GERMAN DARWINISM. From the Nation, September 9, 1875. ⁶²

A few months ago, in answer to the inquiries of a correspondent about books on evolution, we took occasion to point out and emphasize a division, very fundamental and important in our view, in books on this subject, namely, between those which treat of it as a theorem of natural history from a Baconian or scientific point of view, either mainly or exclusively (confining themselves to scientific considerations of proof), and those which treat of evolution as a philosophical thesis deductively, and as a part of a system of metaphysics. Such a division separates the names of Darwin and Spencer (which are popularly so often pronounced together) as widely as any two names could be separated on real grounds of distinction.

Two little books have lately been published which we may add to the short lists we gave of popular works on evolution— one to each list, “The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism. By Oscar Schmidt, Professor in the University of Strasburg,” 1875. “Outline of the Evolution-Philosophy. By Dr. M. E. Cazelles. Translated from the Trench by the Rev. O. B. Frothingham. With an Appendix by E. L. Youmans, M D.,” 1875. ⁶³ Professor Oscar Schmidt’s “Descent and Darwinism” is essentially a scientific treatise, though of a type which could hardly have been produced originally in the English language, or from a Baconian stand-point, and for English students of science. Of its peculiarities we propose to speak further on. The second book belongs to the speculative or metaphysical branch of the subject, and consists of two essays: one, translated from the French of Dr. Cazelles, is an account of Mr. Spencer’s philosophy, and a comparison of it with M. Comte’s; the other essay is a lecture by Dr. Youmans, given

in defense of Mr. Spencer’s claims to the credit of establishing the doctrine of evolution. Dr. Cazelles’s essay is an interesting account of Mr. Spencer’s theories by a fair-minded disciple— by as fair-minded a disciple as one could well be who is at all disposed to yield not merely to claims on one’s assent for the sake of argument or system, but on one’s adhesion to undemonstrated beliefs asserted to be axiomatic and irresistible. But a system like Mr. Spencer’s is obliged to stand on such positions. To us it is inconceivable (and therefore, according to one of Mr. Spencer’s criteria, opposed to truth) that any one should not resent at every step the asserted demonstrations which Mr. Spencer parades. Neither Dr. Cazelles nor Dr. Youmans begins, however, far enough back in their accounts of the origin and progress of Mr. Spencer’s thoughts. These were really theological in origin, and have never departed from the theological stand-point. For it is one thing to arrive at solutions of problems different from those commonly held, or from the orthodox, and quite another thing to outgrow or be drawn by legitimate studies aside from the problems themselves. Believers in philosophies of the unknowable are very much in the state of mind towards the theological problems of their earlier years in which the converted savage is towards the powers and attributes of the idols, which his reason has come to pronounce no other in fact than common blocks or stones. Presenting evidence to this effect does not really diminish the savage’s practical belief that his idols are pre-eminently ugly or awful, and preternaturally, though unapparently, unphenomenally, great. To get rid of this belief he must destroy the really harmless blocks. To have believed strongly without due evidence is a state of mind not easily convertible, when due evidence is seen to be wanting, into one to which the object is absolutely without existence, but is more commonly changed into one in which the old interest remains and the object still affects the believer as an unconditioned, unproved, undemonstrable, but not less pragmatically real existence; and this is the real starting-point of Mr. Spencer’s philosophy.

Dr. Cazelles thinks that Mr. Spencer “freed his theory from all metaphysical attachments” when he came in the course of

his thought to dismiss the moral or teleological implication of the word “progress,” and substituted the word “evolution” as the more appropriate name for the abstraction which he sought to define as the fundamental idea of the universe; and when he also substituted in his formula of definition the word “integration” for the “individuation” which he first thought to be the true form or idea of progress. The theory was doubtless thus freed from attachment to any received form of speculation on the nature of life and being, but not at all freed from the scope and method of metaphysics—this scope being systematic omniscience, including even the unknowable. The method of metaphysics is to treat of detached abstractions—that is, abstractions without check in definition and precision, from the concrete examples and embodiments to which Plato, not less than Bacon, pointed as indispensable guides to clearness and truth. There is no profound difficulty in conceiving what progress means, if we qualify the question by the consideration of the concretes in which progress is made; not even if we extend our inquiry to the vague ranking of organisms as higher and lower. The essential error of metaphysics, or “realism,” is not merely in attributing to an abstraction a truly individual, thinglike existence, or making it a “realized abstraction,” but in treating it as if it had such an existence—in other words, as if it had a meaning independently of the things which ought to determine the true limits and precision of its meaning. Thus, to apply the mechanical law of the conservation of force, which, as a scientific truth, has no meaning beyond the nature and conditions of material movements (whether these are within or outside of an organism)—to apply this law analogically to all sorts of changes—to the “movements” of society, for example —is, in effect, metaphysics, and strips the law of all the merits of truth it has in the minds and judgments of physical philosophers, or of those through whose experimental and mathematical researches it came to have the clear, distinct, precise, though technical meanings in science that constitute its only real merits. The daring ignorance which in this speculation undertook to change the name of the principle, to call it “persistence of force,” supposing the word “force” to refer to an incognizable substratum of causation, and not, as it really does in science, to various measurably interchangeable forms of material movement and antecedent conditions of movement (wholly phenomenal), gave the author’s use of the principle the character pre-eminently of metaphysics. We remember, as its most characteristic feature, this attempt in Mr. Spencer’s “First Principles” to eke out his barren “system” of abstractions by wresting and corrupting the very type of unmetaphysical scientific truth to the vagueness of a principle of the “unknowable.” The principle of the “conservation of force” does refer, indeed, to what thus appeared to be hopelessly unknowable to such a mind— namely, to the experimental and mathematical measures which determine its real meaning and proof. The climax of the speculation was capped when this principle was declared to be an undemonstrable but irresistible axiom—what we cannot help believing when we have once conceived it!

In the same way, “evolution” is, with Mr. Spencer, not a theorem of inductive science, but a necessary truth deduced from axioms; and nothing can be more mistaken, therefore, than Dr. Youmans’s defense of Spencer’s claim to credit for substantiating a doctrine also, unfortunately, called “evolution” —the doctrine of the origin of species by “descent, with modification,” which is wholly due to the labors of leading English and German naturalists—real workers in experimental science. Dr. Youmans, unfortunately for his defense, quotes (p. 125) Spencer’s acknowledgment that, though in 1852, or earlier, he had conceived of the principle of “the survival of the fittest,” he had not conceived of it as producing the diversities of living beings, or conceived of the co-operation of natural selection with indefinite variations to produce species. But this last is the whole gist of the matter, so far as mere conception is concerned; and the merit—though this is a small part of Darwin’s merit in the matter—of this conception belongs so completely to him and to Mr. Wallace that the half-glimpses of the conception by earlier writers are of small account. Even Aristotle had conceived of the cause now called natural selection, in one of its modes of action; and two English writers—Dr. Wells and Mr. Patrick Matthew—in 1813 and 1831, set forth the agency

of this cause in more extended but still limited forms, the latter coming very near to the views of Darwin and Wallace. So far as other elements of the doctrine of descent ought to go to any single thinker’s credit, they undoubtedly belong to Lamarck, to whom, at the beginning of this century, and not to Mr. Spencer, the following introductory remark by Dr. Youmans is justly applicable—namely, that while the idea of evolution “was passing through what may be called its stage of execration, there was no hesitancy in according to him all the infamy of its paternity; but when infamy is to be changed to honor, by a kind of perverse consistency of injustice, there turns out to be a good deal less alacrity in making the revised award.” In applying this remark to Mr. Spencer, as to a long-tried martyr, Dr. Youmans is himself guilty of the very injustice towards Lamarck of which he complains in behalf of Spencer; for there is nothing in Spencer’s writing relating to what is really honored by men of science (namely, the scientific explanation of the origin of species) that is not to be credited either to Lamarck or to Darwin. This honor is really awarded to the scientific proofs and arguments on the subject, to which many other naturalists besides these more eminent ones, and especially those of Germany, have materially added by their contributions of observation and criticism; so that the theory as it now stands, which the sketch by Professor Schmidt sets forth very lucidly, is really a scientific theory only, and bears no necessary relation to any “system” of philosophy. It is worth noticing here that this sketch, though treating the subject historically, and canvassing the merits of various contributions to it in this century and the last, in Germany, France, and England, nowhere mentions the name or fame of Mr. Herbert Spencer.

But in Germany, where the theory first got the name of Darwinism, it is much more of an “ism,” or connects itself much more intimately with general philosophical views, than in England or America, except where in these countries it has got confounded with Mr. Spencer’s speculations. It is to the significance of this fact—the character of Darwinism in Germany —that we wished especially in this review to call attention, as an interesting phenomenon in the history of modern speculation,

determining the true place and the essential influence of Bacon and the Baconian philosophy. German systematic historians of philosophy were never able to make out where to place Bacon’s so-called philosophy, or indeed to discover that he had a philosophy, or, what has appeared to their minds as the same thing, a “system.” And indeed he had no system; but by marshaling the forces of criticism known to his time, and reinforced by his own keen invention, against all systems, past and prospective, he aimed at establishing for science a position of neutrality, and at the same time of independent respectability, between the two hostile schools of the Dogmatics and the Empiricists, though leaning towards the tenets of theology just so far as these had practical force and value. He thus secured the true status for the advancement of experimental science, or of experimental philosophy, as it came to be called. He had less need of doing, and deserves less credit for what is more commonly credited to him—namely, laying down the rules of scientific pursuit, which the progress of science has itself much more fully determined. But what could be more fit as a criticism of such a “system” as Mr. Spencer’s than these aphorisms from the first book of the “Novum Organum”?

“Some men become attached to particular sciences and contemplations, either from supposing themselves the authors and inventors of them or from having bestowed the greatest pains upon such subjects, and thus become most habituated to them. If men of this description apply themselves to philosophy and contemplations of a universal nature, they wrest and corrupt them by their preconceived fancies, of which Aristotle affords us a signal instance, who made his natural philosophy completely subservient to his logic, and thus rendered it little more than useless and disputatious. The chemists, again [those of Bacon’s time], have formed a fanciful philosophy from a few experiments of the furnace. Gilbert, too [a contemporary of Bacon’s], having employed himself most assiduously in the consideration of the magnet, immediately established a system of philosophy to coincide with his favorite pursuit.”

And again:

“In general, men take for the groundwork of their philosophy either too much from a few topics or too little from many; in either case, their philosophy is founded on too narrow a basis of experiment and natural history, and decides on too scanty grounds; for the theoretic philosopher seizes various common circumstances by experiment, without reducing them to certainty or examining and frequently considering them, and relies for the rest upon meditation and the activity of his wit.”

Under the Baconian regime the physical sciences have flourished in Great Britain for more than two centuries; while “philosophy,” as it is known in Germany, both orthodox and heterodox, has dwindled, except so far as it has had practical holds and bearings on one side through theology in religious teachings, or has been reinforced from time to time on both sides from the Continent. In Germany the position of the experimental sciences was far otherwise until near the beginning of this century. The sun of Baconism has not even yet shone fully on the German mind, or except as reflected from the position which the sciences have so long held in Great Britain and France, as compared to the claims of any systems of philosophy. That such a system as Oken’s Naturphilosophie, with its vague and meaningless abstractions, was an influence at the beginning of the present century, is not, however, so surprising as perhaps it would be if Mr. Spencer’s system (bearing a much greater resemblance to it than to any theories of Darwin), had not got such a footing with English-thinking readers as it appears to have. There is, however, at present in Germany an ascetic school of experimental and inductive science, which deprives itself of the aid and guidance of theoretical and deductive considerations, in order the more effectually to protect itself from their undue influence. These Gelehrten are not true Baconians; but their method might be appropriately named “experimentalism.” Men of science in Germany have in general never considered themselves as in a respectable neutral position with reference to opposite systems of philosophy, and Professor Schmidt in his preface accordingly consents to the cry from both sides in philosophy, “Avow your colors”; and proceeds in his introduction to define his stand-point sharply on several subjects which cultivated English liberal thinkers would consider as irrelevant to the theme of his book—e. g., against “dualism” in vital phenomena, against miracles and other metaphysical positions.

Nothing could be more in keeping, on the other hand, with the refinement of modern English Baconism than the manner in which Darwin presents the doctrine of descent in his “Origin of Species”; and as his scientific inquiry did not touch upon

the origin of life itself—but only on the origin of its various forms and their relations to one another and to their surroundings, he even took a pleasure—a poetical, not a dogmatic one, surely—in presenting in religious language his sense of the scientific mystery of life, speaking of “life with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,” etc. Upon this often-quoted passage our author prosily remarks that “in this Darwin has certainly been untrue to himself, and it satisfies neither those who believe in the continuous work of creation by a personal God, nor the partisans of natural evolution.” We doubt if Darwin cared to satisfy any but those who are willing to mark the boundary by a slight difference of style in speaking of the two; between what is evident or probable on experimental grounds, and what as yet baffles all approaches of experimental inquiry. It is a little incongruous that one so pre-eminently cautious and painstaking, so little speculative or metaphysical in the range of his researches, should be hailed as chief by so large a constituency of what really amounts to a philosophical school; albeit they are the brightest minds of Germany, and pre-eminently men of science. Professor Schmidt’s book is in form, however, and in effect, a thorough and learned scientific treatise, though he takes grounds, as the earlier French disciples of Newton did, on matters extraneous to his scientific subject.