Notes to Chapter 3: Evolutionism

1 Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, with Some of Its Applications, pp. 477-8.

2 Wallace's chief biographer, Wilma George, does not attempt in her Biologist-Philosopher: A Study of the Life and Writings of Alfred Russel Wallace to connect up Wallace's two roles of her title. She lets Wallace the co-discoverer of natural selection and Wallace the spiritualist remain compartmentalised. Though several historians have tried to trace out the course of Wallace's defection from Darwinism over human evolution, the only reliable accounts are: Malcolm J. Kottler, 'Alfred Russel Wallace, the origin of man, and spiritualism', Isis, vol. 65 (1974), pp.145-192, and Frank Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. The former shows that Wallace's defection cannot be dated to earlier than March 1869 -- ie after his conversion to spiritualism, which was complete by November 1866. Turner (p.83) agrees with earlier readings of Wallace's paper 'The origin of the human races . . .' Journal of the Anthropological Society of London, vol. 2 (1864), pp. clviii-clxx, which pre-dates his spiritualism, that this does in fact contain 'the latent seeds for all his later departures from scientific naturalism'. Though Kottler seems to me to be correct, there remains the puzzle that Wallace's 1867 paper 'Creation by law' (see n. 3, below), which Kottler does not discuss, dates after his conversion but reads as though Wallace still believed that nothing is exempted from the sway of natural selection. The value of Turner's account is that he describes Wallace's involvement with the ideas of the phrenologist George Combe early in the 1860s, for whom man was 'designed for another and higher destiny' (quoted by Turner, p. 79).

3 In Alfred Russel Wallace, 'Creation by law', Quarterly Journal of Science, vol. 4 (October 1867), pp. 471-88. Nominally a critique of the Duke of Argyll's theistic The Reign of Law (1867), this review attempts to show how the examples Argyll adduces as evidence of conscious contrivance in nature can be explained by natural selection alone. It is very remarkable that what Argyll takes to be the most telling evidences for his natural theology -- non-advantageous beauty, the fitness of nature to man's needs -- are vigorously dismissed by Wallace; and yet his later position was more extremely teleological even than Argyll's.

4 This initial statement is contained within a long review by Alfred Russel Wallace published anonymously, 'Sir Charles LyeIl on geological climates and the origin of species', Quarterly Review, vol. 126 (April 1869), pp. 359-94, which deals with both Lyell's Pn'nciples of Geology ( 10th edn) and his Elements of Geology ( 6th edn). The last three pages are devoted to the theory of man's unassisted ascent from animality -- a theory which Wallace now calls 'in the highest degree improbable' (p. 391). The following year Wallace expanded these last pages into a complete new paper, 'The limits of natural selection as applied to man', and published it in his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection: A Senes of Essays (1870). His views stabilised at that time, for yet another revision, twenty-one years later, for his new collection Natural Selection and Tropical Nature: Essays on Descriptive and Theoretical Biology (1891; new edn 1895), which appeared under the same title as the 1870 version, has very few changes. However, whether the whole evolution of man, or just the evolution of his mental and moral powers, demanded the introduction of an agency additional to natural selection was something which Wallace changed his mind about more than once. In the 'Limits of natural selection' essay of 1870 both body and mind are the result of assisted ascent. By the time of Darwinism (1889), Wallace had retreated by handing bodily evolution back to natural selection, retaining spiritual assistance only for the intellectual and moral nature. But seven years later his opinion was that the human spirit 'is developed in and by means of the body' -- and mental faculties by the brain (quoted by Turner, Between Science and Religion, p. 97).

5 Thomas Henry Huxley, 'Mr Darwin's critics', Contemporary Review, vol. 18 (November 1871), p. 471.

6 Wallace, 'LyeIl on geological climates', p. 392.

7 George Earle Buckle (a journalist and later editor of The Times), 'Natural selection insufficient to the development of man', Popular Science Review, vol. 10 (1871), p. 22.

8 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Worm of Life: H Manifestation of Creative Power, Directire Mind and Ultimate Purpose. Quotations and examples in the remainder of this paragraph are drawn from pp. 278-84 of the first edition.

9 This interpretation is from Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts, p. 13. If we accept Kottler's 'compromise' position that spiritualism caused Wallace's first doubts so that he was led to reconsider the formidable evidence for the excess development of the brain etc., the most important fact is that Wallace never brought paranormal explanations into his public thinking on human evolution. He is concerned exclusively with the technical limitations of Darwinism; and so publicly this was the foundation to his evolutionism, whatever his religious beliefs.

10 Wallace, Contributions, p. 398; Wallace, Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, p. 205 n. In the last version of his 1870 paper, Wallace denied that even a teleological biology could make any useful statements about the final end of evolution. He rests with these personified forces.

11 This typical judgement is from Joseph Warren Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, p. 6.

12 The Duke of Argyll, for instance, determined to do this. See his correspondence with the more circumspect Spencer between March 1893 and September 1898: Autobiography and Memoirs, Vol. 2, pp. 496-500.

13 James Collins, 'Darwin's impact on philosophy', Thought, vol. 34 (1959), p. 186.

14 'The filiation of ideas', in David Duncan, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, p. 543. Lionel Stevenson, in 'Darwin and the novel', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 15 (June 1960), pp. 29-38, has shown that Spencer's interest in pre-Darwinian evolutionism was reflected in literature, too: less familiar novels by Meredith, Kingsley and Eliot of the mid-1850s make use of the same 'development hypothesis' that Spencer constructed in 1852. Similar, more questionable claims have been made for the pre-1859 poetry of Coleridge, Browning, Emerson and of course Tennyson. Beach makes a critical summary of such claims in his Concept of Nature, pp. 415-22.

15 Westminster Review, n.s., vol. 11 (April 1857), pp. 445-85. The article is nominally a review of A. von Humboldt's Cosmos, the ninth edition of Lyell's Principles of Geology and the fourth edition of W. Carpenter's Principles of Comparative Physiology. Spencer soon leaves all three behind, however.

16 Morse Peckham, 'Darwinism and Darwinisticism', Victorian Studies, vol. 3 (September 1959), pp. 28-9.

17 Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas.

18 Charles Kingsley, The Life and Works of Charles Kingsley, Vol. 18, pp. 213-14. This essay, 'North Devon -- a prose idyll', first appeared in Fraser's Magazine in July 1849.

19 The Martyrdom of Man, p.L. All further references in the text are to this reprint for the Rationalist Press.

20 Herbert Spencer phrases it very similarly: cf. The Principles of Biology, revised ed, Vol. 2, p. 354: 'Slowly, but surely, evolution brings about an increasing amount of happiness; all evils being but incidental.' There are comparable sentiments in Darwin, too: cf. Origin, XIV:266. Out of a long list of scientists whom Reade mentions in his preface as helping him form his views, only three -- Lubbock, Tyndall and Tylor -- were known for their work in subjects other than biology or related sciences.

21 Charles Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin and A.C. Seward, Vol. 1, p. 94.

22 G.M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, p. 110.

23 Henry Drummond, The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man, p. 256. The quotations which follow in the text are from this first edition.

24 Reade, Martyrdom of Man, p. 423.

25 George Orwell, 'Charles Dickens', in his Collected Essays, p. 71.

26 Letter to Morley Roberts, dated 12 March 1920: W.H. Hudson, Men, Books and Birds, p. 225.

27 Robert Hamilton, W H, Hudson: The Vision of Earth, pp. 40-1. The two accounts are in Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life ( 1918) and The Book of a Naturalist (1919). The quotation which follows is from the former account, p. 329.

28 Morley Roberts, W.H. Hudson: A Portrait, p. 174.

29 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, pp. 329-30.

30 Quoted from the untitled version, which was the one read by Darwin, in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 24 March 1870, pp. 158-60. In W.H. Hudson, Letters on the Ornithology of Buenos Ayres, ed. David R. Dewar, Dewar dates the letter to 28 January 1870, adding that it was corrected and its tone modified by the Secretary before publication.

31 Charles Darwin, 'Notes on the habits of the Pampas Woodpecker (Colaptes campestris)', Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1 November 1870, pp. 705--6.

32 Letters to Morley Roberts dated 22 October 1918 and 21 July [ 1919; so dated by Roberts]: Hudson, Men, Books and Birds, pp. 167-8, 207. Five months later, Hudson speaks of the newly published biography of Butler sending him back to Butlet's books, though he does not say specifically that he means the 'evolutionary' ones. See the letter to Roberts of 28 December 1919: ibid., p. 214.

33 W.H. Hudson, 'Wasps', in his The Book of a Naturalist p.198.

34 Aldous Huxley, 'Crebillon the Younger', in his The Olive Tree and Other Essays, p. 135.

35 Hudson gave his first anonymous edition an epigraph from the fourteenth chapter of the Origin 'Recapitulation and conclusion', including in this the familiar sentence 'as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection'. It is indicative of Hudson's very careful reading of the Origin that he was able to pick so unerringly on one of the few directly evolutionistic statements in the book. In the 1906 (revised) edition he added his name and a short preface, but removed the Darwin epigraph and substituted four lines (unattributed) from The Faerie Queene, bk VII, canto viii, stanza 2, ll.1-4, which speak of a time when mutability shall cease. The best explanation for this that occurs to me is that by 1906 Hudson's disenchantment with Darwinism was such that he no longer believed in the power of natural selection to generate any kind of perfection.

A Crystal Age poses some complex bibliographical problems, but a cursory inspection of the two main editions shows that Hudson revised quite carefully with a view to curbing the stylistic flourishes of the first edition: 'Universal Mother' (1887) becomes simply 'Earth' (1906 and later), and so on. Quotations throughout are from the first edition.

36 Hudson, A Crystal Age, 2nd ed, p. viii. This most readily available second edition went through a number of impressions, all containing the added preface.

37 Letter of 10 June 1917: W.H. Hudson, Letters from W.H. Hudson to Edward Garnett, new edn, p. 175.

38 I.F. Clarke, 'The nineteenth-century Utopia', Quarterly Review, vol. 296 (1958), p. 86.

39 Letter to Edward Garnett of 10 June 1917: Hudson, Letters, pp. 174-5.

40 In his William Henry Hudson, John T. Frederick argues that the initial inspiration for modelling the Crystallite society on the habits of the social insects may have come from Thomas Bell's The Naturalist in Nicaragua (1874). Certainly this work was well known to Hudson, for he several times quotes approvingly from it; and it does contain a passage relating the social habits of ants to the reformed human society described in More's Utopia. However, I have suggested elsewhere that there may have been a more direct source. Hudson's claim to the contrary notwithstanding, a paper by Benjamin Kidd called 'Humble bees' which appeared in Longman's Magazine, vol. 7 (December 1885), and deals with the habits of the species Bombus terrestris contains such close parallels to the plot that Hudson almost certainly read it before, and not (as he claimed) after, the novel was completed.