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A Critical Glance Into Darwin
by
The horse was a horse, from the first five-toed animal in Eocene times, millions of years ago, through all the intermediate forms of four-toed and three-toed, down to the one-toed superb creature of our own day. Amid all the hazards and delays of that vast stretch of time, one may say, the horse-impulse never faltered. The survival value of the slight gains in size and strength from millennium to millennium could have played no part. It was the indwelling necessity toward development that determined the issue. This assertion does not deliver us into the hands of teleology, but is based upon the idea that ontogeny and phylogeny are under the same law of growth. In the little eohippus was potentially the horse we know, as surely as the oak is potential in the acorn, or the bird potential in the egg, whatever element of mystery may enter into the problem.
In fields where speed wins, the fleetest are the fittest. In fields where strength wins, the strongest are the fittest. In fields where sense-acuteness wins, the keenest of eye, ears, and nose are the fittest.
When we come to the race of man, the fittest to survive, from our moral and intellectual point of view, is not always the best. The lower orders of humanity are usually better fitted to survive than the higher orders–they are much more prolific and adaptive. The tares are better fitted to survive than the wheat. Every man’s hand is against the weeds, and every man’s hand gives a lift to the corn and the wheat, but the weeds do not fail. There is nothing like original sin to keep a man or a plant going. Emerson’s gardener was probably better fitted to survive than Emerson; Newton’s butler than Newton himself.
Most naturalists will side with Darwin in rejecting the idea of Asa Gray, that the stream of variation has been guided by a higher power, unless they think of the will of this power as inherent in every molecule of matter; but guidance in the usual theological sense is not to be thought of; the principle of guidance cannot be separated from the thing guided. It recalls a parable of Charles Kingsley’s which he related to Huxley. A heathen khan in Tartary was visited by a pair of proselytizing moollahs. The first moollah said, “O Khan, worship my god. He is so wise that he made all things!” Moollah Number Two said, “O Khan, worship my god. He is so wise that he makes all things make themselves!” Number Two won the day.
IV
How often it turns out that a man’s minor works outlive his major! This is true in both literature and science, but more often in the former than in the latter. Darwin furnishes a case in the field of science. He evidently looked upon his “Origin of Species” as his great contribution to biological science; but it is highly probable that his “Voyage of the Beagle” will outlast all his other books. The “Voyage” is of perennial interest and finds new readers in each generation. I find myself re-reading it every eight or ten years. I have lately read it for the fourth time. It is not an argument or a polemic; it is a personal narrative of a disinterested yet keen observer, and is always fresh and satisfying. For the first time we see a comparatively unknown country like South America through the eyes of a born and trained naturalist. It is the one book of his that makes a wide appeal and touches life and nature the most closely.
We may say that Darwin was a Darwinian from the first,–a naturalist and a philosopher combined,–and was predisposed to look at animate nature in the way his works have since made us familiar with.
In his trip on the Beagle he saw from the start with the eyes of a born evolutionist. In South America he saw the fossil remains of the Toxodon, and observed, “How wonderful are the different orders, at the present time so well separated, blended together in the different points of the structure of the Toxodon!” All forms of life attracted him. He looked into the brine-pans of Lymington and found that water with one quarter of a pound of salt to the pint was inhabited, and he was led to say: “Well may we affirm that every part of the world is habitable! Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean ones hidden beneath volcanic mountains,–warm mineral springs,–the wide expanse and depth of the ocean,–the upper regions of the atmosphere, and even the surface of perpetual snow,–all support organic beings.”