against religion, arguing that its details were insufficient, by a long way, to support Christianity as it existed in the nineteenth century. So incendiary were his findings – that Jesus was not a divine figure, that the miracles never took place, that the church as we know it has little connection with Jesus – that Strauss’s appointment to a professorship in Zurich in 1839 sparked a local riot so worrying to the local authorities that he had to be ‘retired’ before he even had chance to take up his chair. His conclusions could not be retired so easily, however. In England, Marian Evans, better known as George Eliot, ‘nearly drove herself to despair with the soul-stupefying labour involved in the translation of Strauss into English, but she thought it her duty to humanity’.¹⁶ As we shall see in Chapter 35, Strauss’s work was just one element in the nineteenth century’s struggle with religion, and what some were beginning to call ‘the death of God’.

‘Once the Parisians see me three or four times,’ said Napoleon Bonaparte, then twenty-eight, after his victorious campaign in Italy, ‘not a soul will turn his head to look at me. They want to see deeds.’¹⁷ His next campaign, as we have seen, was in Egypt, where he took those 167 savants or scholars, who discovered and brought back to Europe the highlights of a fascinating early civilisation. These discoveries were soon built on by others, to make the early nineteenth century both the birth and the heroic age (in the West at least) of yet another new historical discipline, archaeology.

Archaeology, a term first used in the 1860s, amplified and deepened the work of philology, going beyond the texts and confirming that there was a more distant past for men, pre-history, from before writing. In 1802, the schoolmaster Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775–1853) delivered three papers to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, in which he revealed that he had deciphered the Persepolis cuneiform script, which he achieved mainly by rearranging the groups of wedges (‘like birds’ feet in soft sand’) and putting spaces between groups of letters, and then relating their form to Sanskrit, as a (geographically) nearby language. He guessed that some of the inscriptions were king-lists, and the names of some kings were known.¹⁸ The other forms of cuneiform, including the Babylonian, were deciphered some years later. In the 1820s, Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphics, as we saw in Chapter 29, and in 1847 Sir Austen Layard excavated Nineveh and Nimrud, in what is now Iraq. There, he uncovered the wonderful palaces of Assurnasirpal II, king of Assyria (885–859 BC) and Sennacherib (704–681 BC). The great guardians of the gates that were uncovered, some half-bulls, some lions, far larger than life-size, created a sensation in Europe and did much to make archaeology popular. These excavations eventually led to the discovery of a cuneiform tablet on which was written the epic of Gilgamesh, notable for two reasons: that it was much older than either Homer or the Bible, and because several episodes in the narrative – such as a great flood – were reminiscent of the Old Testament.

Each of these discoveries pushed back the age of mankind and began to cast a new light on the scriptures. But, save for the Gilgamesh epic, there was nothing that was radical about the new dating: it did not fundamentally contradict the biblical chronology. All that began to change in 1856 when workers started clearing out a small cave in the side of the Neander valley (Neander Thal in German) through which the river Düssel flows into the Rhine. There, a skull was found, buried beneath more than a metre of mud, together with some other bones. The workmen who found the bones passed them to a local friend who, they felt, was educated enough to make something of them, and he passed them on to Hermann Schaaffhausen, professor of anatomy at Bonn University. Schaaffhausen identified the remains as the top part of a skull, two thigh-bones, parts of a left arm, part of a pelvis, and other smaller remains. In the paper he subsequently wrote on the discovery, Schaaffhausen drew attention to the thickness of the bones, the large size of the scars left by the muscles that were attached to them, the pronounced ridges above the eyes, and a low, narrow forehead. Importantly, Schaaffhausen concluded that the bones were not deformed, either because of where they had been kept over the years, or because of some pathological process. ‘Sufficient grounds exist,’ he wrote, ‘for the assumption that man co-existed with the animals found in the diluvium; and many a barbarous race may, before all historical time, have disappeared, together with animals of the ancient world, whilst the races whose organisation is improved have continued the genus.’ He concluded that his specimen ‘may probably be assigned to a barbarous, original people, which inhabited the north of Europe before the Germani’.¹⁹ This is not quite the same as what we mean today by Neanderthal but it was nonetheless a breakthrough. It didn’t immediately change attitudes to time because it was too controversial, but it formed part of the ‘background radiation’ of ideas in the late nineteenth century, against which the insights and discoveries of Boucher de Perthes, and others, discussed in the Prologue, took hold. One of the first outlines of pre-history, as we now understand it, was given by John Lubbock’s The Origin of Civilisation and The Primitive Condition of Man (1870): ‘The archaeological evidence revealed a steady improvement in technical ability from the earliest crude stone tools to the discovery of bronze and iron. In the absence of fossil evidence for the biological improvement of man, evolutionists seized on the evidence for cultural progress as at least indirect support for their claims. The great development of prehistoric archaeology that took place in the late nineteenth century allowed the construction of a sequence of cultural periods that were supposed to have succeeded one another as the human race progressed. Little thought was given to the possibility that different cultures might exist side by side in the same epoch.’²⁰

By this time, the word ‘science’ had begun to acquire its modern meaning. (The term ‘scientist’ was coined by William Whewell in 1833.) Until the end of the eighteenth century, the phrases ‘natural philosophy’ or ‘natural history’ had been preferred. This was so because natural philosophy sounded softer, more humane and it was also a portmanteau term: many local ‘natural history’ societies ran lectures on, say, literary topics, the humanities, and philosophy. Gradually, as the various disciplines emerged, first in Germany and then elsewhere, and as specialisation proliferated, science began to be the preferred term for these new activities.

It may be difficult for us to understand now but, in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, when the philologists were attacking the very basics of Christianity, the men of science did not for the most part join in. For the most part biologists, chemists and physiologists remained devoutly religious. Linnaeus is a case in point. One of the main figures of the Enlightenment and one of the fathers of modern biology, who also formed part of the deep background to evolution, he was very different from, say, Voltaire. An early break with the Chain of Being had been made by John Ray, a naturalist who realised that every species – thousands of which were discovered in the New World and in Africa – could not all be graded on one meaningful hierarchy, that forms of life varied in many ways. Linnaeus therefore thought that reclassifying the organisms of the world might give him some idea of the divine plan. He didn’t claim to know the mind of God and freely confessed that his system of classification was an artificial one. But he thought it might produce some approximation of the Creator’s divine design. What turned out to be especially crucial was that in his own field, botany, he drew on R. J. Camerarius’ discovery (in 1694) of plant sexuality, which meant that Linnaeus made the reproductive organs the key characteristic on which to base his system.²¹ (At that time, sexual reproduction was variously believed to be due to spontaneous generation, to ‘germs’, to male and female semen ‘mixing’ in the womb, with these germs or seminal fluids containing ‘memories’ which ensured they ‘knew’ which forms to develop into.) Also, the binomial nomenclature that Linnaeus developed, in Species Plantarum (1753), Genera Plantarum (1754) and Systema Naturae (1758), drew attention to the systematic similarities between species, genera, families and so on. It became obvious from this that the Creator’s plan was not linear and led Buffon, in attacking Linnaeus, to his theory of ‘degeneration’, that for example all two hundred mammalian species known to him had been derived from thirty-eight ‘original’ forms. This was an early idea of evolution.²²

But another discipline was in the process of formation that would put history, and in particular pre-history, on to a different footing and further prepare the way for Darwin – this was geology. Geology differed fundamentally from all the other sciences, and from philosophy. It was, as Charles Gillispie has said, the first science to be concerned with the history of nature rather than its order.

In the seventeenth century Descartes had been the first to link the new astronomy and the new physics to form a coherent view of the universe, in which even the sun – let alone the earth – was just another star. He speculated that the earth might have formed from a ball of cooling ash and become trapped in the sun’s ‘vortex’. (To avoid criticism from the Church, he said only that this ‘might’ have happened.) Bernard de la Fontenelle, in A Plurality of Worlds (1688), had stressed man’s insignificance in the new order of things, and had even wondered if other stars might be inhabited.²³ The idea that physics operated on the same principles throughout the universe was a major change in thinking that could not have occurred to the medieval mind. The basic ideas of heaven and earth, as understood in the West at least, were Aristotelian and the two realms were held to be fundamentally different: one could not give rise to the other.²⁴ Eventually, Descartes’ physics were replaced by Newton’s, the ‘vortex’ with gravity, but that didn’t alter early geological theories very much. In 1691 Thomas Burnet published his Sacred Theory of the Earth, in which he argued that various materials had coalesced to form the earth, with dense rock at the centre, then less dense water, then a light crust, on which we live. This conveniently explained the Flood – just beneath the thin crust were vast tracts of water. A few years later, in 1696, William Whiston, Newton’s successor at Cambridge, proposed that the earth could have been formed from the cloud of dust left by a comet, which coalesced to form a solid body, and was deluged with water from a second passing comet.²⁵ This idea, that the earth was once covered by a vast ocean, which then retreated, proved enduring. G. W. Leibniz added the thought that the earth had once been much hotter than it is now, and that earthquakes would therefore have been much more violent in the past. (Even then it was clear that present-day earthquakes had very trivial effects on the surface of the earth.)

In the eighteenth century, in his ‘nebular hypothesis’, Kant proposed that the entire solar system was formed from a condensing cloud of gas, a theory that received support from the observations of William Herschel, whose vastly improved telescopes showed, or appeared to show, that some of the nebulae ‘or hazy patches’ seen in the night sky were gas or dust clouds ‘apparently condensing into a central star’.²⁶ Buffon built on this, but like Descartes before him he too sought accommodation with the church, arguing that the earth started out as very hot, but cooled in seven phases (analogous to the seven days of the week in biblical creation), the last of which gave rise to man.

Slowly, then, a view was forming that the earth itself had changed over time. Nonetheless, however the earth had formed, the central problem faced by the early geologists was to explain how sedimentary rocks, formed by deposition from water, could now stand on dry land. As Peter Bowler has pointed out, there can be only two answers – either the sea levels have subsided, or the land has been raised. ‘The belief that all sedimentary rocks were deposited on the floor of a vast ocean that has since disappeared became known as the Neptunist theory, after the Roman god of the sea.’²⁷ The alternative became known as Vulcanism, after the god of fire. By far the most influential Neptunist in the eighteenth century, in fact the most influential geologist of any kind, was Abraham Gottlob Werner, a teacher at the mining school in Freiburg, Germany, who proposed that, once one assumed that the earth, when it cooled, had an uneven surface, and that the waters retreated at a different rate in different areas, the formation of rocks could be explained. Primary rocks would be exposed first. Then, assuming the retreat of the waters was slow enough, there would be erosion of the primary rocks, which would drain into the great ocean, and then these sediments would be revealed as the waters retreated further, to create secondary rocks, a process that could be repeated and repeated. In such a way the different types of rock had been formed in a succession which comprised five stages. The first of them produced the ‘primitive’ rocks – granite, gneiss, porphyry – which had crystallised out of the original chemical solution during the Flood, and the last, which was not formed until all the flood waters had receded, was generated by volcanic activity – accounting for how lavas and tuff, for example, had been produced. According to Werner, volcanoes around the earth were caused by the ignition of coal deposits.²⁸ He thought that volcanic activity had a trivial effect on the formation of the earth and though he was himself in no way interested in religion his Neptunist theory fitted very well with the biblical account of the Flood, which is one reason why it was so popular across Europe. It gave rise to the phrase ‘scriptural geology’.

This theory had tidiness to recommend it, but beyond that there were some serious problems. For a start, it did not even begin to explain why some types of rock that according to Werner were more recent than other types, were often found situated below them. Still more problematical was the sheer totality of water that would have been needed to hold all the land of the earth in solution. It would have to have been a flood many miles deep, and in turn that provoked an even bigger problem: what had happened to all that water when it had receded?

The chief rival to Werner, though nowhere near as influential to begin with, was a Scot, from the Edinburgh Enlightenment, James Hutton (1726–1797), and his Vulcanism. From the middle of the eighteenth century, some naturalists began to suspect that volcanic activity had produced some effect on the earth. It was noticed, for instance, that certain mountains in central France had the form of volcanoes though there was no record of such activity in history. Others pointed to the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, which appeared to consist of columns of basalt that had solidified from a molten state and were therefore of volcanic origin. Hutton did not begin with the origins of the earth, but instead confined himself to observation rather than speculation. He looked around him at the geological changes he could see occurring in his own day and adopted the view that these processes had always been going on. In this way he observed that the crust of the earth, its outermost, most accessible layer, is formed by two types of rock, one of igneous origin (formed by heat), and the other of aqueous origin. He further observed that the main igneous rocks (granite, porphyry, basalt) usually lie beneath the aqueous ones, except where subterranean upheavals have thrust the igneous rocks upward. He also observed what anyone else could see, that weathering and erosion are even today laying down a fine silt of sandstone, limestone, clay and pebbles on the bed of the ocean near river estuaries. He then asked what could have transformed these silts into the solid rock that is everywhere about us. He concluded that it could only have been heat. Water was ruled out – an important breakthrough – because so many of these rocks are clearly insoluble. And so where did this heat come from? Hutton concluded that it came from inside the earth, and that it was expressed by volcanic action. This action, he realised, would explain the convoluted and angled strata which could be observed at many places all over the world. He pointed out that volcanic action was still occurring, that different landmasses were still rising and falling (there was evidence just then that areas of Scotland and Sweden were being raised), and that the rivers – again as anyone could see – were still carrying their silts to the sea.²⁹

Hutton first published his theories in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788, followed by the two-volume Theory of the Earth in 1795, ‘the earliest treatise which can be considered a geological synthesis rather than an imaginative exercise’.³⁰ One of Hutton’s important premises was that the origin of fossils had been fully settled (‘fossils’ originally meant anything dug up). They were recognised by Nicholas Steno and John Woodward in the seventeenth century as the residue of living creatures, many of which were now extinct.³¹ But it was also understood that the presence of fossils on the tops of mountains was accounted for by Noah’s Flood. At the time Hutton’s book appeared, the historical reality of the Flood was beyond question. ‘When the history of the earth was considered geologically, it was simply assumed that a universal deluge must have wrought vast changes and that it had been a primary agent in forming the present surface of the globe. Its occurrence was evidence that the Lord was a governor as well as a creator.’ Just as the Flood was undisputed, so the biblical narrative of the creation of the world, as revealed in Genesis, was also beyond question. On this account, the length of time since creation was still believed to be about six thousand years, and though some people were beginning to wonder whether this was long enough, no one thought the earth very much older. A separate question was whether the animals had been created earlier than mankind, but even this did not, of itself, greatly add to the antiquity of man.³²

There was no question but that Hutton’s Vulcanism fitted many of the facts better than Werner’s Neptunism. Many critics resisted it, however, because Vulcanism implied vast tracts of geological time, ‘inconceivable ages that went far beyond what anyone had envisaged before’.³³ As Werner and others had observed, volcanic and earthquake activity today actually produce only ‘trivial’ effects on the surface of the earth. If this has always been the case, then not only must the earth be of very great antiquity, for great mountains, say, to have been raised to such heights, but Hutton’s ideas also posited a ‘steady state’ for the earth. This compared badly with the idea that the earth was once much hotter than it is now, when geological events – Flood or no Flood – were much grander. This at least implied a development of the earth. There was also something unromantic about Hutton’s theory because it argued that the earth as we know it had been formed by a succession of ‘infinitesimally small events’, rather than by dramatic catastrophes, such as floods. It further required a number of nimble intellectual tricks to reconcile Hutton’s vulcanism with the Bible. One effort had it that there was once a ‘great evaporation’ (which would explain how all the flood waters had disappeared). Nevertheless, as Charles Gillispie has shown, there were many eminent men of science in the nineteenth century who, despite Hutton’s theories, still subscribed to Neptunism: Sir Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy and James Watt, not to mention W. Hyde Wollaston, secretary of the Royal Society.³⁴ Hutton’s theory did not really begin to catch on until John Playfair published a popular version in 1802 (see Chapter 35, below, for the crucial role of popularisers in the nineteenth century, and their part in the decline of faith).

But Hutton (a deist) was not alone in believing that the observation of processes still going on would triumph. In 1815, William Smith, a canal builder often called the ‘father’ of British geology, pointed out that similar forms of rock, scattered across the globe, contained similar fossils. Many of these species no longer existed. This, in itself, implied that species came into existence, flourished, and then became extinct, over the vast periods of time that it took the rocks to be laid down and harden. This was significant in two ways. In the first place, it supported the idea that successive layers of rock were formed, not all at once but over time. And second, it reinforced the notion that there had been separate and numerous creations and extinctions, quite at variance with what it said in the Bible.³⁵

Objections to the biblical account were growing. Nevertheless, it was still the case that hardly anyone at the beginning of the nineteenth century questioned the Flood. Neptunism, the biblical account, was still the most popular version. Peter Bowler says that at this time geological texts sometimes outsold popular novels, but that science ‘was respectable only so long as it did not appear to disturb religious and social conventions of the day’.³⁶ Neptunism did, however, receive a significant twist in 1811 when the Frenchman Georges Cuvier published his Recherches sur les ossements fossiles (Researches on Fossil Bones). Going through four editions in ten years, this showed that a new, updated Neptunism was what people most wanted. Cuvier, a curator at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, formed from the pre-1789 Jardin du Roi, argued that there had been not one but several cataclysms – including floods – in the history of the earth. Looking about him, in the Huttonian manner, he concluded that, because entire mammoths and other sizeable vertebrates had been ‘encased whole’ in the ice in mountain regions, these cataclysms must have been very sudden indeed. He also argued that if whole mountains had been lifted high above the seas, these cataclysms could only have been – by definition – unimaginably violent, so violent that entire species had been exterminated and, conceivably, earlier forms of humanity.³⁷ Excavations in the Paris basin further showed an alternation of deposits between salt and fresh water, suggesting ‘a series of major changes in the relative position of land and sea’.³⁸ But Cuvier’s researches weren’t entirely consistent with the biblical account. He also observed, and this was important, that in the rocks the deeper fossils were more different from life forms in existence today and that, moreover, fossils occur in a consistent order everywhere in the world. This order was: fish, amphibia, reptilia, mammalia. He therefore concluded that the older the strata of rock the higher was the proportion of extinct species. Since, at that time, no human fossils had turned up anywhere, he concluded that ‘. . . mankind must have been created at some time between the last catastrophe and the one preceding it’.³⁹ He also observed that the expedition to Egypt had brought back mummified animals thousands of years old, which were identical to those now living, which confirmed the stability of species. Fossil species must therefore have lived for a long time too, before dying out.⁴⁰ This was, in a sense, a half-way version of the biblical story. Man had been created since the Flood, but not the animals, which were much older.

Nevertheless, Cuvier’s observations helped keep Neptunism and Catastrophism popular, especially in Britain, where acceptance of Hutton’s theories was delayed at least until the 1820s. Robert Jameson, the leading light of the Wernerian Society of Edinburgh, even managed to stop Hutton’s ideas from having much influence in his native city.⁴¹ There was in fact one other reason why many geologists – again, especially in Britain – subscribed to the great Flood theory: this was the existence of huge rocks of a completely different type from the land surrounding them. These would later be shown to have been deposited by the ice sheets during the Ice Age, but to begin with their distribution was attributed to the great Deluge. The man who insisted most on this was William Buckland, Oxford’s first professor of geology. In 1819, in a famous inaugural lecture, Vindiciae Geologicae; or, the Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained, he tried ‘to shew that the study of geology has a tendency to confirm the evidences of natural religion; and that the facts developed by it are consistent with the accounts of the creation and deluge recorded in the Mosaic writings.’⁴² Furthermore, before he had been at Oxford very long, some miners in 1821 stumbled upon a cave at Kirkdale in the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire, where they discovered a huge deposit of ‘assorted bones’. Buckland saw his chance. Hurrying to Yorkshire, he quickly established that while most of the bones belonged to hyenas, there were also many birds and other species, including animals no longer found in Britain – lions, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses. Moreover, each of the bones and skulls were deformed or broken in much the same way and he concluded that what the miners had found was a den of hyenas. He wrote up the discovery, first as an academic paper, which won the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, and then followed it with a more popular account. His aim in this book was to reinforce the existence of the Flood and the recent creation of man. His thesis was nothing if not neat: most of the bones in Kirkdale belonged to species now extinct in Europe; such bones are never found in alluvial (riverine) deposits of sand or silt; there is no evidence that these animals have ever lived in Europe since the Flood. It therefore followed, said Buckland, that the animals whose remains the miners had found, must have been interred prior to Noah’s time. He finally argued that the top layer of remains was so beautifully preserved in mud and silt ‘that they must have been buried suddenly and, judging by the layer of postdiluvial stalactite covering the mud, not much more than five or six thousand years ago.’⁴³

However, there were still problems with the flood theory, not least the fact that, as even Buckland acknowledged, the various pieces of evidence around the world placed the Flood at widely varying epochs. (Buckland, like many others, didn’t let his faith warp his science too much.)⁴⁴ In addition, by the 1830s the cooling earth theory was gaining coherence as an explanation as to why geological activity was greater in the past than now, further fuelling the view that the earth developed, and that life forms had been very different in the past. In 1824 Buckland himself described the first known dinosaur, the gigantic Megalosaurus, though the word ‘dinosaur’ wasn’t coined until 1841, by the great anatomist Richard Owen. That was also the year that John Philips identified the great sequence of geological formations, the Palaeozoic, the age of fishes and invertebrates, the Mesozoic, the age of reptiles, and the Cenozoic, the age of mammals.⁴⁵ This was based in part on the work of Adam Sedgwick and Sir Roderick Murchison in Wales, which began the decoding of the Palaeozoic system. The Palaeozoic period would eventually be shown to have extended from roughly 550 million years ago to 250 million years ago, and during that time plant life had moved out of the oceans on to land, fish appeared, then amphibians and then reptiles had reached land. These new forms of life were all wiped out, about 250 million years ago, for reasons that are still hard to fathom. But it was clear from the analyses of Sedgwick and Murchison that early forms of life on earth were very old, that life had begun in the sea, and then climbed ashore. Deluge or no deluge, all this was again in dramatic contradiction of the biblical account.⁴⁶

The study of fossils and of rock sequences was also put together now with the growing science of embryology. The key figure here was Karl Ernst von Baer, who argued against the early prevailing wisdom that the human embryo, in developing, recapitulates the invertebrate/fish/reptile/mammal progression, and said instead that all embryos are simple to begin with, then develop specialised characteristics that equip them for their place in the world: lower animals are not, as it were, immature forms of man.⁴⁷ It was von Baer who also showed that the organisation of life forms is not a ‘man-centred hierarchy’, that the human form is just one end-result among many. Robert Owen in his Archetypes and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848) and On the Nature of Limbs (1849) showed that vertebrates have a basically similar structure, which are adapted in different ways but are not ‘aimed’ in a linear way at man.⁴⁸

We are running ahead of ourselves, and of the geological story. The importance of the discoveries of Cuvier, Buckland, Sedgwick and Murchison, over and above their intrinsic merit, was that they brought about a decisive change of mind on the part of Charles Lyell. In 1830 he published the first volume of what would turn into his three-volume Principles of Geology. Lyell’s argument was contained in the subtitle, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. He was also much influenced by Georges Scrope, a Frenchman whose studies in the Massif Central had shown, he said, that ‘rivers working over limitless centuries had cut their own valleys’. Before his own book was released, Lyell made a tour of Europe, meeting fellow geologists such as Étienne de Serres, to study a number of geological features, most notably the active volcanoes of Sicily, where he found that the massive cone had been built up gradually though a long series of small eruptions. Furthermore, the volcano was resting on sedimentary rocks of recent origin, as shown by the fact that the fossil molluscs were identical with present-day ones. This convinced Lyell that there was no need to posit a single catastrophe for this mountain.

But essentially Principles was a work of synthesis, rather than of original research, in which Lyell clarified and interpreted already-published material to support two conclusions. The first, obviously enough, was to show that the main geological features of the earth could be explained as the result of actions in history that were exactly the same as those that could be observed in the present. In a review of his book, the term ‘uniformitarianism’ was used and caught on. Lyell’s second aim was to resist the idea that a great flood, or series of floods, had produced the features of the earth that we see around us. He laid great store by Scrope, supporting his view that the world’s rivers had carved out their own valleys, and that ‘gently winding river beds’ could not be the product of – nor produce – violent events, still less catastrophes. On the religious front, Lyell took the common-sense view, arguing that it was unlikely God would keep interfering in the laws of nature, to provoke a series of major cataclysms. Instead, he said, provided that one assumed that the past extended back far enough, then the geological action that could be observed as still in operation today was enough to explain ‘the record in the rocks’.⁴⁹ There was, he added, no shortage of evidence to show that volcanoes had erupted regularly throughout history and that this had nothing to do with either floods or catastrophes. And he compared the findings of stratigraphy, palaeontology and physical geography to identify three separate eras with three distinct forms of life. These became known as the Pliocene, Miocene and Eocene epochs, the last of which went back 55 million years. Yet again this was a much longer time-frame than anything in the Old Testament.

Volume One of the Principles took issue with the Flood, and began the process whereby the idea would be killed off. In volume two, Lyell demolished the biblical version of creation. Inspecting the fossils as revealed in the record of the rocks, he showed that there had been a continuous stream of creation, and extinction, involving literally countless species. In the eighteenth century, Linnaeus had speculated that there must once have been ‘a special corner of the globe’ that had been reserved as a ‘divine incubator’, where life and new species had started. Lyell demonstrated how mistaken this notion was. Life, he showed, had begun in different ‘foci of creation’. He thought that man had been created relatively recently but by a process that was just the same as for other animals.⁵⁰

The big problem with Lyell’s theory was that it revived Hutton’s ‘steady-state’ theory of the earth, arguing that the world we see about us is the product of constructive and destructive forces. But where did the energy for all this come from? As the science of thermodynamics developed in the middle years of the nineteenth century, physicists such as Lord Kelvin argued that the earth must be cooling and calculated on that basis that it was at least 100 million years old. This was nowhere near the truth but still very much greater than it said in the Bible. (Only in the twentieth century did physicists realise that the radioactivity of certain elements is capable of maintaining the earth’s central heat.)⁵¹ With hindsight, one can say that Lyell’s book flirted with evolution. But it was only flirtation: he had no concept of natural selection. On the other hand, he did kill off Neptunism.

There were, however, a number of last-ditch attempts to marry the biblical narrative with the flood of scientific discoveries, and these culminated in a series of papers that became known as the Bridgewater Treatises. ‘This strange and, to the modern reader, deadly series was commissioned by the will of the Reverend Francis Henry Egerton, eighth earl of Bridgewater, a noble clergyman who had always neglected his parish assiduously and who died in 1829. Lord Bridgewater charged his executors, the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, and the president of the Royal Society, with the duty of selecting eight scientific authors, each from a main branch of the natural sciences, who were capable of demonstrating “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation; illustrating such work by all reasonable arguments, as for instance, the variety and formation of God’s creatures in the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms . . .”’ The eight ‘scientific’ authors chosen in fact comprised clergymen, physicians and geologists.⁵² None of them said anything that much advanced the debate but the very existence of the series showed how far some people were prepared to go to try to keep science in its place. Among the arguments used were the view that the universe is so improbable statistically that ‘divine direction’ must be at work, and that our world is so benevolent that it can only have been made by God – examples included the observation that fish have eyes specially suited to marine vision, that iron ore is always discovered in the neighbourhood of coal, by means of which it can be smelted, and so on.⁵³ In the final treatise, Dr Thomas Chalmers insisted that the very existence of a conscience among men, the very notion of morality, was ‘conclusive evidence of an exquisite and divinely established harmony . . .’⁵⁴

The treatises proved popular. Released between 1833 and 1836, each had gone through four editions at least by the 1850s. Their main weakness lay in their unreflective approach to science, each being composed as a final word, as if geology, biology, philology and the other new disciplines would not have further shocks up their sleeves, to add to those that had already occurred and which it had been the aim of the treatises to explain away.

The most immediate response to the Bridgewater Treatises was Charles Babbage’s unofficial Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, published in 1838, which argued that a creator could work as he himself had worked in creating his famous ‘calculating engine’, a forerunner of the computer, in which, he noted, he could programme his machine to change its operations according to some pre-determined plan. Thus was born an idea that was to prove popular – the ‘laws of creation’, rather like the laws of reproduction. This was made the most of by Robert Chambers, yet another Edinburgh figure, whose Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844, was a very radical break, so radical that Chambers published the book anonymously. This work promoted the basic idea of evolution, though without in any way anticipating Darwinian natural selection. Chambers described the progress of life as a purely natural process. He began by saying that life started through spontaneous generation ‘citing as evidence certain soon-to-be-discredited experiments in which small insects had apparently been produced by electricity’.⁵⁵ Using Babbage’s Ninth Treatise as an example, he posited vague laws of creation to account for the progression. But his main contribution, as was introduced in the Prologue, was to organise the palaeontological record in an ascending system and to argue that man did not stand out in any way from other organisms in the natural world. Though he had no grasp of natural selection, or indeed of how evolution might work, Chambers did introduce people to the idea of evolution fifteen years before Darwin.⁵⁶ James Secord, in his book Victorian Sensation (2000), has explored the full impact of Vestiges. He goes so far as to say that Darwin was, in a sense, ‘scooped’ by Chambers, that wide and varied sections of (British) society discussed Vestiges, at the British Association, in fashionable intellectual salons and societies, in London, Cambridge, Liverpool and Edinburgh, but also among ‘lower’ social groups, that the ideas the book promoted passed into general discussion, being referred to in paintings, exhibitions, cartoons in the new, mass-circulation newspapers, and that it was discussed among feminists and freethinkers. Secord makes the point that Chambers was not really a scientist but a middle-brow intellectual from a publishing family and that his book, which in essence provided a narrative of the ‘progress’ of history, drew as much on the narrative technique of recent novels (themselves a relatively new phenomenon) as much as science. Chambers believed his book would create a sensation: one reason he published it anonymously was in case it didn’t do well; another reason was in case it did do well. But the need for anonymity by the author, Secord says, shows that the whole question of evolution was very much in the air in the 1840s and very controversial. His especially important point is that it was Vestiges that introduced evolution to a huge range of people (there were fourteen editions) and that, viewed in such a light, Darwin’s Origin of Species resolved a crisis and did not create one: ‘The idea of evolution is not a Darwin-centred narrative’. This is a major revision in the history of ideas.⁵⁷

A no less convincing response to the Bridgewater Treatises came at almost the same time as Vestiges and underlined the unfolding nature of science. This was the discovery of the great Ice Age, by Louis Agassiz and others. Agassiz was a Swiss geologist who later, in 1847, on account of his work on glaciation, was invited to Harvard. The original idea of a great Ice Age was not his: in 1795 James Hutton, in one of his rare instances of speculation, had wondered whether some strange, ‘erratic’ boulders near Geneva had been carried and left there by glaciers that had since retreated. But it was Agassiz who collected and collated the greatest mass of detail that put the issue beyond doubt. What Lyell did for the antiquity of the earth, Agassiz did for the Ice Age.

By observing present-day glaciers (of which there was no shortage in the Swiss Alps), Agassiz came to the conclusion that much of northern Europe had once been buried by a covering of ice, in places up to three kilometres thick. This conclusion (all the more remarkable because, at the time, he was more interested in fossil fishes) was based chiefly on three types of evidence found at the edges of glaciers even today – ‘erratics’, moraines, and tills. Erratics are large boulders – like those near Geneva – whose constitution is quite different from the rock all around them.⁵⁸ They are pushed by the edges of glaciers, as the ice expands, and then left in a ‘foreign’ environment, when the earth warms up again and the ice retreats. Thus geologists suddenly find a massive boulder of, say, granite, in an area otherwise made up of limestone. Early geologists had thought that this type of phenomenon was produced by the Flood, but Agassiz showed that it was ice that produced this effect. Till is a form of gravel formed by the ice as it expands over the earth and acts, in J. D. Macdougall’s words, like a giant sheet of sandpaper.⁵⁹ (Till provides a lot of gravel resources for modern construction industries.) Moraines are mounds of till that build up at the edges of glaciers and can be quite large: most of Long Island, in New York state, is a moraine more than 110 miles from end to end. Agassiz and others concluded that the most recent great Ice Age began about 130,000 years ago, peaked at 20,000 years ago, and ended quickly at 12,000–10,000 years ago. In time this would prove extremely significant, in that it tallied with the emerging evidence for the beginnings of agriculture.⁶⁰ This provided coherence in both chronological terms and in respect of cultural evolution.

The term ‘evolution’ was originally used in biology exclusively for the growth of the embryo. In the original Latin it means ‘to unfold’. Outside that usage, terms like ‘progressionism’ or development were used to convey the cohering notion that simpler organisms had, in an as yet unknown fashion, given rise to more complex ones. Experts were divided as to whether this progression included man. Evolution was next used in a cultural sense, following the observations of Vico, Herder and others, who saw in the development of human societies a progression from more primitive to more advanced forms of civilisation. Peter Bowler makes the point that early anthropologists such as E. B. Tylor and L. H. Morgan argued that different races progress through a similar sequence of cultural phases, with peoples who are still ‘primitive’ belonging to ‘retarded lines of cultural development, held up at a stage through which the white race had passed at an earlier phase’.⁶¹

Lamarck was one of the most important advocates of progressionism. Jean-Baptiste de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829), was not quite the knave and fool he has sometimes been painted. It was he who noticed that some fossil species were analogous to creatures that are still living, which gave him the idea that some fossil lines, at least, might not be extinct, but instead had changed, responding to alterations in conditions on earth, and were therefore still living ‘but in an amended form that we don’t recognise’. This is a pre-Darwinian concept of adaptation.⁶² Lamarck was convinced of the great age of the earth and that life forms had continuously changed over long periods of time. And he considered man the end-product of this progression.⁶³ Lamarck’s idea of evolution was two-fold. In the first place, he believed that nature embodied a principle towards increasing complexity. Second, he believed that organs within any creature developed more strongly the more often they were used and that these strengthened – or acquired – characteristics were passed on to later generations, always ‘provided that the changes acquired are common to both sexes, or to those which produce the young’.⁶⁴

Because of these factors, and others, which we shall come to, it has been said that there was something ‘in the air’ in the middle of the nineteenth century, which helped give rise to what Darwin would call natural selection.⁶⁵ A struggle for existence had been implied by Malthus, as long ago as 1797. Each tribe in history would have competed for resources, he said, with the less successful becoming extinct. ‘It is now known that in addition to Malthus, Darwin gained insights from reading the work of Adam Smith and other political economists. The concept of divergence through specialisation reflects the economic advantages supposed to accrue from the division of labour.’⁶⁶ Another theory was advanced by William Charles Wells in 1813, ‘An Account of a Female of the White Race of Mankind’, where he suggested that the human races might have been formed when groups moved into unoccupied territory and where they were faced with a new environment.⁶⁷ Accidental variations within the population would mean that some individuals would be better adapted to the new conditions, who would thus tend to become the parents of the new race.

Wherever one looked in the mid-nineteenth century, then, the role played by struggle, by competition, in society and in nature, was on everyone’s lips.⁶⁸ It was by now difficult to contradict the evidence of the rocks, where the basic picture was clear. ‘The earliest rocks [600 million years ago] yielded only the remains of invertebrates, with the first fish appearing only in the Silurian [440–410 million years ago]. The Mesozoic [250–65 million years ago] was dominated by the reptiles, including the dinosaurs. Although present in small numbers in the Mesozoic, the mammals only became dominant in the Cenozoic [65 million years ago → the present], gradually progressing to the more advanced creatures of today, including the human species.’⁶⁹ (The dates in square brackets were not, of course, accepted in the nineteenth century.) It was hard for people not to read some sort of ‘end’ in this progression, ‘leading’, via stages, to humans, ‘and thus revealing a divine plan with a symbolic purpose’. In books of the time, most ‘trees of life’ showed a main stem, thicker than others, leading directly to man.

This picture, of course, now has to be revised in the light of James Secord’s recent work. In his book, he provides an illustration of Darwin’s notes, made when he was reading Vestiges in the British Museum Reading Room. Darwin was far from impressed by many aspects of the argument (he never bought his own copy of the book), but Vestiges, coming on top of the ‘something in the air’, clearly had an effect in allowing Darwin to sharpen the distinction between his own theory of natural selection and its competitors.⁷⁰

A final element in this ‘climate of opinion’, this ‘something in the air’, as regards ‘progressionism’ and how it was achieved, was the work of Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace’s reputation, and role, in the discovery of evolution have gone through their own progression in recent times. For many years it was accepted that the paper he sent to Darwin in 1858, ‘On the Tendencies of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’, contained a clear exposition of natural selection, such that Darwin was forced to begin a move towards publication of his own book, On the Origin of Species. As a result, some scholars have argued that Wallace was never given the recognition he deserves and have even implied that Darwin and his followers deliberately kept him out of the limelight.⁷¹ More recently, however, a closer reading of Wallace’s paper has shown that his idea about natural selection was not the same as Darwin’s, and that it was much less powerful as an explanatory device. In particular, Wallace did not stress competition between individuals, but between individuals and the environment. For Wallace, the less fit individuals, those less well-adapted to their environment, will be eliminated, especially when there are major changes in that environment. Under this system, each individual struggles against the environment and the fate of any one individual is independent of others.⁷² This difference, which is fundamental, may explain why Wallace appears to have shown no resentment when Darwin’s book was published the year after he had sent him his paper.⁷³

None of the foregoing, however, should be allowed to cloud the fact that when On the Origin of Species did appear, in 1859, it introduced ‘an entirely new and – to Darwin’s contemporaries – an entirely unexpected approach to the question of biological evolution’. Darwin’s theory explained, as no one else had done, a new mechanism of change in the biological world. It showed how one species gave rise to another and, in Ernst Mayr’s words, ‘represented not merely the replacement of one scientific theory (“immutable species”) by a new one, but demanded a complete rethinking of man’s concept of the world and of himself; more specifically, it demanded the rejection of some of the most widely held and most cherished beliefs of western man.’ For Peter Bowler, ‘The historian of ideas sees the revolution in biology as symptomatic of a deeper change in the values of western society, as the Christian view of man and nature was replaced by a materialistic one.’⁷⁴ The most notable flash of insight by Darwin was his theory of natural selection, the backbone of the book (its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life). Individuals of any species show variations and those better suited were more likely to reproduce and give rise to a new generation. In this way, accidental variations that fitted better than others were encouraged. No ‘design’ was necessary in this theory, or process, which was at the same time far more parsimonious than any other, and could be observed on all sides.⁷⁵

Although Darwin had been stimulated to published the Origin after being contacted by Wallace, he had been germinating his ideas since the late 1830s, after his now-famous voyage on the Beagle. His time in South America, in particular the Galapagos Islands, had taught him to think in terms of populations rather than individuals, as he studied variation from island to island. He had become familiar with the common rhea, a flightless bird, while travelling the open pampas of Patagonia, and had eaten different forms of the creature as he moved around. He noticed that, at the edges of the territory occupied by the two populations, there was a struggle for supremacy. And he began to wonder why there were related species on different islands and continents – would the Creator have visited each location and made these fine adjustments?⁷⁶ From a study of barnacles he noted how much variety was possible in a species, and all these observations and inferences gradually came together. When the book was published, on 24 November 1859, 1,250 copies were snapped up on the first day. He himself took the waters at Ilkley, in Yorkshire, waiting for the storm to break.⁷⁷ It did not take long and it is not hard to see why: Ernst Mayr concluded that there were six major philosophical implications of Darwin’s theories: (1) the replacement of a static by an evolving world; (2) the demonstration of the implausibility of creationism; (3) the refutation of cosmic teleology (the idea that there was a purpose in the universe); (4) the abolition of any justification for absolute anthropocentrism (that the purpose of the world is the production of man); (5) the explanation of ‘design’ in the world by purely materialistic processes; (6) the replacement of essentialism by population thinking.

We must be clear about the impact of the Origin. It owed something to Darwin’s solid reputation and because his book was packed with supporting details – it was not produced by a nobody.⁷⁸ Yet its impact also had something to do with the fact that, as James Secord has pointed out, the book resolved – or appeared to resolve – a crisis, not because it sparked one. Natural selection was, essentially, the last plank in the evolutionary argument, not the first one, the final filling-in of the theory, providing the mechanism by which one species gave rise to another. The non-revolutionary nature of the Origin, to use Peter Bowler’s term, is shown by Secord’s chart in his book, which records that the Origin did not decisively outsell Vestiges until the twentieth century.⁷⁹

That said, the Origin did promote enormous opposition. Darwin himself realised that his theory of natural selection would prove the most contentious element in his argument and he was not wrong. John F. W. Herschel, a philosopher whom Darwin admired, called natural selection the ‘law of higgledy-piggledy’, while Sedgwick (who was both a divine and a scientist) condemned it as ‘a moral outrage’.⁸⁰ Many of the favourable reviews of the Origin were lukewarm about natural selection: Lyell, for example, never accepted it fully, and described it as ‘distasteful’, while T. H. Huxley did not think it could be proved.⁸¹ In the late nineteenth century, while the theory of evolution was widely accepted, natural selection was ignored, and this was important because it allowed people to assume that evolution was ‘intended to develop toward a particular goal, just as embryos grew to maturity’. Viewed in this way, evolution was not the threat to religion it is sometimes made to appear.⁸² Indeed, the Origin had two chapters on the geographical distribution of living forms, making use of the geology and palaeontology reported above, and people had much less difficulty accepting this than the mechanism of selection. Vestiges had prepared part of the way. Ernst Mayr says the selection aspect of Darwin’s theory was not finally accepted until the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s.⁸³ Many people simply thought that the implications of the Origin were immoral and remained convinced that the world was manifestly well-ordered – evidence for a divinity – and that Darwin’s ideas about accidental (‘higgledy-piggledy’) evolution could not produce such harmony. Darwinism was selfish and wasteful, they said, and a benevolent deity would never allow such a process. What was the Darwinian purpose of musical ability, or the ability to perform abstract mathematical calculations?⁸⁴ Darwin, it should be said, was never entirely happy with the word ‘selection’, and many misunderstood how to interpret the term ‘fittest’. Several critics argued that Darwin’s method of theorising was unscientific because his theory could not be falsified.

Darwin’s theory certainly had a major weakness. There was no account of the actual mechanisms by which inherited characteristics were passed on (‘hard heredity’). These were discovered by the monk Gregor Mendel in Moravia in 1865, but Darwin and everyone else missed their significance and they were not rediscovered and given general circulation until 1900. Until the rediscovery of Mendel, the theories of the German biologist Auguste Weismann attracted most attention, in particular the idea of ‘germ plasm’, which he developed out of cell theory. It will be remembered that cells had first been observed following the invention of the microscope, when they had been called ‘globules’ or ‘bubbles’ (see here). By the early nineteenth century, when significant advances were made in the design of microscopes, biologists, following Marie-François Xavier Bichat, recognised twenty-one categories of animal tissue and realised that they were all made up of cells, now shown to consist of more than their walls and to contain a sticky ‘substance of life’, baptised ‘protoplasm’ by J. E. Purkinje in 1839.⁸⁵ The men who finally showed that all plants and animals were made up of cells were J. J. Schleiden (plants, 1838) and Theodor Schwann (animals, 1839). Weismann noted the nucleus in cells and gradually came to the view that the germ plasm does not consist of whole germinal cells but is concentrated in the rod-like structures in the nucleus which, because they stained differently, were called chromosomes. But even when Mendel was rediscovered it was not immediately apparent that his mechanism in a sense ‘completed’ Darwinism. This is because a debate was then raging as to whether selection, if it occurred, operated on continuous variation or only on disparate variation, that is, characteristics (such as blue or brown eyes) that varied discretely or, say, height, that varied continuously. Mendel himself seems to have chosen discrete characteristics (flower colour, whether seeds were wrinkled or not) because they were cleaner examples of the theory he was trying to prove and because he had his own rival theory to Darwin, namely that selection acted on hybrids, on intermediate forms. (Hybrids traditionally posed a theological problem, as forms intermediate between divinely created species.) The full significance of Mendelian genetics for Darwinian selection was not recognised until the 1920s.⁸⁶

Darwin didn’t stop with the Origin. No account of Darwinism can afford to neglect the Descent of Man. The idea of ‘progressionist evolution’ was everywhere in the nineteenth century, as we have seen, even in physics, with Kant and Laplace’s nebular hypothesis, the notion that the solar system has condensed from a vast cloud of dust under the influence of gravity.⁸⁷

This is one reason why, as the sciences of sociology, anthropology and archaeology began to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century, they were united in developing within a framework of progressionism. As early as 1861, Sir Henry Maine, in Ancient Law, had explored the ways in which the modern legal system had developed from the early practices found in ‘patriarchal family groups’.⁸⁸ Other titles with a similar approach included John Lubbock’s Origin of Civilisation in 1870 and Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society in 1877, though the most impressive, by far, was James Frazer’s Golden Bough, published in 1890. Early anthropologists had also been affected by the colonial experience: on several occasions attempts were made to educate colonised populations, the aim being to convert them to the ‘obviously’ superior European cultural practices. The fact that these attempts had all failed persuaded at least some anthropologists that there had to be ‘a fixed sequence of stages through which all cultures develop’.⁸⁹ And it followed from this that one could not, artificially, boost one culture from an earlier stage to a later one. Lewis Morgan defined these major stages as savagery, barbarism and civilisation, a comforting doctrine for the colonial powers. The main ideas he discusses are the growth of the idea of government, the growth of the idea of the family, and the growth of the idea of property.⁹⁰

It was in this intellectual climate that archaeologists began conceiving the advances in regard to stone hand-axes that were described in the Prologue, when the ‘three-age system’ (of stone, bronze and iron) was introduced. We saw then that at first the idea of a ‘stone age’ of great antiquity met with fierce resistance. No one could accept that the earliest humans had co-existed with now-extinct animals, and it was only when Boucher des Perthes discovered stone tools side-by-side with the bones of extinct animals in the gravel beds of northern France that ideas began to change. But then, roughly speaking in 1860, thanks in part to publication of the Origin, there was a rapid evolution in opinion, and the much greater antiquity of the human race was at last accepted. Charles Lyell finally acceded to the progressionist view of the earth, then collected a mass of evidence in favour of the new view, and synthesised it in Geological Evidences for the Antiquity of Man (1863).

The extremely crude nature of the earliest stone tools convinced many that early man’s social and cultural circumstances were equally primitive, and this led John Lubbock to argue that there had been an evolution of society from savage origins. This was more shocking than it might seem because nineteenth-century religious thinkers still viewed modern man as degenerate as compared with Adam and Eve before the Fall. It was in his book Prehistoric Times (1865) that Lubbock first used the terms ‘Palaeolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’ to describe the transition from the Old to the New Stone Age, which he said could be distinguished by the change in use from chipped to polished stone, though more sophisticated variations were soon observed.⁹¹

For many people, the crucial issue underlying the debate as to whether man was evolved from the apes revolved around the question of the soul. If man was, in effect, little more than an ape, did that mean that the very idea of a soul – the traditional all-important difference between animals and men – would have to be rejected? Darwin’s Descent of Man, published in 1871, tried to do two things at once: to convince sceptics that man really was descended from the animals and yet to explain what exactly it meant to be human – how humans had acquired their unique qualities.

‘Although Darwin gradually abandoned his belief in a benevolent creator, he was certainly inclined to hope that the white race did indeed represent the high point of an inevitable (if irregular) advance toward higher things.’⁹² In the Descent, he knew that, above all, he had to explain the very great – the enormous – increase in mental power from apes to humans.⁹³ If evolution was a slow, gradual process, why did such a large gap exist? This was the answer that the religious sceptics were looking for. His answer came in chapter four of the book. There, Darwin advanced the proposition that man possesses a unique physical attribute, the entity with which this book began, namely an upright posture. Darwin argued that this upright posture, and the bipedal mode of locomotion, would have freed the human’s hands and as a result we eventually developed the capacity to use tools. And it was this, he said, which would have sparked the rapid growth in intelligence among this one form of great ape.⁹⁴ In the Descent Darwin did not offer any cogent reason as to why ancient man had started to walk upright and it was not until 1889 that Wallace suggested it could well have been an adaptation to a new environment. He speculated that early man was forced out of the trees on to the open savannah plains, perhaps as a result of climate change, which shrank the forests. On the savannah, he suggested, bipedalism was a more suitable mode of locomotion.

The importance of the upright posture, despite the fact that the idea was introduced by Darwin himself, was not at first regarded as very significant. It was not until Eugene Dubois discovered ‘Java man’, Pithecanthropus (now Homo) erectus, in 1891–1892, that the theory came into its own (and confirmed the importance of the Neanderthal finds: see Chapter 1). The Pithecanthropus remains included a femur constructed in such a way as to suggest bipedalism, together with a piece of skull of a size that indicated a brain capacity between that of apes and humans. Even so, the importance of man’s upright posture was not fully accepted until the 1930s.⁹⁵

The legacy of Darwinism is complex. ‘The advent of evolutionism is seen by some as a watershed separating modern culture from the traditional roots of Western thought.’⁹⁶ There is no question but that its timing, quite apart from its intellectual substance, played a major role in the secularisation of European thought, considered in Chapter 35.⁹⁷ Darwinism forced people to a new view of history, that it occurred by accident, and that there was no goal, no ultimate end-point. As well as killing the need for God, it transformed the idea of wisdom, as some definite attainable state, however far off. This undermined traditional views in all sorts of ways and transformed the possibilities for the future. To mention just two, it was Darwinism’s model of societal change that led Marx to his view of the inevitability of revolution, and it was Darwin’s biology that led Freud to conceive the ‘pre-human’ nature of subconscious mental activity. As we shall see in a later chapter, Darwin’s concept of what comprises ‘fitness’, in an evolutionary context, has been much misunderstood, and gave rise, consciously or unconsciously, to many social arrangements that were unjust and cruel. But since the rediscovery of the gene, in 1900, and the flowering of the technology based on it, Darwinism has triumphed. Except for one or two embarrassing ‘creationist’ enclaves in certain rural areas of the United States, the deep antiquity of the earth, and of mankind, is now firmly established.