Nationalism and Culture (83 page)

Under the influence of the great discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and other enlightened minds of that period the idea of evolution made a new beginning. Bernardo Telesio, the great Italian scholar and philosopher, and one of the first to contradict the ideas of Aristotle which had dominated the Middle Ages, had undertaken in his work, De Rerum Natura^ to trace all natural events to the operation of natural laws, seeking to explain every manifestation of the universe by the motion of its elements, thus coming at least close to the concept of universal evolution in nature. Before all, however, mention must be made here of Giordano Bruno, in whose pantheistic line of thought the idea of evolution is clearly reflected. Bruno, who in the shaping of his doctrine reached back to the ideas of Democritus and the ancient atomists, combined their views with

* Salomon Munk, in his book, Melanges de fhilosophie juive et arabe, produced proof that Avicebro was none other than the great Jewish poet-philosoplier, Ibn Gabirol.

the Copernican conception of the universe and—following in the footsteps of the Epicureans—arrived at the conviction that the universe is unlimited, an idea which was obviously unknown to Copernicus, since he represented the universe as bounded by the sphere of the fixed stars. The multiplicity of forms in which matter appears arises, according to the view of the great Italian nature philosopher, of itself, without any external impulse. "Matter," so Bruno argues, "is not formless j rather, it conceals within itself the germs of all forms, and since it unfolds what it carries hidden within it, it is, in truth, the mother of nature and of all living beings."

The French physicist and empiricist, Gassendi, also appropriating the doctrine of Epicurus, traced the origin of the world to the play of the atoms, which he thought of as endowed with the power of self-movement. He saw in the atoms the primal particles of all things out of which everything arises and moves toward completion. It is interesting to observe how strongly the ideas of the ancient Grecian nature philosophers, which had suddenly awakened to new life, influenced the thought of the best minds from a considerable time before the discovery of Copernicus up to the time of the French encyclopedists. Thus, the work of Lucretius was at the time of Voltaire in the hands of all educated people. Demonstrably it was chiefly the teaching of the ancient atomists which suggested to thinkers like Descartes, Gassendi and others the idea that a gradual development underlies all events in nature. Nor can we here pass over the brilliant Jewish thinker, Baruch Spinoza, who explained all phenomena of the process of the universe as owing to implicit necessity, and not only had a conception of the general idea of evolution, but anticipated some of its most fundamental hypotheses, such as, for example, the impulse of self-preservation.

On the eve of the great revolution France was the center of a new development in human thinking which has been rightly designated as the intellectual introduction to the later social upheaval. The ancient views of the universe and man, of state and society, of religion and morals, underwent a fundamental transformation. The publication of the famous Encyclopedia was a pretentious attempt to subject the whole body of human knowledge to a rigorous examination and to set it up again on new foundations. Such a time could but be extremely propitious for the advancement of the doctrine of evolution. In fact, we find among a whole line of the thinkers of that period of ferment more or less definite beginnings toward the theory of evolution, by which the later researches were inspired. Maupertuis attempted to account for the origin of organic life from atoms endowed with sensitivity. Diderot, the most universal intellect of this period, undertook to depict the origin and shaping of religions, moral concepts and social institutions as a graduated development, having as predecessors in this field thinkers like Bodin, Bacon, Pascal and Vico.

Condorcet, Lessing and Herder struck out along similar lines and saw in the whole of human history a constant process of transformation from lower to more complicated and higher forms of culture.

La Mettrie recognized that we know nothing essential about the nature of motion and matter, but that man is, nevertheless, in a position to establish by observations the sole difference between inorganic and organic matterj that is, that the latter is self-regulating, but for this very reason uses up its vital forces and dissolves after the death of the living being into its inorganic constituents. And, just as the organic develops out of the inorganic, so out of the organic develops the mental. According to La Mettrie's theory all higher forms of existence are subject to exactly the same laws as the whole of organic and inorganic nature. Therefore he set up no artificial boundary between man and beast and saw in both only different results of the same natural processes. Robinet came to similar conclusions and held to the standpoint that all functions of the mind were dependent upon those of the body. Holbach, in his Systeme de la nature^ brought together these different views and, taking off from strictly materialistic lines of thought, developed the idea of a gradual genesis of the different living forms on the basis of the same uniform natural laws.

In Germany Leibnitz, who tried to counteract the materialism of the French thinkers, repeatedly exposed himself to the attacks of La Mettrie and his sympathizers. Yet his theory of monads, which has unmistakable points of contact with the views of modern biology, led him also to the idea of a gradual formation of the universe, as has been so often pointed out by modern exponents of the theory of evolution. Kant had an even clearer understanding of the idea of evolution than Leibnitz when, in his Allgememe Naturgeschichie und Theorie des Himmelsy he maintained that the whole system of the universe had evolved from revolving nebulae, the chaotic motions of primal matter gradually assuming fixed and permanent orbits. Kant saw in the universe the result of the operation of physical and mechanical forces and held the conviction that the cosmos had gradually shaped itself out of chaos and in the course of an enormous period of time would sink into it again and begin the process anew. He saw the world as a continuous play of becoming and dissolving. Hegel, too, saw in the course of nature an uninterrupted process of development and, in the metaphysical fashion that was-peculiar to him, he transferred these ideas to human history j it was to this circumstance that he chiefly owed his great influence over his contemporaries. The theory of evolution was already unmistakably in the air. It would lead us too far to develop more fully here to what a degree thinkers like Malpighi, Malebranche, Bonnet and others, each in his own way, helped on the idea. The word "evolution" was already in frequent use among

men of science in the first half of the eighteenth century, a proof that the idea of evolution dwelt more and more in men's thoughts.

Among the forerunners of the modern theory of evolution as it found expression with Darwin and his numerous successors, the French natural philosopher, Buffon, deserves especial regard, because his views are to be thought of less as the outcome of philosophical speculation than of practical experiments and earnest, laborious research. Buffon was one of the most intellectual men of his time, and the full significance of many of his inspirations was not properly recognized until long afterward. His Natural History was not merely a greatly conceived attempt at a rational explanation of the course of events in the universe j it developed in many other fields also a great many fruitful ideas. Thus he demonstrated from practical examples that alteration of plant and animal species can arise from many causes—his idea being quite the same as Darwin's was later. Buffon recognized also that the process of evolution can never reach a definite end, and deduced from this that science would be able by tests and observations to establish beyond question certain manifestations of it. It is, therefore, easy to understand how a man of such splendid gifts could have such a great influence on thinkers like Goethe, Lamarck and Saint-Hilaire.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the idea of evolution had everywhere found its way into all unprejudiced minds. Its most distinguished advocate at that time was Goethe, in whose brilliant personality the prophetic vision of the poet was in the happiest way combined with the keen and sober gift of observation of the investigator. Goethe was powerfully stimulated by Buffon in his studies in natural history and developed as early as 1790, in his Vber die Metamorfhose der P-jianzerif ideas which lie wholly within the line of thought of the theory of descent; as when he traced the origin of all the organs of a plant to "metamorphosis," that is to the modifications of a single organ, the leaf—an idea which occurred later to Lamarck. Goethe applied the same ideas to the animal world also and gave us in his vertebrate theory a splendid example of penetrating keenness of observation. Moreover his concept of the geological changes in the earth's surface crust contains several ideas that were only later worked out and established more fundamentally by Lyell and Hoff.

A unique forerunner of the evolution theory was Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, who (doubtless influenced by Lucretius) in his comprehensive didactic poem, Zoonomia^ tried to account for the origin of the universe and of all life on the earth on an evolutionary-historical basis, and expressed many ideas that come surprisingly close to our modern view.

The German nature philosopher, Treviranus, in his work Biologie:

oder die Philosofhie der lebenden NatuVy which appeared in the years 1802-1805, advocated the idea that all higher living beings have developed from a small number of primitive original forms and that every form of life is the result of physical influences which differ only in the direction and the degree of effectiveness of their operation. Lorenz Oken, a contemporary of Goethe, quite independently of him developed the view that the cranium is made up of vertebrae and is only a continuation of the spinal column, and concluded that every living being is composed of cells and that all organic life on the earth had originated in a primal plasma. Oken also made an attempt to reclassify the whole plant and animal world according to descent.

This long line of bold thinkers of every nation, who, with justice, are called the pioneers of the modern theory of evolution, came to an end with the French zoologist, Lamarck, still a pioneer, but most effective. In his Vhtlosophie zoologiquey which appeared in 1809, he assembled the more or less developed ideas of his predecessors, together with his own theories, and gave them a definite scientific basis. He assailed the doctrine of the unalterability of species and concluded that these seem to us unalterable merely because the process of transformation is too gradual to be comprehended within the brief span of a human life. These transformations are, nevertheless, indisputable, and are conditioned by alterations in climate, means of subsistence and other phenomena of the environment. He concludes:

It is not the organs, that is, the nature and structure of the body-parts of an animal which have produced its habits and special capabilities; but, on the contrary, its habits, its manner of life, and the conditions under which the indiv^iduals from which it descends were forced to live, have in time determined its bodily structure, the number and condition of its organs and capabilities.

The great reaction which was noticeable everywhere in Europe after the Napoleonic wars and which in the time of the Holy Alliance of unhappy memory not only exerted a crippling influence on the whole of political and social life, but also put bonds upon the thoughts of men and raised against the further expansion of the evolutionary doctrine a dam which had to be broken down before any further advances in this direction could be thought of. Art, science and philosophy fell under the dominion of the reactionary course of ideas, and a new spirit had to be born in Europe before a new impetus could be given to the theory of evolution. There were few glimpses of light in that long period of intellectual stagnation, and even they were scarcely noticed. Thus the English scholar, W. C. Wells, as early as 1813, developed with some clearness the idea of natural selection. He recognized that a dark skin made men

more capable of withstanding the dangers of a tropical climate, from which he deduced that originally only those individuals were able to survive in tropical regions whom nature for some reason or other had blessed with a dark skin. Of course, Wells confined himself in his researches to definite types and made no attempt to test the general validity of the idea.

The most important thing appearing in that dark period was Charles Lyell's Principles of Geologyy which came out in 1830. This work, in which the English geologist attacked Cuvier's theory of cataclysms, was to prove of fundamental significance for the further shaping of the theory of evolution. Cuvier's authority in the field of natural history had till then been undisputed. Now Lyell maintained that all the changes in the surface of the earth were brought about, not by sudden catastrophes, but by the unceasing operation of the same forces which are even today continuously at work. This theory, which Goethe had already postulated, was the necessary assumption for the whole evolutionary-historical line of thought} only by means of it was the idea of a gradual modification of species, adapting themselves to the gradual alterations of the earth's crust, made properly intelligible and scientifically thinkable.

In the same year in which Lyell's work was given publicity there took place in the Paris Academy that notable controversy between Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire which Goethe followed with such lively interest despite his extreme old age. Cuvier defended the doctrine of the permanency of species, while Saint-Hilaire undertook to prove their alterability through adaptation to the conditions of the environment. But the spirit of the time was against him, and Cuvier emerged victorious before the scientific world from a learned debate in which there was no lack of platitudes. All in that field of science were on his side and had only scorn and derision for his opponent. It looked as if the theory of evolution was done for once and for all, for Cuvier's doctrine was hardly attacked at all during the next three decades. (Even after the appearance of Darwin's epoch-making work the specialists in France, Germany and other countries hesitated to take under consideration the ideas developed there, and a considerable time passed before they were able to resolve upon an earnest examination of the new theory.) Neither did the idea of a natural selection among organic beings, to which the English investigator, Patrick Matthew, gave expression in the appendix to his book on ship-building and indigenous culture, meet with acceptance. The theory of evolution seemed, in fact, to be dead. Only with the decline of political and social reaction in Europe and the collapse of Hegel's doctrines did the demand for scientific thought in Europe come again into its own. Then the theory of evolution awoke to new life and even before the appearance of Darwin's work found