“Symbolic Mutation”: Thomas Carlyle and the Legacy of Charles Darwin in England

Home , Jamaica Committee, John Tyndall, Tyndall

David R. Sorensen

This essay is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, Nantes, France, as part of the “L’Heritage de Darwin dans les cultures européennes,” hosted by the Centre de Recherche sur les identités nationales et l’interculturalité de l’Université de Nantes and the Groupe de Recherche sur l’Eugénisme et le Racisme de l’Université de Paris-Diderot, 3–4 April 2009.

ohn Tyndall (1820–93), physicist, Darwinist, and director of the Royal Institution, returned on 19 August J1874 to his native Ireland in his capacity as president of the British Association to deliver a presidential address in Belfast entitled “The Beginning of Things, or, Science Versus Theology.” Circumstances were ripe for controversy, and temperamentally, Tyndall savored confrontations of this sort. Raised a Protestant, he had never disguised his dislike of the “Papist” church hierarchy in Ireland, and he was aware of long-simmering disputes among its clergy about the dangers of teaching science in the curriculum of the floundering Catholic University. John Henry Newman, the first rector, had resigned over the issue in 1858, and the institution had continued to struggle without a coherent academic or theological plan.1 In the ideologically fractious atmosphere of the times—Darwin’s Descent of Man had been published only three years earlier— it was expected by both believers and skeptics that Tyndall would deliver a corrosive attack against Roman Catholicism. In

CSA 25  2009 62 Carlyle Studies Annual certain respects, he did not disappoint them. As the historians of science John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor explain, his lecture provided “a more completely naturalistic account of Darwinism than Darwin himself, pledging that science would rest from theology the entire domain of cosmological theory” (Reconstructing Nature 25). But judged from a different perspective, Tyndall’s lecture “was the culmination of a series of essays and addresses that argued for a qualified materialism” (Barton 132). Seen in this light, his real antagonist was atheism. Tyndall himself was highly sensitive to the charge that his lecture might be misin- terpreted as a celebration of the physical basis of life. Several months later he wrote an anxious letter to Carlyle’s niece and assistant Mary Carlyle Aitken, asking her if the rumors of her Uncle’s disapproval of the Belfast address were true. She replied promptly: “I need hardly say that your small request gives me no trouble whatever & I hasten to comply with it. I myself heard my Uncle use the expression ‘a philosophy fit for dogs,’ but it was a reference to Darwin’s theory of Evolution not to your Belfast address. He ‘the General’ bids me say that he never said or thought anything of the kind in reference to what you have said or written. As to the ‘similar story,’ I daresay you yourself have often heard my Uncle repeat the words ‘Thou has made him a little lower than the angels’; and add that the Darwinites seemed to say ‘Thou has made him a little higher than the tadpoles’” (Tyndall papers, 9 February 1875).2 At first appearance Tyndall’s request for reassurance seems curious. Why did Carlyle’s views about Darwin matter so much to him? The answer lies in his own complex attitudes to the man whom he had referred to in an 1870 address to the British Association in Liverpool as “our mightiest spiritual teacher” (Use and Limit 36). The “General’s” approval was vital to him because Tyndall found in the writings of the Chelsea prophet the most profound and complete philosophical and historical confirma- tion of the Origin of Species (1859). Carlyle’s was an apologia that for him transcended any other in its future significance. From his first reading of Past and Present in 1843 while working as a railway surveyor in Preston, Tyndall had recognized in Carlyle what he later discovered in Darwin—he was a revolutionary who had radically re-defined the relationship between the divine and David R. Sorensen 63 the material realms of experience.3 For Tyndall, the two men shared a common starting-point in their distinctive endeavors. Both conceived nature synthetically, and stressed the mysterious intricacy of its parts and the ultimate indeterminacy of its design. The impact of their work on science and philosophy was already apparent: “[Physical science] is destined to produce, immense changes—popular conception of the origin, rule, and governance of natural things. By science, in the physical world, miracles are wrought, while philosophy is forsaking its ancient metaphysical channels and pursuing others which have been opened or indicated by scientific research” Use( and Limit 43). Tyndall believed that together, Carlyle and Darwin had liber- ated philosophy from the mechanistic orthodoxies that were choking its intellectual development and constricting its future, and by doing so, they had cleared a path to the eventual fusion of science and religion. In “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle” (1890), Tyndall explicates the synthesis: “Quite as clearly as the professed physicist [Carlyle] grasped the principle of Continuity, and saw the interdependence of ‘parts’ in the ‘stupendous Whole.’ To him the Universe was not a Mechanism, but an Organism—each part of it thrilling and responding sympathetically with all other parts. . . . Other penetrative minds have made us familiar with the ‘Social Organism,’ but Carlyle saw early and utilized nobly the beauty and the truth of the metaphor.” From Carlyle, Tyndall learned to appre- ciate that “the long line of his researches is, in reality, a line of wonders” (New Fragments 385–86, 387). Darwin too, opened peoples’ eyes to the congruity and multitudinousness of the physical world. The theory of evolution described a sublime scheme of nature that was not dependent on a pre-ordained Creator. For Tyndall, Darwin had restored a vital sense of the miraculousness of existence that earlier science, enfeebled by an exhausted religious tradition, had denied and repressed. In his Liverpool speech Tyndall boldly declares: “Strip [the doctrine of evolution] naked, and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animal- cular or animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself—emotion, 64 Carlyle Studies Annual intellect, will and all their phenomena—were once latent in a fiery cloud. Surely the mere statement of such a notion is more than a refutation. But the hypothesis would probably go even farther than this. Many who hold it would probably assent to the position that, at the present moment, all our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, and all our art—Plato, Shakespeare, Newton and Raphael—are potential in the fires of the sun” Use( and Limit 35). The word that unites Carlyle and Darwin in Tyndall’s mind is “wonder.” Gillian Beer has observed that the concept perme- ated both Darwin’s methods and language, and that it linked him closely to Carlyle and Dickens: “The study of ‘fact’ was for [them] an exploration of the fantastic. Darwin shared this pleasure in ‘making strange’, in skimming off the familiar and restoring it, enriched and stabilized. When the word ‘fact’ occurs in The Origin of Species it is usually intensified as ‘a truly wonderful fact—the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity’ . . . ‘this great fact’ . . . or ‘such wonderful and well-established facts’” (259). Seen from this vantage point, Darwin’s outlook is serenely compatible with Carlyle’s, “not opposed,” Tyndall insists, “but supplementary—not mutually exclusive, but reconcilable” (Belfast Address 64). In his Liverpool address, he assures his audience that Darwin’s theory poses no threat to true religion: “Fear not the Evolution hypothesis. . . . Trust me, its existence as a hypothesis in the mind is quite compatible with the simultaneous existence of all those virtues to which the term Christian has been applied. It does not solve—it does not profess to solve—the ultimate mystery of this universe. It leaves in fact that mystery untouched. For granting the nebula and its potential life, the question, whence came they? would still remain to baffle and bewilder us.” Like Carlyle, Darwinists “have as little fellowship with the atheist who says there is no God, as with the theist who professes to know the mind of God.” Tyndall concludes by citing Carlyle’s favorite passage from Kant: “‘Two things . . . fill me with awe: the starry heavens and the sense of moral responsibility in man.’ And in his hours of health and strength and sanity, when the stroke of action has ceased and the pause of reflection has set in, the scientific investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe. Breaking contact with the hampering details of earth, it David R. Sorensen 65 associates him with a power which gives fullness and tone to his existence, but which he can neither analyse nor comprehend” (Use and Limit 36, 38). In such moments, the scientist and the believer are at one in their mutual reverence of a knowledge and power that eludes them both. For Tyndall, Carlyle’s “Natural Supernaturalism” has achieved for religion what Darwin’s natural selection has done for evolution. In their respective spheres, each man has reshaped the context of knowledge and belief. Carlyle began with a simple proposition, that the actual universe radiated with the life of the ideal. From this premise, he arrived at a startling new configuration of morality and evolution. In his lecture “Science and Man” to the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1877, Tyndall notes, “I think it is in one of the Latter-Day Pamphlets that Carlyle corrects a reasoner, who deduced the nobility of man from a belief in heaven, by telling him that he puts the cart before the horse, the real truth being that the belief in heaven is derived from the nobility of man.” Tyndall elaborates the argument in distinctively Darwinian language, showing how Carlyle anticipates the ways in which religion will “adapt” to the irrefutable truth of the evolutionary hypothesis: “Our ideas of God and the soul are obviously subject to this symbolic mutation. They are not now what they were a century ago. They will not be a century hence what they are now. Such ideas constitute a kind of central energy in the human mind, capable, like the energy of the physical universe, of assuming various shapes and undergoing various transformations. They baffle and elude the theological mechanic who would carve them to dogmatic forms. They offer themselves to the poet who understands his vocation, and whose function is, or ought to be, to find ‘local habitation’ for thoughts woven into our subjective life, but which refuse to be mechanically defined” Fragments( 2: 372, 360). Carlyle predicts the direction, but not the desti- nation of what he calls “religiosity.” How this “central energy” will find new vehicles of spiritual expression constitutes one of the most pressing issues of the day, as crucial to religion as Darwinian theory is to science. What is most striking about Tyndall’s effort to enlist Carlyle as the leading Darwinist of the age is the context in which this recruitment occurs. By the 1870s Carlyle’s reputation as 66 Carlyle Studies Annual a surly advocate of a Prussian-style authoritarianism was well established.4 The Scottish theologian John Tulloch trenchantly summarized the critical consensus against Carlyle in his St. Giles lectures of 1884. Carlyle’s refusal “to look steadily at spiritual as distinct from natural life” had vitiated his outlook. In Tulloch’s view, the result of this fatal schism was that he could not imagine life being created “save by a being who had a moral sense like his own. . . . [H]e refused to acknowl- edge a Personal Life above his own life, a Life pitiful as well as just, Love as well as Law. And so his idea of the Divine reality sank into the idea of Supreme Force” (204). Tulloch accused Carlyle of delighting “in the vagueness which lies necessarily in [the] higher region,” and clinging “to it with scorn of all who would give to the Supreme a more concrete meaning. And so Spirit with him constantly passes into Force, Law into Might— Righteousness into mere Order” (205). Darwin himself, an admirer of Carlyle’s earlier writings, was dismayed by the illib- eral turn that he had taken in such works as the “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1848), Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The History of Frederick the Great (1858–65), and Shooting Niagara (1867). In his posthumously published Autobiography (1887), Darwin declared: “[Carlyle] has been all-powerful in impressing some grand moral truths on the minds of men. On the other hand, his views about slavery were revolting. In his eyes might was right. His mind seemed to me a very narrow one; even if all branches of science, which he despised, are excluded” (113). Carlyle was equally scathing about Darwinian theory, though he admired Darwin personally. He informed William Allingham in 1878, “I don’t care three ha’pence for [it]. . . . It is impossible to believe otherwise than that this world is the work of an Intelligent Mind. The Power which has formed us—He (or It—if that appears to anyone more suitable) has known how to put into the human soul an ineradicable love of justice and truth” (29 March; Allingham 264). Yet the assumption that faith in such “Intelligence” amounted to the certainty of a preor- dained “design”—a notion dear to certain twenty-first century opponents of Darwinism—did not move Carlyle. He loudly derided Tyndall’s initiative to fuse his opinions with Darwin’s. To Allingham he “spoke of the folly of Tyndall and others who David R. Sorensen 67 went on about the origin of things; ‘I long ago perceived that no man could know anything about that; but that the Universe could come together by chance was, and is, altogether incred- ible. The evidence to me of God—and the only evidence—is the feeling I have deep down in the very bottom of my heart of right and truth and justice. I believe that all things are governed by Eternal Goodness and Wisdom, and not otherwise; but we cannot see and never shall see how it is all managed’” (14 November 1878; Allingham 268). But such disavowals, which Carlyle frequently expressed, curiously buoyed Tyndall with hope. Neither Darwin’s contempt for Carlyle’s “might is right” nor Carlyle’s disdain for evolution discouraged him. On the contrary, Carlyle’s “feeling . . . of right and truth and justice” operated on Tyndall’s imagination as a galvanic agency, spur- ring him to champion a “symbolic mutation” between the two thinkers that would benefit both science and religion. Notwithstanding his attraction to the magnetic appeal of Carlyle’s moral fervor, Tyndall appreciated the dangers and pitfalls of discipleship. In 1866 he somewhat hesitantly became involved in the Governor Eyre controversy. Having decided to follow Carlyle in joining the Eyre Defense Committee, Tyndall incurred the anger of fellow scientists, including his friend and colleague Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95). Huxley too had previously admired Carlyle, but he now insisted that he no longer recognized the author of Sartor Resartus in the utterances of the cranky reactionary who insulted humanity by lauding militaristic regimentation. Dismayed by Carlyle’s support for Eyre’s brutal suppression of the Jamaica revolt, Huxley bluntly informed Charles Kingsley that henceforth, he sided with those who “look upon hero-worship as no better than any other idolatry, and upon the attitude of mind of the hero-worshipper as essentially immoral” (8 November 1866; Life and Letters 1: 303–04).5 The anti-Eyre Jamaica Committee issued a public letter to Tyndall, challenging him to justify his decision to support the governor. Put on the defensive, Tyndall tried to stake out a middle ground in the debate. In a letter to the Committee sent from the Athenæum Club on 7 November, he condemned Eyre’s use of excessive force but insisted that the circumstances be judged in the context of the region’s history: “I am not prepared to question the truth of these allegations 68 Carlyle Studies Annual

[against Eyre]; I am not prepared to deny that the period of punishment was too long, or that its character was too severe. . . . But I would invite you to transport yourselves to the field while the smoke hung upon it; to remember that a former rebellion in Jamaica which everybody supposed to be quelled in May broke out ‘with redoubled fury in June’; to think of Governor Eyre with the blood of his slaughtered countrymen before his eyes; with the memories of St. Domingo in his mind; with the consciousness that the whole island round him was near its point of combustion, and with no possible means of estimating how near” (qtd. in Finlason 368).6 In trying to shift the ground of the dispute from broad notions of might and right to the particulars of history, Tyndall also signaled his strategy for redeeming Carlyle as a Darwinist. It was no coincidence that Tyndall chose to proclaim the Chelsea sage’s evolutionist credentials on his merits as a historian. Carlyle had devoted the bulk of his career to three major works of history, The French Revolution (1837), Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845), and The History of Frederick the Great (1858– 65), which Tyndall regarded as touchstones of his genius. They provided convincing and exhaustive evidence that Carlyle’s opposition to “mechanistic” logic was rooted in his inveterate dislike of any kind of absolutism, either philosophical or political. These writings represented the triumph of the Darwinian spirit in the recovery of the past, by combining a stubborn devotion to empirical fact with an open-minded receptivity to Goethean “many-sidedness.” What saved Carlyle from violating the boundaries of morality and science was his acute historical sense, which in turn nourished and fortified his dynamic vision of nature. According to Tyndall, Carlyle was the writer who had exerted the heaviest impact on the union between Romanticism and science, investing human experience with a transcendent dimension. In his excavations of the past, he enacted within himself both the limits of reason and the imagination, while simultaneously demonstrating their fruitful intercourse. From Tyndall’s vantage point, it was Carlyle the historian to whom all scientists should be indebted, because in his great epics, he exploded the false “antithesis of spirit and matter” and taught investigators to regard these polarities “as equally worthy and equally wonderful; to consider them in fact as two David R. Sorensen 69 opposite faces of the self-same mystery” (Use and Limit 36). If Darwin’s evolutionary theory served as a powerful warning of the dangers of imposing rigid patterns on the operations of nature, Carlyle’s historical studies yielded a similar caution to those who sought to extract “scientific” certitudes from the study of the past. In his Belfast address, Tyndall cites Henry Thomas Buckle’s best-selling History of Civilization in England (1857, 1861) as a salient example of this misguided tendency. In the book, which was hailed by critics as a landmark study and was subsequently translated into German, French, and Russian, Buckle speaks confidently of a new “science of history.” With Gradgrindian zealotry, he trumpets “statistics . . . [as] a branch of knowledge which, though still in its infancy, has already thrown more light on the study of human nature than all the sciences put together.” This new discipline demonstrates unequivocally “that the advance of European civilization is characterized by a diminishing influence of physical laws, and an increasing influence of mental laws” 31,( 142). Buckle’s confident conclusion “that the history of the human mind can only be understood by connecting it with the history and the aspects of the material universe” (134) illustrates his myopia. Like many of those thinkers who have subordinated the past to a blueprint of rational progress— among them, Turgot, Condorcet, the Saint-Simonians, Fourier, Mignet, Dulaure, Buchez, Sismondi, Comte, John Stuart Mill, Marx and Engels, Guizot, and Thierry—Buckle overlooks the inherently untidy quality of historical facts. He too readily accepts the “false antithesis of spirit and matter,” and as a consequence, he diminishes the role of sympathy and imagination in the reconstruction of the past. In the Belfast address Tyndall cautions thinkers to calibrate their conclusions in rela- tion to what can be known: “All religious theories, schemes and systems, which embrace notions of cosmogony, or which otherwise reach into the domain of science, must, in so far as they do this, submit to the control of science, and relinquish all thought of controlling it” (Belfast Address 61). But in the itali- cized phrase, “in so far as they do this,” he specifies the limits of both religion and science, and maintains that “[s]cience itself not unfrequently derives motive power from an ultra-scientific source.” The progress of the human intellect can never be 70 Carlyle Studies Annual divorced from other less measurable influences. In Tyndall’s words, “Mr. Buckle sought to detach intellectual achievement from moral force. He gravely erred; for without moral force to whip it into action, the achievements of the intellect would be poor indeed” (Belfast Address 61). By ignoring this vital dimension of experience, Buckle misconceives the purpose and value of studying the past.7 In their respective research Carlyle and Darwin offered a much richer harvest of historical insight. They taught that science is as much as an internal as well as an external power. It derives its inspiration from the ineffable quality of all knowledge, argues Tyndall: “Science desires not isolation, but freely combines with every effort towards the bettering of man’s estate. Single-handed, and supported not by outward sympathy, but by inward force, it has built at least one great wing of the many- mansioned home which man in his totality demands” (Belfast Address 62). A true “science of history” is a contradiction, since by its very definition it rejects the Darwinian recognition of science as one room in a “many-mansioned” reality.8 At the conclusion of his general introduction, Buckle hopes that his labors will “open to historians a new field, by reminding them that every- where the hand of Nature is that the history of the human mind can only be understood by connecting it with the history and the aspects of the material universe” (134). In Tyndall’s estimate, Carlyle and Darwin are the torchbearers of a deeper truth, namely that the invisible life of the past also reveals “those unquenchable claims of [man’s] moral and emotional life which the understanding can never satisfy” (Belfast Address 64). Carlyle approaches the study of the past in the same manner that Darwin approaches the study of the natural world. Tyndall’s assessment of Darwin’s methods in the Liverpool lecture is equally relevant to Carlyle’s as a historian: “[The Darwinians’] business is not with the possible, but the actual—not with a world which might be, but with a word that is. This they explore with a courage not unmixed with reverence, and according to their methods which, like the quality of a tree, are tested by their fruits. They have but one desire—to know the truth. They have but one fear—to believe a lie. And if they know the strength of science, and rely upon it with unswerving trust, they also know the limits beyond which science ceases to be strong” (Use and Limit 38). David R. Sorensen 71

Like Darwin, Carlyle revered facts but he never presumed that they could divulge a complete or final knowledge of either people or events. It was his ardor to re-create the past in its essence that led him to inaccuracy. His struggle was always to balance imaginative sympathy with accuracy. In instances such as the Flight to Varennes, he lost himself in the drama of the moment and failed to record the correct distance of the King’s journey. Yet as Tyndall insists, his efforts to balance his poetic and his empirical aims were laudable: “His labours were intensified by his conscientiousness. He proved all things, with the view and aim of holding fast that which was historically good. Never to err would have been superhuman; but if he erred, it was not through indolence or lack of care. The facts of history were as sacred in his eyes as the ‘constants’ of gravitation in the eyes of Newton; hence the severity of his work” (New Fragments 57). A scrupulous scientist, he subjected his biases to rigorous self-inquiry. For example, “the riddled Vengeur sinking to the cry of ‘Vive la Républic!’ found in his strong soul sympathetic admiration.” But, Tyndall asserts, “he prized courage less than truth; and when he found the story of the Vengeur to be a lie, he transfixed it, and hung it up as an historic scarecrow” New( Fragments 395). Carlyle boldly countered the orthodoxies of “the science of history” by giving priority to human over political, philosophical, or ideological interests in his narratives. Whereas he focused on the French Revolution both as a spiritual search for a new “mythus” and as a primordial eruption against injustice and materialism, members of the “scientific” school regarded it, in Buckle’s formulation, as “a single part of that far larger movement which was seen in every department of science, of philosophy, of religion, and of politics” (851). Tyndall was first attracted to the writings of Carlyle precisely because the sage eschewed such lifeless Bitzer-like equations in favor of carefully wrought delineations of real human feeling. Carlyle’s detailed descriptions in Past and Present of the unemployed laborers in Preston in 1842 indicated the emotional proximity between him and his subject. A “eye-witness” to this same tragedy, Tyndall merges Carlyle’s narrative of the Preston riots with his own memories: “I found in it strokes of descriptive powers unequalled in my experience, and thrills of electric splendour 72 Carlyle Studies Annual which carried me enthusiastically on” (New Fragments 349). Carlyle’s historical writing is a combination of empirical fidelity, spiritual wonder, and prophetic intensity. Darwin’s Origin of Species memorably demonstrates that these are the prerequi- sites of great science, as well as great history. For Tyndall, Carlyle’s re-creation of the past embodies a “deep-set feeling which, since the earliest dawn of history . . . incorporated itself in the Religions of the world.” In his Belfast address, Tyndall warns his fellow scientists not to ignore this “feeling,” which has always inspired the creative impulse in art, literature, music, painting, and science. The scientist’s denunciation of religion as the enemy of human reason and progress constitutes “the problem of problems at the present hour.” Tyndall concedes that “the religions of the world” have been “dangerous, nay destructive, to the dearest privileges of freemen . . . and would, if they could, be again.” Notwithstanding their recondite aspect, they are also “capable of being guided to noble issues in the region of emotion, which is its proper and elevated sphere” (Belfast Address 61). Carlyle’s point of view is vital not merely because it releases scientists from the “old clothes” of religious dogmatism, but also because it inspires them to re-channel their spiritual energies towards their research. Similarly, Darwin’s open-mindedness shapes the procedures of his disciples: “They best know that questions offer themselves to thought which science, as now prosecuted, has not even the tendency to solve. They keep such questions open, and will not tolerate any unnecessary limitation of the horizon of their souls” (Use and Limit 167). Tyndall was not unique in seeing Carlyle as the pre-eminent moral thinker of his time who, both instinctively and intuitively, acted as a bridge between Darwinism and religion. One of Carlyle’s earlier disciples Vernon Lushington (1832–1912) had speculated fruitfully about their notable affinities in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in 1856. A self-professed Carlylean “believer,” Lushington’s aim was to vindicate his mentor’s conviction that “Might and Right do differ frightfully from hour to hour, but give them centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical” (341). In his writings Carlyle poetically discloses how the course of human history evinces Darwinian patterns of competition, natural selection, adaptation, and mutation. David R. Sorensen 73

Argues Lushington, “[He] has shown, the Feudal Barons were in their day the right rulers of England; the Pope at Rome was the right ruler of Christendom; the white Englishman was, nay is, the proper master of the Jamaican negro. The title of their authority was Might, but it was a good and true title, a God-given one: the injustice of their practice was but weakness, and in time their ruin. For by the self-same law, what is unjust cannot last. Feudal Serfdom had to go; Roman Papacy had to go; Black Slavery had to go, men enduring their wrongfulness no longer. . . . Each of these institutions carried with it order, organisation, and left but a sorry substitute in its room. There is a penalty on Injustice! Might is Right still” (337). But Carlyle’s later preoccupation with Frederick the Great and Prussia soured Lushington’s enthusiasm. A convert to the Comtean “religion of humanity” in the 1870s, he denounced Carlyle as a militarist. Of The History of Frederick the Great, Lushington laments, “This is not what we want. It is even what we don’t want. We don’t want to increase, to feed our interest in war: we want to reduce it” (qtd. in Taylor 93). Yet it was to Carlyle’s Prussian biography that Tyndall appealed as a sign of the author’s tolerance and tenacity. In the book Carlyle stubbornly resisted his own authoritarian temp- tations. Part of him may have wanted to represent Frederick the Great as an exemplary ruler, but he was too honest a historian to push this claim further than his evidence permitted. Tyndall recalls that “He was continually pulled up by sayings and doings on the part of his hero which took all enthusiasm out of him. ‘Frederick was the greatest administrator this world has seen, but I could never really love the man’” (New Fragments 357). What emerged from this contradiction was an evolutionary view of the Prussian iconoclast, whose rebellion against the hypocritical diplomacy and political chicanery of eighteenth-century Europe “ushers-in the French Revolution, and closes an Epoch of World-History” (Frederick, Works 12: 6). In the “Proem” to his Prussian epic, Carlyle poses a question that reveals his own peculiar Darwinian leanings: “What part of that exploded Past, the ruins and dust of which still darken all the air, will continually gravitate back to us; be reshaped, trans- formed, readapted, that so, in new figures, under new conditions, it may enrich and nourish us again?” (Works 12: 16). The answer 74 Carlyle Studies Annual lies in Frederick’s own commitment to “true Kingship,” which is founded on justice rather than privilege or might. Tyndall concedes that the “bias of [Carlyle’s] mind was certainly towards what might be called the military virtues; thinking, as he did, that they could not be dispensed with in the present temper of the world. But, though he bore about him the image of a great military commander . . . he would at any fit and proper moment have joyfully accepted as the weapons of his warfare, instead of the sword and sphere, the ploughshare and pruning- hook of peaceful civic life” (New Fragments 395). Despite his flaws, Frederick is a worthier leader than Napoleon Bonaparte because he steadfastly refuses to equate guile with veracity or might with right. Paradoxically, Tyndall regards Carlyle—the alleged apostle of the Prussian “drill Sergeant”—as the greatest and most perceptive critic of “social Darwinism,” which “suggested that nature would provide that the best competitors in a competitive situation would win, and this process would lead to continuing improvement” (Hofstadter 6).9 For Tyndall, Carlyle’s attitude to nature stays true to the spirit of Darwin’s doctrine. Carlyle looks forward to Darwin in the manner in which he envisages truth “evolving” from lies and half-truths. This process involves both competition and annihilation—a “natural selection”— and eventually, a rational recognition of higher “mutation” in the shape of a future common good. In Tyndall’s estimate, Darwin and Carlyle meet at the junction of the known and the unknown. Carlyle believes that “[o]ut of pure Unintelligence . . . Intelligence never could have sprung, and so, at the heart of things, he placed an Intelligence—and Energy which, ‘to avoid circuitous periphrasis, we call God.’” Tyndall adds, “I am here repeating his own words to myself. Every reader of his works will have recognised the burning intensity of his conviction that this universe is ruled by veracity and justice, which are sure in the end to scorch and dissipate all falsehood and wrong” (New Fragments 396). In the endless interplay of “might and right” in the world, Carlyle discerns that brute force will never impose the truth, since such force implies a closure of the very attitudes that nourish the possibility of greater wisdom. For Carlyle, as for Darwin, there is an underlying hope that the evolutionary dance might confirm the confluence of David R. Sorensen 75 might and right. Tyndall reiterates that in this context, “Might is not, in the abstract, offensive; for it meant at bottom the assertion that . . . that only is might which has the ‘Law of the Universe’ on its side. With Carlyle, as with Empedocles, Lucretius, and Darwin, the Fit survives. His doctrine is the doctrine of science, not ‘touched’ but saturated with religious emotion. For the operation of Force—the scientific agent—his deep and yearning soul substituted the operation of the Energy . . . which . . . we call God” (New Fragments 396). In his frequent discussions with Carlyle about Darwin, Tyndall observed that his friend objected to Darwin’s doctrine of evolution primarily on moral rather than scientific grounds. The possibility that a new form of Benthamite social control would emerge that scientifically determined “might” by the irrefutable laws of Darwinian natural selection and laissez-faire troubled Carlyle deeply. His admiration for Frederick the Great was largely grounded in the Prussian king’s abhorrence of free trade, and of the terrible human cost that this “Lie” imposed on society. Tyndall recalled, “It was not the absence of scientific power and precision, so much as the overwhelming importance which Carlyle ascribed to ethical considerations and influences, that determined his attitude toward natural science. The fear that moral strength might be diminished by Darwin’s doctrine accounts for such hostility as he showed to the ‘Origin of Species.’ We had many calm and reasonable conversations on this and kindred subjects; and I could see that his real protest was against being hemmed in. He demanded a larger area than that offered by science for speculative action and its associated emotion. . . . It was the illegitimate science which, in its claims, overstepped its warrant—professing to explain everything, and to sweep the universe clear of mystery—that was really repug- nant to Carlyle” (New Fragments 386–87). Tyndall’s defense of Carlyle’s proto-Darwinism suggests the paradoxical aspect of the sage’s legacy. On the one hand, he inspired an entire generation by assailing Utilitarian self- interest and awakening people’s minds to the wondrous human possibilities of a world teeming with compassionate and constructive energy. On the other, he brutally compro- mised this achievement by his cruel and perversely unhistorical attacks against West Indian and American slaves, and by his 76 Carlyle Studies Annual cynical paeans to Cromwell in Ireland and Frederick in Silesia.10 From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to accept Tyndall’s judgment, at least without careful reserva- tion, that “the cloud passes away, and the mountain, in its solid grandeur, remains” (New Fragments 397). But it is a tribute to Carlyle’s acumen as a historian that even when mired in the darkness of his own volatile misanthropy, he could “readapt” historical knowledge to throw light on the future. In his ardor to re-tailor Carlyle as a type of “Reform Darwinist” who gave priority to cooperation over competition, Tyndall underesti- mates the historical incisiveness of the prophet’s pessimism.11 In the wake of the Crimean debacle and the Indian Mutiny, no alert Victorian reader could ignore the subtle parallels that Carlyle painstakingly developed in Frederick the Great between the corrupt cesspool of eighteenth-century diplomacy and its nineteenth-century equivalent, where democracy masqueraded as oligarchy, imperialism as Christian altruism, and capitalism as freedom. Even in a diatribe as harsh as Shooting Niagara, Carlyle can envisage the future with disturbing precision. In the essay he frankly admits that “[i]f amid the thickest welter of surrounding gluttony and baseness, and what must be reckoned bottomless anarchy from shore to shore, there can be found no man, no small but invincible minority of men, capable of keeping themselves free from all that, and of living a heroically human life, while the millions round them are noisily living a mere beaverish or doglike one, then truly all hope is gone.” Had he lived until the end of the century, he would have grasped that his worst fears were being realized. In his Swiftian premo- nition of a mechanistic world undone by its own mechanical contrivances, and of “actual fighting, bloody wrestling, and a great deal of it” (Works 30: 21,23), Carlyle eerily envisages the mayhem and carnage of Gallipoli, the Somme, and Verdun. Yet Tyndall’s dream of a “symbolic mutation” between Carlyle and Darwin should not be dismissed as a mere historical curi- osity, if only because what he called the penchant for “sweeping the universe clear of mystery” has not lost its dangerous allure, either in science or history. Moreover, his Carlylean defense of Darwinism revitalizes our appreciation of the theory of evolution, both of its poetry and its science, in a period when it is more vulnerable than ever to the often crude onslaughts David R. Sorensen 77 launched against it by Creationists, laissez-faire ideologues, and sociobiologists. Tyndall’s desire to conflate Carlyle and Darwin reflects a profound and persistent need to heal the spiritual wounds inflicted by The Origin of Species. Jonathan Howard has rightly observed that “[m]ore than any other scientific theory, the theory of evolution reaches into hallowed areas of spiritual life. It is no longer easy to look to spiritual authority for a satis- fying account of the ultimate issues of human existence: why are we here? why does the world act so uncaringly? what is the sense of the sublime? The Darwinian revolution has been a cruel one in that it has taken many of the customary sources of consola- tion. To realize that the physical construction of human bodies and brains is the outcome of processes as comprehensible as those which form the ocean waves may give intellectual satisfac- tion but it does not necessarily compensate for the loss of divine providence” (105). Tyndall saw in Carlyle’s writings a fountain of solace, which delivered spiritual sustenance as well as intellectual strength. In “Personal Recollections” he recalls the prophet’s fondness for joining him in his scientific experiments: “To Carlyle life was wholly mystical—incapable of explanation—and the conclusion to which the experiments pointed, that life was derived from antecedent life, and was not generated from dead matter, fell in with his notions of the fitness of things. Instead, therefore, of repelling him, the experiments gave him pleasure” (351). It was this sense of the “fitness of things” that forever iden- tified him in Tyndall’s mind as Darwin’s co-explorer, his fellow sojourner on the paths of the natural and the supernatural.

Saint Joseph’s University

Notes

1. the Tyndall papers are published with the kind permission of the Royal Institution, London. 2. For a balanced history of the controversy, see Colin Barr; see also Wilfred Philip Ward, 1: ch. 11. In his lecture “Christianity and Scientific Investigation” (1855), which was later included in The Idea of a University (1853, 1858), John Henry Newman urged an ecumenical approach to the truth: “I ask religious writers, jurists, economists, physiologists, chemists, 78 Carlyle Studies Annual geologists, and historians, to go on quietly, and in a neighbourly way, in their own respective lines of speculation, research, and experiment, with full faith in the consistency of that multiform truth, which they share between them, in a generous confidence that they will be ultimately consistent, one and all, in their combined results, though there may be momentary collisions, awkward appearances, and many forebodings and prophecies of contrariety” (Idea of a University 420–21). 3. Of Carlyle’s impact on Tyndall, Kenneth J. Fielding wisely observes, “What his often younger, self-educated, self-improving readers admired was exactly the vigorous rhetoric which broke with conservative tradition, and his demand for freedom of though and self-dependence, combined with purpose, and responsibility. The record of their response has fallen out of sight—if it was ever in it. It may be because such readers were peculiarly English, and of the unglossiest kind, that interest in them has now localised to vanishing point. They were of the past not the present. Yet they once constituted not just Carlyle’s audience, but were one to which he seems to have pitched his voice” (45). 4. For example, it is instructive to contrast the arguments of Tyndall with those of W. H. Lecky (1838–1903), Carlyle’s other great Irish friend at this time. In Lecky’s view, Carlyle’s teaching “was essentially Darwinian. He believed deeply in the survival of the fittest.” But Lecky also pointed out, “It was not true, Carlyle often protested, that he taught that might is right— though it must be owned that in some of his later works this accusation might be brought against him with much plausibility” (xiv; see below, 237). 5. James G. Paradis points out that Huxley’s hero-worship of Darwin was shaped by the his opposition to Carlyle. In his biographical essay on Darwin, which appeared in Nature (1882), Huxley “found the humility and simplicity of this reserved, self-secluding investigator almost mysterious. In contrast to the Carlylean hero, Darwin was sedentary, a thinker, not an actor” (69). 6. in his response to the letter Huxley seemed relieved that Tyndall had eschewed Carlylean notions of might and right in his defense of Eyre. Huxley admitted that he greatly admired “the tone” of the letter “without being able to recognise in it any important fact or argument which had not passed through my mind before I joined the Jamaica committee” (9 November 1866; Life and Letters 1: 304). 7. darwin’s own appraisal of Buckle’s book was mixed. He informed J. D. Hooker, 23 February [1858], “I am reading his Book, which with much sophistry as it seems to me, is wonderfully clever & original & with astounding knowledge” (Correspondence 7: 31). 8. Kingsley, another Carlylean disciple, had voiced a similar argument in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in David R. Sorensen 79

1860: “Even if . . . the history of mankind depended merely on physical laws, analogous to those which govern the rest of nature, it would be a hopeless task for us to discover an inevitable sequence in History, even though we might suppose that such existed” (21–22). 9. tyndall oddly anticipates Huxley in this belief. Frank M. Turner astutely shows how “the confusion and richness of Carlyle’s thought . . . contained the seeds for the most important nineteenth-century refutation of might-makes-right social thinking”—Huxley’s Romanes lecture of 1893— in which the latter “attacks the same specious use of scientific theory to justify competition that Carlyle had castigated in Past and Present” (149–50). Turner’s assessment also offers provides an effective antidote to the equally specious attempts by Peart and Levy to diminish Carlyle and Ruskin’s attacks against “the dismal science” by tying them to racism, eugenics, and imperialism; see Peart and Levy 34–43. 10. A. N. Wilson shrewdly points out that Darwin was more Carlylean in his racial attitudes than he liked to assume. Citing his discussion of the disappearance of the Tasmanians at the hands of the English colonists in The Descent of Man, Wilson observes: “[Darwin] accepts Malthus’s view that barbarous races reproduced at a lower rate than civilized ones and he appears . . . to believe that acts of genocide, if perpetrated by the British, were somehow part of the Natural Process. . . . This is the element which the twenty-first-century reader would find most shocking in Darwin. Most Victorian readers would be untroubled by the notion that European nations were superior to those in other parts of the world” (375–76). 11. For “Reform Darwinism,” see Hawkins 151–83.

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