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Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution in the 1 860s

JAMES MOORE

The Open University Faculty of A rts Milton Keynes MK 7 6AA, England

A term like Darwinism is bound to change in the course of time., ... and to try to turn the clock back is not likely to be successful. ... I am quite sure that everybody will continue to define Darwinism as the theory of evolution in which all direc- tional change is caused by natural selection.... When it comes to using terms that are common coin in modern science, we cannot load them down with the uncertainties of past history.

Ernst Mayrl

One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this.

Ludwig Wittgenstein2

Three decades had passed since extinguished theologians lay round the cradle of Darwinism, strangled like the snakes beside that of Hercules; thirty-four years, to be exact, since Thomas Huxley committed forensic murder at Oxford before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, grinding the local diocesan between the facts of natural history and the supreme Victorian value of truth-telling - or so legend already pro- claimed.3 Now, with the first return of the British Association to the fabled scene of slaughter, the bishops were in the audience, the evolutionists at center stage. The Sheldonian Theatre was packed. The National Anthem had been rendered. The president

1. Mayr-Greene correspondence. 1979, in John C. Greene, Science, Ideol- ogy, and World View: Essays in the History of Evolutionary Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 198 1), pp. 152, 155.

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Ans- combe, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), p. 340.

3. Cf. both Thomas Henry Huxley, "The Origin of Species" (1860), in idem,

Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 24, no. 3 (Fall 1991), pp. 353-408. ? 1 991 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Pritmted in the Netherlands.

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354 JAMES MOORE

of the Association had launched a massive assault on Darwin's theory of natural selection for giving a conjectural, haphazard, nonteleological account of the history of life, and a vote of thanks for the address had been moved by one whom the president invoked as "the greatest living master of natural science among us.

On the evening of August 8, 1894, it thus fell to Huxley to second a resolution by Lord Kelvin, an unanswerable critic of Darwin for thirty years, expressing thinly veiled assent to the anti- Darwinian arguments of Lord Salisbury, the late Tory prime minister and chancellor of the University of Oxford, who had himself, as one of his last acts of office two years earlier, recognized Huxley's eminence as a statesman of science by making him a privy councillor. The occasion called for a degree of verbal dexterity that those who had charged Huxley with his task knew full well he possessed. Cloaked in his doctor-of-laws gown, which Anglican Oxford had bestowed on him in 1885, he hauled his faltering frame to the edge of the platform and struggled to make himself heard. The Time's reporter did not miss a line:

As one of those persons who for many years past had made a pretty free use of the comfortable word "evolution" (laughter), let him remind them that 34 years ago a considerable discussion ... took place in one of their sectional meetings upon what people frequently called the "Darwinism question," but which on that occasion was not the Darwinism question, but the very much deeper question which lay beneath the Darwinism question - he meant the question of evolution. ... Darwinism was not evolution, nor Spencensm, nor Haeckelism, nor Weismannism, but all these were built on the fundamental doctrine which was evolution, which they Ihadi maintained so many years.

Huxley was adamant: all that they - he and Joseph Hooker and Darwin's "old guard" - had fought for in the 1 860s was the mutability of species and the natural descent of existing species

Collected Essays, 9 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1893-94), 11, 52 (hereafter CE), and William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: The .Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), p. 7, with J. R. Lucas, "Wilber- force and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter," Hist. J., 22 (1979), 313-330; Sheridan Gilley, "The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate: A Reconstruction," in Reli- gion and Humanism .. , ed. Keith Robbins (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 198 1), pp. 325-340; and J. Vernon Jensen, "Return to the Wilherforce-Huxley Debate," Brirt. J. Hist. Sci., 21 (1988), 161-179.



Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution 355

from a few primitive forms. And since the president in his address had actually lent his authority to evolution, understood in this sense, Huxley took "enormous satisfaction" in welcoming "so distinguished a convert" to the doctrine. Whereupon, expressing gratitude for the president's kind remarks on Darwin's personal character, he sat down before a cheering crowd.4

No fainting ladies, no Bibles brandished, no blood split. Darwin's bulldog had grown long in tooth and short of voice. It was his last public appearance before he died. Darwin's bulldog also had long since differentiated between those worth biting and those at whom he ought merely to bark. His guardianship of Darwin's scientific property had become qualified and refined. The Huxley who in April 1860, in the Westminister Review, had been the first person anywhere to use the term "Darwinism" with reference to the views expressed in the Origin of Species, who by December 1862 was commending descent with modification by any natural means, including natural selection, to a working-class audience with the words, "I really believe that the alternative is either Darwinism or nothing" - this was not the Huxley who in November 1871 began to place "Darwinism" in quotation marks, who in 1887 carefully discerned natural selection as its "quintessence," and who by 1894 could scarcely be drawn to defend anything called "Darwinism" at all.' Older and wiser and politi- cally more adept, Huxley had grown circumspect in his use of words. In this essay I show how one word, "Darwinism," came to be used in such a way that even a reputed arch-Darwinian could dissociate himself from it.

A LOADED TERM

Within three decades a change had come about, not in Huxley's language alone, but in the way that both the followers and the critics of Darwin across the world referred to his theoretical views. The expatriate German philologist Friedrich Max Muller declared in 1878 that "the word 'Darwinism' ought either to be sharply defined or should be replaced by 'evolution-doctrine."'

4. 'The British Association," Times, 9 August 1894, p. 6, col. 5. 5. Huxley, "Onrgin of Species," p. 78; T. H. Huxley, On the Origin of Spec ies;

Or, The Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature 11 8621, ed. Ashley Montagu (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 137; idem, "Mr. Darwin's Critics," Contemp. Rev., 18 (November 1871), 443-476; idem, "On the Recep- tion of the 'Origin of Species."' in The Life and Letters of Charles !)arwin, with an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1887), 11, 195 (hereafter LLD).



356 JAMES MOORE

His concern for linguistic discipline was then shared by many others. It was Alfred Russel Wallace, the cofounder of the theory of natural selection, who advocated it as "pure Darwinism." Asa Gray, the first and foremost defender of natural selection in North America, called the theory "Darwinism pure and simple, free from all speculative accretions." And George Romanes, a more qualified defender of natural selection, nonetheless upheld its pre- eminence as "the Darwinism of Darwin" himself in the face of what he called the "gross perversions" and "dogmatic" distortions of Darwin's popularizers.6

Similarity, from the 1870s on the leading critics of Darwin and his disciples made careful verbal distinctions. The Duke of Argyll, an amateur naturalist and philosopher, also wrote of "Darwinism pur et simple"; he claimed to see through Huxley's "policy of supporting Darwinism, forensically on the one hand, and of keeping up careful reserves against being personally committed to it, on the other." Academic philosophers such as James Hutchison Stirling in Britain and Borden Bowne in the United States viewed biological evolution and Darwinism as "quite distinct things," and Hutchison Stirling, like Argylll, pointed up the "loose Darwinian- ism" of Huxley.7 Theological writers of the caliber of America's Calvinist dogmatician Charles Hodge, in his remarkable What Is Darwinism (1874), and Britain's quixotic Catholic Arnold Lunn, in The Flight from Reason (1930), routinely separated evolution from Darwinism on the grounds that the latter's "vital principle," "formative idea," or "essence" was natural selection. Litterateurs in the mold of Samuel Butler and George Bernard Shaw had less

6. F. Max Miiller to Prof. Noir6, February 8, 1878, in The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Muiller, ed. Mrs. F. Max Muller, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), II, 42; Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, with Some of Its Applications (London: Macmillan, 1889), p. viii; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion: Two Lectures ... (New York: Scribners, 1880), p. 46 (cf. pp. 80-81); George John Romanes, Darwin, and After Darwin: An Exposition of the Darwiniain Theory and a Discussion of Post-Darwinian Questions, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1892-97), I, vi, 11-12. See also F. W. Hutton, "Darwinism," in idem, Darwinism and Lamarckism, Old and New (New York: Putnam, 1899). p. 41.

7. Duke of Argyll to F. Max Muller, February 2, 1875, in (;eorge Douglas, Eighth Duke of Argyll, K. G., K. T. (1823-1900): Autobiography and Memoirs, ed. the Dowager Duchess of Argyll, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1 906). II, 530; Duke of Argyll, "Darwinism as a Philosophy," Good Words, 19 (1878), 166-173, 265-270, 330-333 (quotation on p. 169); Borden P. Bowne, "Darwin and Darwinism," Hibbert J. 8 (October 1909), 123; James Hutchison Stirling, Darwinianism: Workmen and Work (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1894), p. 186. See also *'The Rise and Influence of Darwinism," Ediniburgl Rev., 196 (1902), 366-407.




orthodox reasons for making the same distinction indeed, for proliferating terms, as Butler did, like "Wallaceism," "Weisman- nism," and "Charles Darwinism" - but what allied them with contemporary anti-Darwinian theologians and philosophers was an aversion to natural selection as a nonteleological doctrine.8

Nor was this aversion much less evident among anti-Darwinian naturalists of the period, who in their own way were as frank and judicious in their choice of terminology as their Darwinian collegues. For example, George Henslow, the botanist scion of Darwin's Cambridge mentor, touted his own theory of evolution by direct adaptation as "the True Darwinism," an advance on the mere Darwinism of natural selection, which Darwin had increasingly played down. Other naturalists who lacked the personal contact with Darwin enjoyed by the young Henslow were typically more prepared to sever all linguistic ties with the past. Insisting that evolution and "Darwinism" were conceptually distinct, and that "a rigorous automatic Natural Selection is the essential idea of Darwinism," as Vernon Kellogg explained in his unique Darwinism To-Day (1 907), they declared that "Darwinism ... belongs to history," that Darwinism was on its "death-bed," and. even that a biologist's correct attitude toward Darwin should be to work "as if he never existed."9

So far, all agreed that Darwinism was to be associated pecul- iarly with the author of the Origin of Species and his theory of natural selection. But the German neo-vitalist philosopher Hans Driesch, in a locus classicus of terminological gymnastics, dissociated Darwin and Darwinism completely:

8. Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1874), pp. 51, 175; Arnold Lunn, The Flight from Reason: A Criticism of the Dogmas of Popular Science (1930; rev. ed., London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1932), chap. 7; Samuel Butler, Evolution Old anid New; Or, The Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, as Compared with that of Charles Darwin (1879; 3rd ed., London: A. C. Fifield, 1911), pp. 58, 63, 360-36 1; idem, "The Deadlock in Darwinism" (1 890), in idem, Essays on Life, Art, and Science, ed. R. A. Streatfeild (London: A. C. Fifield, 19(18), pp. 234-340; Bernard Shaw, Bac k to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (London: Constable, 192 1), pp. xviii and viii-lxxxvii passim.

9. George Henslow, "The True Darwinism," Nineteenth Cent., 60 (Novem- ber 1906), 795-801; Vernon L. Kellogg, Darwinism To-Day: A Discussion of Present-Day Scientific Criticism of the Darwinian Selection Theories, together with a Brief Account of the Principal Other Auxiliary atnd Alternative Theories of Species-Forming (London: Bell, 1907), pp. 2-3, 5-6, 15. See also William Seton, 'Darwinism On Its Deathbed," Catholic World, 80 (December, 1904), 348-357; and W. Hall Calvert, 'Darwinism," Westminster Rev., 175 (April 1911), 444-458.



358 JAMES MOORE

Darwin, the very type of a man devoted to science alone and not to personal interests, - Darwin was anything but dogmatic. ... It was an outcome of this mental condition that Darwin's polemics never left the path of true scientific discussions, that he never in all his life abused any one who found reason to combat his hypotheses, and that he never turned a logical problem into a question of morality. How different is this from what many of Darwin's followers have made out of his doctrines, especially in Germany; how far is "Darwinism" removed from Darwin's own teaching and character!

Driesch, dropping the quotation marks around "Darwinism," went on to berate "dogmatic Darwinism" or "pure Darwinism," neither of which he took to "signify the proper theoretical system of Charles Darwin." Darwin had made "great concessions to Lamar- ckism"; he might, Driesch ventured, "possibly be called even a vitalist." ̀

The circle has closed. From "pure Darwinism" as what Darwin originally taught (Wallace, Gray), through "Darwinism" as what Darwin actually taught (Romanes, Hodge), or what his grand- father taught and he himself should have (Butler), to "True Darwinism" as what Darwin would have taught given the chance (Henslow), and finally, to "pure Darwinism" as what Darwin emphatically did not teach (Driesch) - the hermeneutic options are messy enough to make a tidy-minded scholar want to take sides. After all, who got it right? Who correctly interpreted what Darwin said? Who understood what Darwin really meant? Who has fair claim to represent authentic Darwinism'?

I find these questions unhistorical, and thus uninteresting. Granted that "Darwinism" cannot mean anything one likes, the first problem for the historian is surely not to sit as judge and jury, but to trace what "Darwinism" has actually been taken to mean -

that is, how the word has been used. And to do this with any precision, it is not sufficient to analyze the usage at a period when, as I have illustrated, almost everyone - Driesch excepted - held that "Darwinism" had one correct or "essential" meaning which was somehow to be associated uniquely with Charles

10. Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism . . ., 2 vols. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908), pp. 260-261, 270-271. Cf. idem, The History and Theory of Vitalism, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 138-148; and Bertram C. A. Windle, "'Darwinism' and Certain Superstructures - Morality and Morals," in idem, Facts and Theories: Being a Consideration of Some Biological Conceptions of To-day (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1912), pp. 135-143.




Darwin's theory of natural selection. For the view that "Dar- winism" is thus to be assigned one correct or essential meaning may itself be a historical artifact that requires analysis, an artifact formed amid contingencies such as the existence after 1872 of five minutely revised editions of the Origin of Species, Darwin's decision to sponsor the English translation of August Weismann's Studies in the Theory of Descent a decade later, and the publication by Francis Darwin of five volumes of his father's letters in 1887 and 1903. Certainly, as Huxley's case suggests, there is a story to be told about the negotiation and narrowing of "Dar- winism" at an earlier period, beginning about the time of the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860.

It is this period that I examine in the following pages, the prehistory of a consensus about the proper attribution of "Dar- winism," which lingers to this day. Ernst Mayr, perhaps the ablest representative of this consensus in the twentieth century, is quite right to say (as I quote in the epigraph above) that a term such as "Darwinism" cannot be loaded down with "the uncertainties of past history." The reason, however, as I shall show, is that "Darwinism" is a loaded term already. One has simply to "look at its use," in Ludwig Wittgenstein's words, "and learn from that."

A SOCIAL-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

It is striking how little effort has been expended by historians of science in tracing the proliferation of Darwin-related vocabulary and interpreting its function in public and professional discourse. By 1864 "Darwinism," "Darwinian" as both noun and adjective, "Darwinite," and even "Darwinically" had entered the English language. Cognate terms were introduced into French and German, and probably into most other western European lexica, by the end of the decade. "Social Darwinism" first appeared in French in 1880, in Italian in 1882, in English in 1897, and in German as late as 1901. This is the only piece of Darwinian terminology yet to have received anything like a searching analysis."' Its late introduction and the attending circumstances are what

11. See Donald C. Bellomy, "Social Darwinism' Revisited," Perspect. Amer. Hist., n.s., 1 (1984), 1-129; Paul Weindling, "Theories of the Cell State in Imperial Germany," in Biology, Medicine and Society, 1840-1940, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 102n5; and James Moore, "Socializing Darwinism: Historigraphy and the Fortunes of a Phrase," in Science as Politics, ed. Les Levidow (London: Free Association Books, 1986), pp. 38-80.



360 JAMES MOORE

impelled me to look into the possibility that "Darwinism" too, without the "Social," might have an instructive past.

Yet others have not felt so moved. The history of Darwinism has been written pretty consistently as the history of a concept rather than of a term. The analyses to which it has been subjected depend more on distinctions made by philosophers and biologists than on those of semanticists or sociologists. "Social" Darwinism is separated from "biological" Darwinism and biological Dar- winism from "philosophical."'2 Darwinism is construed as an "ideengeschichtliches Phanomen"; it is seen as both a "wissenschaftliche Theorie" and a "weltanschauliche Bewegung."'3 Dar- winism as a scientific theory is broken down into component doctrines of descent with modification, natural selection, and human evolution; it is identified by "une recurrence a partir du XXe siecle," or less obviously, by reference to its essential selec- tive mechanism as discerned in the latter decades of the nineteenth.'4 Darwinism as a worldview is held to entail alternatively naturalism, positivism, or materialism; on occasion it is found to be compatible with Christianity.'5 In short, Darwinism has been so many things to so many people that David Hull has lamented, "Only incidentally, it seems, was it a scientific theory about the

12. Linda L. Clark, Social Darwinism in France (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1984), pp. 3-4; Morton 0. Beckner, "Darwinism," in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, 6 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), II, 296.

13. Walter Zimmermann, "Die Auseinandersetzung mit den Ideen Darwins: Der 'Darwinismus' als ideengeschichtliches Phanomen," in Hundert Jahre Evolu- tionsforschung: Das wissenschaftliche Vermichtnis Charles Darwins, ed. Gerhard Heberer and Franz Schwanitz (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer, 1960), pp. 290-354; Giinter Altner, ed., Der Darwinismus: Die Geschichte einer Theorie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 198 1), pp. 1-2. Cf. Hans Querner. "Darwin, sein Werk und der Darwinismus," in Biologismus im 19. Jahrhundert ... , ed. Gunter Mann (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1973), pp. 10-29.

14. Alvar Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader. The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 18559-/872, (Gotenburg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1958), p. 24; Yvette Conry, L'introduction du darwinisme en France au XIXe siecle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1974). p. 425; Peter J. Bowler, The Notn-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 7-9.

15. John C. Greene, "Darwinism as a World View," in idem, Science, Ideology, and World View (above, n. 1), pp. 128-157; Neal C. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Peter J. Bowler, Evolution. The History of an Idea (rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), chap. 7; idem, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 9(X)() (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).




evolution of species by chance variation and natural selection."'i6 Hull himself has recently construed Darwinism in a more

promising way. Refusing to look for some "essential"3 meaning of the word, he proposes that Darwinism, like a species in modern biology, should be interpreted as a "historical entity." This entity is a "conceptual system" that has evolved, "a 'lineage' in the filia- tion of ideas," which had its origin in a mid-Victorian social group, the "Darwinians," who are also to be seen as an evolving historical entity in the sense that their composition and relationships changed over time. For analytic purposes, at least, Hull keeps his two historical entities distinct: "A scientist can be a Darwinian without accepting all or even a large proportion of the elements of Darwinism. Conversely, a scientist can by and large accept the tenets of Darwinism without being a Darwinian."17

This is all very well provided one has a clear notion of what Darwinism as a conceptual system is, or was, and who the Darwinisms are, or were. On the latter point, Hull has useful things to say; on the former, he is less than convincing. Thus Jacques Roger rightly objects to Hull's intrusion into cultural history of an explanatory model borrowed from the history of nature: "'. . . is Stephen Gould the legitimate and unfaithful son of George Gaylord Simpson or the natural child of Ernst Mayr? Nobody breeds true in the cultural world, which is full of hybrids, ... hopeful and hopeless monsters, not to speak of chimeras. There are no interspecific barriers nor Mendelian laws in cultural genetics." "Personally," Roger goes on, "I would prefer to use the label 'Darwinism' only for the thought of Darwin himself.... Maybe it would be better to speak of . . . 'Darwinians' for [sic] those who understood - or believed they understood - and accepted Darwin's ideas." II

"Maybe"? Surely there need be no doubt about it, no question of preference. If the historian wishes to know what words such as "'Darwinism" and "Darwinian" mean it should be necessary, I repeat, only to look and see how they have been employed -

16. David L. Hull, 'Darwinism and Historiography," in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), p. 388. Cf. Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (London: Croom Helm, 1987), where Hull's desideratum is met but without the least regard for the semantic problem.

17. David L. Hull, "Darwinism as a Historical Entity: A Historiographic Proposal," in The D)arwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1985), pp. 778, 809.

18. Jacques Roger, "Darwinism Today (Commentary)," in Kohn, Darwinlian Heritage, pp. 819, 820-82 1.



362 JAMES MOORE

"One cannot guess how a word functions" (Wittgenstein). Doing so may not be easy, but it is bound to be historically more inform- ative than using formal definitions or evolutionary analogies to sift meanings from the past.

Hull tacitly acknowledges this point in alluding to the self- consciousness of the early Darwinians as members of a group: "They count as Darwinians," he states, ". . . because they took themselves to be working in the Darwinian research program, pledged allegiance to what they took to be 'Darwinism,' and contributed to 'Darwinism.' . . . Although the members of a group like the early Darwinians need not agree even over fundamentals, they must firmly believe that such a consensus exists."'9 What this remark clearly calls for is a historiography informed by both semantics and sociology. If "Darwinism" is to be tackled on strictly historical grounds, by attention to how the word itself was used, by whom, and not least why it will be necessary to look beyond the history of ideas as traditionally conceived.

Here Raymond Williams's approach to the vocabulary of cultural transformation is exemplary, while some remarks by Ludwig Fleck suggest how Williams's perspective can help us to understand more limited semantic shifts within the lexicon of science. Williams was interested in how the meanings inherent in people's actual use of certain "keywords" have changed through time. In Culture and Society he spoke of the "general pattern of change" as "a special kind of map" by which it is possible to inves- tigate a changing culture. Starting with "Industry," "Democracy," "Class," "Art," and "Culture" itself, Williams's analysis grew to embrace scores of terms, including "Development," "Evolution," "Materialism," "Naturalism," and "Realism." He selected these terms to illustrate "both continuity and discontinuity" of meaning, and also "deep conflicts of value and belief." "Darwinism" is not among them, nor does Williams's treatment of "Social Darwinism" in another context suggest that he saw it as a keyword either.2"' Yet as exercises in "historical semantics," all his terminological discussions focus broadly and instructively "not only on historical origins and developments but also on the present - present

19. Hull, "Darwinism as a Historical Entity," pp. 796, 798. 20. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-18550 (London: Chatto

and Windus, 1958) pp. xiii, xix; idem, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (rev. ed., London: Fontana Press, 1988), p. 23; idem, "Social Dar-

winism," in The Limits of Human Nature, ed. Jonathan Benthall (New York:

Dutton, 1974), pp. 115-130.




meanings, implications, and relationships - as history."2' And this is of course just the perspective in which a loaded term like "Darwinism" must be viewed.

Fleck, in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, helps to convert Williams's broad cultural concerns into a social history of semantics at the local level, within a "thought collective" of scientific literati. Here language is a potential minefield; words are unexploded bombs, which turn into weapons as their meanings are negotiated and defined within the thought collective. "Even a single word," Fleck explains, "can represent a complex theory" or ".set of findings."

Whether an individual construes it as truth or error, under- stands it correctly or not, a set of findings meanders throughout the community, becoming polished, transformed, reinforced, or attenuated, while influencing other findings, concept formation, opinions, and habits of thought. After making several rounds within the community, a finding often returns considerably changed to its originator, who reconsiders it himself in quite a different light. He either does not recognize it as his own or believes, and this happens quite often, to have originally seen it in its present form.

In this process the simple word that originally stood for a theory, or set of findings, becomes a slogan, and its "socio-cogitative value" is completely altered. It no longer influences the mind through its logical meaning - indeed, it often acts against this -

but rather it acquires a "magical power" and exerts a "mental influence" simply by being used. Fleck instances terms like "materialism," "atheism," and "vitalism," terms of such controversial import that when one is found in a text "it is not examined logically, but immediately makes either enemies or friends." This gives rise within the thought collective to "new themes such as propanganda, imitation, authority, rivalry, solidarity ... - themes which would not have been produced by the isolated thought of any individual.... Every epistemological theory ... that does not take this sociological dependence of all cognition Iwhich includes meaning] into account in fundamental and detailed manner" is, according to Fleck, "trivial."2

21. Williams, Keywords, p. 23. Cf. Geoffrey Hughes, Words in Time: A Social History of English Vocabulary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

22. Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. Thad- deus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1979), pp. 42-43.



364 JAMES MOORE

No brief essay could give a "fundamental and detailed" account of the way in which the meaning of "Darwinism" was socially dependent, even within the confines of a single decade. My objectives are more limited, and two have now been met: first, to evince the range of usage of "Darwinism" since the end of the nineteenth century; and second, to place the word itself, rather than the concept or some set of concepts to which it refers, within a social-historical perspective.

If I have succeeded in these aims, then the peculiar mana that circulates about Darwinism by virtue of its controverted status in the history of modern biology should be largely dissipated. Darwinism can take a place among, and alongside, all the other "isms" that were first hoisted as verbal banners before newly literate and newly franchised audiences in the middle decades of the nineteenth century: liberalism, evangelicalism, spiritualism (all c. 1831), Owenism (1833), socialism (c. 1837), Chartism, Pusey- ism, Newmanism (all 1838), Tractarianism (1840), Carlyleism (1841), Malthusianism (1848), Secularism, vegetarianism (both 1851), altruism (1853), Positivism (1854), sacerodotalism (1861), imperialism (c. 1870), Vaticanism (1875), and Monism (1876). Moreover, the latter decades of the Victorian era, which saw Darwinism emerge in biological controversy beside a variety of new factional terms - Spencerism, Haeckelism, Weismannism, neo-Lamarckism, neo-Darwinism - also witnessed the rise of important verbal distinctions within other specialized and professionalizing fields: in philosophy, for example, neo-Platonism (1865), agnosticism (1869), hylo-idealism (1881), neo-Kantianism (1888), pragmantism (1898), and panpsychism (1901). This would suggest, again, that the history of Darwinism is not unlike that of other "isms."

It would also suggest, pace Williams, that "the isolation of isms and ists as separate words" in the nineteenth century and their ''significant transfer from theological to political controversy"' is only a partial account of their cultural career.23 For scientists and other professional groups also multiplied secularized religious labels in mid-Victorian Britain. Their disputes were as much about doctrine as those of their political and religious counter- parts. Their parties, their denominations, were no less real. Indeed, as I now intend to show in the third part of my analysis, Darwinism was embedded from the start in political and religious controversy; its meaning was negotiated and narrowed as a result. By 1871 a "Darwinism" had been hammered out that stood for

23. Williams, Keywords, p. 174.




many of the features with which the word is associated today -

but it was an ideological "Darwinism."

THE DARWINIAN BROAD CHURCH

Short of scrutinizing some ten thousand letters, half of them Darwin's, and a few hundred journal articals, it would be impossible to determine with precision when "Darwinism" came into general use and how its meaning was altered during the 1860s. Having neither the time nor the inclination to perform this task, I have settled for a narrower basis of induction. Just as a floor needs to be supported by only a few well-placed joists to bear weight, so the story I have to tell will carry conviction if under- girded by a judicious distribution of evidence. And just as a load- bearing floor has points around which the leverage is greatest, requiring extra support, so my story has moments - the mechani- cal analogy breaks down - where credibility hinges particularly on the strength of the evidence. Both criteria are fulfilled, I believe, by the range and quality of evidence available in a handful of Victorian "lives and letters" and in a few well-known journals and archives. Let me sketch the contours of my story before filling in the details from these sources.

"Darwinism" was sponsored from the outset, in the spring of 1860, by a small number of Darwin's friends and collegues. Darwin himself did not participate directly in their public controversies, nor (so far as I am aware) did he ever use the word;24 but he abetted, inspired, and occasionally goaded his disciples from the safety of Down House, his parsonage in rural Kent. To them "Darwinism" stood for undifferentiated evolutionary naturalism in the anticreationist mode, a new gospel for the life sciences and anthropology in which natural selection may or may not have been the sole or even the most important cause of organic development. Converts were won, alliances formed, and within a few years Darwinism became notorious as much for the friends it kept as for its political enemies. By 1865 the Darwinians felt under siege. By 1869 the enemy had been recognized within. Darwinism now had to be repackaged, its range of meaning narrowed and controlled. Huxley realized this first and hit upon "agnosticism" as an escape from his metaphysical detractors. Darwin twigged shortly afterwards when faced with the most

24. Except in his posthumously published autobiography: "in Germany a catalogue or bibliography on 'Darwinismus' has appeared every year or two" (LLD, I, 86).



366 JAMES MOORE

formidable critic of his career, St. George Mivart. In 1871 Darwinism was born again under Darwin's own auspices as the theory of organic evolution caused distinctively by natural selection, a scientific theory with no metaphysical or ideological en- tailments. Thereafter until his death Darwin insulated himself from religious controversy, called himself an agnostic, and busied himself with plants. Huxley forswore defending Darwinism and devoted himself increasingly to the public career as a liberal statesman of science for which Salisbury made him a privy councilor in 1892. By then "Darwinism" had taken on something like the pure scientific status that Darwin had sponsored twenty years earlier. As such it again became a political football, this time among biologists and other professionals who sought to lend it ideological content by prefixing "social" to the word. This is the basic sense of "Darwinism" that has come down to us today.

Such is my story in outline. It begins with a minority evolutionary tendency propelled by a Darwinian faction. It ends with an ascendant evolutionary party in which the Darwinian ideological tendency has been sequestered and defined. In the 1860s Dar- winism's "socio-cogitative value" (to use Fleck's term) became complex and problematic; its sponsors therefore sought to differ- entiate its proper usage from that of critics, defectors, and would- be allies within the "thought-collective" of evolutionary naturalists, and among the intellectual public at large. At a crucial juncture, "'Darwinism" became natural selection, which became "pure" science.

The initial sponsors of Darwinism can be readily identified. Darwin names them for us. These are the men to watch - the inner core of the "converts" Darwin hoped to make, the appointed "judges" of his views, the apostles of evolution he sent expectantly into an unregenerate creationist world: Charles Lyell, a geologist, was his father-superior in science; Joseph Hooker, a botanist, was his oldest and closest friend outside the extended family; Thomas Huxley, a zoologist, was chief among the "young and rising naturalists" whom Darwin was determined to get on "our side of the question of the mutability of species."25 All three lived and worked in London and all had known each other since the early 1850s; all had learned of Darwin's secret research on transmuta- tion by 1856. Lyell and Hooker stage-managed the first publication of Darwin's work in 1858 before the Linnean Society.

25. Darwin to J. Lubbock and to J. Hooker, both December 14, 118591, LLD, II, 242, 243. See also Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959; rev. ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), chap. 12.




Huxley, a year later - styling himself after Thomas Carlyle's hero, the prophet Mohammed, through whom the forces of nature spoke - professed to have his "claws and beak" in readiness to defend the Origin of Species.26

Darwin at this stage had a fairly Manichaean view of things. His letters bristle with references to those "for" and "against" him, to "our side" and "the outsiders,"' to the "battles" and "fights" through which, he finally convinced himself, "our cause" would "conquer" and "prevail." His hopes were pinned especially on Hooker and Huxley, vigorous young husbands and fathers, established working naturalists, Fellows of the Royal Society, well connected, respectively, through employment at Kew Gardens and the Royal Institution. Between these three there was a kind of "'masonic bond ... in being well salted in early life."'27 Each had begun his career with a stint aboard ship as a naturalist. Darwin valued Hooker's opinion on "any scientific subject" more than that of "any one else in the world"; Huxley he called "my good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel - i.e. the devil's gospel."28 When Huxley had seen off Samuel Wilberforce at Oxford in June 1860, and Hooker had answered the bishop more effectively, by addressing the point at issue, Darwin praised them both for "showing the world" that "first-rate men are not afraid of expressing their opinion" of evolution. Huxley, six months later, while contemplating New Year's resolutions, explained to Hooker that "the alternative, for men constructed on the high pressure tubular boiler principle, like ourselves, is to lie down and let the devil have his own way. And I will be torn to pieces before I am forty sooner than see that."29

The religious language, the combativeness, and the factional spirit among this triumvirate were self-reinforcing: they egged each other on, wound each other up, and wallowed in mutual admiration. "I earnestly hope it may have made some of the

26. Cf. T. Huxley to Darwin, November 23, 1859, in LLD, II, 232, with Thomas Carlyle, On Heros, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 4th ed. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1852), p. 96.

27. Darwin to Hooker, February 14, 118601, in More Letters of Charles Darwin: A Record of His Work in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters, ed. Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1903), I, 140 (hereafter MLD); quoted in Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1918), I, 161 (hereafter LLJH).

28. Darwin to Hooker, ISeptemberl 14, 118621, MLD, II, 284; Darwin to Huxley, August 8, 118601, LLD, II, 33 1.

29. Darwin to Huxley, July 20, 118601, MLD, I, 157; Huxley to Hooker, December 19, 1860, in Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1900), I, 222-223 (hereafter LLTH).



368 JAMES MOORE

educated mob who derive their ideas from the 'Times' reflect," wrote Huxley to Hooker of his review of the Origin published there, "and whatever they do they shall respect Darwin & be damned to them!"31" This ethos is absent for the most part from Darwin's correspondence with Lyell and with his other early allies - Wallace and Gray, both of whom were overseas, and the Reverend Charles Kingsley. A certain common ground, a camara- derie, was missing.

Wallace, who had inadvertently forced Darwin's hand in 1858, was an unequivocal convert both to species mutability and to natural selection - one of "us," according to Darwin's letters. But even before returning from the Orient in 1862 to live with his mother in London, Wallace was destined to have a checkered career. Lacking family wealth and a higher education, he perched on the margins of scientific respectability; though producing voluminous good work in more than one branch of natural history, he did not achieve a Fellowship of the Royal Society until 1893. With Gray, the botany professor at Harvard, it was otherwise: thoroughly orthodox in science and religion, the master interpreter of natural selection to the American intelligentsia, he nevertheless continued to hold that organic evolution, even on Darwin's principles, "leaves the argument for design, and therefore for a designer, as valid as it ever was." Kingsley, an amateur geologist, took substantially the same view and praised the series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly where Gray developed it at length. Lyell, too, believed that as a "naturalist and metaphysi- cian," Gray had grappled with the problem of design in his articles better than "anyone else on either side of the Atlantic."3'

For his part, Darwin did not excommunicate his theological entourage, although he differed rather more from each of them as time passed. The little sect he had founded was not yet tightly circumscribed. Indeed, the second edition of the Origin of Species in 1860 incorporated a commendatory remark by Kingsley, as

30. Huxley to Hooker, November 1, 1859, Huxley Papers (Impenral College of Science and Technology, London), 2.57-58 (hereafter HP).

31. Darwin to A. Wallace, April 6 and August 9, 1859, in James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1916), I, 137, 139 (hereafter ARW); Asa Gray, Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews pertaining to Darwinism, ed. A. Hunter Dupree (1876; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 144; C. Kingsley to F. Maurice 11 863?1, in [Fanny Kingsley], Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memo- ries of His Life, 2 vols. (London: Henry S. King, 1877), II, 171; C. Lyell to G. Ticknor, November 29, 1860, in IK. M.] Lyell, Life, Letters, and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart., 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1881), Il, 341 (hereafter LLL).




from "a celebrated author and divine." and in 1 86 1 the third edition advertised a reprint of Gray's articles as "an admirable, and, to a certain extent, favourable Review." Darwin, it was not generally known, had engaged in an extraordinary piece of self- promotion. Having failed to bring out the American edition of his book as a "joint publication," with a glowing review by Gray "at the head," he had had Gray's articles reprinted at his own expense and distributed to no less than one hundred naturalists, divines, periodicals, and libraries. The pamphlet's title, the substance of which Darwin himself had proposed, was Natural Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology.32

Ten years later he would again undertake to justify himself in this way. Then, however, the basic issue would be: "What are the limits of'Darwinism'?"

DARWINISM AS EVOLUTIONARY NATURALISM

"Darwinism" was thus launched by a small, heterogeneous group of naturalists clustered about the author of the Origin oJ Species and represented to the British public chiefly by two pugnacious propagandists, Hooker and Huxley. It was Huxley alone who occupied the limelight for several years, baiting bishops, settling old scores with scientific bigwigs like Richard Owen, and generally using Darwin's book as a ideological weapon. His article of April 1860, where "Darwinism" first appeared, opened by calling the Origin "a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism"; it closed with the promise that even if Darwin's "'theoretical views ... were disproved to-morrow," the book would still serve to extend "the domination of Science over regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated." Again, to workingmen in December 1862, after stating that "the alternative is either Darwinism or nothing," Huxley declared somewhat incongruously that "men of science do not pledge themselves to creeds; they are bound by articles of no sort" - an

32. Morse Peckham, ed., The Originz oJ Species by Charles Darwin: A ['ariorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1 959), pp. 57, 748 (183.3.:b); Darwin-Gray Correspondence, January-February 1860 and October 1860-February 1861, in Calendar of the Letters of Charles Robert L)arwin to Asa Gray, ed. Bert James Loewenberg et al. (1939; Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1973), nos. 20, 22, 95 on the American edition of the Origin, and nos. 32, 97. 100, 127, 132. 134 on Gray's pamphlet. These letters are dated, summarized, and augmented in Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith, eds., A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1812-1882 (New York: Garland, 1985), nos. 2665, 2676, 2955, 2961, 3(017, 3028, 3050, 3064, 3074 (hereafter Calendar).



370 JAMES MOORE

antiestablishmentarian thought to tickle the lower orders as much as Darwin himself admitted to being regaled by the lecture.33

Hooker meanwhile was ruminating in private. His expressions indicate how the mood was running among the Darwinian van- guard. With the Americans tearing themselves apart over the moral issue of slavery, Darwin heard from him that "there is a deal in breeding, and I do not think that any but high bred gentlemen are safe guides in emergencies such as these. ... If there is anything at all in force of circumstances and Natural Selection, it must arrive that the best trained, bred, and ablest man will be found in the higher walks of life. ... Your 'Origin' has done more to enhance the value of an aristocracy in my eyes than any social, political or other argument." Here spoke one whose opinion on "any scientific subject" Darwin valued more than that of "any one else in the world." In another letter, written after an indulgent weekend visit to Walcot Hall in Shropshire, Hooker matched Huxley's alternative to workingmen, "Darwinism or nothing," with one of his own: either "Blood, Blunt, Brains, land] Beauty" must accumulate "by natural selection ... in an aristocracy," he told Darwin, "or there is no truth in Darwinism.... That's my philosophy - make the best of it till we meet."34

What was the lowest common denominator of these ideological remarks - "Social Darwinism" to a later generation of interpreters? What intellectual platform supported Huxley's identifica- tion of Kingsley as "an excellent Darwinian" in 1860, Kingsley's reference to himself in 1862 as a "Darwinite," and their formation at Cambridge in October that year (at the British Association) of the "Thorough Club," for the "promotion of a thorough and earnest search after scientific truth particularly in matters relating to biology"? Darwin, whom Huxley was anxious to have join the club, had told him in late 1859 that "Rev. C. Kingsley has a mind to come round" - but come around to what?35 Here Darwin

33. Huxley, "Origin of Species" (above, n. 3), pp. 23, 79; idem, On the Origin of Species (above, n. 5), p. 139. Cf. T. Oldham to Huxley, April 8, 1863, HP 23.236-237, expressing thanks for "that grand though brief course of lectures on Darwinism."

34. Hooker to Darwin, [March 20, 18621 and June 29, 1863, LLJH, I1, 38- 39, 40-41. Cf. Hooker to Darwin, September 26, 1865, LLJH, II, 64: "I do suppose we have a pure nature, independent of conditions (and of Darwinism applied!) but what it is we can only hope to know if we realize a future state."

35. Huxley to F. Dyster, February 29, 1860, HP 15.110-112; Kingsley to Huxley, July 18, 1862, HP 19.205-206; "'Thorough Club"' draft regulations and invitation card, HP 31.120-121; Huxley to Darwin, October 9, 1862, LLTH, I, 199; Darwin to Huxley, November 27, 118591, LLD, 1I, 282. Cf. F. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley (above n. 31), II, 140-144.




himself must be seen as the standard-bearer within the group: his expectations, his language, profoundly influenced the group's sense of individual and collective commitment.

The issue, to Darwin, was a deeply personal one. Again and again in the early 1860s he spoke of an individual "going with" him - "very far," "some way," "a little way," "an inch," even "half an inch." "Can you tell me whether you believe further or more firmly than you did at first?" he inquired anxiously of Gray; "I should really like to know this." Huxley worried him too. A year after the Origin appeared Darwin felt "a little disappointed" that his chief public defender was not "inclined to think the general view in some slight degree more probable" than he had at first. "This I consider rather ominous. Otherwise I should be more contented with your degree of belief."36 The "general view" to which Darwin referred was not "Darwinism" as it would later be understood - that is, simply evolution by natural selection. It was something rather more.

In the spring of 1863, when Huxley and Hooker had proved themselves, Darwin was still looking for a clear endorsement from Lyell and Gray. Both allowed an active role for the Creator in natural history. Lyell's Antiquity of Man, just published, restated Darwin's views without accepting them; its last chapter, on human origins, was an "elaborate, obscure, and protracted exercise in beating about the bush." Darwin despaired: "I have sometimes almost wished Lyell had pronounced against me," he wrote Gray. "When I say 'me,' I mean only change of species by descent. That seems to me the turning-point. Personally, of course, I care much about Natural Selection; but that seems to me utterly unimportant, compared to the question of Creation or Modification."37 What Darwin would have meant by "Darwinism," if at this stage he had used the word, was thoroughgoing evolutionary naturalism. Hypo- thetical assent to species mutability was not enough; he demanded full-blooded belief in the uniformity of nature, from microor- ganisms up to man. This was the bottom line.

Just how accommodating Darwinism could be in its early days is best illustrated by the case of Huxley, whose views are often

36. Darwin to A. Gray, September 26, 118601, LLD, 1I, 345; Darwin to Huxley, December 2, 118601, LLD, I1, 355.

37. Michael Bartholomew, "Lyell and Evolution: An Account of Lyell's Response to the Idea of an Evolutionary Ancestry for Man," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 6 (1973), 298; Darwin to Gray, May I 1, 118631, LLD, II, 371. Darwin had just publicized his priorities in the Athenaeum: see Paul H. Barrett, ed., The Col- lected Papers of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), II, 81.



372 JAMES MOORE

taken to epitomize the word. In February 1860, as Huxley preened himself for defending "Science versus Parsondom" in a Royal Institution lecture on the origin of species, Darwin complained to Hooker that as an exposition of natural selection the lecture seemed to him "an entire failure." Two months later the article in which Huxley first used "Darwinism" was another dis- appointment. Darwin groaned to Lyell, 'I do not know that he much advances the subject." In 1862 Darwin objected to Huxley himself that many people might infer from his anniversary address to the Geological Society "that you were dead against change of species," though "clearly" - to Darwin - he was not.38

T'he problem was that Huxley continued to assert the Lyellian nonprogressionist view that there were "persistent types" of life in the geological record. Natural selection, he reckoned, was best defended by persuading the world that the doctrine postulated no necessary tendency to progress. And this was only one of his three persistent heresies. Another was that natural selection could not be regarded as a vera causa until mutually infertile breeds had been produced by artificial selection from a common stock. Nor, Huxley argued, was natural selection necessarily able to account for gaps in the phylogenetic series. He attributed these to gross mutations, remarking to Hooker that a "law of variation" was urgently needed.39

Yet regardless of his misgivings, Huxley understood Darwin's views full well and advanced them with increasing clarity. In September 1864, responding to the German idealist Alfred von Kolliker's effort to "define what we may term the philosophical position of Darwinism," Huxley at last undertook to formulate the correct position himself. Nonprogression, cross-sterility, saltations - all three of his heresies were evident in his review. But what

38. Huxley to Dyster, February 29, 1860. HP 15.110-112; Darwin to Hooker, February 14, 118601, MLD, 1, 139; Darwin to Lyell, April 10, 118601, LLD, 11, 300 (cf. Darwin to Huxley, April 14, 1186t)1, MLI), II, 232); Darwin to Huxley, May 10, 11 8621, MLD, 11, 234.

39. Huxley to Hooker, September 4, 1861, LLTH. 1, 227. See Edward B.

Poulton, Charles L)arwin and the Theorv of Natural Selection (London: Cassell, 1896), chap. 1 8; idem, "Huxley and Natural Selection" (I 905), in Huxley Memorial Lectures to the University of Birmingham (Birmingham: Cornish. 1914), pp. 45-5 1; Michael Bartholomew, "Huxley's Defence of Darwin," .4nn.

Sci., 32 (1975), 525-535; Adrian Desmond, Archetypes anid Ancestors: Pale- ontology in Victorian London, 1850-1875 (London: Blond and Briggs, 1982),

chap. 3; and Ruth Barton, "Evolution: The Whitworth Gun in Huxley's War for the Liberation of Science from Theology," in The Wider Domaini of Evollutionlary Thought, ed. David Oldroyd and Ian Langham (Dordrecht: Reidel. 1983), pp. 26 1-287.




mattered most to him was speaking "Darwinically" rather than "teleologically": "Darwinism supposes that cats exist because they catch mice well," not that "cats exist in order to catch mice well." The author of the Origin of Species had "rendered a most remarkable service to philosophical thought by enabling the student of nature to recognize, to their fullest extent, those adaptations of purpose which are so striking in the organic world, ... without being false to the fundamental principles of a scientific conception of the universe." If this was "Darwinism," Darwin loved it: anyone who failed to understand him after reading the review, he told Huxley, "'will be a blockhead."4"

THE DARWINIAN CLIQUE

By the autumn of 1864 it was not only Darwinism that had begun to acquire a higher and clearer profile. There was a visible closing of ranks and hardening of categories on every side. Tory traditionalists - Evangelicals and High Chuchmen - had reacted to the university reforms of the 1850s by using "ecclesiastical terrorism" against their opponents. Liberal churchmen had counterattacked by boldly restating their conviction that the divine purpose in history was revealed through the free investiga- tion of nature and Scripture. Essays and Reviews, written by seven of these churchmen, was their manifesto. It appeared three months after the Origin of Species, sold 22,000 copies in two years (Darwin's title took two decades to achieve that figure), and by 1865 elicited, astonishingly, some four hundred controversial books and pamphlets.4"

The Origin might well have proved more disruptive if, as it was said, there had not been "a much greater row going on about Essays and Reviews"; but even so, the reception of the two books was closely linked.42 The Wilberforce who in June 1860 tangled with Huxley in his own diocese and in July savaged the Origin in

40. T. H. Huxley, "Criticisms on The Origin of Species,"' Nat. Hist. Rev., n.s., 4 (September 1864), 569, 570; Darwin to Huxley, October 3, 118641, LLD, 111, 30.

41. M. A. Crowther, Church Embattled: Religious Controversy in Mid- Victorian England (Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1970), p. 38; Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy, 1860-86 (London: Allen Lane, 1976), pp. 46-49; Ieuan Ellis, Seven Against Christ: A Study of "Essays and Reviews" (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1 980), pp. 1I 7, 124.

42. R. Church to A. Gray, March 28, 1861, in Life and Letters of Dean Church, ed. Mary C. Church (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. 188.



374 JAMES MOORE

the Quarterly Review was also the bishop who, five months later, in the same Tory organ, declared war on Essays and Reviews and threatened its authors with persecution. In February 1861 it was Oxford's iron first again, this time inside the velvet glove of Canterbury, that penned the letter, signed by twenty-five bishops and published in the Times, which rumbled litigation at the essayists. Two of these "septem contra Christum," as they were dubbed, the Reverends Rowland Williams and H. B. Wilson, did find themselves indicted for heresy and out of a job in June 1862. Their case took a year to come to trial, and when they had been convicted for loose views on the Bible and eternal punishment, they appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which in February 1864 overturned the judgment against them, "dismissing hell with costs."43

Wilberforce was furious, as no doubt were many of the 137,000 laymen who addressed a memorial of thanks to the dissenters on the Committee, the archbishops of Canterbury and York. With legal channels exhausted, churchmen now had no recourse but to unite in public protest. Immediately, a declaration in favor of biblical inspiration and eternal torments was got up at Oxford, with the bishop's active support, and circulated to the 24,800 clergy of Britain and Ireland, of whom about 11,000 signed. Armed with this show of strength, Wilberforce went to the Convocation of Canterbury and in June 1864 secured a "syn- odical condemnation" of Essays and Reviews.44

Meanwhile another declaration had been prepared in London by a few evangelical "students of the natural and physical sciences." This reached Convocation in April that year and was amended afterwards to state explicitly a "Fortieth Article" of religious belief to which all Christian men of science should subscribe. The text, alluding darkly to "some in our own times" who used scientific researches as an occasion for impugning the veracity of the Bible, affirmed that "it is impossible for the Word of God, as written in the book of nature, and God's Word, written in Holy Scripture, to contradict one another, however much they may appear to differ." Eventually the sponsors obtained 717 signatures, but not without causing consternation in the scientific community. At the British Association in September 1864 their opponents were so well organized that one reporter suspected a

43. Ellis, Seven Against Christ, pp. 109-111. For the episcopal letter and its provocation, see James Moore, ed., Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. 3, Sources (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 435-436.

44. Ellis, Seven Against Christ, chap. 4.




"dangerous clique" of using "the influence of this grand Scientific League in furtherance of heretical teachings, as a prop to the scepticism which has of late years met with disciples even in the ranks of duly authorized Christian Ministers."45

The truth was much worse. A dangerous clique had been at work both outside the British Association and within; its members had allied themselves with progressive "Christian Ministers" and now, provoked and threatened by the marshaling of forces that would stifle dissent, impede research, and put paid to liberal reforms, they stood poised to unite more closely in furtherance of the "heretical teachings" of evolutionary naturalism.

The origins of this clique must not be sought in the controversies of the early 1860s. As far back as April 1856, on the eve of Darwin's first full disclosure of his views to Lyell, Huxley, and Hooker, a nucleus had formed. Hooker then wrote Huxley,

I am very glad that we shall meet at Darwin's. I wish that we could there discuss some plan that would bring about more unity in our efforts to advance Science. As I get more and more engrossed at Kew I feel the want of association with my brother Naturalists ... we never meet except by pure accident and seldom then as Naturalists - . . . it is the same thing with our publications; they are sown broadcast over the barren acres of Journals and other periodicals. .. . [Wlithout some recognized place of resort that will fulfill the conditions of being a rendez- vous for ourselves, an incitement to our friends to take an interest in Nat. Hist., and at the same time a profitable intellectual resort, - we shall be ignorant of one another's where- abouts and writings.46

Whether Hooker's ideas were discussed at Down House three weeks later is moot. But his intent was clear - to "advance Science." So when Hooker, Huxley, and other "brother Natu- ralists" first met as the "X Club" in November 1864, it was not merely to keep up old friendships or to defend themselves against Christian conspiracies: they plotted an aggressive campaign to

45. W. H. Brock and R. M. MacLeod, "The Scientists Declaration: Reflex- ions on Science and Belief in the Wake of 'Essays and Reviews," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 9 (1976), 48; Frank A. J. L. James, "The Sacralisation of Science: The Scientists' Declaration, 1864-5," in British Society for the History of Science and the History of Science Society; Program, Papers, and Abstracts for the Joint Conference, Manchester, England, 11-15 July 1988 (Madison, Wisc.: privately printed, 1988), pp. 435-460.

46. Hooker to Huxley, [April 4, 18561, LLJH, I, 369-370.



376 JAMES MOORE

reclaim nature from theology and to place scientists at the head of English culture. And behind them, as in 1856, stood the inspiring genius of Darwin. Huxley later explained how it was the "strong affection" Darwin excited in his friends that led "those ... who had seen good reason for his views to take much more trouble in his defence and support, and to strike out much harder at his adversary than they would otherwise have done."47

The story of the X Club has been told too often to bear repeti- tion here. What needs emphasis is that this quiet and informal but well-connected circle of nine younger representatives of the physical and biological sciences, mathematics, and philosophy, furnished the political power base for promoting Darwinism in the later 1 860s. United by "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas," as one of them put it, they eagerly anticipated "opportunities ... when concerted action on our part may be of service."48

For five years, through all the tensions and commotions following publication of the Origin of Species and Essays of Reviews, the X-men had dissipated their energies in ecumenical alliances that proved on the whole ineffective. In February 1861 John Lubbock and William Spottiswoode drew up a memorial to the authors of Essays and Reviews, regretting the episcopal letter in the Times and welcoming the essayists' "attempts to establish religious teaching on a firmer and broader foundation." Huxley's friend George Busk, later of the X, added his name, as did Darwin, Lyell, and at least half a dozen other scientific luminaries. Hooker and Huxley refused, though they sympathized with the project. A canny Hooker explained why: if the memorial were "signed wholly or chiefly by men of one way of thinking, in such matters as 'Origin of Species,' 'Age of Man,' &c. &c.," it would "countenance a belief amongst . . . outsiders that our scientific differences influenced our religious views."49 Which of course would make a mockery of their professional objectivity.

47. Huxley to St. G. Mivart, November 12, 1885, LLTH, II, 113. 48. J. Vernon Jensen, "The X Club: Fraternity of Victorian Scientists," Brit.

J. Hist. Sci., 5 (1970), 63. See also idem, "Interrelationships within the Victorian 'X Club,"' Dalhousie Rev., 51 (1971-72), 539-552; Roy M. MacLeod, "The X-Club: A Social Network of Science in Late-Victorian England," Not. Rec. Roy.

Soc. London, 24 (1970), 305-322; and Ruth Barton. "The X Club: Science, Religion, and Social Change in Victorian England," Ph.D. diss., University of

Pennsylvania, 1976. 49. Hooker to Lubbock, February 29 [sicl, 1861, LLJH. 55. For the

scientists' memorial, see Moore, Religion in Victorian Britain (above, n. 43), pp. 436-437.




In the event the memorial was never delivered, and the "scientific differences" surfaced in the refurbished Natural History Review. Taken over from anti-Darwinians by Huxley, Lubbock, Busk, and eight fellow travelers, it was the periodical they all had been waiting for, a "mildly episcophagous" one, Huxley told Hooker, where "you and Darwin and Lyell will have a fine opportunity if you wish it of slaying your adversaries." In January 1 861 Huxley sent the first issue to Wilberforce with mock-serious regards, calling attention to his article on human affinities with apes. Darwin followed it with a complimentary copy of Gray's pamphlet on natural selection and natural theology.9"

But the Naitural History Review, too, collapsed, failing to 'appeal to the masses" as Huxley wished.5' So in the autumn of 1864 the X-men began to invest their time and a good deal of money - ?100 each from Lubbock, Spottiswoode, Huxley, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, and eight other shareholders - in a weekly "Review of Literature, Science, and the Arts," The Reader. This was probably the last attempt in mid-Victorian England to maintain "a broad, public intellectual context" among liberal scientists, theologians, and men of letters. Darwin, Lyell, and Kingsley were among the journal's seventy-five eminent named supporters; Darwin's freethinking cousin, Francais Galton, undertook a major share of the editorial duties. Huxley became theological editor and wrote the anonymous leader, "Science and Church Policy," for the last issue of 1864.52

By now the X Club had been in existence for eight weeks; a month had passed since Benjamin Disraeli, leader of the Tory opposition, defender of the Church, stood before the Oxford Diocesan Society in a black velvet shooting coat, with Wiberforce in the chair, and pronounced himself "on the side of the angels";

50. Huxley to Hooker, July 17, 1860, LLTH, 1, 209; Loewenberg et al., Calendar (above, n. 32), no. 134. For the letter to Wilberforce of January 3, 1861 (draft in HP 227.101), see Cyril Bibby, 'The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate: A Postscript." Nature, /76 (1955), 363; and Charles S. Blinderman, "The Oxford Debate and After," Not. Q)uer., 202 (1957), 126-128, which also gives the bishop's reply, January 30, 1861 (HP 29.25).

5 1. Huxley to Hooker, July 21, 1863, HP 2.120-122. 52. David Roos, "The 'Aims and Intentions' of Nature," in Victorian Science

and Victoriani Values. Literary Persp)ectives, ed. James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985), p. 164; minutes of I st meeting, November 3, 1864, X Club Notebook, Tyndall Papers (Royal Institution, London; hereafter TP). See also Barton, "X Club," pp. 60), 225; Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters anid Labours of Francis Galton, 3 vols. in 4 (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1 914-30), II, 67-69; and Francis Galton, Memories of My l if]e (London: Methuen, 190)8), pp. 167-168.



378 JAMES MOORE

and three weeks earlier Pius IX had issued the encyclical Quanta cura with its appended "Syllabus of Errors" proclaiming his hostility to "progress, . . . liberalism, and . . . modern civilization." Huxley seized the moment and in his own self-styled "encyclical" declared that science should annex theology and all its works. A "slashing" piece, Hooker exulted to Darwin, destroying everything in its path. It also helped to destroy The Reader. Vituperative articles and editorial incompetence brought the grand experiment to a halt within a year. The X-ponents of "Darwinism" now sought a public platform of their own.53

THE TERRIBLE DARWINISMUS

"Darwinism" was becoming common coin by 1865 and the Darwinians were being differentiated. This did not yet pose great problems, but the time was soon to come. The key even affecting public perceptions seems to have been the appearance early in 1863 of Lyell's Antiquity of Man and Huxley's Man's Place in Nature. Lyell's book wound up in obfuscations; Huxley did little better. He hemmed and hawed about natural selection in his usual way - "the last position in which I wish to find myself is that of an advocate for Mr. Darwin's or any other views; if by an advocate is meant one whose business it is to smooth over real difficulties, and to persuade where he cannot convince" - then, professing faith in evolutionary naturalism, he trailed off into glozing sentimentalities about human "nobility" and the "infinite source of truth."54 Nevertheless, in April that year the Times first made reference to "Darwinian" human conflicts; by May the courtly Lyell had discussed "the Darwinian theory" with the Queen; in July, Huxley complained to Darwin about being "pes- tered to death in public and private because I am supposed to be what they call a Darwinian"; and in September came the first reference to Darwin's views in a presidential address to the British Association.:

The question of "Darwinism" was being brought dramatically to

53. A. R. Ashwell and Reginald G. Wilberforce, Life of the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, . . . with Selections from His Diaries and Correspondence, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1880-82), III, 154-155; Ellis, Seven Against Christ (above, n. 41), p. 136; Huxley to Dyster, January 26, 1865, HP 15.129; Hooker to Darwin, January 1, 1865, Darwin Archive (Cambridge University Library; hereafter DAR); Barton, "X Club," p. 225. For the divisive effect of Huxley's leader, see his correspondence with George Rolleston, January 1865, HP 25.171-174, 180-184.

54. CE (above, n. 3), VIl, 149-150,155, 156. 55. Times, April 9, 1863, p. 7; Lyell to Lady Lyell, May 7, 1863, LLL




the fore, not on account of natural selection, but because those who were popularly identified with Darwin's views had canvassed naturalistic accounts of human origins. For this reason primarily, the question did not go away. It was simple, clear, and poignant. In early 1865 Lyell, running again with blue bloods, engaged the Prussian princess royal in "an animated conversation on Darwin- ism," she being "very much au fait at the 'Origin,' and Huxley's book, the 'Antiquity,' &c. &c." At Oxford later that year, at least one undergraduate, disillusioned with ecclesiastical feuds and debates about human nature, concluded that "a kind of poetical materalism, a sort of moral or spiritual Darwinism, might be very interesting to go in for."56

But while the public were confounding distinctions (at least the kind that historians go in for), the Darwinians were starting to draw lines. Darwin was exasperated with Lyell. Lyell was enam- ored with Gray. Gray and Darwin had reached an impasse about design - the advertisement for Gray's pamphlet disappeared in the fourth edition of the Origin in 1866 - and Huxley was distancing himself from Kingsley over the soul and immortality.57 Their Thorough Club had failed, just like other Darwinian ecumenical pacts; Huxley explained to Kingsley that "except among two or three of my scientific colleagues I find myself alone on these subjects."58 The "two or three" were no doubt Darwin and Hooker, the pugnacious physicist Tyndall, and possibly Wallace (of whom more anon). What united them was the nonteleological naturalism that Huxley had distilled as the "philosophical position of Darwinism" in October 1864, just as the X Club was being formed. The club now became a guerilla group, hell-bent on relaunching "Darwinism" as a party slogan before the largest public it had known.

(above, n. 31), 11, 369; Huxley to Darwin, July 2, 1863. LLTH, I, 246; EllegArd, Darwin and the General Reader (above, n. 14), p. 73.

56. Lyell to Darwin, January 16, 1865, LLL, 385; H. Nettleship to J. Bryce, August 20, 1 865, quoted in Harvie, Lights of Liberalism (above, n. 41), p. 45.

57. On Gray and Darwin, see the sequence of Darwin's letters, 1861-1863, in LLD, I1, 353, 373; MLD (above, n. 27), I, 203; and Loewenberg et al., Calendar, nos. 46, 53. By August 1863 Darwin had worked out the metaphor of stone fragments, which he used five years later in Variation of Animals and Plants to distance himself from Gray.

58. Huxley to Kingsley, April 30, 1863, LLTH, I. 239. Huxley and Kingsley grew further apart after 1 865 as they took opposite sides in the racially loaded debate over the prosecution of Jamaica's Governor Eyre. See Huxley to Kingsley, April 12 and November 8, 1866, LLTH, I, 276, 281-282; and Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1962), chaps. 4-5.



380 JAMES MOORE

Their platform was the British Association, and their appointed spokesman Hooker. The Byzantine and still largely unfathomed political machinery of the Association could be manipulated easily by small interest groups. From 1865 to 1874, when they changed theater to the Royal Society, the X Club freedom fighters had unparalleled influence. In 1866 and 1867 their inside agent was T. A. Hirst, one of the Association's powerful general secretaries; aiding him was the other secretary, Darwin's cousin Galton. Hooker was named as lecturer to the Nottingham meeting in 1866 and became president-elect a year later.

At Nottingham the reforming president W. R. Grove glossed the evolution issue in his opening address. (Darwin complained that "it dealt in such generalities that it would apply to any view or no view in particular.") Grove left Hooker "'to back him up' and 'to carry Darwinism through the ranks of the enemy.'""" Hooker's lecture surveyed recent competing explanations of insular flora; it argued that on either hypothesis of oceanic migration or conti- nental extension, "the theory of the derivative origin of species" based on "natural selection and variation" was essential. Then came the punch line: Hooker allegorized the Association's 1860 Oxford meeting as the gathering of certain tribes of savages who, believing that the new moon was created afresh each month, attacked the "missionaries" who had come to them from "the most enlightened nation of mankind" to teach them the true theory of the moon's motions. But six years had passed, Hooker boomed, and now the same tribes, gathered together, accepted the missionaries' theory, applauding their "presiding Sachem" for his avowal of the "new creed." Grove had done nothing of the sort - that is, avow "Mr. Darwin's derivative theory of species" - but Hooker still boasted privately about how he delivered himself "to about 2,000 persons in the Theatre, and gave them a pounding about Darwinism until they jumped from their seats."6'

In August 1868, when Hooker himself gave the presidential

59. Galton, Memories (above, n. 52), p. 213; LLTH, I, 287; Barton, -X- Club," pp. 164ff; minutes of 21st-34th meetings, February 1867-June 1868, X Club Notebook, TP (above, n. 52); Ruth Barton, "John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Rereading of the Belfast Address," Osiris, 2nd ser., 3 (1987), 114 (and see idem, "'An Influential Set of Chaps': The X-Club and Royal Society Politics, 1864- 85," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 23 1199 01, 53-81 ).

60. Darwin to Hooker, August 30, 118661, LLD, 111, 48; Hooker to Darwin, September 4, 1866, LLJH, II, 105. On Grove, see Iwan Rhys Morus, "The Politics of Power: Reform and Regulation in the Work of William Robert Grove," Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1989.

61. "British Association for the Advancement of Science," J. Bot., 5 (Jan- uary 1867), 29-30; Hooker to W. Macleay, lAugust 1866?1, LLJH. 1, 1)00.




address, he had less doubt about what "Darwinism" should mean. Darwin's Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication had appeared in January, reminding everyone not only of the weight of evidence on behalf of natural selection but of the readiness with which the theory could be applied to human beings. "Everywhere," observed the Pall Mall Gazette a few weeks later, "'Darwinism' has become a byword, which had gone far to replace 'materialism,"' a term of virulent abuse. With controversy seething, Hooker had his work cut out; he agonized for months about what to say. At all times Darwin was at his elbow. Word finally leaked that a party political pronouncement was in the offing, and Wallace told Darwin of his hope that Hooker would "promulgate 'Darwinianism' in his address."62

Wallace was not disappointed. At Norwich Hooker opened his scientific survey by stating that it would "infallibly drag me into Darwinism." He did not use the word again, but in due course, after summarizing Darwin's botanical achievements and praising his Variation (the book "may well awe many a timid naturalist into swallowing more obnoxious doctrines than natural selection"), Hooker tightened its referent: the theory of natural selection, he declared, was "an accepted doctrine with almost every philosophical naturalist" and gained "adherents rapidly." Its detractors had been ably controverted by "Mr. Darwin's true knight, Alfred Wallace," of whose "many contributions to philosophical biology" it was "not easy to speak without enthusiasm." Even Sir Charles Lyell had lately abandoned the doctrine of special creations in the tenth edition of his Principles of Geology, and "I know," Hooker kindly conceded, "no brighter example of heroism, of its kind."63

Nor was this the only way in which Darwinism came up at Norwich in 1868. While Wallace gloated to Darwin afterwards that "Darwinianism was in the ascendant at Norwich (I hope you do not dislike the word, for we really must use it)," Huxley

62. Ellegard, Dairwin and the Genzeral Reader, p. 59; Wallace to Darwin, August 16, 118681, ARW (above, n. 31), 1, 219. See the minutes of the 30th and 31st meetings, February 6 and March 5, 1868, X Club Notebook, TP (Darwin was present at the latter); and the Darwin-Hooker correspondence afterwards, Calendar (above, n. 32), nos. 6068 et seq., especially Darwin to Hooker, April 3, 1868, MLD, 1, 297, and Hooker to Darwin, May 20, 1868, LLJH, 11, 13-114. It was arranged that Huxley would move the vote to thanks for Hooker's presidential address and Tyndall second it. I owe this information to Frank James.

63. J. D. Hooker, "Address . . . " Report of the Thirty-eighth Meetinlg of the British Association .. . (London: John Murray, 1869), pp. lix, lxix, lxx-lxxi.



382 JAMES MOORE

reacted to the proceedings with alarm.64 Something had given him pause. Perhaps it was the Reverend M. J. Berkeley's presidential address to the biology section, which spoke of the "extreme results" of Darwin's theory in its application to "mental peculiari- ties as well as physical"; or perhaps E. B. Tylor's paper in the same section on "language and mythology as departments of biological science," which called for the discovery "in the phenomena of civilization ... of distinct laws." Certainly Huxley must have noted the presidential address to the mathematics and physics section, where his X-comrade Tyndall held out hope that the materialist mystery of psycho-physical parallelism would "resolve itself into knowledge at some future day" as a result of "progressive development." But whatever upset Huxley, it posed an urgent threat, for he reported to Darwin in September 1868 on "the terrible 'Darwinismus' which spread over the [biology] section and crept out when you least expected it, even in Fergusson's lecture on 'Buddhist Temples."' He added a postscript: "I am preparing to go into opposition; I can't stand it."65

Two points may be inferred from Huxley's remark. His reference to "Fergusson's lecture on 'Buddhist temples"' (the ethnolo- gist James Fergusson was once tipped to join the X Club and had been advised on his lecture by Hooker66) suggests disapproval of the extent to which some individuals at Norwich were prepared to carry their speculations in the name of "Darwinism." Indeed, extremist activity of this sort was also reported in the press. "Ardent disciples" of Darwin were present "in abundance," observed the Anglican Guardian; they were ready to "state their theories more boldly and push their consequences more fearlessly than the master himself."67

But this was nothing new. Since 1864 Wallace, Galton, Lub- bock, and Walter Bagehot had been hammering home the connection between "Darwinism" and sociopolitical evolution. Huxley himself had published extensively on ethnology in the same period and was engaged with Hooker in a Darwinian takeover of the Ethnological Society of London, aiming to rid it of women and dilute the racism of the competing Anthropological Society by a

64. Wallace to Darwin, August 30, 1 8681, AR W, 1, 221. 65. Report of the Thirty-eighth Meeting, pp. 6, 86, 121; Huxley to Darwin,

September 12, 1868, DAR 166. 66. Minutes of 3rd and 5th meetings, January 5 and March 2, 1865, X Club

Notebook, TP; Barton, "'Influential Set of Chaps"' (above, n. 59), p. 57; Hooker to Darwin, May 20, 1868, LLJH, II, 114.

67. "The British Association," Guardian, 23 (September 2, 1868), 977.




process of amalgamation.68 What was new to Huxley, since a year or two before, was the dangerous manner in which some individuals had presented their Darwinian speculations. Here is the second point that may be inferred from his remark. The "terrible 'Darwinismus"' was a knowing allusion to a style of scientific discourse made familiar by no one so much as the young German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. It was Haeckel's kind of "Darwinism" that Huxley was preparing to oppose.

LUNAR POLITICS

For eight years Huxley and Darwin had been bombarded by letters and reprints from the gamut of German-speaking naturalists, from Rudolph Wagner and Heinrich Bronn to Ludwig Biichner and Carl Vogt. "Darwinismus" had cropped up in their communications with increasing frequency since 1862 and the term seems to have been used with no greater precision than its English counterpart. By 1868 Darwin had come to regard the German Darwinists as "my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail."69 But Ernst Haeckel posed a special problem: his "Darwinismus" was embedded in a polemical treatise entitled Generelle Morphologie der Organismen that he wanted translated into English. Its two 500-page volumes landed resound- ingly in Darwin's and Huxley's letterboxes in November 1866, hard on the heels of personal visistations by the bombastic author, who, one gathers, regaled his hosts with Teutonic outbursts and underwent something like a religious experience in Darwin's presence. "Were you not charmed with Haeckel?" Huxley in-

68. See Evelleen Richards, "Huxley and Woman's Place in Science: The 'Woman Question' and the Control of Victorian Anthropology," in History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, ed. James Moore (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 253-284.

69. Darwin to W. Preyer, March 31, 1868, LLD, III, 88. See Darwin's letters on his German reception, 1862-1868, LLD, II, 229-230, 327, 330, 345, 357, 374, 387; and MLD, 1, 259, 304. Cf. Rudolf Wagner's early hope, expressed in rough English to Huxley (January 4, 1863, HP 28.88), that "the diversity of our views on the Darwinism not will trouble our scientific harmony in other matters."

Judging from the titles in the Darwin Reprint Collection (hereafter DRC) in the Darwin Archive at Cambridge, Darwin first read about "Darwinism" in 1864 in French publications: DRC R.70 (annotated "Rubbish") and R.92. "Darwinis- mus" came up frequently from 1866 on, as can be seen in R.133, 136, 153, and in the bibliography in R.160. Neither the works of Ludwig Biichner, 1862- 1869, in the Darwin Library at Cambridge, some of which Darwin read carefully, nor Fritz Miiller's Fur Darwin discusses "Darwinismus" per se.



384 JAMES MOORE

quired of Darwin ambiguously - to which there seems to have been no reply.7"'

Darwin struggled with the German text for a month or two before giving up the idea of a translation. "Hardly any new facts or detailed new views," he panned the book to Huxley. "Too profound and too long for our English countrymen," he reported rather less candidly to Haeckel. Huxley, who read German fluently, was at first inclined to agree. He chuckled over the polemical parts of the Generelle Morphololgie and told Haeckel how "naughty" they were: "I pictured to myself the effect which a translation ... would have upon the minds of my respectable countrymen!""7 But Huxley read the book with care and learned how to apply evolution to his work in paleontology. His 1868 papers on dinosaurs and Archaeopteryx lithographica showed Haeckel's influence. When the translation proposal was revived in the middle of that year, he was receptive. The Ray Society's council discussed the proposal at Norwich in August and agreed in November to publish the translation, charging Huxley, a council-member, to negotiate with Haeckel.i2 The terms Huxley presented are a measure of the "opposition" that he had entered into; they mark a turning point in the history of Darwinism in Britain.

The Generelle Morphologie was a monumental achievement. Written and printed in less than a year, it systematized all existing

70. Wilhelm Bolsche, Haeckel: His Life and Work, trans. Joseph McCabe (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), pp. 241-243; Huxley to Darwin, November 11, 1866, LLTH, 1, 278. For interpretations of Haeckel and Darwin, see Giinter Altner, Charles Darwin und Ernst Haeckel: Ein Vergleich nach theologischen Aspekten ... (Zurich: EVZ-Verlag, 1966), pp. 35-73; Hans Schwarz, "Dar- winism between Kant and Haeckel," J. Amer. Acad. Relig., 48 (198t)), 581- 602; Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); and Jacques Roger, "Darwin, Haeckel et les Franqais," in De Darwin au darwinisme: Science et ideologie, ed. Yvette Conry (Paris: J. Vrin, 1983), pp. 149-165.

71. Darwin to Huxley, December 22, [18661, MLD, I, 274; Darwin to E. Haeckel, January 8, 11867], MLD, 278; Huxley to Haeckel, May 20), 1867, in George Uschmann and Ilse Jahn, "Der Briefwechsel zwischen Thomas Henry Huxley und Ernst Haeckel: Ein Beitrag zum Darwin-Jahr," Wiss. Z. F. -Schiller- Univ. Jena, math.-nat. R. no. 1/2, 9 (1959-60), 13.

72. See Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors (above, n. 39), pp. 126-131, 156-158; Mario A. Di Gregorio, "The Dinosaur Connection: A Reinterpreta- tion of T. H. Huxley's Evolutionary View," J. Hist. Biol., 15 (1982), 413-417; Darwin to Huxley, June 10, 118681, HP 5.239; Huxley to Haeckel, January 21, October 6, and November 13, 1868, in Uschmann and Jahn, "Briefwechsel," pp. 15, 17-18, 19.




knowledge of organic forms on the basis of "die von Charles Darwin reformirte Descendenz-theorie,' a theory that Haeckel believed could be traced back through Lorenz Oken and Goethe to Lamarck."3 The opus bequeathed to biology the "Stammbaum," or genealogical tree, as well as other now-standard terms -

"ontogeny," "phylogeny," and "oecology." For all these reasons (and more) the book remains of great historic importance. But it was also a period-piece of Naturphilosophisch syncretism. Haeckel had learned his science from Johannes Muller and Max Schultze, his politics from the anticlerical liberal Rudolf Virchow, and his religion chiefly from Goethe. Darwin became Haeckel's master in 1860 just when he was enraptured by the social Radiolaria, their colonies united by networks of protoplasm, and inspired by the Italian Risorgimento, which held promise of German unification.74 Six years later, in the Generelle Morphologie, the elements of Haeckel's education converged. Comparative anatomy, embryo- logy, cytology, and natural selection; liberalism, anticlericalism, and nationalism - all were transformed into a monistic evolutionary cosmology, the world into a manifestation of God: "Gott ist allmachtig. ... Gott ist das allgemeine Causalgesetz. ... Gott ist die Nothwendigkeit. Gott ist Summe aller Krafte, also auch aller Materie."79

Here, then, is what Huxley had to face. The problem with the Generelle Morphologie was not that "Darwinismus" got lost in the metaphysical mrlee, or that Haeckel somehow misappropriated the word. On the contrary, the text is perfectly clear: the "theory of selection .. . can rightfully be called Darwinism in honour of its original creator," Haeckel pronounced, and he used "selections- theorie" thus consistently throughout.76 The problem for Huxley was, rather, one of packaging: "Darwinismus" in Haeckel's book came wrapped up in extrapolations, execrations, and other contentious comments that, however acceptable in German biological discourse, would have been anathema in Britain. The fixity of

73. B13lsche, Haeckel, p. 1 88. 74. Pietro Corsi and Paul J. Weindling, 'Darwinism in Germany, France, and

Italy," in Kohn, Darwinian Heritage (above, n. 17), pp. 685-698; Paul J. Weindling, "Ernst Haeckel, Darwinism and the Secularization of Nature," in Moore, History, Humanity and Evolution (above, n. 68), pp. 311-327.

75. Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: Allgemeine Grundzuge der organischen Formen-wissenschaft, mechanisch begrundet durch die von Charles Darwin reformirte Descendez-Theorie, 2 vols. (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1 866), 11, 45 1.

76. Ibid., 11, 166. Cf. Roger, "Darwin, Haeckel et les Fran*ais" (above, n. 70),pp. 155-156.



386 JAMES MOORE

species is called "a colossal dogma, . . . sanctified by antiquity and empowered by blind belief in authority." The Creator-God of Christian theology is dubbed a "gaseous vertebrate" (i.'. . eines gasformigen Wirbel-thieres"). The "absolutely wonderful doctrinal system" of natural selection is said to be "purely monistic" and as such is held to entail "the definitive death" of teleology and vitalism as well as continual spontaneous generation.77

These and other such passages - there were many - had put the wind up Huxley when he informed Haeckel in November 1868 that the Generelle Morphologie must be "condensed to the uttermost." One chapter contained "'an awful 'Stein des Anstosses"' that would have to be removed. Another needed to be rewritten lest it "make shipwreck of us at once." "We don't much mind heterodoxy here," Huxley warned incongruously, "if it does not openly proclaim itself as such." To obtain the offer of publication by the Ray Society, Huxley had "had ... in a certain sense to become responsible for your behaving yourself like a good boy!"78

Haeckel agreed to all the changes with unwonted meekness and proposed to deliver the revised text in April 1869.79 Then the line went dead. The Generelle Morphologie was never translated; only a letter or two passed between Huxley and Haeckel in the next five years. The reasons for this remain obscure, but I have little doubt that Huxley's continuing hostility to Darwinismus was an important factor. Besides laying down the law to Haeckel on how he should behave before a British audience, Huxley was now at pains to dissociate himself and "Darwinism" from monistic materialism or indeed any metaphysical worldview.8""

Christening some slime from the ocean floor Bathybius haeckelii in a report to the biology section of Norwich was, it turned out, an inauspicious start. For although Huxley thus repaid Haeckel's compliment of naming the Porto Santo rabbit Lepus huxleyi, he was immediately forced to deny that the substance, which he regarded as living protoplasm, lent credence to the doctrine of spontaneous generation.81 In his infamous lecture "On the Physi-

77. Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie, I, 90, 100, 107, 1 69n, 173-1 74n. 78. Huxley to Haeckel, November 13, 1868, in Uschmann and Jahn, "Brief-

wechsel," p. 19. 79. Haeckel to Huxley, November 18, 1868, and February 23, 1869, in

ibid., pp. 19-20, 22. 80. Cf. Huxley to Hooker, January 6, 1861, LLTH, I, 224. 8 1. Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: Or the Development of the Earth

and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Laws ... IGerman 18681, trans. E. Ray Lankester (London: Henry S. King, 1876), I, 147; Philip F. Rehbock, "Huxley, Haeckel, and the Oceangraphers: The Case of Bathybius haeckelii,"




cal Basis of Life," delivered in Edinburgh the same week he lectured Haeckel on literary rectitude, Huxley attempted to recover himself. He argued that while the protoplasmic theory of life put paid to vitalism, it no more than pointed to the possibility of spontaneous generation, and it certainly did not entail materialism, which he declared to involve "grave philosophical error." Ontological questions to Huxley were "essentialy questions of lunar politics," and he sent an offprint of the lecture to Haeckel, "as it contains a criticism of Materialism which I should like you to consider."82

But to no avail. Haeckel took Bathybius as proof of what he had long since concluded must be the case, and throughout 1869 his views on abiogenesis were serialized in translation in the Quarterly Journal of the Microscopical Society, where they provoked no little controversy.83 This possibly explains why Huxley reviewed Haeckel's Naturliche Sch8pfungsgeschichte, a popularization of the Generelle Morphologie (and "perhaps the chief source of the world's knowledge of Darwinism" in the next half- century), with such severity in the October issue of a general periodical.84 It no doubt helps to account for the resolute anti- dogmatism of Huxley's own presidential address to the British Association in September 1870, where he distinguished carefully between "belief" in abiogenesis on the basis of partial evidence and his own "expectation" that the "evolution of living protoplasm

Isis, 66 (1975), 518; Huxley to Haeckel, October 6, 1868, in Uschmann and Jahn, "Briefwechsel," p. 18. See also Nicolaas A. Rupke, 'Bathybius haeckelii and the Psychology of Scientific Discovery: Theory instead of Observed Data Controlled the Late 19th Century 'Discovery' of a Primitive Form of Life," Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 7 ( 1976), 5 3-62.

82. T. H. Huxley, "On the Physical Basis of Life" (1 868), CE (above, n. 3), I, 162; Huxley to Haeckel, January 10, 1869, in Uschmann and Jahn, "Brief- wechsel," p. 2 1. See Gerald L. Geison, "The Protoplasmic Theory of Life and the Vitalist-Mechanist Debate," Isis, 60 (1969), 279-284.

83. See John Farley, "The Spontaneous Generation Controversy (1859- 1880): British and German Reactions to the Problem of Abiogenesis," J. Hist. Biol., 5 (1972), 285-319; idem, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from Descartes to Oparin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), chap. 5.

84. T. H. Huxley, "The Natural History of Creation . . . ," Ac ademy, I (October 9, 1869), 13-14, and (November 13, 1869), 40-43; Erik Norden- skiold, The History of Biology, trans. Leonard Bucknall Eyre (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), p. 515. Cf. Darwin to Huxley, October 14, 1869, LLD, III, 1 19. For a further reaction to the book, see Stephen Jay Gould, "Agassiz's Later, Private Thoughts on Evolution: His Marginalia in Haeckel's Naturliche Schopf- ungsgeschichte (1868)," in Two Hundred Years of Geology in America, ed. Cecil J. Schneer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1979), pp. 277- 282.



388 JAMES MOORE

from not living matter" may have once occurred. He cautioned, "I have no right to call my opinion any thing but an act of philosophical faith."85

Yet the most notable result of Huxley's reaction to Haeckel and Darwinismus was, I believe, his adoption of a philosophical stance that would enable "Darwinism" to be extricated from ontological controversies and dissociated from hostile worldviews. I say "stance" because, although "agnosticism" could be analysed historically and systematically, and indeed was later expounded in this way by Huxley and others, the word itself came into existence to serve the strategic purposes of Darwin's chief defender in the Victorian public arena.86 Since 1867 at least, when the second Reform Act added a million names to electoral registers, Huxley had embarked on an ambitious crusade to educate the Christian nation and their clergy in the methods and results of scientific naturalism. He conducted "Sunday Evenings for the People," canvassed for "scientific Sunday schools," chaired the "Sunday Lecture Society," preached and published "lay sermons," and, when elected to the London School Board in 1870, he urged that both science instruction and Bible-reading should be part of the curriculum. His aim was now to persuade and convince rather than to confront and offend - "I am . .. giving addresses to the working men," he notified Haeckel, "and (figurez-vous!) to the clergy" - and nothing would have been more offensive to religious audiences than a renowed Darwinian confronting them as a materialist.87

In early 1869 the issue of philosophical identity came to a head when Huxley agreed to join in the debates of a predominately

85. T. H. Huxley, Address to the British Assoc iation for the Advancement of Science, delivered ... at Liverpool, September 14, 1870 (L-ondon: Taylor and Francis, 1870), pp. 16-17.

86. See Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victori'an Unibelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 1 0-22; James G. Paradis, T. H. Huxley: Man 's Place in Nature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 100-113. Ct. Ruth Barton, "The Creation of the Conflict between Science and Theology," in Science anid Theology in Action, ed. Chris Bloore and Peter Donovan (Palmerston North, N.Z.: Dunmore Press, 1987), p. 65.

87. Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors (above, n. 39), pp. 158-164; Ed Block, Jr., "T. H. Huxley's Rhetoric and the Popularization of Victorian Scientific Ideas," Vict. Stud., 29 (1985-86), 379-381; Cyril Bibby, T H. Hlu{xley. Scientist, Humanist, Educator (London: Watts, 1 959), chap. 8; "Sunday Lecturc Society Proceedings from 1 869 to 1889," British Library Department of Printed Books 4355.d.f.17; Huxley to M. Foster, April 10, 1869, HP 4.13-14; Huxley to Haeckel, January 21, 1868, in Uschmann and Jahn, "Briefwechsel," p. 15.




Christian and clerical forum, the Metaphysical Society. He now had to declare himself an adherent of something that could not be labelled "materialist" (or indeed "spiritualist" or "Positivist"); he required a stance that would provide an Archimedan point from which the science he was most closely associated with, now commonly called "Darwinism," could move the Victorian world. Therefore, six months after renouncing materialism before a Sunday audience in the Kirk stronghold of Edinburgh, six months after lecturing Haeckel on metaphysical proprieties, Huxley first called himself an "agnostic." It was his way of dodging "lunar politics" while getting on with the political tasks that he and the X-men had set themselves. As he told the Cambridge Young Men's Christian Association some months later, all the topics of which he could legitimately speak as a scientist were "neither Christian nor Unchristian, but ... Extra-christian"; they had "a world of their own" that was "not only 'unsectarian' but ... altogether 'secular'." ".Whatever evil voices may rage" against the "one or two living men" whose "great thoughts ... will live and grow" for centuries to come, growled Darwin's bulldog at the end, "Science, secure among the powers that are eternal, will do her work and be blessed."88

NATURAL SELECTION IN CRISIS

The specter of Ernst Haeckel - "Darwin's Dachshund," to his detractors - and the furore at the British Association in 1868 provoked a semantic crisis for "Darwinism." But these were by no means the only factors that kept the issue on the boil for several years. While Huxley manned the metaphysical barricades, Darwin was facing the uncontrolled proliferation of "Darwinism" among his interpreters. Haeckel had been dealt with. Darwin too admon- ished him about making "enemies" - taking "what I said much stronger than I had intended" - and applauded his willingness "to omit and shorten some parts" of the Generelle Morphologie.89 But there was still George Lewes in the radical Fortnightly Review for

88. Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, 1869-1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 947), pp. 50-56; T. H. Huxley, "On Descartes' 'Discourse Touching the Method of Using One's Reason Rightly, and of Seeking Scientific Truth,"' Macmillan's Mag. 22 (May 1870), 79, 80.

89. Darwin to Haeckel, May 21, 1867, and November 19 118681, LLD, 111, 68, 104. Darwin's copies of Generelle Morphologie and Natuirliche Schopfungs- geschichte in the Darwin Library, Cambridge, seem to have been read extensively.



390 JAMES MOORE

1868, stating that "Mr. Darwin has reason to be proud of his disciple" and arguing Haeckel's case inter alia for continual spontaneous generation (which Darwin thought a "quasi miracle"). There was still, by contrast, Charles Loring Brace in the North American Review, lamenting that "Darwinism in Germany" had become entangled with irreligion, and claiming that "Darwin himself does not share [the] extreme views of his German followers."'90

Between these poles there were all manner of former or would- be allies, and their opponents, who laid claim to correct religious interpretations of "Darwinism": Gray, from whom Darwin finally distanced himself publicly in the concluding paragraphs of the Variation of Animals and Plants; Kingsley, who now tried in vain to recover his in-group status by writing to Darwin of "what the world calls Darwinism, and you and I and some others, fact and science";9 the Reverend George Warington, who, to Darwin's astonishment, got himself branded with "Biichnerism" by the evangelical Victoria Institute for expounding "Darwinism 'pure and simple,' which is Darwinism and Deity";92 the Reverend Thomas R. R. Stebbing, a marine biologist, whom Darwin praised for shaking "ignorant prejudices" and setting "an admirable example of liberality" in his published lecture Darwinism;93 and, not least, the Reverends Francis Orpen Morris and James M'Cann, whose respective pamphlets, Difficulties of Darwinism and Anti-Darwinism, originated in outrageous presentations be-

90. George Henry Lewes, "Mr. Darwin's Hypotheses," Fortn. Rev., n.s., 3 (April 1, 1868), 353-373 (quotation on p. 357n), and (June 1, 1868), 611- 628; 4 (July 1, 1868), 63-80, and (November 1, 1868), 429-509, all in DRC (above, n. 69) R.108 with extensive annotations ("quasi miracle" on p. 493); Charles L. Brace, "Darwinism in Germany," reprinted from No. Amer. Rev., April 1870, p. 13, in DRC R.1 22 without annotations.

91. Kingsley to Darwin, December 15, 1867, in F. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley (above, n. 31), 11, 249.

92. George Warington's paper, "On the Credibility of Darwinism," with replies and discussion, appeared in J. Trans. Vict. Inst., 2 (1867), 39-125 (quotation on p. 119; cf. 80-81, 95); a copy is in DRC R.64. See Darwin to G. Wanngton, October 7, 118671, Royal College of Physicians (London) archives; and Darwin to Wallace, October 12-13, 118671, AR W (above, n. 31), 1, 189.

93. Darwin to T. Stebbing, March 3, 1869, American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia) 362 (hereafter APS). Thomas Stebbing's pamphlet, Darwinism ... (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1869), is without annotations in DRC R.106; so also his later lecture, Darwinism: The Noachian Flood ... (London: Mac- millan, 1870), in R.149. See Stebbing to Darwin, March 5, 1869, DAR 177; Darwin's letters to Stebbing, 1871-1881, APS 388, 404, 583; and Charles

Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), Il, 376. See also Eric Mills, "Amphipods and Equipoise: A Study of T. R. R. Stebbing," Trans. Conn. Acad. Arts Sci., 44 (1972), 238-256.




fore the biology section of the British Association in August 1869, where they received short shrift from the chair, occupied by the X Club's George Busk. Both parsons caricatured Darwin, and both baited Huxley as a materialist: to Morris he was "Professor Protoplasm"; to M'Cann, "Darwinism" on Huxley's authority meant "the evolution of a material man from a material basis." Huxley troubled to answer them both; neither he nor Darwin ever forgave them.94

Yet the use and abuse of "Darwinism" by religious controver- sialists in the late 1860s was merely the backdrop against which greater dramas were being played. Although Darwin still hoped first and foremost to convert the world to evolution, the theory of natural selection remained vital to him, "the main but not exclu- sive means of modification" in successive editions of the Origin. And natural selection was in trouble by 1868. Its opponents were formidable; its friends, if not less numerous than before, were at least less loyal than Darwin wished. The differences among the Darwinians now emerged as clear distinctions. "Darwinism" was no longer elastic enough to stand for all its former sponsors' beliefs about evolution.

The most persistent and prestigious critics of natural selection were physical scientists with close ties to William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), a sort of "Y Club" to Darwin's "X." Their hostility, which in most cases probably had a religious origin, was symbol- ized powerfully in December 1864 by the passage of arms between Huxley, newly fortified by the X Club, and the evangelical Cambridge mathematician G. G. Stokes, secretary of the Royal Society's council, over the terms on which Darwin had been awarded the Copley Medal.95 Thomson had by then published two important thermodynamic arguments, in 1862 and 1863, limiting

94. See F. 0. Morris, Difficulties of Darwinism: Read before the British Association at Norwich and Exeter in /868 and 1869, with a Preface and a Correspondence with Professor Huxley (London: Longmans, Green, 1869), pp. iv-v, for references to "Professor Protoplasm" and "a small busybody clique" in Section D; James M'Cann, Anti-Darwinism, . . . with Professor Huxley's Reply (Glasgow: David Bryce, 1869), p. 31. Except for one inconsequential marginal line, neither pamphlet, in DRC R.137 and R.138, is annotated. For Darwin's response, see Descent of Man, 1, 63; and Darwin to J. Brodie Innes, November 27, 1878, in Robert M. Stecher, "The Darwin-Innes Letters: The Correspond- ence of an Evolutionist with His Vicar, 1848-1883," Ann. Sci., 17 (1961), 244. For Huxley, see M'Cann, Anti-Darwinism, pp. 31-39; and cf. Morris, Diffi- culties, p. 64, with Huxley to Hooker, ISeptember 301, 1869, HP 2.138-139, and T. H. Huxley, "On the Study of Biology," in idem, American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology (London: Macmillan, 1877), pp. 163-164.

95. See Hull, "Darwinism as a Historical Entity" (above, n. 1 7), p. 798; Colin



392 JAMES MOORE

the enormous time span over which Darwin assumed that natural selection had worked. In April 1867 H. C. Fleeming Jenkin, an engineer and Thomson's business partner, repeated these arguments influentially against "the Darwinians" in a "cumulative" disproof of natural selection, drawing also on physical analogies to show that the extent of species' variability was strictly limited. Thomson resumed the attack in February 1868 by using physical astronomy to bring geological speculation to heel, and a year later his long-term collaborator, the Bible-toting Edinburgh professor P. G. Tait, sought to reduce the time available to natural selection by a further order of magnitude.96

Darwin was "much troubled" by the physicists' arguments. For years Thomson hovered around him "like an odious spectre." Huxley did little, as usual, to defend natural selection when he replied to Thomson before the Geological Society of London that "biology takes her time from geology.... If the geological clock is wrong, all the naturalist will have to do is modify his notions of the rapidity of change accordingly." When George Darwin, second wrangler at Cambridge in 1868, impressed his father with the authority of Thomson's calculations, Hooker didn't help much either: "Take another dose of Huxley's . . . G. S. address," he snapped, "and send George back to college."97

The one ally Darwin might have counted on was Lyell, his geological timekeeper for over thirty years. In the spring of 1868 Lyell brought out the second volume of the tenth edition of his Principles of Geology and there abandoned the doctrine of special creations (for which Hooker would praise him at Norwich); but otherwise the book offered Darwin cold comfort. Lyell took natural selection to be the work of the "Supreme Creative Intelli- gence"; he met Thomson's thermodynamic arguments with the

A. Russell, "The Conflict Metaphor and Its Social Origins," Sci. Christ. Belief, / (1989), 12, 19-20; M. J. Bartholomew, "The Award of the Copley Medal to Charles Darwin," Not. Rec. Roy. Soc. London 30 (1 976), 209-218; David B. Wilson, "A Physicist's Alternative to Materialism: The Religious Thought of George Gabriel Stokes," Vict. Stud., 28 (1984-85), 69-96; Frank A. J. L. James, "George Gabriel Stokes and William Thomson: Biographical Attitudes towards Their Irish Origins," in Science in Ireland, 1800-1930: Tradition and Reform . .. , ed. John R. Nudds et al. (Dublin: Trinity College, 1988), pp. 75- 82.

96. [H. C. Fleeming Jenkinl, "The Origin of Species," N. Brit. Rev., n.s., 7 (June 1867), 277-3 18; Joe D. Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), pp. 27-40, 70-86.

97. Darwin to J. Croll, January 31, 1868, MLD, II, 163; Darwin to Wallace, July 12, 1871, ARW, 1, 168; T. H. Huxley, "The Anniversary Address of the President," Quart. J. Geol. Soc. London, 25 (1 869), xlviii; Hooker to Darwin, [March 7, 1 8691, MLD, It, 7.




suggestion that science might yet detect "proofs of . .. a regenerat- ing and self-sustaining power in the works of a Divine Artificer." Again, human evolution was fudged.98 Lyell had failed his final test of allegiance. Like Gray and Kingsley before him, he vanished from Darwin's inner circle; only Hooker and Huxley (despite his foibles) remained. Wallace, Darwin's codiscoverer, also kept closely in touch - but his moment of truth had come as well.

Wallace never wavered in his defense of natural selection. From 1864, when he was the first to go public on its implications for humans, until 1889, when his masterly exposition of the theory appeared under the title Darwinism, he upheld his and Darwin's first insight with perfect clarity and perhaps even undue deference to his older colleague. The problem that Wallace posed owed nothing to ill will or misunderstanding, nor were religious prepossessions involved. Rather, what became apparent to Dar- win in the late 1860s was that he and Wallace would never quite agree over how natural selection should be applied.

Their differences were several, but one in particular caused Darwin to lose faith in his colleague's "scientific judgment."99 Wallace, who in 1868 urged "Darwinianism" on him, stating "I hope you do not dislike the word, for we really must use it" Wallace, for whom Darwin then had such respect that he admitted, "to differ from you . . . actually terrifies me, and makes me distrust myself" - this ardent defender, whom Hooker praised before the British Association in 1868 as "Mr. Darwin's true knight," had already concluded that some higher "Power" than natural selection must be invoked to explain the origin of human intellectual and moral faculties. In April 1869, when Darwin discovered this awful fact in Wallace's review of the tenth edition of Lyell's Principles, he stabbed exclamation marks at the text. "I differ grievously from you and I am very sorry for it," he wrote Wallace with an air of finality. A robust reply came at once: "My opinions on the subject have been modified solely by the consideration of a series of remarkable phenomena, physical and mental, which I have now had every opportunity of fully testing, and which demonstrate the existence of forces and influences not yet recognised by science."""'

98. Bartholomew, "Lyell and Evolution" (above, n. 37), pp. 302-303); Burchfield, Lord Kelvin, pp. 69-70.

99. Darwin to [G. Alleni, lbefore February 21, 18791, Calen?dar (above, n. 32), no. 11 891. See Malcolm Jay Kottler, 'Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace: Two Decades of Debate over Natural Selection," in Kohn, Darwinian Heritage (above, n. 17), pp. 367-432.

10). Darwin to Wallace, September 23, 1868, ARW, 1, 227; Alfred Russel Wallace, "Principles of Geology . . . ," Quart. Rev., 126 (April 1869), 359-394,



394 JAMES MOORE

Whatever the cause (a traumatic broken engagement seems worth suggesting), in 1865, about a year after Wallace and Darwin got onto familiar terms, Wallace had begun attending seances. Darwin's brother-in-law Hensleigh Wedgewood knew this, and by the end of 1866 the word was out. Wallace had publicized his conversion to spiritualism in a plebeian "secularist magazine" and reprinted the series, "The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural," for his friends.'01 Lyell, one of Wallace's frequent contacts, was no doubt sent the pamphlet, which reinforced his own view of man's special status. Huxley received his copy at a critical time, in the wake of Haeckel's visit, when the issue of metaphysical decorum loomed large. While professing to be neutral but uninterested -

spiritualism, if true, furnished "an additional argument against suicide" - he could only have been reminded of the urgent problem of packaging "Darwinism." "'2

Or if the pamphlet did not alert him, then the book Wallace published in 1870 did the job. There Wallace claimed that "matter is essentially force, and nothing but force"; that "all force is probably will-force," the product of "Mind"; and that this Mind - like a Great Breeder, or "supernatural John Sebright," Huxley laughed - "occasionally" used the "laws of variation, multiplica- tion and survival" for a "special end," most notably the production of human beings. Worse, these remarks appeared in the climactic essay of a book prefaced by a eulogium on Darwin, rushed into print one year ahead of his long-awaited Descent of Man, and entitled Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection. So there could be no question about the danger Wallace posed. Darwinism in his hands ran every risk of being associated with a worldview exactly the opposite of Haeckel's, but very nearly as disrepu- table.U"3 It was another reason for Huxley and Darwin to call themselves agnostics.

in DAR 133 (cf. MLD, 1I, 40); Darwin to Wallace, April 14, 1869, and Wallace to Darwin, April 18, 1869, ARW, I, 243-244.

101. Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), I, 409-41 1; I, 275-281. Wallace reprinted the pamphlet in his Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1874).

102. Lyell to Darwin, May 5, 1869, LLL (above, n. 31), II, 42; Wallace, My Life I, 420-425, 433-434, and II, 280; Huxley to 'Sir," January 29, 1869, in Report on Spiritualism of the Committee of the London Dialectical Society ... (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1871), p. 230. See Malcolm Jay Kottler, "Alfred Russel Wallace, the Origin of Man, and Spiritualism," Isis, 65

(1974), 145-192. 103. Alfred Russel Wallace, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selec-

tion, reprinted in Natural Selection and Tropical Nature: Essays on Descriptive




THE MIVARTIAN CHALLENGE

By mid-1869 the original phalanx of Darwinians had dwindled to approximately three. Wallace had defected over man; Lyell, Gray, and Kingsley never paid their dues; Haeckel had been banned for the time being. "Darwinism" meanwhile had become a slogan, and now returned to its first sponsors with connotations and associations they repudiated. Far from meaning evolution in general, as Huxley first intended it, or evolutionary naturalism in a nonteleological mode, as he described its "philosophical position" in 1864, Darwinism was making enemies or friends on the basis of metaphysical interpretations that actually hindered further acceptance of the general doctrines for which the word had stood before. In 1868 Hooker had made a one-off bid for semantic control by using "Darwinism" to refer directly to the theory of natural selection. A few months later Huxley called himself an agnostic in an effort to spare himself and Darwinism from ontological controversy. Neither of these ploys quite worked. There were always an awkward few who claimed to see the reality of things - that the Darwinians themselves were meta- physicians manques. One such was St. George Mivart. It was he who finally provoked Darwin himself to assert control of Dar- winism.

Like Darwin, Mivart was a wealthy Dissenter who picked up science at his leisure. His father owned the Mivart Hotel in Grosvenor Square (later Claridge's) and indulged him, so his legal training at Lincoln's Inn was a formality not a necessity. Mivart devoted himself to nature's laws instead, studying anatomy with Owen in the 1850s and with Huxley a decade later. From 1858 to 1863 the Huxley-Owen battles over bones and brains were part of Mivart's education. Owen's transcendental anatomy and Dar- winian descent vied for his allegiance, always with a view toward the fraught question of "man's place in nature." In 1862 Owen and Huxley together landed Mivart a lectureship in comparative anatomy at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London (a post he held - latterly as professor - for twenty-two years), but by 1864 or 1865 Mivart seemed to have chosen sides. After attending Huxley's lectures and working on primate osteology under his

and Theoretical Biology (London: Macmillan, 1891) pp. 204, 210-213; Huxley, "Mr. Darwin's Critics" (above, n. 5), p. 444. By 1876 Wallace had gone over to "Kelvin's camp" on the question of geochronology: see Joe D. Burchfield, "Darwin and the Dilemma of Geological Time," Isis, 65 (1974), 316-317.



396 JAMES MOORE

guidance, Mivart began to regard himself as a card-carrying Darwinian. On June 3, 1869, with Huxley's support, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Twelve days later Mivart turned traitor. He went straight to Huxley and told him to his face that he intended to pick a fight with the Darwinians for their views on human nature and morality. Huxley was thunderstruck. He replied grimly that "nothing so united or severed men" as questions such as these. Little did he realize that for a year or two he had been clasping - nay, nourishing - a viper at his bosom. "14

In 1866 Mivart had read Wallace's spiritualist pamphlet and met Haeckel, who "eloquently preached Darwinism" to him during a long walk in the Zoological Gardens. Mivart had attended the British Association in 1868, and there, with his Catholic friend and fellow-student Father Roberts, he encoun- tered the "terrible 'Darwinismus."' All these episodes left an indelible mark. Mivart found Wallace convincing, at least in part; Haeckel he found offensive, and the "terrible 'Darwinismus"' at Norwich struck him, no less than Huxley, as an error to be opposed. But Mivart's reasons were the reverse of Huxley's: he was a Roman Catholic, a specialist in "lunar politics," steeped in scholastic philosophy since his conversion more than twenty years before. It was Father Roberts, his guardian angel in Huxley's lectures, who had persuaded him of "the difficulties, or rather impossibilities, on the Darwinian system, of accounting for the origin of the human intellect, and above all for its ... ethical judgments." So while Huxley was admonishing Haeckel and becoming an artful agnostic, Mivart lay low and prepared to attack Darwinism in his own way. Another reason, perhaps, why a month after Mivart's apostasy Huxley wrote again to Darwin about "the great question of 'Darwinismus' which is such a worry to us all."'I 5

Even before his lapse, Mivart had begun to publish a series of three articles, "Difficulties of the Theory of Natural Selection," in the Catholic journal The Month. This was a sort of controlled explosion, a test-firing under cover of anonymity for the bomb- shell that would go off with Mivart's name on it when Darwin published the Descent of Man. The series' procedure came to this:

104. St. George Mivart, "Some Reminiscences of Thomas Henry Huxley," Nineteenth Cent., 42 (December 1897), 988-993; Jacob W. Gruber, A Con- science in Conflict: The Life of St. George Jackson Mivart (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), chaps. 1-2. See also John D. Root, "Catholicism and Science in Victorian England," Clergy Rev., 66 (1981), 138-147, 162-1 70.

105. Mivart, "Some Reminiscences," pp. 994-995; Wallace, My Life, II, 43, 300; Huxley to Darwin, July 16, 1869, LLTH, 1, 312.




set "Darwinism" equal to the theory of natural selection by subtracting from it the abuses and misapprehensions of critics inspired by the odium antitheologicum; then add up objections to "'Natural Selection,' pure and simple," as a sufficient cause of evolution by exploiting the divisions among the "Darwinians" and their critics; and finally, multiply instances in which the Dar- winians - notably Darwin himself - by applying natural selection to morals and theological questions, evinced a "defect of logic" and a "lack of philosophical ability." Here Mivart cried foul. "Darwinism" was being used "in the interests of heterodoxy": "It is unfair . . . to ridicule certain IreligiousJ conceptions in the name of physical science, when this objection comes in reality not from physical science at all, but solely from a strong metaphysical anti- theistic bias or conviction."' 116

Copies of Mivart's articles reached Wallace and Darwin in October 1869. Wallace thought they contained "some good criticism." Darwin, now chary of Wallace after his defection, told him pointedly, "I wish I knew who was the author; you ought to know, as he admires you so much; he has a wonderful deal of knowledge."""7 Within a few months Darwin certainly had his answer: Mivart began to ply him with letters avowing "sincere esteem for the author of 'Natural Selection,"' condemning those "who make use of that theory simply as a weapon against higher interests," and posing enigmas for natural selection to explain. He referred to his view of man's "intellectual moral & religious nature" and noted seeing in Italy "our friend Huxley's 'Man's Place in Nature' for sale at most of the railway stations amongst a crowd of obscenities." Darwin replied conscientiously to Mivart's letters and may even have renewed a personal acquaintance with him during a visit to London.' (8

But in the winter of 1870-71 the relationship began to chill. Two books were politely exchanged, two "Darwinisms" collided. Mivart's title, On the Genesis of Species, mimicked the Origin.

106. IMivarti, "Difficulties of the Theory of Natural Selection," Month, 11 (1869), 35-53, 134-153, 274-289 (see esp. pp. 35, 38, 39, 53, 283, 286).

107. Wallace to Darwin, October 20, 1869, and Darwin to Wallace, October 21, 1869, ARW, 1. 246, 247. Darwin's copy of the articles in DRC R.145 is heavily annotated. In a concluding note to the reprint Mivart sided with Wallace as the "most qualified of all men after Mr. Darwin" to discuss natural selection, quoting long passages from Wallace's review of Lyell's Principles. Mivart also revealed that his three-part series had been written 'in the latter part of the spring of 1868."

108. Mivart to Darwin, April 25, 1870, DAR 171. See Mivart's other letters, March 8 11870?1-June II, 1870, DAR 171.



398 JAMES MOORE

Darwin wrote wryly to Wallace, "What an ardent (and most justly) admirer he is of you. His work, I doubt not, will have a most potent influence against Natural Selection. The pendulum will now swing against us." Mivart, by contrast, responded to a presentation copy of the Descent of Man with renewed profes- sions of esteem and repeated invitations for Darwin to visit him again, when the book might be inscribed. "Our conflict lies rather in the field of 'Philosophy' than in that of 'Physical Science,"' he ventured reassuringly; ". . . I am more & more persuaded that it is philosophical questions which will form the subjects of important controversy in our immediate future." 109

TURNING THE TABLES

Mivart and Darwin both saw the handwriting on the wall. "Darwinism" was about to receive its definitive exposition as metaphysically neutral science. Darwinism as such, the theory of natural selection, was also to be eclipsed. For no single publication contributed more directly or indirectly to forming the consensual meaning of "Darwinism" that prevailed in the later decades of the nineteenth century and survives almost unchallenged today than Mivart's Genesis of Species. 10

The book contained little new. Its explosive ingredients were a cumulative argument against natural selection, mounted with juridical skill, and a shrewd caricature of Darwinism as the theory of natural selection "pure and simple," and of the "absolute or pure Darwinian" as one who accepts that natural selection is "the explanation" of the origin of species. On these terms, of course, neither Darwin nor Huxley nor perhaps anyone else was a Darwinian, but then Mivart was not striving for accuracy; his caricature was a shrewd polemical ploy. It enabled him to relegate "Darwinism," a voguish and increasingly threatening word "Teutonic Darwinians" were at the gate - to the scientific dustbin at a time when Darwin himself was lending his name and reputa-

109. Darwin to R. Cooke, January 30, 118711 (copy), DAR 143; Darwin to Wallace, January 30, 1871, ARW, I, 258; Mivart to Darwin, April 23, 1871, DAR 171; and Mivart's other letters, January 19-31, 1871, DAR 171.

110. Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader (above, n. 14), pp. 28-29, 47-48, and passim; Peter J. Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin: The Years of Con- troversy; The "Origin of Species" and Its Critics, 1859-82 (London: University of London Press, 1972), chap. 10; Bowler, Eclipse of Darwinism (above, n. 15), pp. 22-24; idem, Non-Darwinian Revolution (above, n. 14), pp. 72-74, 94-96.




tion to a theory of human nature that Mivart felt duty-bound to oppose. " ' I

Mivart's argument followed the pattern established in his earlier articles, on which Genesis was based. Fortified by references to all the chief objections and objectors to natural selection of the previous decade - Huxley on saltations, Thomson on time, Wallace on human faculties, Owen's theory of "derivation" - it culminated by ticking off Darwin and his disciples for dabbling in metaphysics. Whereupon Mivart rested his case for theistic evolution on substantial forms, rational souls, and primary intuitions. "The correlated physical forces go through their Protean trans- formations, have their persistent ebb and flow outside of the world of WILL and SELF-CONSCIOUS MORAL BEING."' 12

Such sentiments were timely in January 1871. The Descent of Man came out in February; the Paris Commune was set up in March. Concerned Victorians, already habituated to evolution, twigged and their greatest living naturalist was an intellectual incendiary. His views would sanction the behavior of Frenchmen as well as apes. "A man incurs a grave responsibility who, with the authority of a well-earned reputation, advances at such a time the disintegrating speculations of this book," thundered the Times at Darwin in April. "Society must fall to pieces if Darwinism be true," shrieked the Family Herald to a middle-brow audience in May. By June, according to Herbert Spencer, philosopher of the X Club, the magazines were full of essays "on Darwinism and Religion, Darwinism and Morals, Philosophy and Darwinism, all having reference to the question of mental evolution."' 'I

Then in July, Mivart reviewed the Descent of Man. Like Wilberforce redivivus, writing anonymously in the Quarterly Review, he exposed "the entire and naked truth as to the logical consequences of Darwinism" before anxious Tory eyes. The book was "calculated ... to disturb convictions reposing upon the general consent of the majority of cultivated minds" and was likely to produce "injurious effects ... on too many of our half-educated classes." Man is a "free moral agent" with "a consciousness of an

11 1. St. George Mivart, On the Genesis of Species, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1871), pp. 5, 22, 82, 148, 22(), 275.

112. Ibid., pp. 289, 296-297, 301, 329. 113. "Mr. Darwin on the Descent of Man," Times, April 8, 1871, p. 5, col.

5; Family Herald, May 20, 1871, p. 44, quoted in Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader, p. 101; H. Spencer to E. Youmans, June 3, 1871, in John Fiske, Edward Livingston Youmans: Interpreter of Science for the People (New York: D. Appleton, 1894), p. 267. For Darwin's interest in the Times's review, see LLD, III, 138-139.



400 JAMES MOORE

absolute and immutable rule legitimately claiming obedience with an authority necessarily supreme and absolute"; but Darwin's analysis of the "social instinct" as the basis of morality furnishes no adequate "reason why we should obey society at all." "Mr. Darwin's errors," Mivart summed up, "are mainly due to a radically false metaphysical system in which he seems (like so many other physicists) to have become entangled."' 1"4

For Darwin this was the last straw - Mivart's authorship was not in doubt. He had read all the articles about "Darwinism" and worried about them."5 The Genesis of Species was "producing a great effect against Natural Selection," he told Wallace, "and more especially against me." There were also a good review of Genesis by a friend of Gray's at Harvard, Chauncey Wright; Darwin had considered making a pamphlet of it until Wallace advised him that its language and argument were "very obscure." Now after Mivart's "wonderfully clever" attack on the Descent Darwin determined to print the pamphlet regardless, even if "just to show that someone will say a word against Mivart."" 16 He wrote immediately for Wright's permission, congratulating him on his "power of grasping other men's thoughts ... by thoroughly analyzing each word." His review indeed represented Darwin's own views exactly: "I agree to almost everything which you say." Darwin went on buttering Wright up, pleading and plotting. The pamphlet would need a title with Mivart's name in it. "Some 200 copies" could be distributed to "all scientific journals, - to all the scientific societies & to clubs & to all private individuals whom I can think of as at all caring for such subjects." It would be a fillip for them both. Wright agreed instantly and proposed a "somewhat sensational" title to boost sales. Darwin negotiated the reprint - a sanguine 750 copies - with his publisher, John Murray, who in September sent out a large number to "the Press" and "friends." Mivart was not among them. "Many of my friends have received a copy from 'Down,"' he groused to Darwin, requesting one himself. The pamphlet arrived by return without an apology. "I

114. [St. George Mivart], "The Descent of Man . . . ," Quat. Rev., 131 (July 1871), 47-90 (quotations on pp. 47, 52, 79, 81, 89-90).

115. See the annotations in DRC R. 174 ([Mivarti, "The Descent of Man"); R.163 (A. B., "Darwinism and Religion," Macmillan's Mag., May 1871); R.164 (Frances Power Cobbe, "Darwinism in Morals," Theol. Rev., April 1871); and R. 161 (A. Grant, "Philosophy and Mr. Darwin," Contemp. Rev., May 1871).

116. Chauncey Wright, "Art III ... ," Nor. Amer. Rev., 113 (July 1871), 63-103; Darwin to Wallace, July 9 and 12, 1871, and Wallace to Darwin, July 12, 1871, ARW, I, 264-265, 269.




was glad to show . . . that something could be said in my defence," Darwin muttered."' 17

The Wright-Darwin pamphlet was not the Harvard mathe- matical philosopher's first or last intervention in debates over natural selection. He had reviewed Darwin and Wallace several times and written on the problem of phyllotaxis (the theory of the origin and arrangement of leaves around their stems). His concern with language was also evident. In 1868 he noted that "the word Darwinism has become as familiar as Galvanism or Mormonism" - comparable fads - and in 1875, the year of his death, Wright coined the term "German Darwinism" to stand for theories of evolution set forth "deductively, and as part of a system of metaphysics."'"'l But it was "Darwinism" understood as the theory of natural selection "pure and simple" that concerned him in the pamphlet. Mivart had accused "Darwinians" of metaphysical abuses. Wright undertook to turn the tables.

His strategy was twofold. On the one hand, he maintained that Darwin's theory represented the tradition of good, inductive, experimental philosophy, with its roots in the Baconian ban on speculation in final causes (which interfere "with the study .. . of what is, by preconceptions necessarily imperfect as to what ought to be") and the Newtonian aversion for "hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechani- cal." On the other hand, he argued that Mivart had seriously misapprehended natural selection because of his own immersion in the tradition of bad scholastic metaphysics. Wright believed that on "purely scientific grounds" Mivart and Darwin differed

117. Darwin to C. Wright, July 13-14 and 17 118711 (copies), DAR 148; Wright to Darwin, August 1, 1871, DAR 181; Darwin to J. Murray, August 17, 118711, and September 13, 1871, John Murray Archives (London), Darwin 224-225, 226-227; Cooke to Darwin, August 18, 1871, and Murray to Darwin, September 22 118711, both DAR 171; Mivart to Darwin, September 26, 1871, DAR 171; Darwin to Mivart, September 27, 118711 (draft), DAR 96:102. See also James Bradley Thayer, Letters of Chauncey Wright, with Some Account of His Life (Cambridge, Mass.: privately printed, 1878), pp. 230-236. By the end of October only fourteen copies of the pamphlet had been sold: Murray to Darwin, November 1, 11 87 11, DAR 171.

118. Quoted in Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (1949; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. 62, 258n75. Chauncey Wright's article "German Darwinism" was reprinted in his Philo- sophical Discussions. . . (New York: Henry Holt, 1877), edited by Charles Eliot Norton, whose sister-in-law married Darwin's eldest son William in the year of publication. Norton's presentation copy in the Darwin Library, Cambridge, shows no evidence of having been read, although on the back loose endpaper Darwin wrote "excellent book."



402 JAMES MOORE

only in regard to "the extent to which the process of Natural Selection has been effective in the modifications of species." But a close reading of the Genesis of Species had convinced him that this difference arose from Mivart's theology rather than Darwin's. Mivart gave terms like "specific stability," "plasticity of form," and "accidents of nature" scholastic connotations that Darwin never dreamt of when he wrote the Origin. On the basis of such misconceptions, then, Mivart imagined that natural selection had been discredited, making way for his alternative doctrine of "specific genesis." "As if," Wright protested, "experimental philosophy itself, without aid from 'Darwinism,' would not reject his metaphysical, occult, transcendental hypothesis" of abruptly changing "substantial forms." This hypothesis might have the virtue of simplicity compared to Darwin's, but it was not the "kind of simplicity . .. which modern science has in view; and, con- sequently, our real knowledges, as well as our hypotheses are much more complicated than were those of the schoolmen."'9

DARWINISM AS NATURAL SELECTION

Wright called his pamphlet Darwinism: Being an Examination of Mr. St. George Mivart's "Genesis of Species." Although Wright thought the title "somewhat sensational," Darwin sponsored it without a qualm.120

Ten years earlier Darwin had enlisted objective authority from abroad, from a Harvard naturalist, under the unlikely title Natural Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology. Gray's pamphlet had helped win friends for evolution by dispelling misconceptions about an objectionable theory. Now Darwin was glad to have the outside authority of Gray's Harvard protege, on whom he bestowed the ultimate accolade of "Mathematician & sound rea- soner," to help control the meaning of a problematic and increasingly objectionable word.'2' Wright's declared "special purpose"

119. Chauncey Wright, Darwinism: Being an Examiniation of Mr. St. George Mivart's "Genesis of Species" (London: John Murray, 1871) pp. 9, 13, 15, 37, 43.

120. Cf. the slight changes from the title first given in Wright to Darwin, August 1, 1871,DAR 181.

121. Darwin to J. Weir, October 11, 1871, quoted in Edward B. Poulton, "Fifty Years of Darwinism," in Fifty Years of Darwinism: Modern Aspects of Evolution; Centennial Addresses in Honor of Charles l)arwin . . . (New York: Henry Holt, 1908), p. 33. On Gray and Wright, see A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810-1888 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 290-299. See also John Angus Campbell, "The Polemical Mr. Darwin," Quart. J. Speech, 61 (1975), 375-390.




in his essay was "to contribute to the theory lof natural selection] by placing it in its proper relations to philosophical inquiries in general."'22 This he undertook in the manner I have described, by turning the tables on Mivart: by holding him rather than the Darwinians accountable for scientific abuses, by construing his notion of natural selection to be metaphysical instead of theirs. But Wright did much more than snatch natural selection "pure and simple" from Mivart's grubby scholastic hands: he contributed the name by which the theory, so conceived, should afterwards be called. For the first time, clearly and succinctly, with the high sanction of its author, the theory of natural selection in its vestal scientificity became known as "Darwinism."

Semantic control is concerned with demarcation as well as definition. By limiting the meaning of "Darwinism" in a controversial environment, by sponsoring a narrow usage, the Wright- Darwin pamphlet enabled the theory of natural selection to be sequestered from wider critical debates. This had been Mivart's own strategy from the start, to define Darwinism as "'natural selection,' pure and simple," with a view toward dispensing with it as an evolutionary vera causa. Wright, in accepting Mivart's terms of argument, simply promoted a different outcome: natural selection, purged of metaphysical misapprehensions, could be laid up against the day when its scientificity would be corroborated. After all, Darwin had curtailed the theory's explanatory power in successive editions of the Origin - the sixth and last edition, which he completed shortly after reissuing Wright's review, contained a chapter-full of qualifications in answer to Mivart -

and the Descent of Man was significant more for revealing the theory's limitations than its scope.'23 Natural selection had in fact always meant less on the whole to the Darwinians than evolutionary naturalism, and in 1871, with "Darwinism" safely under wraps, it became possible for them to leave natural selection to the fates and get on with business as usual.

No sooner was the pamphlet published than the old troika Darwin, Huxley, Hooker - hit the road. Darwin sent a copy to Huxley personally. Huxley agreed with him that it would "do good"; freshly inspired by Thomson's renewed attack on natural selection in his August presidential address to the British Associa- tion, he too had felt "obliged to pitch into Mivart." By chance he had just sent off a review, "mainly versus Mivart & the Quarterly Review of the 'Descent' - but with some incidental touching up

122. Wright to Darwin, June 21, 1871, DAR 181. 1 23. See Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin (above, n. 11(0). chap. I 0.



404 JAMES MOORE

of Wallace."' 24 Ecstatic, Darwin replied: "What a wonderful man you are"; after "maturely considering" all Mivart's objections, "I never felt so convinced of the general truth of the Origin. - The pendulum is swinging against our side, but I feel positive it will soon swing the other way; & no mortal men will do half as much as you in giving it a start in the right direction, as you did at the first commencement." Hooker too rallied Huxley on hearing of his review. Huxley sent Darwin a duplicate proof with instructions to relay it to "dear old Hooker." His policy had been to "strike hard about those questions which men devoid of special scientific training can deal with." Papal infallibility had been promulgated at the Vatican Council the year before, and to Huxley this was the perfect pretext to jump up and down on Mivart's theology. He said nothing as usual in defense of natural selection, although now for the first time in Huxley's work it became the sine qua non of "Darwinism." l 25

Darwin was over the moon. "How you do smash Mivart's theology.... I have been preeminently glad to read your discussion on his metaphysics, especially about reason & his definition of it. . . . For me, this is one of [thel most important parts of the Review." Hooker returned the proof to Darwin, burbling with excitment: "What a wonderful Essayist he is, and incomparable critic and defender of the faithful"; but Huxley's handling of Wallace (who posed a worse threat for his spiritual adherence to natural selection) was "a far, far greater service to Science." Darwin paraphrased for Huxley: "I think Hooker is perhaps most struck by the clear way you handle the metaphysics, & perhaps this is the best of the best."' 26

But to dispense with metaphysics was also to divorce "Dar- winism" from ideology, and, as Martin Fichman has proposed, this was an implicit outcome of the debate with Mivart that had immediate practical consequences.'27 On Wright's interpretation,

124. Huxley to Darwin, September 30, 1871, DAR 99:39-42. Cf. Darwin to Wright, October 28, 1871 (copy), DAR 148.

125. Darwin to Huxley, September 21, 118711, HP 5.279-282; Hooker to Huxley, September 17, 1871, LLJH, JI, 129; Huxley to Darwin, September 28, 1871, DAR 99:43-46; Huxley's "Mr. Darwins Critics" (above, n. 5). pp. 444- 446, 456, 474-475. For Huxley's equivocal stance on Mivart's philosophy, see the recollection by Huxley's student C. Lloyd Morgan in his Emergent Evolution ... (London: Williams and Norgate, 1923), pp. v-viii.

126. Darwin to Huxley, September 30, 118711, HP 5.283-284; Hooker to Darwin, [October 2, 18711. LLJH, I1, 129-130; Darwin to Huxley, October 5. 118711, HP 5.288.

127. Martin Fichman, "Ideological Factors in the Di)ssemination of Dar-




"Darwinism" stood for a tradition of philosophical enquiry that resolutely separated "what is" from "what ought to be." Similarly, Huxley affirmed in his review that "Darwinism" as a scientific theory remained untouched by Mivart's discussions of "theology, philosophy, and ethics." The problem with "Darwinismus" in Haeckel, "Darwinianism" in Wallace's hands, "Darwinism" in Mivart's was that natural selection became a mechanism for asserting partisan doctrines of human nature and society. Haeckel was a monistic Prussian nationalist, Wallace a spiritualized Owenite socialist, Mivart a transcendental Catholic Tory. In each of their worldviews "Darwinism" was a political slogan; and the divisive effects that a politicized "Darwinism" would have on efforts to educate the Christian nation, obtain state funding for research, and reorganize and realign scientific institutions, all on the broad basis of evolutionary naturalism, were, by the time the Descent of Man appeared, a complication that a budding scientific statesman such as Huxley, his X Club comrades, and their inspiring genius, Darwin, could do without. The chastening of "Dar- winism" in 1871, the cleansing of natural selection from every taint of ideology, therefore represented an important forward step in the career of science and scientists in Victorian Britain.' 2

The practical consequences for Darwin were less conspicuous but no less real than for Huxley. Far from feeling badgered by Mivart into a "state of frustrating confusion," as has been alleged, Darwin could detach himself from public controversy in 1872 with the sense of having had the final word. (Wright would defend him against Mivart's review of the sixth edition of the Origin.)'29 Indeed, his so-called retirement at that date, his resolve to read only "good" reviews that "contain new matter, or are written by men whom I respect," and his resumption of full-time botanical work all correlate closely with a new and steady reluctance to

winism," in Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences: Essays in Honor of I. Bernard Cohen, ed. Everett Mendelsohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 984), pp. 471-485.

128. Huxley, "Mr. Darwin's Critics," p. 475. Cf. a political reading of Darwin's remark to Hooker (July 24, 118691, MLD, 1. 313): "You must read Huxley v. Comte; he never wrote anything so clever before and has smashed everybody right and left in grand style." On Wallace and socialism, see John R. Durant, "Scientific Naturalism and Social Reform in the Thought of Alfred Russel Wallace," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 12 (1979), 39-58; and R. E. Hughes, "Alfred Russel Wallace: Some Notes on the Welsh Connection," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 22 (1989), 401-418.

129. Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin, p. 251; Darwin to Wright, June 3, 1872, LLD, 111, 164.



406 JAMES MOORE

disclose his views on religion. Darwin's repeated excuses - he hadn't thought deeply enough; he couldn't make up his mind; his views weren't worth expressing; he didn't have the time - need not suggest perplexity; they equally show tenacity of purpose, a determination to shrug off as insoluble metaphysical questions, a resolve that emerged from his controversy with Mivart. It was not long before Darwin, too, would call himself an agnostic. I3()

For Huxley, the first to see the political advantage of adopting agnosticism as a public philosophy, the reconstruction of Dar- winism as the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection was a further asset in his campaign to raise the image of naturalistic science and convert a creationist world to evolution. In 1871 Huxley's career turned a corner: official life began to lay closer hold on him. He sat almost continuously on Royal Com- missions for many years; he served as secretary of the Royal Society for a decade (and later as president); he emerged as a leader in the struggle for educational reform, urging in hundreds of lectures to teachers, workingmen, and public audiences up and down the country that scientific training should be introduced into the general curriculum. He was more than once asked to stand for Parliament. In 1871 Huxley's politics also changed: he broke with Spencer's "administrative nihilism" and supported moderate state reforms. He began to develop the view that society was in some sense opposed, and to be opposed, to the ordinary course of nature.' 3'

130. Cf. Darwin to Hooker, September 8, 1868, MLD. I, 304 ("I am not sure whether it would not be wisest for scientific men quite to ignore the whole subject of religion") with the letters dating from late 1871 in Calendar 7924, 8070, 8099, 8110, 8145, 9105, 911 1. Darwin's earliest-known reference to himself as an agnostic came in May 1879. At this time also he apparently wrote the passage in his autobiography, "I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic." See James Moore, "Of Love and Death: Why Darwin 'gave up Christianity,'' in idem, History, Humanity and Evolution (above, n. 68), pp. 195-229.

131. See LLTH, 323; Bibby, T H. Huxley (above, n. 87); Oma Stanley, "T. H. Huxley's Treatment of 'Nature,"' J. Hist. Ideas, 18 (1957), 1220-127; and Erling Eng, "Thomas Henry Huxley's Understanding of 'Evolution,"' Hist. Sci., 16 (1978), 291-303. Huxley composed his attack on Mivart in "Mr. Darwin's Critics" during the same three-week period at St. Andrews in September 1871 when he wrote his critique of Spencer's politics in "Administrative Nihilism" (CE

[above, n. 31 1, 251-289). Cf. Huxley's abandonment of a major anthropological project about this time (LLTH, II, 451) with both his presidential address in 1878 to the anthropology department of Section D of the British Association, Report of the Forty-eighth Meeting. . . (London: John Murray, 1879), pp. 573- 578, and his political "Prefatory Note" to the English translation of Ernst Haeckel's Freedom in Science and Teaching (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1879), pp. v-xx.




Life in Britain did seem more than ever to be a struggle for existence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, during the so-called great depression, and Darwin's name was often invoked in support of policies that would soon be denominated "Social Darwinism." This was never Huxley's practice. The Malthusian struggle for existence served him well as a check on inordinate political hopes, but in his many interventions in late-Victorian public affairs he never confused this with "Darwinism" or the theory of natural selection.'32

"'Darwinism,"' Huxley told his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and other dignitaries assembled in 1885 at the unveiling of Darwin's statue in the Natural History Museum at South Kensing- ton, was something that "in one form or another, sometimes strangely distorted and mutilated, became an everyday topic of men's speech" after the publication of the Origin of Species, "the object of an abundance both of vituperation and of praise, more often than of serious study."'33 As for natural selection, it was a theory to which Huxley never fully subscribed, although he held that its nonteleological naturalism represented "the fundamental principles of a scientific conception of the universe." Now in troubled times, with scientists like himself embroiled in controversies over far-reaching questions of imperial policy and indus- trial reform, it was possible to bracket "Darwinism" and "natural selection" together - both of them contentious, both misunder- stood - and set them aside. The "quintessence of Darwinism" was now natural selection. Natural selection was of such little con- sequence that in a famous essay celebrating "the coming of age of the Origin of Species," Huxley could omit even to allude to the theory. "The first thing seems to me to drive the fact of evolution into people's heads," he excused himself to Darwin; "when that is once safe, the rest will come easy."'34

The rest did not "come easy." Nor did it come soon. But Huxley kept "Darwinism" out of politics, or tried to, and for his sagacity or adroitness he was made a privy councillor in 1892. Lesser men who lacked his circumspection still bore witness ironically to its major premise, if the historian and political economist James Bonar, writing a year later, is to be believed: "It

132. See Michael J. Helfand, "T. H. Huxley's 'Evolution of Ethics': The Politics of Evolution and the Evolution of Politics," Vict. Stud., 20 (1977), 159- 177.

133. T. H. Huxley, "The Darwin Memorial" (1 885), CE. 11, 249. 134. Huxley, "On the Reception" (above, n. 5), p. 195; Huxley to Darwin,

May 10, 1880, LLTH, II, 13.



408 JAMES MOORE

seems clear from the want of unanimity among Darwinians in matters of Sociology and Politics that the principles of the Master are perfectly neutral on such questions."' 35

Thus on the evening of August 8, 1894, before the British Association at Oxford, when another late great Tory leader, like Disraeli in 1864, had declared himself "on the side of the angels" as far as natural selection was concerned, Huxley could not gainsay him. Natural selection had been put on ice; science and politics met and kissed. "Darwinism was not evolution." Evolu- tion, that "comfortable word," was the "fundamental doctrine" that he and Hooker and Darwin's "old guard" had maintained for "so many years," and on which Salisbury now had "put the seal of his authority." Of "Darwinism," rather, it could be said what Huxley afterwards remarked of "ecclesiastical conservatism and orthodoxy" since his encounter with Wilberforce three decades before: "E pur si muove!" 136

Acknowledgements

It is a pleasure to thank Simon Schaffer, Iwan Morus, Alison Winter, Rob Iliffe, Graham White, and other members of the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at Cam- bridge University for advising and encouraging me as I prepared this essay. Frank James of the Royal Institution, Ralph Colp, Jr., and Adrian Desmond also gave timely help. My interest in "Darwinism" as a conceptual and semantic problem was first stimulated in 1977 by John Greene, to whom I remain obliged for many things.

135. James Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy in Some of Their Historical Relations (1893; 3rd ed., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922). p. 361. On the lesser men, see Bernard Lightman, "Ideology, Evolution and Late- Victorian Agnostic Popularizers," in Moore, History, Humanity and Evolution, pp. 285-309.

136. Huxley to L. Campbell, August 18, 1894, LLTHI, 11, 379; also the epigraph on the title-page of Haeckel's Generelle Morphologie (above, n. 75).



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