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

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“Symbolic Mutation”: Thomas Carlyle and the Legacy of Charles Darwin in England “Symbolic Mutation”: Thomas Carlyle and the Legacy of Charles Darwin in England 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 myste- rious 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,
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