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Darwinism as Religion
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Darwinism as Religion
What Literature Tells Us About Evolution

MICHAEL RUSE

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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Ruse, Michael.
Title: Darwinism as religion : what literature tells us about evolution /​Michael Ruse.
Description: [Oxford]; New York : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015048181 | ISBN 9780190241025 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature-​19th century-​History and criticism. |
Literature and science-​Great Britain-​History. | Religion and
literature-​Great Britain-​History. | Evolution (Biology) in literature. |
Nature in literature. | Religion in literature. | Religion and science. |
Darwin, Charles, 1809–​1882-​Influence.
Classification: LCC PR878.E95 R87 2016 | DDC 820.9/​356-​dc23 LC record available at
http://​lccn.loc.gov/​2015048181

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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
  v

For my children:
Nigel
Rebecca
Emily
Oliver
Edward

“Happy is the man who hath his quiver full of them.”

“In all civilised countries man accumulates property and bequeaths

it to his children.”
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CONTENTS

Prefaceâ•… ix
Prologueâ•… xv

1. The Eighteenth Centuryâ•… 1

2. Before Darwinâ•… 18

3. The Darwinian Theoryâ•… 43

4. Receptionâ•… 59

5. Godâ•… 82

6. Originsâ•… 102

7. Humansâ•… 114

8. Race and Classâ•… 128

9. Moralityâ•… 148

10. Sexâ•… 167

11. Sin and Redemptionâ•… 192

12. The Futureâ•… 208

13. Darwinism as Backgroundâ•… 222

14. Darwinian Theory Comes of Ageâ•… 237

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viii C o n t e n t s

15. The Divide Continues  252

16. Conflicting Visions  266

Epilogue  281
Bibliography  285
Index  299
  ix

P R E FA C E

In 1873, some fourteen years after Charles Darwin had published his Origin of
Species and two years after the Descent of Man appeared, a perceptive if unsym-
pathetic critic wrote of Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s self-​styled “bulldog”:

He has the moral earnestness, the volitional energy, the absolute con-
viction in his own opinions, the desire and determination to impress
them upon all mankind, which are the essential characteristics of the
Puritan character. His whole temper and spirit is essentially dogmatic
of the Presbyterian or Independent type, and he might fairly be de-
scribed as a Roundhead who had lost his faith. He himself shows the
truest instinct of this in calling his republished essays ‘Lay Sermons.'
They abound, in fact, with the hortatory passages, the solemn personal
experiences, the heart-​searchings and personal appeals that are found
in Puritan literature. (Baynes 1873, 502)

That insight is one end of the Thread of Ariadne that leads to the center of this
book. I argue that evolutionary thinking generally over the past 300 years of its
existence, and Darwinian thinking in particular since the publication of the two
great works mentioned above, has taken on the form and role of a religion. One
in opposition to the world system, Christianity, from which in major respects it
emerged. “Religion” is a somewhat elastic term, and I do not claim that evolu-
tionists are committed to a god-​hypothesis, or to a formal hierarchical system—​
although amusingly and perhaps revealingly in the popular press Darwin’s
supporter was known as “Pope” Huxley. But I shall argue that in the way that
evolution tries to speak to the nature of humans and their place in the scheme
of things, we have a religion, or if you want to speak a little more cautiously a
“secular religious perspective.”

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x P r eface

I am very much NOT saying that this is all there is to be said about evolution-
ary thinking. An important part of my story is that today there is a professional
science of Darwin-​indebted evolutionary studies that is in no sense a religion.
I am saying that there was and is another side to the story, about what I shall call
“evolutionism” or “Darwinism,” and here religious talk is appropriate. I shall also
argue that Charles Darwin is the key figure in my story and thus, in this respect,
there was absolutely, totally, and completely a “Darwinian Revolution.” He was
building on things that had gone before, but he changed our world—​for those
who agreed with him fully, for those who agreed with him but partially, and for
those who rejected his thinking in various ways.
Nigh a decade into the twentieth century, the novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward
(the former Mary Augusta Arnold), looking back forty years to her early years
in Oxford, wrote:

In addition to Christ Church, Balliol, and Lincoln, with the literary

and philosophical culture for which they stood, there was, of course,
Science, camped around the University Museum, in the background. 
As far as my own personal recollection goes, the men of science en-
tered but little into the struggle of ideas that was going on.  The main
Darwinian battle had been won long before 1870; science was quietly
verifying and exploring along the new lines; it was in literature, history,
and theology that evolutionary conceptions were most visibly and dra-
matically at work. (Ward 1909, xxii)

Mrs. Ward’s recollection frames the approach of this book. For forty years, piece
by piece, I have been pasting together my collage. Starting with straight history
of science, in The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (1979) I
gave an overview of Darwin’s thinking, its sources, and its consequences. I fol-
lowed this with Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology
(1996) and Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? (1999),
looking at the story as a history of ideas, focusing on the ways in which values
can get into (or out of) scientific thinking. Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the
Evolution Controversies (1982) and Darwinism and Its Discontents (2006) looked
more at the science itself. In Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach
to Philosophy (1986) and Philosophy After Darwin (2009) I took up the philo-
sophical issues. And in Darwin and Design: Does Nature Have a Purpose? (2003)
and The Evolution-​Creation Struggle (2005) and other works I looked at religious
factors and their histories. Now I want to do this one more time, from (what is
for me) a totally new perspective: evolution including Darwin as seen through
the lens of literature, fiction and poetry. Note that I am not using evolutionary
thinking to analyze literature but seeing the influence of evolutionary thinking
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Preface xi

on literature and from this drawing conclusions. I say simply that in equal mea-
sures I have confirmed much that was believed and discovered much that was
new. I say humbly that I am absolutely staggered at the amount of material I
have found pertinent to my inquiry and hugely impressed at the sophistication
and sensitivity of the massive corpus of secondary material. Again and again, to
modify a famous metaphor of Newton, I found myself holding but a small mug
while standing at the shore of a great ocean, into which I dipped and came up
always with a catch teeming with unknown, brilliant life.
I tell the story chronologically from the beginnings in the early eighteenth
century to the ongoing present in the twenty-​first century. With regret, apart
from a couple of early exceptions, I write only of material in the English language.
There is much to say about work in other languages, but not here. Again with one
or two obvious exceptions, I have avoided science fiction. I wanted to stay with
culture at a more general level, rather than getting into a specialized field where
perhaps there might be a bias toward the sorts of things I want to discuss. Also,
apart from a couple of brief references, I decided that the theatre and cinema
were beyond my scope. Even so, worried that I might end with little more than
a catalogue, I have had to be severely selective. I have tried to be balanced and
fair, but I have had to leave out more than I could include, and so I apologize
now and leave things at that. I will say that I am incredibly lucky. I am well into
the decade past my allotted biblical span of years. I have never, ever, had such
an exciting project and if I can infect you with some of my enthusiasm that will
be justification enough and more. If you do not sense that this has been a labor
of great love, paying respect and thanks to writings that have filled my life with
joy and inspiration since I was a small child, then I have failed both the topic
and you, the reader. I had long hesitated to take on such a task as this precisely
because literature was my world away from my professional interests and I did
not want to mix the two. Now I have done so and I think at last the time was ripe.
So to the best part of all. First let me thank my editor, Peter Ohlin. He saw,
what is true, that this is not really a work of literary criticism but a history of
ideas that is used, in the tradition of Arthur Lovejoy and Isaiah Berlin, to throw
light on philosophical issues, in this case the nature of evolutionary theorizing.
I am very grateful both for his insight and for his support. As with the choice
of topic, I am incredibly lucky in the people with whom, as one does, I have
shared my thinking as I have worked on this project. I am much aware of the
difficulties in trying to think in an interdisciplinary fashion, but I can only say
that the students of English literature with whom I have interacted and begged
advice have, to an exemplary degree, been thoughtful and helpful and totally
nonthreatened by a presumptuous stranger. Above all, mention must be made
on the American side of the Atlantic to John Glendening, who has shared
with me his deep knowledge of evolution in fiction, and on the British side of
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xii P r eface

the Atlantic to John Robert Holmes, who has shared with me his equally deep
knowledge of evolution in poetry. I regard Holmes’s Darwin’s Bards: British and
American Poetry in the Age of Evolution as one of the landmark works in recent
scholarship. Ian Hesketh in Australia has been both reader and critic, and as im-
portant an enthusiastic supporter of the very idea of my project. My friendship
with Philip Appleman goes back forty years since I was a visiting professor at
Indiana University. I am grateful to Anne DeWitt for the wonderful quote from
Mrs. Ward. The antiquarian bookseller Jeremy Parrott has recently acquired a
set of Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine, All the Year Round, with marginalia
(probably by Dickens himself) identifying the anonymous authors. He has very
generously shared with me information about the authorship of the pieces on
the Origin in 1860 and 1861. Jeff O’Connell tracked down more articles and
books than morally I had any right to ask him to find. It goes without saying that
no one could tackle such a project as mine without the nigh-​transcendentalist
aura of those pioneers Gillian Beer and George Levine. The generous bequest
of William and Lucyle Werkmeister funds both my professorship at Florida
State University and my research expenses. Very great thanks are due to the
Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa that provided a home
while I worked on the background for this study. The warmth and support of
Hendrik Geyer and his staff made the four months I spent there the most pro-
ductive time in my whole academic career.
In Our Mutual Friend, the little schoolmistress, hopelessly in love with the
unresponsive schoolmaster, learns the name of her hated rival.

“I wonder,” said Miss Peecher, as she sat making up her weekly report
on a half-​holiday afternoon, “what they call Hexam's sister?”
Mary Anne, at her needlework, attendant and attentive, held her
arm up.
“Well, Mary Anne?”
“She is named Lizzie, ma'am.”
“She can hardly be named Lizzie, I think, Mary Anne,” returned Miss
Peecher, in a tunefully instructive voice. “Is Lizzie a Christian name,
Mary Anne?”
Mary Anne laid down her work, rose, hooked herself behind, as
being under catechization, and replied:  “No, it is a corruption, Miss
Peecher.”
“Who gave her that name?” Miss Peecher was going on, from the
mere force of habit, when she checked herself; on Mary Anne's evinc-
ing theological impatience to strike in with her godfathers and her god-
mothers, and said: “I mean of what name is it a corruption?”
“Elizabeth, or Eliza, Miss Peecher.”
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Preface xiii

“Right, Mary Anne. Whether there were any Lizzies in the early
Christian Church must be considered very doubtful, very doubtful.”
Miss Peecher was exceedingly sage here. “Speaking correctly, we say,
then, that Hexam's sister is called Lizzie; not that she is named so. Do
we not, Mary Anne?”
“We do, Miss Peecher.” (Dickens [1865] 1948, 339)

Called or named, I too love a Lizzie and through this project, as always, she has
been there to support and to encourage.
Finally, for having let me live into the age of the Internet, let me give thanks
to whatever deity it is that Darwinians worship. Twenty years ago this project
would not have been possible. Now within seconds one can track down an ob-
scure poem or interesting reference and keep working as though one had la-
bored all day, as in the past, in the bowels of a great library. Some change really
is Progress.
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  xv

PROLOGUE

Charles Robert Darwin (1809–​1882), the great English scientist, spent from
1831 through to 1836 going around the globe on board HMS Beagle (Browne
1995). The ship’s mandate was to map the coastline of South America. Although
Darwin was, at least informally, the ship’s naturalist, he was not officially part of
the crew. He was a gentleman, paying his own way. He was independent. Hence,
partly because he was a terrible sailor much afflicted by seasickness and partly
because his real scientific interests back then lay in geologizing, Darwin spent as
much time as possible on dry land, leaving it to his shipmates to get on with their
surveying tasks. Wherever he went, he made sure to include in his baggage his
copy of Paradise Lost by John Milton, for—​as he recorded in his Autobiography,
written many years later—​this was his “chief favourite,” the work for inspiration
and relaxation after the day’s labors (Darwin 1958, 85).
In 1859, Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, where he argued that
organisms are the products of a process of gradual natural change—​evolution—​
fueled mainly by a mechanism that he called “natural selection.” Darwin changed
our world. He changed his own world, the one that thirty years earlier he had en-
countered and seen through the glorious visions of the great Puritan poet.

God said,
‘Be gathered now ye waters under Heaven
Into one place, and let dry land appear.’
Immediately the mountains huge appear
Emergent, and their broad bare backs upheave
Into the clouds; their tops ascend the sky:
So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low
Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep,
Capacious bed of waters
(Milton [1667] 2000, 7.282–​290)

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xvi P r o l o gue

Next, the creation of organisms, numbers without limit, throbbing with life.

And God created the great whales, and each

Soul living, each that crept, which plenteously
The waters generated by their kinds;
And every bird of wing after his kind;
And saw that it was good, and blessed them, saying.
‘Be fruitful, multiply, and in the seas,
And lakes, and running streams, the waters fill;
And let the fowl be multiplied, on the Earth.’
(7.391–​398)

Finally, the climax:

‘Let us make now Man in our image, Man

In our similitude, and let them rule
Over the fish and fowl of sea and air,
Beast of the field, and over all the earth,
And every creeping thing that creeps the ground!’
This said, he formed thee, Adam, thee, O Man,
Dust of the ground, and in thy nostrils breathed
The breath of life; in his own image he
Created thee, in the image of God
Express, and thou becam’st a living Soul.
Male he created thee, but thy consort
Female, for race; then blessed mankind, and said,
‘Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the Earth.’
(7.519–​531)

When Darwin started the Beagle voyage he was a fairly conventional Christian.
Then, Darwin’s religion transmuted into a form of deism, seeing God as un-
moved mover, one who had started the process but then let things unfurl accord-
ing to unbroken law. But Darwin never forgot, and nor should we, that it was the
Miltonian world vision that set the challenge to which he rose so magnificently.
The challenge that the philosopher-​scientist John Herschel called the “mystery
of mysteries”—​a scientific understanding of the world and the life teaming upon
it (Cannon 1961). This is at the center of our story—​the coming of evolution
and its implications for the old Judeo-​Christian story of origins—​and we begin
not that long after Milton lived and wrote, as the old verities started to crumble
and people sought new ways and new ideas.
  1

The Eighteenth Century

The Sicilian philosopher Empedocles (c490–​c430 b.c.) was a proto-​evolutionist,

thinking that the elements come together randomly and sometimes form parts
of animals and plants—​a head here and a leg there—​and that in turn these
sometimes combine to make functioning organisms (Bowler 1984). This think-
ing found little favor with the great Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle.
They did not reject evolution out of prejudice—​certainly not out of religious
prejudice. It was simply that a story that put everything down to blind chance
could not account for the most distinctive aspect of organisms—​what we would
call their “teleological” nature, what Aristotle would speak of in terms of “final
cause.” Organisms, plants, and animals are not just hodge-​podges; they are com-
plex, functioning entities, with parts that seem as if they were designed—​Plato
thought they were designed—​for intended ends. The eye is for seeing; the
hand is for grasping; the pretty, fragrant flower is to attract pollinating insects
(Ruse 2003).
With the coming of Christianity, bringing in its wake what the nineteenth-​
century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle was to call “Hebrew old clothes”—​
starting with the creation story of Genesis—​the Western world was even more
set against evolutionary thinking, something that lasted up to and through the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, covering the main events of the Scientific
Revolution. What then was to change people’s thinking? What was it that was
so powerful that the grip of final-​cause thinking and of Jewish-​creation thinking
could be loosened and people could start contemplating a natural story of ori-
gins? It was not that these two factors simply collapsed and died. It is true that
the Scientific Revolution broke the hold of final-​cause thinking in the physical
world—​Francis Bacon famously referred to them as Vestal Virgins, decorative
but sterile. But in the world of animals and plants, such teleological thinking had
even greater force, especially in Britain. Above all, what made possible specu-
lation about natural origins was the new philosophy of Progress, the idea that
somehow and for some reason or reasons things are and can continue to im-
prove, and that this can come about through human (rather than divine) effort

1
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2 Darwinism as Religion

(Ruse 1996). This was not an idea that was really known to the Greeks. By the
beginning of the eighteenth century, however, what we now call the beginnings
of the Enlightenment, successes and advances in science and technology, com-
bined with political improvements as occurred in Britain when the autocratic
monarch James the Second was overthrown, were starting to engender hope
and confidence that it was possible that there was, and might be, change for the
good. And with the coming of this world vision, it was almost natural—╉at least
it was almost natural for some people—╉to take this thinking from the world of
humans and to apply it to the world of organisms. Often, having found this kind
of moving-╉upward progress in the living world, people were happy in a kind of
circular fashion to apply it to confirmation of Progress in the human world!1
We start our story with Progress, move then to evolution, and end by looking
at the implications for religious thinking.

Progress
The most distinguished historian of the concept of Progress defined the notion
thus: “The idea of human Progress, then, is a theory which involves a synthesis of
the past and a prophecy of the future. It is based on an interpretation of history,
which regards men as slowly advancing—╉pedetemtim progredietes—╉in a definite
and desirable direction, and infers that this progress will continue indefinitely”
(Bury 1920, 5). Taken in this sense, we can distinguish three basic forms or
interpretations.
First, there were the French, living (until the Revolution) under a religion-╉
infused repressive monarchy, the ancien régime. Fermenting and writing against
this were the public intellectuals, the philosophes, the best known of whom was
Voltaire. For them, hopes of Progress were all-╉absorbing and inspiring, some-
thing illustrated by history and made possible by ever-╉increasing advances in
technology, in medicine and education, and in general thinking about society
and culture. Most famous was the Marquis de Condorcet, who wrote (in the
early 1790s) even as he was imprisoned and about to die due to misfortunes
in the Revolution: “No one can doubt that, as preventative medicine improves,
and food and housing becomes healthier, as a way of life is established that de-
velops our physical powers by exercise without ruining them by excess, as the
two most virulent causes of deterioration, misery and excess wealth, are elimi-
nated, the average length of human life will be increased and a better health and
stronger physical constitution will be ensured” (Condorcet [1795] 1956, 199).

╛╛Following convention, I use the capitalized “Progress” for the cultural notion and the uncapital-
1

ized “progress” for the biological notion.

  3

The Eighteenth Cent ur y 3

Particularly interesting to us is Denis Diderot (1713–​1784), general man of

letters and cofounder of the Encyclopédie (1751–​1772), a characteristically re-
vealing attempt to bring all of human knowledge together into one overarching
work. He made explicit the extent to which he saw Progress as something show-
ing itself in human societies today, from the most primitive to the most sophisti-
cated, and his own being very much toward the latter end of the scale rather than
the former. “The Tahitian is at a primary stage in the development of the world,
the European is at its old age. The interval separating us is greater than that be-
tween the new-​born child and the decrepit old man” (Diderot 1943, 152). Note
the analogy with human individual growth.
Second we have a more German-​based notion of Progress. This is an upward
growth that is less physical and more something perceived or apprehended
by the mind—​a perspective central to the philosophy of the greatest of all the
German thinkers, Immanuel Kant, who argued that all understanding is a func-
tion of mind-​imposed categories or restraints on empirical experience. It is to
be found in many others, notably the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and
those following him, the so-​called nature philosophers or Naturphilosophen like
the philosopher Friedrich Schelling and the anatomist Lorenz Oken. Although
writing a little after our time, the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel gives perfect ex-
pression to the idea: “Nature is to be regarded as a system of stages, one arising
necessarily from the other and being a proximate truth of the stage from which
it results; but it is not generated naturally out of the other, but only in the inner
Idea which constitutes the ground of Nature” (Hegel [1817] 1970, 20). Such
Progress (in many respects an outgrowth of the Romantic movement, which
put such emphasis on apprehension) is above all organic, developing like a plant,
and spiritual or soulful in the sense of set off against the material world.
And third we have the British notions of Progress, understandably tending
more to pragmatic, political, and economic themes. This was a country at the
cutting edge of science, leading the way in the development of industry and
of political and economic thinking to match and control the advent of so soci-
etally transforming a phenomenon. Much of the really innovative thinking came
from north of the Border, notably in the philosophical thinking of David Hume
(1711–​1776) and the economic thinking of Adam Smith (1723–​1790). The
former—​trying to do for philosophy what Newton had done for physics—​ar-
ticulated the most profound empiricist worldview ever seen before or since. The
latter, trying to speak to the needs of a society where business interests were now
becoming paramount, expressed an idea that we shall encounter again, arguing
that self-​interest is at the heart of the human psyche and any efforts to control
and manage society must take this first and foremost. “It is not from the benevo-
lence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from
their regard to their own interest” (Smith [1776] 1994, 15).
4

4 Darwinism as Religion

William Godwin
Most famous of all the British writers on Progress is William Godwin (1756–╉
1836) who expressed his ideas first in a work of theory and then in fiction.
His Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and
Happiness was published in 1793, provocatively at the height of the French
Revolution. With reason considered a strong statement in favor of a form of
anarchism—╉Godwin thought society should never interfere with individual
judgment—╉the work offered trenchant attacks on existing institutions from
those affecting the public domain like the law courts to those affecting the pri-
vate domain of family life—╉“marriage, as now understood, is a monopoly, and
the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by posi-
tive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice will be alive
and vigorous. So long as I seek, by despotic and artificial means, to maintain my
possession of a woman, I  am guilty of the most odious selfishness” (Godwin
[1793] 1976, 762).2 At the same time, a positive message to balance the negative
attacks, there was an almost-╉fanatical belief in human perfectibility and conse-
quent progressive improvement of society. Vices and moral weaknesses can be
overcome. This apparently is a function of our receptivity to truth. “Every truth
that is capable of being communicated is capable of being brought home to the
conviction of the mind. Every principle which can be brought home to the con-
viction of the mind will infallibly produce a correspondent effect upon the con-
duct” (145). You may worry that we will simply have a body of perfect human
beings, sitting around in isolation. Fortunately this will not be so. Because we are
all fundamentally the same, a sentiment in favor of ourselves will extend to the
favors of others. “We are partakers of a common nature, and the same causes that
contribute to the benefit of one will contribute to the benefit of another” (183).
Against this background, we have Godwin’s novel—╉written immediately
after the Enquiry and published a mere fifteen months later—╉Things as They Are;
or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. It is an odd work, combining strong social
criticism with thrilling adventure, explicit detective investigations with implicit
psychosexual relationships that have given twentieth-╉century Freudians many
happy hours of analysis. It tells the story of a young servant, Caleb Williams, and
his master, Ferdinando Falkland, and their often tortured interactions, manifest-
ing love and hate in nigh equal quantities. Falkland is a man who is wise and
generous but given to atypical outbursts of temper. Apparently these outbursts

╛╛This passage actually comes from an appendix, “Of Cooperation, Cohabitation and Marriage”
2

added to the second edition of 1786. Godwin was worse than Henry James when it came to messing
with his texts.
  5

The Eighteenth Cent ur y 5

date back to a conflict with a tyrannical neighbor, Barnabas Tyrrel, who (hardly
surprisingly given his appalling nature and behavior) gets himself murdered by
person or persons unknown. Because of his interfering with Tyrrel’s bad behav-
ior, suspicion falls on Falkland. However, not only does he deny this but tenants
of Tyrrel are arrested and then hanged for the murder.3
It is this course of events that has unnerved Falkland, and Williams, who is
given to poking his nose into the business of others, suspects Falkland of the deed.
He confronts his master, forces a confession, but also is bound never to reveal
this fact. Naturally finding himself somewhat uncomfortable with his situation,
Williams flees but then is induced to return to face the (false) accusation that
he has stolen from his master. Offered the chance of a fair trial before Falkland’s
brother-​in-​law, it turns out that this is but a weak promise, and Williams ends up
convicted and thrown in jail, where fortunately one of Falkland’s servants takes
pity on him and gives him tools to make his escape.
Now Williams starts a life of hiding, of deception, of discovery, of misery, and
of constant motion, hounded as he is by a fiend called Gines ( Jones in some ver-
sions), who in a much-​imitated-​later mode—​notably the American television
series The Fugitive—​is always on his track trying to call him in and return him to
his punishment. In one instance, Falkland and Williams come face to face, but
the meeting leads to no resolutions other than that now Falkland sends Williams
money to support him! Finally, with his former master cornered, Williams is able
to get Falkland brought to court to face his accuser, and to establish Falkland’s
guilt once and for all. At this point, rather like Great Expectations, we are of-
fered a choice of endings. In an unpublished version, the magistrate ridicules
Williams’s charges and the unfortunate man ends up back in prison, fairly clearly
now unhinged and mentally unstable. In the published version, written because
Godwin was not satisfied with the first version, Williams succeeds in his efforts,
Falkland and he are reconciled, but then not only does Falkland die (he dies in
the unpublished version too) but Williams is consumed with guilt at what he has
done to a man who is essentially good.
As I say, it is an odd work, not the least because of the love-​hate relationship
between Williams and Falkland. But what really counts is that Caleb Williams
is a vehicle for Godwin’s political philosophy and psychology of humankind
(Graham 1990). Again and again, Godwin hammers away at the inequity of the
laws against the poor—​the game laws particularly come in for vicious critique—​
and the oppression of the weak and powerless—​especially given the way that
trials and tribunals (of which there are many in the novel) are always stacked
against them. Tyrrel quarreled with one of his tenants by the name of Hawkins.

3
  The novel of Godwin’s daughter, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, likewise has someone hanged for
a crime she (in this case a woman) did not commit.
6

6 Darwinism as Religion

He therefore barred the man’s usual path to his own home. The son got up in
the night and broke the padlocks. What a mistake! The son was sent to jail and
the father was broken. “He had trusted to persevering industry and skill, to
save the wreck of his little property from the vulgar spite of his landlord. But he
had now no longer any spirit to exert those efforts which his situation more than
ever required” (Godwin [1794] 1982, 75). It was this that sparked the quarrel
with Falkland and led to Tyrrel’s death. Not that this ended with much consola-
tion for Hawkins and his son, for it was they who were falsely accused of the
murder and ended their lives in the hangman’s noose.
In the world described by Godwin, given the oppressive nature of society’s
laws and their mode of enforcement, there was not much more joy for women.
Adding to Tyrrel’s inequities, we have the story of poor Emily, his niece. This
is not a novel that Charles Darwin would have liked—​he demanded a pretty
woman and a happy ending—​for first the poor girl is threatened with rape by
the man whom her supposed protector had arbitrarily chosen for her husband
and then she is imprisoned for nonpayment of her room and board over the past
years. Expectedly, she falls sick. “Her fever became more violent; her delirium
was stronger; and the tortures of her imagination were proportioned to the un-
favourableness of the state in which the removal had been effected. It was highly
improbable that she could recover” (85). She doesn’t.
This unfairness of the judicial system—​something that apparently spawned
countless imitators—​is the ongoing theme of the novel. Not one of the many
trials throughout the novel turns out as it should. But intertwined through all
is the more positive theme about human nature, namely, that doing ill is not a
function of some innate human depravity but of the oppressive nature of cir-
cumstances. As Williams said, speaking of himself and trying to understand why
he shows such a lack of generosity to his master: “I was born free: I was born
healthy, vigorous, and active, complete in all the lineaments and members of a
human body. I was not born indeed to the possession of hereditary wealth; but
I had a better inheritance, an enterprising mind, an inquisitive spirit, a liberal am-
bition” (135). What is striking—​and perhaps more explicable by the demands
of the philosophy than by unspoken sexual desires—​is the extent to which
Williams constantly emphasizes the overall worth of his oppressor, Falkland.
Even at the end—​and remember our subject is a man who has not only commit-
ted one murder but who has let two innocent people hang in his stead—​we find
Williams saying: “Mr. Falkland is of a noble nature. Yes; in spite of the catastro-
phe of Tyrrel, of the miserable end of the Hawkinses, and of all that I have myself
suffered, I affirm that he has qualities of the most admirable kind” (323).
The point being made is that had it not been for the unjust laws that allowed
Tyrrel to oppress Emily and the Hawkinses and thus led to the murder of Tyrrel
by Falkland, a sin compounded by relief at the Hawkinses getting the blame
╇ 7

The Eighteenth Cent ur y 7

and subsequently being punished for the murder, Falkland would not have then
opened himself to Williams’s inquisitiveness and all that followed afterward,
namely, the master’s hounding of a former servant for whom he clearly felt deep
affection. But there is more than this. A  key element of Godwin’s thinking is
that the truth sets us free, or rather the truth leads to good moral behavior. All
agree that dramatically the second ending to the novel is better than the first, but
the real reason for the revision is the urge to express Godwin’s philosophy and
psychology. Had Williams only been willing to rely on the truth and its effect
on Falkland’s nature, rather than recourse to the evil of the law, all would have
been well. “I am sure that if I had opened my heart to Mr. Falkland, if I had told
to him privately the tale that I have now been telling, he could not have resisted
my reasonable demand” (323). And if this had happened, Falkland would not
have collapsed and died of shame, and Williams would not have ended the novel
wracked by guilt.
Enough! The point to be made is that Progress as a philosophy is firmly on
the scene. A  novel can present ideas in a way more dramatic, engaging, and
hence threatening than countless nonfictional volumes of political philosophy.
Revealingly, the Prime Minister of the day thought, because no one was going
to read the work anyway, there was little point in prosecuting Godwin for his
subversive ideas as expressed in his Enquiry. It is not the first, nor will it be the
last, time that a British leader has made a mistake. Thanks to Caleb Williams—╉a
great commercial success from the moment of its appearance, praised and hated
in equal measures—╉Progress was now part of the general discourse.

Evolution
In retrospect, it is hard to keep count of the factors in the eighteenth century that
point to the coming of evolution. For a start, people were starting to push back
the age of the Earth (Rudwick 2005). Even conservatives happily took refuge in
such biblical notions as 1,000 years being but a day in the eyes of the Lord. The
French naturalist Georges Buffon thought that the Earth was about 70,000 years
old—╉not much by modern standards, 4.5 billion years, but a lot more than
6,000  years, the figure calculated in the seventeenth century by Archbishop
Ussher and embraced by today’s American Creationists. With the extension of
Earth’s age came speculations about how the Earth was formed. One group, the
Neptunists, put it all down to water and sediments settling out and forming the
strata that so characterize the Earth’s surface. Naturally, this more and more pro-
moted study of the fossils as evidence of events of the past. Another group, the
Vulcanists, put all down to fire and its effects. Most interesting is the Scottish
geologist James Hutton (1788). Clearly influenced by the Newcomen engine,
8

8 Darwinism as Religion

which fueled by fire went round and round as it drove the pumps that emptied
the mines of water, Hutton saw the Earth as a kind of machine, forever going
round and round bringing rocks to the surface and in turn being sucked down
again (Ruse 2013). Famously he extended life’s history to virtual eternity—​“no
vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”
Another factor pointing toward evolution came from the physical sciences.
Newton’s universe just keeps circling around without essential change. But,
before long, people started speculating on possible beginnings. In the eigh-
teenth century a number of figures—​Immanuel Kant, Pierre Laplace, William
Herschel—​began to speculate about the gas clouds that one sees about the uni-
verse (Bush 1996). Could these “nebulae” be the parents of solar systems, as the
matter collapses into itself thanks to gravity? Is it possible that at the center we
get solid masses, generating heat from the condensation, and then around them
smaller bodies forever circulating? More than one person found this a suggestive
analogy, pointing to the possibility of a natural origin of organisms. Related to
these physical speculations were what we today would call biological specula-
tions. A long-​held belief was that different organisms form no random pattern.
In his wisdom, God has created life so that it can be put in a continuous chain
from the most humble forms to the most sophisticated. In the natural world this
upper point is filled by humankind, although most supporters of the “chain of
being” extended it to include higher forms of being, the orders of angels right up
to the top. The poet Alexander Pope (in 1734) captured this idea in verse.

Vast chain of being, which from God began,

Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no eye can see,
No glass can reach! from infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing!—​On superior pow’rs
Were we to press, inferior might on ours:
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d:
From nature’s chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.
An Essay on Man, Epistle I, section VIII

Note that this was a static world picture, but as the century went on there were
certainly hints by some of the enthusiasts that it could be made to move, in an
escalator-​type fashion.
The work of the great classifier Carl Linnaeus was clearly going to be crucial
in some sense to the coming of evolution (Frangsmyr 1983). He set about put-
ting all organisms into one coherent, connected system—​a hierarchy of nested
╇ 9

The Eighteenth Cent ur y 9

sets. Thus, for instance, dogs and wolves are separate species, but individuals
are clearly more similar to each other than they are to cats and lions. Following
this insight, Linnaeus put the members of the dog and wolf species into a higher
grouping, the genus, that included all of them and excluded others, like mem-
bers of the cat and lion species. None of this in itself implies evolution, as such,
although there is some evidence that toward the end Linnaeus was thinking that
some species might form naturally. But the greater the success of the system,
the more it called for an explanation and the more evolution seemed a plausible
candidate. More immediately, what was important and to some shocking was
the way in which Linnaeus grouped humans together with higher apes. He was
not alone in being fascinated by the similarities between us and the apes. For in-
stance, the Scottish judge James Burnet, Lord Mondboddo, was much interested
in the origins of language, and this led him to think that possibly the higher apes
were primitive forms of humanity. No more than Linnaeus was Mondboddo a
full-╉blown evolutionist, however. He denied that there are links between humans
and apes and other lower forms of humanity (Burnett 1773–╉1792).
Expectedly, Buffon was also making a contribution to the debate about ori-
gins (Roger 1997). He speculated at times that some groups of species had
common ancestors, from which—╉thanks to the effects of the environment—╉
today’s forms “degenerated.” The ancestral cat form gave rise to tigers and lions
and domestic cats, and so forth. He did not publicly take this thinking back to its
logical conclusions and roots, although privately he may have thought this way.
Not that he was ever really committed to the idea—╉sometimes he pictured life’s
history as a tree and at other times used different metaphors, like maps or nets.
Complicating any final assessment, Buffon ran into trouble with the religious au-
thorities and smartly stepped back into line, although whether from conviction
or expediency is still debated.

The Evolutionists
Against this background, what of genuine transmutationists or evolutionists?
Denis Diderot staked an early claim. And it was clear that it was Progress that
was fueling his thinking. As in the human societal case, also drawing analogy
with the growth of the individual, he wrote:

Just as in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, an individual begins, so to

speak, grows, subsists, decays and passes away, could it not be the same
with the whole species? … would not the philosopher, left free to spec-
ulate, suspect that animality had from all eternity its particular elements
scattered in and mingled with the mass of matter; that it has happened
10

10 Darwinism as Religion

to these elements to reunite, because it was possible for this to be done;

that the embryo formed from these elements had passed through an
infinity of different organizations and developments … that it has per-
haps still other developments to undergo, and other increases to taken
on, which are unknown to us; that it has had or will have a stationary
condition; … that it will disappear for ever from nature, or rather it will
continue to exist in it, but in a form, and with faculties, quite different
from those observed in it at this moment of time. (Diderot 1943, 48)

Most thorough was the grandfather of Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin

(1731–​1802). A prominent figure in the British Midlands—​physician, inventor,
educational theorist, friend of many (including Ben Franklin), member of the
Lunar Society (a Birmingham-​based club of industrialists and scientists includ-
ing Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and Joseph Priestly)—​
Darwin was also a poet, much given to discussing scientific ideas in verse.
Linnaeus had based a lot of plant classification on their sexual organs, opening
an opportunity for Darwin (who had three children with his first wife, two with
a mistress in the interregnum, and then seven with a second wife, and probably
more to boot) to hymn the botanic world in somewhat racy terms.

—​Fair CHUNDA smiles amid the burning waste,

Her brow unturban’d, and her zone unbrac’d;
Ten brother-​youths with light umbrella’s shade,
Or fan with busy hands the panting maid;
Loose wave her locks, disclosing, as they break,
The rising bosom and averted cheek;
Clasp’d round her ivory neck with studs of gold
Flows her thin vest in many a gauzy fold;
O’er her light limbs the dim transparence plays,
And the fair form, it seems to hide, betrays.
(Darwin 1789, 331–​340)

Published around the same time as Godwin’s works, in Zoonomia, a medical

work that at once attracted attention and respect—​it was soon translated into
German and read by the elderly Immanuel Kant—​Erasmus Darwin wrote un-
ambiguously in favor of evolution.

From thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of the warm-​
blooded animals, and at the same time of the great changes they undergo
both before and after their nativity; and by considering in how minute
a portion of time many of the changes of animals above described have
  11

The Eighteenth Cent ur y 11

been produced; would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length
of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before
the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold
to imagine, that all warm-​blooded animals have arisen from one living
filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality,
with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities,
directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus
possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent ac-
tivity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its
posterity, world without end! (Darwin 1794–​1796, 2, 240)

Then a little later (actually published posthumously) he turned to verse.

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.
Thus the tall Oak, the giant of the wood,
Which bears Britannia’s thunders on the flood;
The Whale, unmeasured monster of the main,
The lordly Lion, monarch of the plain,
The Eagle soaring in the realms of air,
Whose eye undazzled drinks the solar glare,
Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthy sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!
(Darwin 1803, Canto I, lines 295–​314)

Notions of biological progress, from the blob to the human, are the very back-
bone (to use an apt metaphor) of this vision, and Darwin explicitly tied his biol-
ogy into his philosophy. The idea of organic progressive evolution “is analogous
to the improving excellence observable in every part of the creation; such as the
progressive increase of the wisdom and happiness of its inhabitants” (Darwin
12

12 Darwinism as Religion

1794–╉1796, 2, 247–╉248). Indeed, it wasn’t just Progress in general that he en-

dorsed but a form with very significant similarities (and probably debts) to that
of Godwin. In particular, as in science, it is all very much a matter of starting with
the individual and finding the truth, about others and about the world.

Immortal Guide! O, now with accents kind

Give to my ear the progress of the Mind.
How loves, and tastes, and sympathies commence
From evanescent notices of sense?
How from the yielding touch and rolling eyes
The piles immense of human science rise?—╉
With mind gigantic steps the puny Elf,
And weighs and measures all things but himself!”
(Darwin 1803, Canto III, lines 41–╉48)

Then with knowledge accumulating, a form of sympathy for others takes over
and makes for harmonious society. For Darwin, as for Godwin, Progress is all
very much a matter of something stemming from the individual rather than
something imposed.

The Anti-╉Jacobin Attack
It was during the first part of the last decade of the eighteenth century that the
French Revolution started to go badly wrong. The early receptions of Zoonomia
basically passed over the evolutionary speculations without comment. But it was
not long before conservative critics started to panic at the subversive thoughts
of Progress. No good could come of them. One of the most effective weapons
forged by the opponents of Progress, who included notably George Canning—╉
then Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and, some years later, the Prime
Minister—╉was the satirical weekly The Anti-╉Jacobin. Some of its best squibs were
devastating parodies of Darwin’s poetry—╉parodies that not only named Darwin
explicitly but for good measure included Godwin’s name too. No one had any
doubt that this was a package deal. In the “Progress of Man,” human bloodlust
is made our defining character and woe to any unfortunate mammal that gets in
our way.

Ah, hapless porker! what can now avail,

Thy back’s stiff bristles, or thy curly tail?
Ah! what avail those eyes so small and round,
Long pendant ears, and snout that loves the ground?
╇ 13

The Eighteenth Cent ur y 13

Not unreveng’d thou diest!—╉in after times

From thy spilt blood shall spring unnumber’d crimes.
Soon shall the slaught’rous arms that wrought thy woe,
Improved by malice, deal a deadlier blow;
When social man shall pant for nobler game,
And ‘gainst his fellow man the vengeful weapon aim.
(Canning, Frere, and Ellis [1798] 1854, 90–╉91)

Note not just that evolution came into this world as a function of—╉an epi-
phenomenon on—╉thoughts of human Progress, and how its reception therefore
was going to be very much a matter of how people regarded Progress as an idea,
but what this meant for the status—╉certainly the perceived status—╉of the idea
of evolution itself. If you want to support or counter a regular scientific claim—╉
for instance, about the nature of the double helix—╉then you turn to the empiri-
cal evidence, for and against. There was no question of doing that here. At least in
part this was because there really wasn’t that much empirical evidence. But also
in part—╉a bigger part—╉because people saw that value commitments were what
was really at stake. In this sense, then, what we have is less something strictly
scientific—╉certainly not something scientific like the real sciences of the day,
physics and chemistry—╉but more something that fell into a category already
recognized (the French king had set up a commission that found just this of
mesmerism) and that was soon to be labeled a “pseudoscience.” One means here
something of a pretender—╉something backed by and promoting values rather
than empirical evidence. It is also something that tends to set up tensions in the
conventional and staid, a bit of a threat to the status quo. In this respect, then, it
is something that bears some similarities to a religion, a suspicion strengthened
if one finds that it sets out to challenge existing, conventional religions. It is to
this issue that we turn now.

Religion and Its Critics

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, both in Catholic countries like
France and in Protestant countries like England, religion was very much part
of the state—╉endorsed by authorities and in turn offering support and ground-
ing for such authorities (Evans 2001; Hilton 2006). Expectedly, therefore, those
wanting change had religion and its institutions in their sights. Famously, he who
has been described as God’s greatest gift to the infidel, David Hume, tore into
the foundations of Christianity with a vigor that has yet to be equaled, even by
those dubbed the “New Atheists.” He denied the plausibility of miracles and he
was scathing about some of the traditional arguments for God’s existence. The
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14 Darwinism as Religion

argument from design was subjected to detailed and withering critical discus-
sion. Across the Channel, Voltaire was playing his part, in his farce Candide rip-
ping to shreds those who would argue (as did the philosopher Leibniz) that evil
can be explained away in the cause of the greater good in the ultimate effects.
Meeting his old teacher, the philosopher Dr. Pangloss, Candide is appalled to
see his dreadful state. He had become “a beggar all covered with scabs, his eyes
diseased, the end of his nose eaten away, his mouth distorted, his teeth black,
choking in his throat, tormented with a violent cough, and spitting out a tooth at
each effort.” How could this have happened?

“My dear Candide,” replied Pangloss, “you remember Paquette, that

pretty girl who used to wait on our noble lady. In her arms I  tasted
the delights of Paradise, and they produced these hellish torments by
which you now see me devoured. She was infected, and now perhaps
she is dead. Paquette was given this present by a learned Franciscan,
who had traced it back to its source. He had had it from an old count-
ess, who had had it from a cavalry officer, who was indebted for it to a
marchioness. She took it from her page, and he had received it from a
Jesuit who, while still a novice, had had it in direct line from one of the
companions of Christopher Columbus. As for me, I shall not give it to
anyone, for I am a dying man.”
“What a strange genealogy, Pangloss!” exclaimed Candide. “Isn’t
the devil at the root of it?”
“Certainly not,” replied the great man. “It is indispensible in this best
of worlds. It is a necessary ingredient. For if Columbus, when visiting
the West Indies, had not caught this disease, which poisons the source
of generation, which frequently even hinders generation, and is clearly
opposed to the great end of Nature, we should have neither chocolate
nor cochineal.” (Voltaire [1759] 1947, 29–​30)

Little wonder that so few take philosophy seriously.

Or religion for that matter. Although there were atheists, Voltaire was no athe-
ist and neither was David Hume (Ruse 2015a). Nor for that matter was Erasmus
Darwin. They tended as did many at that time to a form of deism, seeing God
as the unmoved mover who has set the world in motion and who now stands
back and lets the laws of nature do all, giving Jesus (at most) the status of a great
teacher and moral ideal. But what truly drove the critics was reform of society,
and that meant breaking the hold of the Church. Someone like Godwin—​who
incidentally started life as a nonconformist minister (and hence outside the cor-
ridors of power)—​obviously wanted to destroy the status of the established
Anglican Church. The same was true of those under the Catholic suzerainty.
  15

The Eighteenth Cent ur y 15

Diderot more than anyone illustrates the links we are trying to draw—​endors-
ing social and cultural Progress, linking this with evolution, and at the same time
attacking the rival world picture of Christianity. His novel The Nun started out
as a joke on a friend but turned into one of the most anti-​Catholic diatribes of
all time. Supposedly it is the story of a young girl who is forced into joining a
religious order and of what happens to her when she does. Predictably it is not
long before she is beaten up, stripped naked, and put in solitary in a cell. When
she expresses a desire to leave, she is treated as one dead. “I was made to lie
in a coffin in the centre of the choir, candles were placed on either side with a
holy-​water stoup, I was covered with a shroud and the prayers for the dead were
recited, after which each nun, as she went out, sprinkled me with holy water
and said Requiescat in pace” (Diderot [1796] 1972, 81). She is made to pick up
red-​hot tongs and to walk on broken glass. She is made to eat bread and water
while sitting on the floor and wearing a hair shirt. She is made to scourge herself
while naked before the Mother Superior; although this has consequences that
one might not have foreseen—​or perhaps one would! The abbess is so moved
that she kisses the sore spots better, and this is but a preliminary.

By now she had raised her collar and put one of my hands on her
bosom. She fell silent, and so did I.  She seemed to be experiencing the
most exquisite pleasure. She invited me to kiss her forehead, cheeks,
eyes and mouth, and I  obeyed. I  don’t think there was any harm in
that, but her pleasure increased, and as I was only too glad to add to her
happiness in any innocent way, I kissed her again on forehead, cheeks,
eyes and lips. The hand she had rested on my knee wandered all over
my clothing from my feet to my girdle, pressing here and there, and she
gasped as she urged me in a strange, low voice to redouble my caresses,
which I did. Eventually a moment came, whether of pleasure or of pain
I cannot say, when she went as pale as death, closed her eyes, and her
whole body tautened violently, her lips were first pressed together and
moistened with a sort of foam, then they parted and she seemed to
expire with a deep sigh. (Diderot [1796] 1972, 137–​138)

And so it goes. You cannot trust anyone, not even a nice young Benedictine, her
confessor. It is almost a relief to end up working in a brothel.
I won’t say that this is all good, clean fun because it isn’t. But it is certainly
a bit of a tongue-​in-​cheek romp, very much in the style of the then-popular
gothic novels, not to mention a series of like tales of the appalling practices of
the Catholic priesthood. Although written more for entertainment than instruc-
tion, published in the same year as The Nun (1796), The Monk: A Romance by
the English writer Matthew Gregory Lewis ([1796] 2008) is typical—​sex, rape,
16

16 Darwinism as Religion

imprisonment, murder, and a bit of incest thrown in as a spice. Whatever the

intent, however, the effect is the same, to pour scorn and ridicule on a system
that is as corrupt as it is powerful—╉a system that needs to be abolished and re-
placed by a more enlightened regime governed by principles of reason and with
aspirations of Progress.

What of the Church?

In England, the two universities Oxford and Cambridge were Church establish-
ments. You had to be a professing Anglican to attend, and you had to be ordained
if you were to teach at one of them. William Paley (1743–╉1805), Archdeacon of
Carlisle, was the writer of texts for the undergraduates who, along with a bit of
mathematics and classics, were all fed a diet of theology—╉the solid, empiricist
theology of the Anglican middle way.

There is a book, who runs may read,

which heavenly truth imparts,
and all the lore its scholars need,
pure eyes and Christian hearts.
The works of God above, below,
within us and around,
are pages in that book, to shew
how God himself is found.4

In this mode, writing thirty years after Hume, Paley blithely ignored all of
the counterarguments. In his Evidences of Christianity ([1794] 1819), he made
the biblical miracles the keystone of faith—╉if people were prepared to die
before denying them, can one not assume that we have here a bit more than a
fabrication, more than a story made up to deceive 2,000 years of followers? In
his Natural Theology ([1802] 1819)—╉which actually even mentions Hume—╉
the argument from design is trotted out and made the centerpiece. The eye
is like a telescope. Telescopes have telescope makers. Therefore the eye must
have an eye maker—╉the Great Optician in the Sky. Theology in short—╉both
revealed and natural—╉begins in nature and points up from there. That was just
the sort of God appreciated by the British—╉making their way through science
and technology, harnessing the forces of nature. Nothing showy but solid and
dependable.

╛╛By John Keble, published in 1827.

4
  17

The Eighteenth Cent ur y 17

It is against this background that we can understand the thinking of Thomas

Robert Malthus (1766–​1834), another parson of the Church of England. He
was worried by what was becoming a national obsession, the rising population
rate brought on by industrialization. (In the country, there was reason to limit
one’s family, at least until one inherited the family farm. In the town, in facto-
ries, children were much needed for agile tasks difficult for adults. Hence there
was reason to start on a large family earlier.) Relatedly, Malthus was appalled by
what he took to be the naïve optimism of Condorcet in France and Godwin in
Britain. Thus he penned his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) in coun-
terresponse. In one of the most famous calculations of all time, he argued that
food supplies can only increase arithmetically whereas population potentially
increases geometrically. Because the latter is much stronger than the former, we
are doomed to inevitable struggles for existence. Hopes of Godwin-​like Progress
are chimerical. “This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of
production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly
keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmount-
able in the way to the perfectibility of society. All other arguments are of slight
and subordinate consideration in comparison of this” (Malthus [1798] 1959,
6). If the premises are just, the argument is conclusive against the improvement
of the nature or lot of the mass of mankind.
One cannot overstress that Malthus was arguing within what he took to be
a Christian, natural-​theological context (Mayhew 2014). He was not Voltaire-​
like, arguing that this is such a horrible world that the problem of evil is beyond
solution within a Christian context. To the contrary, he saw the clash between
population potentials and food actualities as something put in place by a good
god to motivate us, to get us up on our legs and working for a living. If everything
were handed to us on a plate, we would do little or nothing. God in His wisdom
saw this danger and so put in place a remedy before we even started. The conse-
quence, however, is that whole wonderful dream of Godwin-​like Progress fades
before our eyes. Its hopes are not realized and never can be. And with that rather
gloomy—​or if you prefer, realistic—​conclusion, we can leave the eighteenth
century and move into the next.
18

Before Darwin

Evolution arrived on the back of the social doctrine of Progress. It was there-
fore at once plunged into the battle against religion. Progress, with good reason,
was seen as opposed to the societal status quo, and in both Britain and France
a major support of the societal status quo was organized religion. This is not
to downplay theological issues. Crude literalism was no longer really the issue.
In 1823, William Buckland, professor of geology at Oxford, published a work
supporting a supposed world-╉wide flood. Even conservative Christians laughed
at him. Time had moved on. What was troublesome, however (especially for
Protestants), was the opposition between Progress and Providence, where the
latter is taken to be the claim that we sinners can do nothing save through the
Blood of the Lamb (Ruse 2005). Our own efforts count for naught.

When I survey the wondrous cross

On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.1

If evolution is to move forward, it must speak to both the social and the theologi-
cal, in its own support and in critique of the opposition.

Progress Revives
Until 1815 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, lifting the fear of invasion, times
were tense in Britain. Thoughts of Progress and of its corollary evolution were
not much in favor. One can never speak absolutely. In 1808 that strange vision-
ary William Blake, as part of a long work on Milton (probably begun in 1804),

╛╛By the Congregationalist minister Isaac Watts, published in 1707.

1

18
  19

B efore Dar w in 19

published the poem (that we now call) “Jerusalem.” Making reference to Jesus’s
supposed visit to England and to the grim aspects of the Industrial Revolution,
it urges us to action.

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land

This poem, turned into a hymn by being set to the music of Hubert Parry, is
always sung at the closing of the annual conference of the British Labor Party.
To be candid, for all the references to the need of our effort, what with the talk
of the Savior and what He has already done and the fact that Jerusalem is not
the physical city in Palestine but the heavenly city where true believers will live
for eternity with Him—​“And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming
down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband”
(Revelation 21:2)—​one can make a case for saying that the work is as much about
Providence as about (a somewhat Romantic notion of) Progress. Certainly, gen-
erally in British society, the emphasis was on the virtues of stability and the need
to preserve the old and tried and trusted ways of life. But the wars did come to an
end and before long it became clear that the spirit of the eighteenth century may
have been battered and subdued but it was far from extinguished. The young
poet Percy Bysshe Shelley sounded the clarion call loud and clear. The past was
a time of suppression and superstition. The future beckons.

Joy to the Spirit came.

Through the wide rent in Time’s eternal veil,
20

20 Darwinism as Religion

Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear;

Earth was no longer hell;
Love, freedom, health had given
Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime,
And all its pulses beat
Symphonious to the planetary spheres;
Then dulcet music swelled
Concordant with the life-​strings of the soul;
It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there,
Catching new life from transitory death;
Like the vague sighings of a wind at even
That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea
And dies on the creation of its breath,
And sinks and rises, falls and swells by fits,
Was the pure stream of feeling
That sprung from these sweet notes,
And o’er the Spirit’s human sympathies
With mild and gentle motion calmly flowed.

In fact, these particular sentiments—​from Shelley’s poem “Queen Mab”—​were

(in 1813)  published privately and only started to become well-​known when
some ten years later existing copies were bound up and sold and—​this never
hurts sales—​the bookseller was prosecuted for its inflammatory themes.
But we don’t really need radical poets to make our point. Even to the most
conservative members of society, it was increasingly clear that things could not
stand still. In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen depicts social stability (Levine 1998).
Yet, she raises the issue of slavery in the West Indies (White 2006). We are talk-
ing of a time when the independent country of Eire was but a dream, and a third
of the population was Irish. Catholics and others had to be brought somewhat
into the fold, allowed to vote, and allowed to enter parliament. This happened at
the end of the third decade of the century, and then shortly thereafter in 1832
came the First Reform Act, something fueled by pressures from growing urban
areas (like Birmingham and Manchester) that tended to have little or no parlia-
mentary representation, contrasting with rural areas with an overabundance of
representation, often thanks to “rotten boroughs” with just a handful of electors
(who would vote just as their powerful patron dictated). One must keep these
things in perspective. Although redistributed somewhat, the electorate still only
rose from about half a million to just over three-​quarters of a million—​meaning
in a total population of about 14 million about one in five adult males could vote.
Working-​class men were going to have to wait. The same was true of women,
  21

B efore Dar w in 21

who it turned out were going to have to wait until the twentieth century for
their vote.
One humorous (if at times a little strained) contribution to the debate came
from the pen of the satirist Thomas Love Peacock. His novel Melincourt (1817)
draws heavily on the ideas of Lord Mondboddo, having as its central character
an orangutan that is given a baronetcy and put forward as a member of parlia-
ment. For this reason, it is often characterized as an early excursion into the
world of evolution, but this is not really so. Mondboddo was no full-​blooded
evolutionist and neither was Peacock. Rather, Mondboddo thought that the
higher apes are primitive humans and Peacock followed him in this. “Sir Oran
Haut-​ton was caught very young in the woods of Angola … He is a specimen
of the natural and original man—​the wild man of the woods… . Some pre-
sumptuous naturalists have refused his species the honours of humanity; but
the most enlightened and illustrious philosophers agree in considering him in
his true light as the natural and original man” ([1817] 1891, 1, 54). It is true
that we regular humans have progressed beyond this form, but not so far as to
take us to a new species.
Peacock was scathing about institutions in his society, and expectedly the
Church was right in his sights. The Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub (I told you the
humor was a bit strained) lives right up to—​or down to—​his name. Meeting
a pretty girl, “he sate down to calculate the probability of Miss Melincourt’s
fortune on the one hand, and the certainty of church preferment through the
patronage of the Marquis of Algaric, on the other” (1, 86). Fortunately for the
girl, he thinks the second option the safer strategy. But it is the political system
and the buying and selling of seats in the house of commons that really raises
Peacock’s ire.

With a view of ensuring him the respect of society which always attends
on rank and fortune, I have purchased him a baronetcy, and made over
to him an estate. I  have also purchased of the Duke of Rottenburgh
one half of the electoral franchise vested in the body of Mr Christopher
Corporate, the free, fat, and dependent burgess of the ancient and hon-
ourable borough of Onevote who returns two members to parliament,
one of whom will shortly be Sir Oran. (1, 62)

In due course, the baronet is elected, although shortly thereafter things go dread-
fully wrong when the new member mistakes friendliness for aggression and de-
stroys much of the borough he now represents. Fortunately the town was “re-
built a few days afterwards, at the joint expense of its two representatives, and his
grace the Duke of Rottenburgh” who owns the seats (2, 29).
22

22 Darwinism as Religion

Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens

All a good joke, but closer to the truth than many felt comfortable acknowledg-
ing. Yet, moving forward, be not mistaken that the “Reform” Bill meant sweet-
ness and light for all of his majesty’s subjects. The newly constituted parliament
contained a fair representation of the business class whose members had their
own ends. They wanted the working classes to have spurs to accept the lowest
paying of jobs. Thus, one of the first moves was to pass draconian poor laws,
condemning the indigent to workhouses of so miserable a ferocity that, to avoid
them, people would do anything—╉laboring for pitiful returns and getting off
the Malthusian carousel by practicing what he called “prudential restraint.” For
critics, this whole politicoeconomic approach to society was altogether too for-
mulaic and soulless. Even in 1829, in a noted essay “Signs of the Times,” the
up-and-coming Thomas Carlyle (1795–╉1881) was inveighing against the “me-
chanical” nature and philosophy of society. While agreeing that it led to cheap
and plentiful goods, he worried that it was being applied too readily to human
beings without thought of the consequences.

It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people

that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condi-
tion, as regulated by public laws. Thus is the Body-╉politic more than
ever worshipped and tendered; but the Soul-╉politic less than ever. Love
of country, in any high or generous sense, in any other than an almost
animal sense, or mere habit, has little importance attached to it in such
reforms, or in the opposition shown them. Men are to be guided only
by their self-╉interests. Good government is a good balancing of these;
and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-╉interest, requires no virtue
in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the dis-
contented, a “taxing-╉machine”; to the contented, a “machine for secur-
ing property.” (Carlyle [1829] 1864, 191)

Adding: “But though Mechanism, wisely contrived, has done much for man in a
social and moral point of view, we cannot be persuaded that it has ever been the
chief source of his worth or happiness” (191). We lose out on poetry and love
and religion and fear and wonder and enthusiasm, all of which make for fulfilled
and truly happy living.
Then in his rather strange novel, Sartor Resartus ([1834] 1987), about a
German philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (“God-╉born devil-╉dung”), who
had written a tome on the origin and influence of clothes—╉a metaphor for the
practices and customs of society that have to be cast off to see the true nature
  23

B efore Dar w in 23

of things—​Carlyle continued on these themes, showing the great influence of

German idealism or (what came to be known in America as) “transcenden-
talism.”2 Notice in the following passage the organic metaphor—​one speak-
ing of natural growth rather than human mechanical design and suggesting
that in some sense everything is alive. Spirit in some sense infuses the whole
of existence. “Cast forth thy Act, thy Word, into the ever-​living, ever-​working
Universe: it is a seed-​grain that cannot die; unnoticed to-​day (says one), it will be
found flourishing as a Banyan-​grove (perhaps, alas, as a Hemlock-​forest!) after a
thousand years” (31).3 We must break from the purely mechanical and strive for
genuine freedom. “ ‘Satisfy yourselves,’ he says, ‘by universal, indubitable experi-
ment, even as ye are now doing or will do, whether FREEDOM, heaven-​born
and leading heavenward, and so vitally essential for us all, cannot peradventure
be mechanically hatched and brought to light in that same Ballot-​Box of yours;
or at worst, in some other discoverable or devisable Box, Edifice, or Steam-​
mechanism’ ” (Carlyle [1834] 1987, 189). This is not to say that Carlyle and his
many enthusiastic readers (which included Charles Dickens as well as the biolo-
gists Richard Owen and a little later Thomas Henry Huxley) were against change
or Progress—​it was just that it had to be of a more idealistic nature—​one that
spoke to the free soul of human beings.
We all know how Dickens loathed the new poor laws—​has there ever been
a novel so emotionally directed against a social position as was Oliver Twist
(1837), with its devastating picture of the new workhouses and those like Mr.
Bumble who ran them? Later, he promoted Carlyle’s thinking more generally in
Hard Times (1854), so much so that at times it is less a novel and more a tract—​
“Signs of the Times” “might be regarded as an ideological prospectus to the
novel” (Goldberg 1972, 79)—​something you are rather flagged to when (apart
from the echo in the title) you learn that one of the main characters named his
children Adam Smith and Malthus!

So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam

Power. It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the
engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell

2
  As German thinking about Progress entered into the Anglophone world, so also did French
thinking, particularly through the so-​called Positivist movement headed by Auguste Comte, to have
a great influence on many British intellectuals, notably George Henry Lewes, the common-​law hus-
band of George Eliot, the novelist.
3
  Spirit but not necessarily thinking spirit. “The choice of plant metaphors rather than, say, animal
metaphors makes acceptance of the role of the unconscious unavoidable, since plants are distin-
guished by lack of volition” (Tennyson 1965, 163, n.6). We shall later see wrestling with this notion
of spirit and whether at some point it can achieve consciousness.
24

24 Darwinism as Religion

me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or
discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at
any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with the
composed faces and the regulated actions. (Dickens [1854] 1948, 69)

And then: “â•›‘I beg your pardon for interrupting you, sir,’ returned Bitzer; ‘but
I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of self-╉interest.
What you must always appeal to, is a person’s self-╉interest. It’s your only hold.
We are so constituted’â•›” (288).
Not that one should think that Dickens any more than Carlyle was against
change as such. Bleak House (1853) is a powerful attack on the legal system of
his day. The man from Shropshire—╉“My whole estate, left to me in that will of
my father’s, has gone in costs. The suit, still undecided, has fallen into rack, and
ruin, and despair, with everything else—╉and here I stand, this day!” (Dickens
[1853] 1948, 214)—╉is but one of the unfortunates. It is rather that Dickens is
looking for change that will free and promote the human spirit rather than bind
and crush it—╉in Bleak House as much as Oliver Twist and Hard Times.

Wrestling with Industrialism
The late 1830s and 1840s saw the rise of Chartism, an essentially working-╉class
movement, sparked by hatred of the new poor laws, aimed at universal suffrage
(for men). In the end—╉although it pointed to further reforms in the 1860s
and 1870s—╉after violent strikes and savage repressions, it all rather petered
out. Naturally the Church was a target of the would-╉be reformers. In general,
it was unresponsive. Indeed, the 1840s saw the classic hymnal testament to the
status quo.

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.4

But there were those who sympathized with the masses, including the novel-
ist, naturalist, and so-╉called Christian Socialist Charles Kingsley (1819–╉1875).
His second novel, Alton Locke, tells the tale of a poor lad from a repressively
narrow Christian background who becomes a tailor and of what befalls him. He
meets Chartists and is attracted to them and to their philosophy, even getting

╛╛By Cecil F. Alexander, published in 1848.

4
  25

B efore Dar w in 25

himself involved in a strike and getting himself put in prison. There is not much
love of Malthusian ideas—​“I believe them to be an infernal lie” ([1848] 1983,
112)—​and even less of the new poor laws. Yet, Kingsley was and always was to
be a clergyman, a believing Christian, and in respects rather conservative and
committed to the structure of the land. (He was a favorite of the Royal Family.)
In the end, the solution lies not in ourselves but in our Lord. “Claim your share
in national life, only because the nation is a spiritual body, whose king is the Son
of God; whose work, whose national character and powers, are allotted to it by
the Spirit of Christ” (364).
Complementing Kingsley, almost at the end of our period (1855), more in-
teresting and more radical (and a far superior novel) is North and South by Mrs.
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–​1865), the wife of a Unitarian minister in Manchester.
Telling the story of the daughter of a clergyman who loses his faith, Margaret
Hale is moved from the rural south of England to Milton (Manchester), a grim
city in the north. There she meets and clashes with John Thornton, a self-​made
mill owner with a rough, nigh-​contemptuous attitude to his workers. Margaret
is his equal. She too turns out to be as tough as nails. Others are crushed by mis-
fortune and die. Not she. Others run from threats and challenges. Again, not she.
When Thornton is threated by strikers, it is Margaret who stands up to them.

Even while she looked, she saw lads in the back-​ground stooping to
take off their heavy wooden clogs—​the readiest missile they could find;
she saw it was the spark to the gunpowder, and, with a cry, which no
one heard, she rushed out of the room, down stairs,—​she had lifted
the great iron bar of the door with an imperious force—​had thrown
the door open wide—​and was there, in face of that angry sea of men,
her eyes smiting them with flaming arrows of reproach. The clogs were
arrested in the hands that held them—​the countenances, so fell not a
moment before, now looked irresolute, and as if asking what this meant.
For she stood between them and their enemy. ([1855] 2011, 230)

This is the world of Malthus. Thornton speaking of his early life:

Week by week our income came to fifteen shillings, out of which three
people had to be kept. My mother managed so that I put by three
out of these fifteen shillings regularly. This made the beginning; this
taught me self-​denial. Now that I am able to afford my mother such
comforts as her age, rather than her own wish, requires, I thank her si-
lently on each occasion for the early training she gave me. Now when
I feel that in my own case it is no good luck, nor merit, nor talent,—​
but simply the habits of life which taught me to despise indulgences
26

26 Darwinism as Religion

not thoroughly earned,—​indeed, never to think twice about them,—​

I believe that this suffering, which Miss Hale says is impressed on
the countenances of the people of Milton, is but the natural punish-
ment of dishonestly-​enjoyed pleasure, at some former period of their
lives. I do not look on self-​indulgent, sensual people as worthy of my
hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of
character. (108)

Does this mean that Gaskell has turned her face on Progress? Far from it, nor
indeed would Malthus have thought that she should. He was not against Progress
and at the end of his Essay spoke enthusiastically of it. Rather it was that he was
against naïve hopes of Progress as he found in Condorcet and Godwin. Gaskell
would have agreed with him. Life is tough but the best survive and triumph.5 As
the relationship between Margaret and Thornton develops and matures—​yes,
this is a novel that Charles Darwin would have liked6—​she comes to see that
morality and trade are not enemies but indeed are or should be one. And rub-
bing in the moral, before the story ends Margaret returns to her old home in
the South, where she hears an appalling story of cat roasting—​a poor feline is
burned alive to get favors from the powers of darkness. Even she who lost her
pet accepts the efficacy of such a course of action: “it were very cruel for sure,
and she should not like to do it; but that there were nothing like it for giving a
person what they wished for; she had heard it all her life; but it were very cruel
for all that” (505). It is not just that Margaret is a person facing the future; she is
also a person leaving the past. And although Gaskell would have been shocked
at the suggestion that she was writing in a materialistic or atheistic context—​she
was not—​in respects we are already in a world light years away from, light years
ahead of, the world of Kingsley and Alton Locke. Hers is a world that has em-
braced the factors transforming Britain (Martin 1983).7

  Note the sharp division between Progress and Providence is starting to crumble. Just as, at
5

the end of this book, we shall see a Calvinist wrestling with reconciling human free will against the
background of an all-​powerful, determining God, so here we have Christians who believe in God’s
Providence nevertheless having to recognize a place for human-​driven Progress.
6
  “He could not enjoy any story with a tragical end, for this reason he did not keenly appreciate
George Eliot, though he often spoke warmly in praise of ‘Silas Marner.’ Walter Scott, Miss Austen, and
Mrs. Gaskell, were read and re-​read till they could be read no more” (F. Darwin 1887, 1, 124–​125).
7
  The novel is more complex than this brief sketch implies. Stressing that Malthusianism does
not mean the end of morality, Thornton refuses to speculate wildly, risking the money of others.
Eventually he is bailed out by an unexpected inheritance of Margaret. There is more than a hint in
the novel that his misfortunes make Thornton sympathetic to a more Carlyle-​like philosophy of life.
What we do see is Gaskell’s deep respect for people with vitality and guts, much as we shall see in
post-​Origin writers like George Gissing and Edith Wharton.
╇ 27

B efore Dar w in 27

Evolution
Two great French scientists dominate our period—╉the sometime Chevalier
(later Citoyen) Jean-╉Baptiste de Lamarck and Georges Cuvier (Ruse 1979).
Lamarck was the first to offer a fully articulated theory of evolution—╉notably in
his Philosophie Zoologique (1809). Although today Lamarck is known for the sup-
posed inheritance of acquired characteristics, an idea not in fact new with him,
the main force of his theory was one of continuous spontaneous combustion
followed by an almost vitalistic climb up the chain of being, disrupted occasion-
ally by external factors. Cuvier was the father of comparative anatomy, found-
ing paleontologist, and strong opponent of evolution. Expectedly, Lamarck was
strongly in favor of Progress—╉╉How else would a minor aristocrat thrive through
the French Revolution?—╉and Cuvier was not—╉he was the ultimate civil ser-
vant, appalled at the Revolution and its disruption of stability. Lamarck is im-
portant for our story, especially after, in the second volume of the Principles of
Geology (1830–╉1833), the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell gave a full exposition
of his theory—╉an exposition that, although critical, was sufficiently detailed to
convince more than one, notably Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), of the truth
of the evolutionary story. But in respects it is Cuvier (1813) who sets the scene
against which all else plays out. He saw the Earth as developmental, with a series
of deluges (what the British were to call “catastrophes”) wiping out most or all of
the then-╉existent organisms, and then new ones being (certainly in the opinion
of the British) created miraculously to fill the gaps. Using his anatomical skills
on fossil remains, it was Cuvier who (for all his opposition to social Progress)
started us on the road to seeing the fossil record as roughly progressive, with
primitive forms oldest (as judged from being further down the strata) and com-
plex and more familiar forms the newest.
Among the poets, Byron (around 1820) was quick to pick up on this:

But let it go:—╉it will one day be found

With other relics of “a former World,”
When this World shall be former, underground,
Thrown topsy-╉turvy, twisted, crisped, and curled,
Baked, fried, or burnt, turned inside-╉out, or drowned,
Like all the worlds before, which have been hurled
First out of, and then back again to chaos—╉
The superstratum which will overlay us.

So Cuvier says; —╉and then shall come again

Unto the new creation, rising out
From our old crash, some mystic, ancient strain
28

28 Darwinism as Religion

Of things destroyed and left in airy doubt;

Like to the notions we now entertain
Of Titans, giants, fellows of about
Some hundred feet in height, not to say miles,
And mammoths, and your winged crocodiles.
(Don Juan, 9, 37–​38; in Byron 1847, 700)

Apart from its great industrial significance—​knowing the fossils could

yield significant clues to commercially important strata—​geology as a healthy
outdoor activity became a very popular science in the first half of the nine-
teenth century, not the least because spectacular remains—​including the first
dinosaurs—​were now being unearthed. Immensely popular were the models of
extinct giant forms created for the park when the Crystal Palace building (of the
Great Exhibition of 1851) was moved to South London (Shatto 1976). At once
Dickens picked up on them. Opening Bleak House ([1853] 1948):

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting
in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in
the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the
earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet
long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. (1)

Adding to the interest in geology was the whiff of controversy, when Lyell in
his Principles challenged British catastrophism, arguing in an updated version of
James Hutton’s philosophy that the whole of the past can be explained as a func-
tion of laws operating incessantly at the same intensities. Although Lyell was
sure that Lamarckian evolution is not the solution, his “uniformitarianism”—​
stressing that everything must be the result of unbroken law—​intensified the
problem of the origins of species. Even though biblical literalism was no real
barrier to a solution, there was still the problem highlighted by the Greeks and
reemphasized by Cuvier (1817), who (influenced by Kant and beyond that
Aristotle) argued that the intricate functioning nature of organisms—​what he
called the “conditions of existence”—​made change from one form to another
impossible (because transitional forms would be nonfunctional).
Lamarckism speaks somewhat to this issue, but with as yet no real answer
those who were going to promote evolution had to be so enamored of Progress
that it was going to ride roughshod over philosophical objections. One who felt
this way was the Scottish anatomist (and mentor of the young Charles Darwin)
Robert Grant (Desmond 1984). Then spectacularly and notoriously came the
Scottish publisher (writing anonymously) Robert Chambers (Secord 2000). In
his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), he argued for a full-​blown
  29

B efore Dar w in 29

evolutionary theory, drawing eclectically on the support of the nebular hypothe-

sis, on the similarities between frost patterns (ferns) on windows and real plants,
on our growing knowledge of the fossil record, on analogies between the indi-
vidual’s growth and that of the group, on Lamarckian views of upward change,
on increasing understanding of monstrosities and their causes, and—​fortified
by a total disdain for the kinds of functional issues raised by Cuvier and his
followers—​all wrapped up with (as one might expect of a very successful busi-
nessman) an enthusiasm for Progress and its implications in the biological world.

A progression resembling development may be traced in human nature,

both in the individual and in large groups of men… . Now all of this is
in conformity with what we have seen of the progress of organic creation.
It seems but the minute hand of a watch, of which the hour hand is the
transition from species to species. Knowing what we do of that latter tran-
sition, the possibility of a decided and general retrogression of the highest
species towards a meaner type is scarce admissible, but a forward move-
ment seems anything but unlikely. (Chambers 1846, 401–​402)

There were also happy speculations about the future. “Is our race but the initial
of the grand crowning type? Are there yet to be species superior to us in orga-
nization, purer in feeling, more powerful in device and act, and who shall take a
rule over us!” (Chambers 1844, 276). Chambers was happy to assure his readers
that: “There may then be occasion for a nobler type of humanity, which shall
complete the zoological circle on this planet, and realize some of the dreams of
the purest spirits of the present race” (276).
As you might suppose, none of this went down well with the staid and es-
tablished in the scientific community, especially if (necessarily if they were at
Oxford or Cambridge) they were ordained members of the Church of England,
and hence themselves under some pressure from yet more conservative mem-
bers of their Church for agreeing that the Earth is very old and that some forms
of organism are now extinct—​apparently thereby implying that God scrapped
some of his creations before his favored organisms, humans, appeared on the
scene. Both on the epistemological grounds that Vestiges was bad science and on
the sociological grounds that Vestiges was personally threatening, these scientific
leaders had little doubt that evolutionary theorizing is pseudoscientific (Ruse
2013). Benjamin Disraeli, the future conservative Prime Minister, picked up on
this and in one of his novels parodied Vestiges through one of his ditzy female
characters.

First there was nothing, then there was something; then, I forget the
next, I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came, let me see, did
30

30 Darwinism as Religion

we come next? Never mind that; we came at last. And the next change
there will be something very superior to us, something with wings.
Oh! that’s it; we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows. (Disraeli
[1847] 1871, 38)

Fortunately, the English anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen (1804–╉

1892) was by then articulating an alternative position, one that owed much to
Cuvier with its stress on function, but that in respects owed more to Germanic
thinking, stressing neoplatonic forms linking organisms—╉what Owen (1849)
was to call “archetypes”—╉that reveal themselves in ever more complex organ-
isms as one moves up the fossil record. As with someone like Hegel, this was
not necessarily physically evolutionary—╉and certainly made important the role
of a creative God—╉but in its idealistic way was as Progressive as anything to be
found in Erasmus Darwin or Chambers.

Genuine Evolution?
Expectedly, given the downplay of Progress, there is not much evolution from
the creative writers in the first part of our period, although some of the lines of
Shelley do echo those of Erasmus Darwin.
On war and violent conflict:

And one great Slaughter-╉house the warring world!

(Darwin 1803, 4, 66)
Making the earth a slaughter house!
(Shelley 1821, 7, 48)

And more amusingly:

HENCE when a Monarch or mushroom dies,

Awhile extinct the organic matter lies;
But, as a few short hours or years resolve,
Alchemic powers the changing mass dissolve…
(Darwin 1803, 4, 383–╉386)
Yon monarch, in his solitary pomp,
Was but the mushroom of a summer day.
(Shelley 1821, 9, 31–╉32)

We have to wait until the 1830s to get what is often taken to be the first explicit
use of evolution, by Robert Browning (1812–╉1889) in his poem “Paracelsus.”
  31

B efore Dar w in 31

Thus he dwells in all,

From life’s minute beginnings, up at last
To man —​the consummation of this scheme
Of being, the completion of this sphere
Of life: whose attributes had here and there
Been scattered o’er the visible world before,
Asking to be combined, dim fragments meant
To be united in some wondrous whole,
Imperfect qualities throughout creation,
Suggesting some one creature yet to make,
Some point where all those scattered rays should meet
Convergent in the faculties of man.
(Browning 1981, 2, 56–​67)

But although later, after Darwin, Browning rather claimed that he was expressing
full-​blooded evolutionary ideas here, I suspect they were as likely more idealis-
tic than physical (Beach [1936] 1966, 440). Just before this passage, the poet
says: “God renews His ancient rapture,” suggesting that the deity may have been
more directly involved in the process than Erasmus Darwin (or Lamarck) would
have allowed.
I am unsure whether we get even this in another potential candidate, Arthur
Hugh Clough’s celebrated “Natura Naturans” (1849)—​nature doing its own
thing—​that celebrates the growing sexual attraction between a couple in a rail-
way carriage, tying it to a rise through the ladder of life. We start at the bottom
with low plant life.

Yet owned we, fused in one,

The Power which e’en in stones and earths
By blind elections felt, in forms
Organic breeds to myriad births;
By lichen small on granite wall
Approved, its faintest feeblest stir
Slow-​spreading, strengthening long, at last
Vibrated full in me and her.

The emotion builds and builds—​one suspects that the vibrations have less to do
with mechanical sex aids and more with the rough and shaky nature of early rail
travel. It takes the couple up through animal forms to the climax.

Their shells did slow crustacea build,

Their gilded skins did snakes renew,
32

32 Darwinism as Religion

While mightier spines for loftier kind

Their types in amplest limbs outgrew;
Yea, close comprest in human breast,
What moss, and tree, and livelier thing,
What Earth, Sun, Star of force possest,
Lay budding, burgeoning forth for Spring.

Such sweet preluding sense of old

Led on in Eden’s sinless place
The hour when bodies human first
Combined the primal prime embrace,
Such genial heat the blissful seat
In man and woman owned unblamed,
When, naked both, its garden paths
They walked unconscious, unashamed:
(Clough 2003, 43–​44)

The final lines rather suggest that the reference is to the creation story of Genesis,
although clearly in a way Clough is pushing toward drawn-​out sequential change
and there is a raw eroticism not found in the biblical account. One is not entirely
surprised that the future Mrs. Arthur Hugh Clough nearly broke off their en-
gagement when she discovered this little number—​“I did hardly know that good
men were so rough and coarse” (Kenny 2005, 263).
What of another popular candidate for pre–​Charles Darwin evolution—​a
rather strange dream sequence in Alton Locke? The sleeping hero is told: “He
who falls from the golden ladder must climb through ages to its top. He who
tears himself in pieces by his lusts, ages only can make him one again. The mad-
repore [coral] shall become a shell, and the shell a fish, and the fish a bird, and
the bird a beast; and then he shall become a man again, and see the glory of the
latter days” (Kingsley [1848] 1983, 336–​337). Sure enough he goes through the
sequence of crab, remora, ostrich, mylodon, ape, man. Yet here we can be fairly
certain that we are not dealing with physical evolution, because five years later
Kingsley wrote a popular little book (Glaucus) about the spiritual, moral, and
physical benefits of naturalizing at the seashore where he firmly put in the boot
to Vestiges and as firmly endorsed Owen’s transcendentalist visions, which the
anatomist had now laid out firmly at the lecture podium and in print.

Not (understand well) that they have any “transmutation” or “develop-

ment of species” (of individuals, as it ought honestly to be called, if the
notion is intended to represent a supposed fact,) —​a theory as unsup-
ported by experiment and induction, as it is by a priori reason: but that
╇ 33

B efore Dar w in 33

there has been, in the Creative Mind, as it gave life to new species, a de-
velopment of the idea on which older species were created, in order that
every mesh of the great net might gradually be supplied, and there should
be no gaps in the perfect variety of Nature’s forms. (Kingsley 1855, 70)

Alfred Tennyson
Who then might be taken as expressing genuine evolutionary thoughts?
Remarkably the man at the very center of Victorian literary culture, the poet
Alfred Tennyson (1809–╉1892) (Stevenson 1932). Even more remarkably, he
did not do this just casually or quietly, but as the theme making full sense
of the message in his central and most famous poem, In Memoriam (1850),
that which was to gain him the Poet Laureate’s position and was to be so be-
loved of the Victorians and such a great comfort to the queen on her bereave-
ment. Evolution was not some new enthusiasm—╉like Spencer, Tennyson was
probably moved (in a way unintended by the author) by Lyell’s arguments
against Lamarckian evolution—╉although even before he read Lyell he was
toying with developmental ideas (where the stages of history are recapitu-
lated in the life of the individual) that may or may not have been fully physi-
cally evolutionary.

“From change to change four times within the womb

The brain is moulded,” she began,
“So through all phases of all thought I come
Into the perfect man.
“All nature widens upward: evermore
The simpler essence lower lies.
More complex is more perfect, owning more
Discourse, more widely wise.”

(“The Palace of Art,” written 1833. These stanzas do not appear in the published
version of 1842.)
Tennyson was also deeply committed to the idea of change, although within
a Christian context. This is said by the dying King Arthur about the dissolution
of the Round Table.

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
(“Morte D’Arthur,” [1842] 1994, 131)
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34 Darwinism as Religion

And thoughts of Progress—​industry, trade and the rule of law—​were ever present.

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-​wide whisper of the south-​wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-​storm;
Till the war-​drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-​flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
(Locksley Hall, written mid-​1830s,
published 1842, in Tennyson 1994, 167–168)

It was however Vestiges that confirmed and spurred on Tennyson’s thinking.

In Memoriam (1850) was written over some twenty years as a tribute to a close
friend, Arthur Hallam, who died young. Always interested in science, Tennyson
found the underlying message of Lyell’s Principles profoundly depressing. Lyell
had argued that nature is going nowhere, just simply bound by unbroken stern
laws, and that there is no end in prospect, nor any progress in view. Life comes
and life goes without meaning as expressed in the following famous passages:

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;
...
So careful of the type? but no.
From scaped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.’
(Tennyson 1850, 78, 80)

Given Nature “red in tooth and claw”—​this is the source of this famous
phrase—​nothing seems to make any sense. Not only are individuals pointless
mortals, but so also are groups. We are born, we live, and then we die—​usually
painfully. Nothing makes sense or has meaning. There are just endless Lyellian
  35

B efore Dar w in 35

cycles. Then toward the end of the 1840s Tennyson read Chambers, or at least he
read a very detailed review of Chambers’s Vestiges (Killham 1958, 85). Finding
that Chambers argued for an organic evolution which was unambiguously
progressionist—​that is, moving up from simple forms up to humans, and then
perhaps beyond, Tennyson picked up pen and finished his poem. He argued in
the final lines that, despite a Lyellian uniformitarianism, perhaps there is mean-
ing after all: that life is progressing upward, and that perhaps will go on beyond
the human form that we have at present. Could it not be that Hallam represented
some anticipation of the more-​developed life to come, cut short as it were in its
prime? There is therefore hope for us all and a meaning for the life of Hallam.

A soul shall strike from out the vast

And strike his being into bounds,
And moved thro’ life of lower phase,
Result in man, be born and think,
And act and love, a closer link
Betwixt us and the crowning race
...
Whereof the man, that with me trod
This planet, was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God.
(Tennyson 1850, 209, 210)

This is not a materialist view of life. It is not really even a deistic view akin
to that endorsed by Erasmus Darwin, for one senses that Tennyson’s God
is not about to leave anything to chance or blind law. His was basically the
Christian God.

O YET we trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
(Tennyson 1850, 76)

Yet it is unambiguously an evolutionary view and one that clearly owes at least
something to Chambers. Note the echo of Chambers’s “crowning type” in
36

36 Darwinism as Religion

Tennyson’s “crowning race,” a phrase to which incidentally he seems to have

been rather partial because he used in The Princess (1847)—╉“Then springs the
crowning race of humankind./╉May these things be!”—╉and then later in Maud
(1855), expressing the same hopes as in In Memoriam:

And he felt himself in his force to be Nature’s crowning race.

As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his birth,
So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man:
He now is first, but is he the last? is he not too base?
(Tennyson 1994, 386)

Evolution is right there in Victorian culture in the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury and—╉as often is the case with pseudosciences—╉the elite may have loathed
it, but the public was lapping it up.

Religion
This is a story about evolution in opposition to religion, the Christian religion.
We have already seen some of this: the push of Progress against the establish-
ment and the clash between Progress and Providence. Tennyson, who was in re-
spects the most successful evolutionist, succeeded precisely because he did not
want to take up the battle against religion. There is more to say than this. Thomas
Kuhn (1962) makes the important point that you don’t take up with a new para-
digm unless there are good reasons to drop the old one. Kuhn is talking about
science, but his point applies to our story.8 For now, leave the troubles of reli-
gion in relation to evolution and ask about religion in its own right. There were
those who were unambiguously Christian, whether they were for or against evo-
lution. Charles Kingsley was one. Charles Dickens was another. No one could
read A Christmas Carol without seeing that here was a man who took absolutely
and completely seriously Jesus’s message of love and care for our fellow human
beings. This is not to say that these people saw no faults in the religion. Kingsley
would hardly have written Alton Locke if he were entirely happy at the ways in
which things were going. Dickens was often far more critical than he was posi-
tive. He loathed and detested the unctuous hypocrisy of so much evangelical

8
╛╛I take it that this discussion ties in with the crumbling of the Providence-╉Progress dichotomy.
The problem was how far you could bring Progress into your Providential world picture and think
of it still as Providential. Although I refer favorably here to Kuhn’s thinking, this should not be taken
as an endorsement of his radical view of revolutions, where the world literally changes. In this book,
I am talking of a very great change in perspective, but as this very note implies I see such change as
messy and overlapping and in respects gradual. One is not surprised to find hybrids like Tennyson.
  37

B efore Dar w in 37

religion—​with its humorless condemnation of human urges. There is no funnier

or more ridiculous figure in the whole of fiction than the Reverend Mr. Stiggins,
in Pickwick Papers. He was also more than capable of poking fun at notions of
Providence. Sam and Toby Weller are talking of the death of Toby’s wife.

“Vell,” said Sam, venturing to offer a little homely consolation, after

the lapse of three or four minutes, consumed by the old gentleman in
slowly shaking his head from side to side, and solemnly smoking, “vell,
gov’nor, ve must all come to it, one day or another.”
“So we must, Sammy,” said Mr. Weller the elder.
“There’s a Providence in it all,” said Sam.
“O’ course there is,” replied his father, with a nod of grave approval.
“Wot 'ud become of the undertakers vithout it, Sammy?” (Dickens
[1837] 1948, 733)

Most significantly, Dickens saw that one of the biggest problems of contempo-
rary Christianity lay in its inability to reach out to the urban masses. In Hard
Times, with acid tongue in cheek, he wrote of the churches of Coketown, the
industrial city in which his story occurs, that:

[T]‌he perplexing mystery of the place was, Who belonged to the eigh-
teen denominations? Because, whoever did, the labouring people did
not. It was very strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday morning,
and note how few of them the barbarous jangling of bells that was driv-
ing the sick and nervous mad, called away from their own quarter, from
their own close rooms, from the corners of their own streets, where they
lounged listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel going, as at a thing
with which they had no manner of concern. (Dickens [1854] 1948, 23)9

It wasn’t just the growing social irrelevance of Christianity. It was that the
story was failing to engage. Some, like Shelley, went all of the way to nonbelief.

the name of God

Has fenced about all crime with holiness,

9
  In his essay on the mechanical age, Carlyle had written:  “the Bible-​Society, professing a far
higher and heavenly structure, is found, on inquiry, to be altogether an earthly contrivance:  sup-
ported by collection of moneys, by fomenting of vanities, by puffing, intrigue and chicane; a machine
for converting the Heathen …” (Carlyle [1829] 1864, 189). Dickens echoes this in Bleak House,
writing of one of the would-​be converters of life’s unfortunates (Mrs. Pardiggle) that she “would
have got on infinitely better if she had not had such a mechanical way of taking possession of people”
([1853] 1948, 107).
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38 Darwinism as Religion

Himself the creature of his worshippers,

Whose names and attributes and passions change,
Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord,
Even with the human dupes who build his shrines,
Still serving o’er the war-╉polluted world
For desolation’s watchword; whether hosts
Stain his death-╉blushing chariot-╉wheels, as on
Triumphantly they roll, whilst Brahmins raise
A sacred hymn to mingle with the groans;
Or countless partners of his power divide
His tyranny to weakness; or the smoke
Of burning towns, the cries of female helplessness,
Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy,
Horribly massacred, ascend to heaven
In honor of his name; …
(Shelley 1821, 7, 26–╉42)

Notice—╉and this is important—╉that nonbelief is rarely if ever purely epistemo-

logical (Ruse 2015a). Does God exist? It is a moral issue. Should we believe in a
God who justifies such awful behavior? God is not just nonexistent. He and his
followers are immoral.

Transcendentalism
Was there an escape, an alternative? As Carlyle showed us, from Germany were
various transcendental ideas and themes, making God a less ethereal figure and
bringing him more into the world, as a kind of living force. Back in 1798 the poet
Wordsworth had been trying out these ideas.

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
(“Tintern Abbey,” written in 1798. In Wordsworth 1994, 207)
  39

B efore Dar w in 39

It is this kind of thinking that infuses Sartor Resartus. Arguing for what he called
“natural supernaturalism,” Carlyle proposed a kind of pantheism where the
world of God and the world of nature are collapsed down into one.

“But is not a real Miracle simply a violation of the Laws of Nature?” ask
several. Whom I  answer by this new question:  What are the Laws of
Nature? To me perhaps the rising of one from the dead were no viola-
tion of these Laws, but a confirmation; were some far deeper Law, now
first penetrated into, and by Spiritual Force, even as the rest have all been,
brought to bear on us with its Material Force. (Carlyle [1834] 1987, 194)

We can but scratch at the surface of true understanding. “Nature remains of

quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion; and all Experience thereof limits
itself to some few computed centuries and measured square-​miles.” Not that
this deprives us of obligations. We must move from the “Everlasting No” to
the “Everlasting Yes.” “On the roaring billows of Time, thou art not engulfed,
but borne aloft into the azure of Eternity. Love not Pleasure; love God. This is
the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved: wherein whoso
walks and works, it is well with him” (146).
Similar thinking was tremendously influential, particularly in the New World,
where the New England transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henry Thoreau embraced it with enthusiasm. It is right there in the poetry of
the great American poet Walt Whitman (1819–​1892), who—​combining every-
thing with a kind of Malthusian struggle—​goes so far as to give the world’s life
force an evolutionary twist.10

The world below the brine,

Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,
Sea-​lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle,
openings, and pink turf,
Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold,
the play of light through the water,
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass,
rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers,

10
  Beach (1936) links Whitman to Emerson. Whitman always expressed a huge admiration for
Charles Darwin: “Of this old theory, evolution, as broach’d anew, trebled, with indeed all-​devouring
claims, by Darwin, it has so much in it, and is so needed as a counterpoise to yet widely prevailing
and unspeakably tenacious, enfeebling, superstitions” (Whitman 1892, 326). It seems though that an
earlier, and perhaps deeper, influence was the evolutionary theory of Robert Chambers. This poem is
from the much-​expanded edition of “Leaves of Grass,” published in 1860 (Blake 2010).
40

40 Darwinism as Religion

Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling

close to the bottom,
The sperm-╉whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting
with his flukes,
The leaden-╉eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy
sea-╉leopard, and the sting-╉ray,
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-╉depths,
breathing that thick-╉breathing air, as so many do,
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings
like us who walk this sphere,
The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.
(Whitman 2004, 287–╉288)

“Nemesis of Faith”
Yet, although obviously all this sort of stuff resonated with thinking like Owen’s
archetypal vision of life’s history—╉hardly surprising given the similar Germanic
sources—╉for many it was not enough.11 It could not fill the gap created by the
other dropped shoe of German scholarship—╉“higher criticism.” People were now
in full flight looking at the bible as a human document and finding that much
simply did not withstand the glare of critical scrutiny. Works like David Strauss’s
Life of Jesus struck right at the heart of the Christian story, arguing that the miracles
were simply natural events gussied up to make plausible the claims about Jesus
being the Messiah. Hated and praised in equal terms, the controversial tome could
not be ignored. In 1846, Marion Evans (1819–╉1880)—╉the future novelist George
Eliot—╉published an English translation and the fat was in the fire. The flames shot
up dangerously with the publication of Nemesis of Faith (1849), a semiautobio-
graphical novel by James Anthony Froude, whose brother Richard Hurrell Froude
had been a close associate of John Henry Newman, one of the founders of the
Oxford Movement—╉the very high church party within the Church of England. It
tells the story of an Anglican priest, Markham Sutherland, ordained under family
pressure despite significant doubts, and of his unhappy life thereafter.

11
╛╛The attraction of Owen’s archetypal theory was that it did not have to be interpreted as evo-
lutionary. It could be taken in an idealist form as simply showing the conceptual links. Obviously,
though, it did lend itself to an evolutionary interpretation and many took it that way. Where Owen
himself stood on evolution was ambiguous (Rupke 1994). Later in life he clearly endorsed some kind
of actual change. He may well have done so earlier as well, but owing to his need to satisfy conserva-
tive patrons, like the fellows of Cambridge colleges, strategically he said nothing.
  41

B efore Dar w in 41

Brotherly sentiment did not extend to the future cardinal of the Church of
Rome. “Newman talked much to us of the surrender of reason. Reason, first of
every thing, must be swept away, so daily more and more unreasonable appeared
to modern eyes so many of the doctrines to which the Church was committed.
As I began to look into what he said about it, the more difficult it seemed to me.
What did it mean? Reason could only be surrendered by an act of reason” (157).
Biblical literalism was out now that the Germans had shown its fallibility. In any
case, the message of Christianity is very dubious.

I will not, I must not, believe that the all-​just, all-​merciful, all-​good God
can be such a Being as I find him there described. He! He! to have cre-
ated mankind liable to fall —​to have laid them in the way of a tempta-
tion under which He knew they would fall, and then curse them and all
who were to come of them, and all the world, for their sakes; jealous,
passionate, capricious, revengeful, punishing children for their fathers’
sins, tempting men, or at least permitting them to be tempted into
blindness and folly, and then destroying them. (11)

And Carlyle—​whom in fact Froude much admired—​is no true substitute.

“Carlyle! Carlyle only raises questions he cannot answer, and seems best con-
tented if he can make the rest of us as discontented as himself …” (35). That
was a nasty crack although one suspects more than one reader chortled at the
sentiment.12
But why did Markham care so much, apart from the fact that—​inevitably—​
he lost his job? Simply because of the moral issues. He feared that without reli-
gion there can be no morality. After he leaves the priesthood, he meets a mar-
ried woman and they fall in love, in good part because her husband spends no
time at all at home and virtually turns down the bed sheets for them. But should
they consummate their relationship? Can one have morality without God? They
remain apart physically. “His conscience was satisfied with what he had done.
Unsteady as it was, and without the support of a strongly believed religious faith
had once provided for it, he experienced at last what so long he had denied, that
to attempt to separate religion from morality is madness; that religion resisting
only on internal emotion, is like a dissolving view which will change its image as
the passions shift their focal distances; …” (180–​181).
Unfortunately, this does not prevent God or the fates from drowning her
child, leaving them both consumed with guilt. They end up in Roman Catholic
monastic institutions. She interestingly dies happy, regretting her marriage but

12
  Samuel Butler quipped: “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one
another, and so make only two people miserable and not four” (Butler 1935, 349).
42

42 Darwinism as Religion

not her relationship. Markham, having been converted to Roman Catholicism

by a Newman-type figure from the past, also proves not to have staying power
and dies wracked with guilt about his affair tinged with regret that he did not
make a proper meal out of it. If there is no God, he might as well have enjoyed
the fruits on offer in this life.

[A]‌midst the wasted ruins of his life, where the bare bleak soil was
strewed with wrecked purposes and shattered creeds; with no hope to
stay him, with no fear to raise the most dreary phantom beyond the
grave, he sank down into the barren waste, and the dry sands rolled over
him where he lay; and no living being was left behind him upon earth,
who would not mourn over the day which brought life to Markham
Sutherland. (226–​227)

And on that somber note let us end our pre-​Darwinian survey and move the
story forward.
╇ 43

The Darwinian Theory

Charles Darwin’s father, Dr. Robert Darwin, was the oldest son of Dr. Erasmus
Darwin (Browne 1995, 2002). His mother was the daughter of Josiah
Wedgwood, the founder of the famous pottery works. He married a first cousin,
Emma Wedgwood, and they raised seven children to maturity. Darwin was a
great revolutionary, but he was no rebel. He was born into a comfortable, upper-╉
middle-╉class family and accepted and absorbed the beliefs and ideologies of
his background. His genius was to take these beliefs and ideologies and, break-
ing them down, reassemble them into a whole new way of looking at the world
(Richards and Ruse 2016).

Becoming an Evolutionist
Teenage years at one of England’s famous public schools (in reality, private
schools) were followed by two years at Edinburgh University, studying to be
a physician like his father and grandfather before him. This did not take and
so Darwin was packed off to the University of Cambridge, intending after his
studies to become an Anglican priest. This intention faded and was dropped
after Darwin on graduation accepted the offer to be ship’s naturalist on HMS
Beagle—╉a trip that eventually lasted five years (1831–╉1836) and took the crew
all the way around the globe. As noted, at some point on this journey, Darwin’s
Christian beliefs metamorphosed into a kind of deism, primarily because he
could not accept the biblical miracles—╉remember how Paley had made these
the keystone for the faith—╉and this lasted right through until the final years of
his life, when he became somewhat of an agnostic (never an atheist).
Darwin knew about evolution, having read his grandfather’s Zoonomia and
having been mentored by Grant when at Edinburgh—╉as well as reading about
Lamarck’s theory in Lyell’s Principles of Geology, a work he read on the voyage.
These early readings obviously primed but did not convert him. A number of fac-
tors on the trip spurred his thinking—╉these included fossils in South America

43
44

44 Darwinism as Religion

and (particularly) the distributions of the birds and reptiles on the Galapagos
Archipelago in the Pacific. But Darwin did not slip over into being an evolution-
ist until he got home and his collections were being classified. Early 1837 is the
almost-╉certain date. Then for some eighteen months Darwin pursued a cause,
until at the end of September 1838, reading Malthus’s Essay sparked understand-
ing, and he grasped the principle of natural selection brought on by the struggle
for existence.
He wrote up his ideas in the early 1840s, but for reasons we still do not fully
understand, he then sat on his theory for fifteen years. Finally, in the summer of
1858, a young collector in the Malay Archipelago, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–╉
1913), sent to Darwin an essay with essentially the same ideas as Darwin him-
self had discovered some twenty years previously (Darwin and Wallace 1858).
Quickly, Darwin prepared a manuscript and the Origin of Species appeared late in
1859. Apart from a provocative comment at the end of the book, there is noth-
ing on our own species, Homo sapiens. This was not because Darwin did not
think his theory applied to us. His first clear statement of natural selection in
a private notebook toward the end of 1838 talks of natural selection applied to
our brains and intelligence. It was rather that Darwin wanted first to get his main
theory out in public. But of course it was the “monkey theory” that everyone
wanted to talk about and through the 1860s this was the main topic of discus-
sion. Somewhat reluctantly, after Wallace started to argue that human evolution
demands spirit forces to get the full effects, Darwin turned to humankind, and
the Descent of Man appeared in 1871, with somewhat of a supplemental volume,
the Expression of the Emotions, in 1872. Then Darwin had had enough and for the
final ten years of his life turned to issues in botany and the like.
Let us start by laying out the theory of the Origin and the extension in the
Descent. Then, after discussing some of the reactions by the scientific commu-
nity and the implications of these, I will turn to the reception of Darwin’s theory
by the writers, novelists and poets. In this chapter and the next I will be con-
cerned with the general reception of the theory and then later will turn to the
main theme of this book, the ways in which it became a form of secular religion
challenging Christianity. The period being covered goes from 1859 to roughly
around the late 1920s, when Mendelian genetics was incorporated into evolu-
tionary thinking.

The Origin of Species

Darwin referred to his book as “one, long argument” and that is the right way to
approach it (Ruse 1975a, 1975b). He had (in 1831) read the Preliminary Discourse
on the Study of Natural Philosophy, a little text on the philosophy of science by John
  45

The Dar w inian Theor y 45

Herschel, and both as undergraduate and on the Beagle’s return he had been close
to the polymath William Whewell, and read (twice in 1837)  his History of the
Inductive Sciences and (in 1841) a long review by Herschel of Whewell’s Philosophy
of the Inductive Sciences. Darwin knew that the best science—​the best Newtonian
science—​is hypothetico-​deductive (a body of laws) and that it has at its heart a
central cause or force, a vera causa (“true cause”). Herschel, more an empiricist,
stressed that the mark of a vera causa is that one have analogical, experienced
evidence—​we know that a force keeps the moon in orbit around the Earth because
we have experienced the tug along a piece of string when we use it to whirl a stone
in orbit around our hand. Whewell, more a rationalist, stressed that a vera causa
unites different areas of study into one whole—​it lies at the center of a “consilience
of inductions.” We infer the cause, rather than experience it, even analogically.
Darwin set out to do everything by the book or books. He opened the Origin
by talking of artificial selection by fanciers and farmers, an analogy that had
probably led him to natural selection in the first place. Pigeons today would
probably be put in different genera let alone species, and yet we know that they
have all come from the same original stock. We have therefore the makings of
an empiricist vera causa. Then, he gave a pair of quasi-​deductive arguments to
establish first the struggle for existence and second natural selection.

A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which
all organic beings tend to increase. Every being, which during its natural
lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during
some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year, other-
wise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly
become so inordinately great that no country could support the prod-
uct. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive,
there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual
with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct spe-
cies, or with the physical conditions of life. (Darwin 1859, 63–​64)

Next, drawing on the fact that whenever you have a population of organ-
isms, you find that there are differences between them and that every now and
then something new seems to pop up into being, Darwin speculated that in the
struggle, some types or forms are likely to prove more successful than others,
simply because these types or forms will help their possessors against others.
Given enough time, these types will spread through the group and eventually
there will be full-​blooded change.

Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-​fitting are the
mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical
46

46 Darwinism as Religion

conditions of life. Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that

variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other varia-
tions useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle
of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of genera-
tions? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more
individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having
any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance
of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may
feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly
destroyed. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection
of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection. (80–​81)

It is important to note that, for Darwin, change was not random. It was a matter
of having features that lead to success. In other words, having features like the
hand and the eye that are “as if ” designed for their ends—​they are “adaptations.”
Natural selection gives a scientific explanation of final causes. Darwin always
stressed that it was the influence of Paley’s Natural Theology, bolstered undoubt-
edly by Cuvier’s thinking (taking us back to Kant and then to Aristotle), that was
crucial here. As also was Adam Smith. The Scotsman’s theory of the division of
labor—​you get much more done if you divide the jobs among specialists—​fed
right into what Darwin was to call his “principle of divergence.” We have many
different forms of organism, because they do better in the struggle for existence
if they are specialized for certain niches and lifestyles and do not try to do every-
thing. This led to his metaphor of the tree of life.

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been
represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth.
The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those
produced during each former year may represent the long succession
of extinct species…. As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and
these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler
branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life,
which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and
covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.
(129–​130)

The third section of the Origin is devoted to applying natural selection qua
rationalist vera causa to a wide range of biological phenomena—​instinct and be-
havior, paleontology and the fossil record, biogeography and the distributions of
organisms around the globe, systematics and the relationships between groups,
anatomy and particularly the similarities (homologies) between organisms
  47

The Dar w inian Theor y 47

of different species, and then embryology and the links shown by developing
forms. All the time, note, Darwin uses his cause, his mechanism, as the explana-
tory power. It is not just a matter of evolution but of evolution through natural
selection. Thus, for instance, to explain why it is that the embryos of organisms
very different are frequently similar, he argues that this is because selection only
really gets to work on the adult forms—​the embryos protected in the womb feel
no such forces. It is important to note also another Adam Smith influence. For
Darwin, selection is always a matter of one organism against another—​we are
all self-​regarding if you like. No one puts themselves out for anyone else unless
there is return—​like help or passing on one’s heredity (as with children), and
so forth. Here Darwin differed from Wallace. The latter, much influenced by the
socialism of the 1840s reformer Robert Owen, always found a place for selection
aiding the group even at the expense of the individual.
Concluding, Darwin wrote the most famous lines in the whole of biology if
not science.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many

plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various in-
sects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth,
and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different
from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner,
have all been produced by laws acting around us … Thus, from the war
of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are
capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals,
directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed
law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful
and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (489–​490)

Do note that Darwin was fully committed to biological progress and this was
a reflection of his belief in social and cultural Progress—​what other philosophy
would be embraced by the grandchild of one of the greatest successes in the
Industrial Revolution? In the third edition of the Origin (1861) he suggested
that biological progress might come from what today we would call arms races,
where lines of organisms compete—​predator and prey, for instance—​thus per-
fecting their adaptations.

If we look at the differentiation and specialisation of the several organs

of each being when adult (and this will include the advancement of
the brain for intellectual purposes) as the best standard of highness
48

48 Darwinism as Religion

of organisation, natural selection clearly leads towards highness; for

all physiologists admit that the specialisation of organs, inasmuch as
they perform in this state their functions better, is an advantage to each
being; and hence the accumulation of variations tending towards spe-
cialisation is within the scope of natural selection.  (134)

Note, however, that Darwin is not (unlike his predecessors) putting forward his
theory of evolution based on his belief in human Progress. He didn’t need to
because with selection he had a naturalistic explanation of final causes. Rather,
his belief in biological progress is based on his theory. Thus we expect to see a
shift away from evolution-╉as-╉pseudoscience. More on this shortly, but note that
even though Darwin is not supporting evolution through his philosophy, one
might still argue that the philosophy makes the theory attractive and that there
is as much wishing as solid science in making the science support the philoso-
phy. What is important to stress is that—╉even though he was still at this point
a deist—╉he was not like Tennyson or his own friend, the American botanist
Asa Gray (1876), in wanting to involve God directly in the upward direction
of change. Darwin had little real idea about where and why the variations for
change originate (he had many unreal suggestions), but he was always certain
that they were not directed. In this sense, variation is “random.”1

The Descent of Man
Turn now to the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). As the
subtitle flags you, it is an odd book for most of it is not about the descent of
man! It is rather about Darwin’s secondary mechanism of sexual selection.
This is a notion that goes back to the earliest formulation of the theory and
makes a brief appearance in the Origin. Clearly based on the analogy with the
domestic world, Darwin argued that along with natural selection—╉analogous
(with its focus on existence) to such features prized by the breeder as size (the
beefiness of the steer) and coat covering (the fleece of sheep)—╉there is sexual
selection—╉analogous (with its focus on reproduction) to such features prized

╛╛This matter of heredity, what today we call “genetics,” was an ongoing problem for Darwin. In
1

a work published between the Origin and the Descent—╉The Variation of Animals and Plants Under
Domestication (1868)—╉he introduced what he called his “provisional theory of pangenesis,” argu-
ing that particles are given off from all over the body and then collected in the sex cells. Apart from
anything else, this gave Darwin a material basis for a kind of Lamarckism, the inheritance of acquired
characteristics, something to which he always subscribed along with selection. No one was very im-
pressed, but no one had any other suggestions (Olby 1963).
  49

The Dar w inian Theor y 49

by the breeder as weapons (the spurs of the cock) and attractiveness (tail of the
peacock). Indeed, impressed by such examples, Darwin divided sexual selec-
tion into male combat—​the stag fighting for the harem of hinds—​and female
choice—​the male birds on display in a lek before the females.
Why this newfound interest in sexual selection? Simply that this was the nat-
uralistic response to Wallace (Ruse 2015b). Darwin agreed with the younger
naturalist that there are human features like skin color and hairlessness and
probably great intelligence that do not seem to have their origin in natural selec-
tion. Savages (as they both thought of native people), for instance, rarely use
all of their available brain power. It was here that sexual selection was brought
into play as Darwin argued that much of human evolution resulted from such
a process—​something that he stressed was no less natural than natural selec-
tion. Nevertheless, despite the somewhat distorting discussion of the secondary
mechanism, overall it must be understood to be secondary. The main cause of
human evolution, as for all other organisms, is natural selection. And to this end,
the first part of the Descent trots out familiar sorts of facts and analyses, showing
how morphologically and in all other ways we humans may be special but we are
not different. Our ancestors do not exist today, but we are primates and it is clear
that the higher apes are our closest relatives.
Particularly significant are Darwin’s discussions of religion and of morality.
His treatment of the former showed a heavy debt to David Hume, whose Natural
History of Religion (1757) Darwin read around the time that he discovered natu-
ral selection. For Hume, religion was all a big mistake. “We find human faces in
the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by
experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good will to everything that hurts
or pleases us.” Darwin basically took the same tack: “my dog, a full-​grown and
very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a
little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would
have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was,
every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked.
He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner,
that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some
strange living agent, and no stranger had a right to be on his territory” (1, 67).
Adding: “The belief in spiritual agencies would easily pass into the belief in the
existence of one or more gods.”
Morality took more care and imagination. However, the basic idea is simple—​
morality pays off because the moral person does better in the struggle than the
immoral person. “It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of mo-
rality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children
over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard
of morality and an increase in the number of well-​endowed men will certainly
50

50 Darwinism as Religion

give an immense advantage to one tribe over another” (1, 166). Darwin doesn’t
mince words about what this means: “There can be no doubt that a tribe includ-
ing many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patrio-
tism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid
to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be vic-
torious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.” And so we
get the consequence. “At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted
other tribes; and as morality is one element in their success, the standard of mo-
rality and the number of well-​endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise
and increase.” Parenthetically, this might seem as though Darwin is here appeal-
ing to the good of the group over the good of the individual. He made it clear
that he regarded tribes as inter-​related families, and the family he took to be one
individual, a kind of super organism. In other words, with respect to morality,
humans are parts of a whole rather than individuals in their own right.
What does Darwin get out of sexual selection? A lot of fairly standard views
on human beings, especially human beings as seen by the mid-​Victorians.

Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and

has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger, but whether
relatively to the larger size of his body, in comparison with that of
woman, has not, I believe been fully ascertained. In woman the face is
rounder; the jaws and the base of the skull smaller; the outlines of her
body rounder, in parts more prominent; and her pelvis is broader than
in man; but this latter character may perhaps be considered rather as a
primary than a secondary sexual character. She comes to maturity at an
earlier age than man.
Male and female children resemble each other closely, like the young
of so many other animals in which the adult sexes differ; they likewise
resemble the mature female much more closely, than the mature male.
The female, however, ultimately assumes certain distinctive characters,
and in the formation of her skull, is said to be intermediate between the
child and the man. (2, 316–​317)

Darwin was always a great ferreter, looking for facts that he could carry off
and use. He looked upon this as a strength of his approach rather than a weak-
ness. The whole point of his theorizing was to take information that was known
already and to put it in a new context, giving it a new meaning. Expectedly, a
great deal of what he had to say about humankind was secondary, sometimes
depressingly so. “It is well known that with many Hottentot women the pos-
terior part of the body projects in a wonderful manner; they are steatopygous;
and Sir Andrew Smith is certain that this peculiarity is greatly admired by the
╇ 51

The Dar w inian Theor y 51

men.” Adding: “Some of the women in various negro tribes are similarly charac-
terised; and, according to Burton, the Somal men ‘are said to choose their wives
by ranging them in a line, and by picking her out who projects farthest a tergo,
Nothing can be more hateful to a negro than the opposite form’â•›” (2, 345–╉346).
Complementing this, there isn’t much love of European features. “With respect
to colour, the negroes rallied Mungo Park on the whiteness of his skin and the
prominence of his nose, both of which they considered as “unsightly and un-
natural conformations” (2, 346). In the same vein: “On the western coast, as Mr.
Winwood Reade informs me, the negroes admire a very black skin more than
one of a lighter tint.” And so it goes. Both male combat and female choice seem
to be active in human affairs and sometimes probably other factors outweigh
sexual selection. But in the end, we are animals, and that is all there is to it.

First Reactions
At the British Association meeting in Oxford in 1860, Thomas Henry Huxley
(1825–╉1895) squared off against the leader of the Church of England high
church faction, “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce (son of William), Bishop of Oxford
(Desmond 1997). Supposedly the bishop asked Huxley if he was descended
from monkeys on his grandfather’s side or his grandmother’s side. Supposedly
Huxley responded that he would rather be descended from a monkey than from
a bishop of the Church of England! All a good lark, with the combatants going
off to supper together later. Probably mythological, although a myth with a pur-
pose, like Moses leading his people out of Egypt and to the Promised Land.
There were real quarrels with undertones of bitterness. Huxley and Richard
Owen differed over whether or not humans were unique in having a brain part,
the hippocampus minor. Yes, said Owen. No, said Huxley, who proved to be
right. Charles Kingsley had great fun parodying this in his Water Babies (1863).
Owen and Huxley are hybridized into Professor Ptthmllnsprts—╉“Put them all
in spirits.”

Now it befell that, on the very shore, and over the very rocks, where Tom
was sitting with his friend the lobster, there walked one day the little
white lady, Ellie herself, and with her a very wise man indeed –╉Professor
Ptthmllnsprts. . . He held very strange theories about a good many things.
He had even got up once at the British Association, and declared that
apes had hippopotamus majors in their brains just as men have. Which
was a shocking thing to say; for, if it were so, what would become of the
faith, hope, and charity of immortal millions? You may think that there
are other more important differences between you and an ape, such as
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52 Darwinism as Religion

being able to speak, and make machines, and know right from wrong,
and say your prayers, and other little matters of that kind; but that is a
child's fancy, my dear. Nothing is to be depended on but the great hip-
popotamus test. If you have a hippopotamus major in your brain, you are
no ape, though you had four hands, no feet, and were more apish than
the apes of all aperies. But if a hippopotamus major is ever discovered
in one single ape's brain, nothing will save your great-​great-​great-​great-​
great-​great-​great-​great-​great-​great-​great-​greater-​greatest-​grandmother
from having been an ape too. (Kingsley [1863] 2008, 85)

Joking apart, two things are clear. Although Darwin had rather run together
the fact of evolution and the cause of evolution, people had little trouble in pull-
ing them apart. As far as the fact of evolution is concerned, of course, there were
those who opposed it. Apart from Wilberforce, many of Darwin’s old teachers
at Cambridge—​famously Professor of Geology Adam Sedgwick and the by now
Master of Trinity William Whewell—​for all that they were major influences
on Darwin (Sedgwick gave Darwin a crash course on geology before he set off
on the Beagle and Whewell’s importance has been noted already) were strong
against the message of the Origin. Across the Atlantic, Swiss-​born Louis Agassiz
(discoverer of ice ages) at Harvard and Charles Hodge, Principal of Princeton
Theological College, never accepted evolution. At less exalted levels it was also
opposed. Mrs. Alfred Gatty—​editor of Aunt Judy’s Magazine, a family publication
for children—​hit the ground running in 1861 with a somewhat labored story—​
explicitly intended to combat “the Darwinian presumption as far as I could in a
small way”—​about rooks expounding (in a fashion intended to reduce the ideas
to risible absurdity) on their degenerate offspring, humans. “My friends, man is
not our superior, was never so, for he is neither more nor less than a degenerated
brother of our own race! Yes, I venture confidently to look back on thousands
on thousands of generations, and I see that men were once rooks!” (Gatty 1862,
146–​147). What led to our decline and fall? “Alas! indolence and a fatal ten-
dency to yield to the ease of the moment are the causes of our own conduct;
and so they were, I have no doubt whatever, of the degradation of our ancestors.”
Apparently, those of us who go down coal mines and end the day with black
faces are truly doing their bit to get us back to our longed-​for earlier rook-​like
state. Far better, however, that we aspire to a true transformation. “Except ye
become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven.”
Whatever the immediate effect on infant minds, this kind of stuff seems not
to have had a lasting effect. Naysayers notwithstanding, evolution as fact was
accepted almost immediately and almost universally, especially by the younger
generation. With the exception of the American South, this is true even in re-
ligious circles (Roberts 1988). Like the emperor’s new clothes, as soon as the
  53

The Dar w inian Theor y 53

respectable Charles Darwin said “but we did evolve,” people said they had
known it all along. A good guide is the final exam of the honors biology program
at Cambridge (Ruse 1979). In 1851, the first year there was such a degree, stu-
dents were asked to give a refutation of evolutionary thinking. By the mid-​1860s,
students were told not to bother with defending evolution but to discuss the
causes! Given that Frank Darwin, Charles’s son, got a First, one assumes that
being a chip off the old block was no handicap.
What of natural selection? Talk now about the scientific community. There
was some good work done using selection and this continued right down
through our period (Kimler and Ruse 2013; Ruse 1996). Soon after the Origin
was published, Henry Walter Bates, a collector who had traveled with Wallace
in South America, came up with a finding and an explanation that still rightly
bears his name. Some nonpoisonous butterflies mimic poisonous forms, even
though there is no close relationship. Bates showed that this is a function of
natural selection with the nonpoisonous forms, as it were, piggybacking on the
poisonous butterflies (Bates 1862, 1863). There was more work of this ilk—​that
is, work on fast-​breeding organisms with readily identifiable adaptations. The
German-​born naturalist Fritz Müller who had emigrated to Brazil was also much
interested in selection as a mechanism and he too came up with a Darwinian ex-
planation of mimicry, this time of different species of poisonous butterflies who
grow to look alike (and have strong, distinctive coloration) so that predators will
more quickly learn that that form is not for good eating.2 In the same vein, pio-
neering investigations were done in the 1870s by the German biologist August
Weismann, perhaps better known for his ferocious attacks in the 1880s on
Lamarckian inheritance. In a major study on the markings of caterpillars, trans-
lated into English by 1882 and published in a collection with an appreciative
preface by Charles Darwin no less, he was categorical in assigning importance to
the Darwinian mechanism: “it has been established that each of the elements of
marking occurring in the larvae of the Sphingidae originally possessed a decided
biological significance, which was produced by natural selection” (Weismann
1882, 388). This kind of thinking was used and endorsed by British scientists,
notably including Wallace, who from the 1860s picked up on mimicry and
through the years wrote overview articles (Wallace 1866, 1889, 1891). Then,
from the next generation, Edward B. Poulton (1890, 1908), professor of zoology
at Oxford, made significant selection-​based contributions to problems of animal
coloration. Also (especially among collectors of butterflies and moths) there
2
  Darwin was appreciative of this work using selection. He praised Bates’s work in reviews,
was instrumental in getting Bates’s work published by his own publisher, John Murray, and then
through Murray’s good offices getting the lower-​middle-​class Bates a good job as secretary of the
Royal Geographical Society. Darwin also arranged at his own expense for a little book by Müller, Für
Darwin, to be translated and published in English, Facts and Arguments for Darwin (1869).
54

54 Darwinism as Religion

was considerable interest in industrial melanism, where insects take on darker

forms as camouflage in response to the blackening of trees because of industrial
pollution. “I believe … that Lancashire and Yorkshire melanism is the result
of the combined action of the ‘smoke,’ etc., plus humidity [thus making bark
darker], and that the intensity of Yorkshire and Lancashire melanism produced
by humidity and smoke, is intensified by ‘natural selection’ and ‘hereditary ten-
dency’ ” (Tutt 1890, 56). One enthusiast even told Darwin about this, although
he seems not to have taken it up.3 Then at the end of the century, W. F. R. Weldon
(1898) began doing groundbreaking studies on crab adaptations. In this he was
supported by the mathematical genius of Karl Pearson (1900)—​who made his
name as a statistician devising the chi-​squared test, among other innovations.
But generally it cannot be denied that, starting with Huxley himself, many
of the better-​known professional biologists as professional biologists were not
overly committed to the power of natural selection. In part, this was because they
could not see its full force. Huxley kept stressing that no one had yet artificially
made two different species. And in combination with this, no one seemed to
have set out to prove the critics wrong. Darwin himself seemed always to have
thought that the action of selection was too weak to show itself in human time.
You need thousands of years to see it in full action.4 In part, though—​and this

3
  My dear Sir,
The belief that I am about to relate something which may be of interest to you, must be my excuse
for troubling you with a letter.
Perhaps among the whole of the British Lepidoptera, no species varies more, according to the
locality in which it is found, than does that Geometer, Gnophos obscurata. They are almost black
on the New Forest peat; grey on limestone; almost white on the chalk near Lewes; and brown on
clay, and on the red soil of Herefordshire.
Do these variations point to the “survival of the fittest”? I think so. It was, therefore, with some
surprise that I took specimens as dark as any of those in the New Forest on a chalk slope; and
I have pondered for a solution. Can this be it?
It is a curious fact, in connexion with these dark specimens, that for the last quarter of a
century the chalk slope, on which they occur, has been swept by volumes of black smoke
from some lime-​kilns situated at the bottom:  the herbage, although growing luxuriantly, is
blackened by it.
I am told, too, that the very light specimens are now much less common at Lewes than formerly,
and that, for some few years, lime-​kilns have been in use there.
These are the facts I desire to bring to your notice.
I am, Dear Sir, Yours very faithfully,
A. B. Farn
Letter from Albert Brydges Farn on November 18, 1878 (Darwin Correspondence Project,
11747).
4
  Darwin introduced a full discussion of Bates’s work into the fourth edition of the Origin (1866),
although interestingly towards the end of the book. Perhaps this was a function of his Lyellian beliefs
  55

The Dar w inian Theor y 55

is the bigger part—​selection was a solution in search of a problem. The direction

of science before Darwin and after Darwin was just not in the Darwinian direc-
tion, meaning something that made adaptation fundamental and central.5 It was
homology—​the foundation of Germanic biology with its neoplatonic resonances—​
that was central. By looking at isomorphisms one could discern relationships. This
is what Darwin himself used in a massive study of barnacles that he performed be-
tween discovering natural selection and publishing on it. This is what was central to
the work of both Owen and Huxley—​in respects, their quarrels were a classic case
of what Freud was to call the “narcissism of small differences.” And it was what was
central to biology after Darwin, especially when people like the German biologist
Ernst Haeckel got involved (Richards 2008). It wasn’t that people weren’t doing
professional evolutionary biology but that it wasn’t Darwinian biology. Especially
after the huge numbers of spectacular fossils started to flood in from excavations in
the American West, the focus was less on causes and more on patterns and paths,
on what were known as “phylogenies”—​what was related to what, as in: “Are the
birds descended from the dinosaurs?” (Bowler 1996) Haeckel’s “biogenetic law” –​
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny –​was a great help here. 6
Causes therefore were something of a luxury item, but fortunately no one was
going to use them very much. They would be more tacked on after the work was
done. Huxley favored some kind of evolution by jumps, “saltationism.” Others,
particularly those who thought there was something to adaptation, were more in-
clined to the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. And yet a third

in the necessity of huge amounts of time for significant change, so even he was not entirely convinced
of the power of selection to have rapid and important effects. Also, paradoxically, as a professional
biologist, he himself was not very Darwinian.
5
  Amusingly but significantly Huxley (1893) actually denied that butterfly coloration could have
any biological significance.
6
  It is tempting therefore to say that the paradox is that while the professional scientists often
belittled natural selection, at first it was hobbyists—​amateur lepidopterists—​who were most aware
of and ready to turn to natural selection for explanations. This is true in part. Farn was a minor civil
servant, mainly notable as a sportsman, having shot thirty birds in thirty shots on the estate of Lord
Walsingham, thus establishing a record “which has probably never been equaled” (Salmon 2000,
176). Wallace was appreciated for his contributions, and in the 1870s for his work on geographical
distributions, but particularly thanks to his enthusiasm for spiritualism, he was always a bit of a fringe
figure. No one was prepared to give him a proper job and his entry to the Royal Society came late
(1893). Bates was now more a servant of the scientific community than a leading member. But this
characterization of those actually using natural selection in a scientific manner to explain change as
outside the central professional loop is only partially true. Given the appreciation of Weismann’s
work, not to mention home-​grown studies of people like Poulton and of Weismann’s translator, the
London-​based professor of organic chemistry and keen entomologist Raphael Meldola, it is better to
say that there were professional, selection-​based evolutionary studies but that they were a minority
interest in the general professional biological world, even in that (especially that) which was under-
standing classifications and lines of descent in an evolutionary manner.
56

56 Darwinism as Religion

group, particularly in America and particularly in the paleontological realm, fa-

vored a kind of momentum—╉orthogenesis—╉that carried organisms along, even
sometimes taking them over into nonadaptive dead ends. The bizarre snouts of
the titanotheres were thought to be a prime example. All of this meant that, with
the speculations about causes and the fact that too often phylogenetic specula-
tion collapsed into ignorance and contradiction, even putting selection on one
side, judged as professional science, evolutionary studies did not have very high
status and ambitious young biologists turned to other fields like cytology and
then a bit later genetics (Bateson 1922).

Darwinism as Popular Science

All of this has led some students of the period to speak of the “myth” of the
Darwinian Revolution (Bowler 1988)—╉itself an egregious myth of the worst
kind.7 This is clear even before we turn to the world of the creative writer, the
novelist, and the poet. Take Thomas Henry Huxley, who in respects is the key
player in our period, even more than Charles Darwin (Desmond 1997). He is
the man with energy, who is a brilliant teacher and administrator, creating and
working at the Royal School of Mines, plotting the move (in 1872) to the new
science complex in South Kensington. He is also collaborating with others
trying to bring Great Britain right into the nineteenth century—╉for instance,
his students were much involved in medical education—╉and called upon and
respected for his abilities and his general passion to improve the lot of his fellow
country men and women. It is true that, as a professional scientist and educator,
he was not much of a Darwinian. Apart from not being able to use selection very
much in his own science, he could not really see how to use it practically. He

7
╛╛All-╉too-╉typical is Lightman (2010) who argues that, as far as the general public in Britain and
America was concerned, when it came to evolution, “Darwin was just one author among many com-
peting for their attention and patronage” (20). To make his case, seeking things that separate off gen-
eral opinion from that of Darwin, Lightman picks out Lamarckian inheritance, biological progress,
and a desire to see evolution in a God-╉infused manner. Reinforcing his conclusion, Lightman argues
that natural selection is basically absent from the general view. To which one can only respond to all
of these charges, read this book. Darwin was far more a man of his age than Lightman realizes, and
natural selection was known to all and sexual selection even more. Remember, there was no film or
television in the nineteenth century. Emma Darwin read fiction aloud to Charles after lunch every
day. They were not alone. If you want popular opinion, that is where you should look (Holmes 2012).
In a way, more interesting than refuting the false vision is trying to understand the popularity of such
misconceptions. One suspects that, even today, many find the Darwinian story unsettling. This is
certainly true in the philosophical world, with deniers both religious, Alvin Plantinga (2011), and
non-╉religious, Thomas Nagel (2012). As we shall see, this is true in the literary world also. So why
not historians of science?
  57

The Dar w inian Theor y 57

realized that if you are going to get science supported and let it flourish you have
got to find customers prepared to pay good cash—​that was his interest in medi-
cal education (doctors) and why he sat on the London School Board (teach-
ers)—​and that was why he could push anatomy and embryology. That was also
why in his huge course on biology of 165 lectures there was less than one lecture
on evolution and less than ten minutes on natural selection.
But it didn’t mean that he thought that natural selection was irrelevant to
human nature and even less did he think it was not worth talking about. In the
public realm, night after night he spoke to working men’s clubs and the like, or
debated with other intellectuals (including bishops and cardinals), and wrote
essay after essay for the popular press or the solid, middle-​class journals that
throve in that literate society. And natural selection was right there. From the
start: “How far ‘natural selection’ suffices for the production of species remains
to be seen. Few can doubt that, if not the whole cause, it is a very important
factor in that operation; and that it must play a great part in the sorting out of va-
rieties into those which are transitory and those which are permanent” (Huxley
[1859] 1893).
Most revealing is the talk Huxley gave right at the end of his career, a decade
after the death of Darwin and but a couple of years before he himself died. He
was discussing ethics and why it is that we cannot simply deduce right and
wrong from the processes of nature. But to get to this point in the discussion, he
had to admit that organisms—​humans in particular—​are faced with a struggle
for existence and that there is a consequent selection for various adaptations.

Man, the animal, in fact, has worked his way to the headship of the sen-
tient world, and has become the superb animal which he is, in virtue of
his success in the struggle for existence. The conditions having been of a
certain order, man's organization has adjusted itself to them better than
that of his competitors in the cosmic strife. In the case of mankind, the
self-​assertion, the unscrupulous seizing upon all that can be grasped,
the tenacious holding of all that can be kept, which constitute the es-
sence of the struggle for existence, have answered. For his successful
progress, throughout the savage state, man has been largely indebted
to those qualities which he shares with the ape and the tiger; his excep-
tional physical organization; his cunning, his sociability, his curiosity,
and his imitativeness; his ruthless and ferocious destructiveness when
his anger is roused by opposition. (Huxley 1893, 51–​52)

Huxley now wanted to argue that ruthlessness and the like are not particularly
moral qualities and that we must learn to control them, but this is not the writ-
ing of a man who has turned his back on the struggle for existence and natural
58

58 Darwinism as Religion

selection in human evolution. The whole point is that that is what did cause us
and now we show the effects.
Charles Darwin was faced with evolution as a pseudoscience. He wanted to
upgrade it, I very much suspect, to the status of a professional science like phys-
ics and chemistry. He did not succeed in doing this, at least not a universally
practiced, professional evolutionary science in the Darwinian mode, meaning
one that made natural selection central. But if Huxley is anything to go on, he
did make for a Darwinian evolutionary popular science—​one of the public
domain.8 Do note, though, unlike pre-​Origin evolutionary thinking, it was not
rejected and despised and found threatening by the scientific elite. They may
not have wanted to use selection as a tool, but they certainly accepted it for what
they thought it was. Do note also that as something in the public domain, al-
though evolutionary thinking was no longer simply the epiphenomenon of a
particular philosophy or world view (Progress), it was still perfectly legitimate to
introduce social and other values and link them to the discussion. That is what a
popular science is all about. Darwin himself realized all this and in respects took
what was on offer. Certainly, compared to the Origin of Species—​almost pain-
fully forced in its exclusion of social or cultural values—​the Descent of Man is
written in a more popular way with greater willingness to introduce social values.
Dealing with humans, of course, this is bound to happen to a certain extent, but
Darwin saw the opportunity and embraced it.9

8
  We shall see later that having an adequate theory of heredity was a key factor in making evolu-
tionary studies into professional science. But without getting into counterfactual history, which is
always dicey, my sense is that (as noted) its absence at the time of the Origin and the Descent was not
the key to the indifference towards and sometimes rejection of selection in the professional world
and the consequent move to popular science. It is true that some astute critics pointed out that with-
out an adequate theory of heredity, it was hard to see how selection could be effective (Hull 1973).
One suspects, however, that while this may have reinforced the doubts of those inclined to turn away
from selection anyway, no one turned from selection purely on this account. Later in the century,
Weldon started to do very sophisticated selection studies without a proper understanding of hered-
ity. The fact is that most professional scientists were just not looking for a selection-​based profes-
sional science. They were keen on a selection-​based popular science.
9
  Although people like Huxley were pushing a popular-​professional science division, and basi-
cally won, many at the time (being excluded from the professional ranks) denied entirely that there
was or could be such a division (Lightman 2009, 1, 4). Others were contesting the very idea (and
consequent authority) of professional science (DeWitt 2013). This reinforces my point about being
uncomfortable with simply saying that selection was taken up as a tool of science only by or mainly
by amateurs. Where do you put someone like James W. Tutt, writer of popular books like A Natural
History of the British Lepidoptera. A Text-​book for Students and Collectors (1908) and founder of the
Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation? Many of the contributors to the journal make their
livings in other fields, as did someone like Meldola who was a professor of chemistry, and yet the so-
phisticated understanding of Tutt and his contributors makes one uncomfortable with simply label-
ing them amateurs, any more than one would so type Darwin who never held a paid post in his life.
╇ 59

Reception

Thomas Hardy (1840–╉1928), writing of “this strange message Darwin brings,”

summed it up nicely.

We all are one with creeping things;

And apes and men
Blood-╉brethren,
And likewise reptile forms with stings.
(Hardy 1994, 842, written in the 1920s)

So turn now to the creative writers. How did they react to Darwinism? Was
Hardy the exception or the norm? Did the poets and novelists accept it? Did
they understand it? Did they modify it? Did they clarify it? In what sense did
they contribute to the status of Darwinism as a popular science and make us very
wary of sloshing around terms like “myth”?

Reception: Natural Selection
Charles Darwin himself was a known figure, the author of the popular Voyage
of the Beagle, and even though by the time of the Origin he had for many years
been tucked away in the Kent village of Downe, folk were aware that for long he
had labored over the classification of barnacles. To such an extent that a popular
novelist (Edward Bulwer Lytton, in What Will He Do with It? published a year
before the Origin) could make fun of Darwin’s efforts: thus an announcement in
the window of a shopkeeper in a provincial town.

GATESBORO’ ATHENIEUM
AND LITERARY INSTITUTE.
LECTURE ON CONCHOLOGY.
BY PROFESSOR LONG.
Author of “Researches into the Natural History of Limpets.”

59
60

60 Darwinism as Religion

One fears that the professor’s audience was mainly a captive group of girls from
the local school. The mayor, wanting to improve the literary standards of his
town, has presented to the local library the professor’s two-​volume tome on the
subject. The shopkeeper, having conveyed this information to a curious cus-
tomer, “mechanically resumed the task of cutting those leaves, which, had the
volumes reached the shelves of the library uncut, would have so remained to the
crack of doom.” Even thus prepared for readers, their wait will be long and lonely.
After the Origin, the tone changes. Mrs. Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866),
set around 1830, has a thoroughly attractive naturalist hero, Roger Hamley, by the
author’s own account modeled on Darwin (Litvack 2004). The novelist knows
her science, although her Darwin-​held views are diametrically opposed to the real
Darwin. Roger is invited to meet “M. Geoffroi St. H—​, whose views on certain
subjects Roger had been advocating” (301). For background, Geoffroy St. Hilaire
(as we would spell it) was a French comparative anatomist, supporter of evolu-
tion and opponent of Cuvier, albeit inclined to Germanic-​type thinking about
archetypes and hence opposed to the adaptationism of Cuvier and, of course,
Darwin. Mrs. Gaskell knew Darwin and was distantly related to him, so this might
have been an in-​joke. The important thing is that in her story Mrs. Gaskell made
Roger a serious and appreciated supporter of evolution, long before it was fash-
ionable in England.1
What of evolution through natural selection? It is there, through the whole
period. Expectedly, Dickens is immediately sensitive, having Pip the hero of
Great Expectations say of his five dead siblings, that they “gave up trying to get
a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle” ([1860] 1948, 1).2 Just an
aside comment, but it was published first in December 1860, showing that the
Malthus-​Darwin theme is right up there in popular consciousness. Dickens him-
self would have known all about Darwin’s theory because in the weekly maga-
zine he edited, All the Year Round (circulation c100,000), he carried two articles

  Debrabant (2002) perceptively suggests that there is change of tone also from Gaskell’s earlier
1

novels. In this post-​Origin world, the superintendence of a benevolent deity is entirely gone and the
thoroughly amoral but more forceful—​although, to be fair, wonderfully dreadful—​heroine’s step-
mother, Mrs. Gibson, thrives to the end of the novel without divine retribution. Henson (2003) sug-
gests that Gaskell was already on the way to a Darwinian world before the Origin was published. This
is obviously true in some senses—​North and South showed that—​but there is in Wives and Daughters
a new sense of social change, a move to the world of Thomas Henry Huxley. Roger starts the novel as
the unappreciated, second son of a country squire but ends on his own merits as a respected London
scientist (Hughes 2007). Although set in early times, the novel reflects a power shift in the 1860s
back from the North—​the setting of the earlier novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South
(1855)—​to London (Uglow 1993, 586).
2
  Dickens probably drew on Darwin’s work on barnacles as inspiration for his savage attack on
the British civil service in Little Dorrit, starting serialization in 1855. Like real crustacea, the Barnacle
family, running the Circumlocution Office, fasten themselves parasitically on the ship of state, ben-
efiting themselves only and slowing down the proper functioning of everything else (Smith 1999).
  61

R ece ption 61

in mid-​1860 and another early in 1861 that discussed the Origin and natural se-
lection carefully (Anon. 1860a, 1860b, 1861).3

How, asks Mr. Darwin, … have all these exquisite adaptations of one part
of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one
distinct organic being to another, been perfected? He answers, they are so
perfected by what he terms Natural Selection —​the better chance which a
better organised creature has of surviving its fellows —​so termed in order
to mark its relation to Man's power of selection. Man, by selection in the
breeds of his domestic animals and the seedlings of his horticultural pro-
ductions, can certainly effect great results, and can adapt organic beings to
his own uses, through the accumulation of slight but useful variations given
to him by the hand of Nature. But Natural Selection is a power incessantly
ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as
the works of Nature are to those of Art. Natural Selection, therefore, accord-
ing to Mr. Darwin —​not independent creations —​is the method through
which the Author of Nature has elaborated the providential fitness of His
works to themselves and to all surrounding circumstances. (Anon. 1860a)

The author, David Thomas Ansted (1814–​1880), was a professional geolo-

gist and long-​time acquaintance of Darwin. It is stressed that there is nothing
to cause worry for the religious, and the status of Darwin as a scientist and his
worth as a human being are likewise strongly underlined. Although the pieces
are ostensibly agnostic about Darwin’s work, opponents are referred to as
“timid” and overall the sentiment is very positive. “We are no longer to look at
an organic being as a savage looks at a ship—​as at something wholly beyond his
comprehension; we are to regard every production of nature as one which has
had a history; we are to contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the
summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the
same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing
up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders, of numerous
workmen” (1860b, 299). One doubts that Dickens was surprised by any of this
for it was not a one-​off by the author. In a book Ansted published later in 1860,
Geological Gossip, the treatment is even more favorable.4

3
  Even as early as 1848 Dickens was showing enthusiasm for the Vestiges of Chambers (Fielding
1996). He hovered over every word written in All the Year Round, and so it is interesting that although
he was a good friend of Richard Owen (Sage 1999), he did not prevent the author from being very
critical of Owen’s thinking on the species question.
4
  Darwin was a little disappointed in the first, brief piece. “There is notice of me in penultimate
nor of ‘All the Year Round’, but not worth consulting; chiefly a well-​done hash of my own words.—​”
(Darwin 1985–​, 8, 254, letter to Charles Lyell, June 14, 1860). He was much more positive about the
treatment in Geological Gossip. “I want to express my admiration at the clear and correct manner in
which you have given a sketch of natural selection” (8, 446, letter to D. T. Ansted, October 27, 1860).
62

62 Darwinism as Religion

And so the coverage continued, in the popular press and in journals like
Punch, with its well-​known cartoons.5 Taking an early example of Darwin’s ideas
in fiction, the Cornhill Magazine rivaled All the Year Round as the literary maga-
zine of the 1860s and 1870s—​the first issue sold over 100,000 copies. Edited
initially by the novelist William Thackeray, it published (among others) Framley
Parsonage by Anthony Trollope, Wives and Daughters by Mrs. Gaskell, Romola
by George Eliot, and Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. It was read
widely. In 1862 it carried a little skit by one E.  S. Dixon,6 A Vision of Animal
Existences, about a man who goes off to the zoo one hot summer’s day and who
meets up with a couple of very strange people, a woman by the name of “Natural
Selection,” with the occupation “Originator of Species”—​“ Was the woman mad?
Yours is a bold assumption, madam!”—​and a boy, presumably her son, “Struggle
for Existence”—​“As he looked me in the face, I saw that his eyes were luminous,
like a cat’s in the dark; his canine teeth were short strong tusks; his fingernails
were retractile talons; his tunic was the colour of arterial blood” (313).
They take him round the zoo, showing him that talk of miraculous origins of
species is simply false and that there is clear evidence of descent with modifica-
tion. “The swimming-​bladder of the fish is the first sketch of the apparatus that
was gradually perfected into lungs. There are fish with gills which breathe the
air dissolved in the water at the same time that they also breathe free air in their
swim-​bladders. Believe me, sir, all vertebrate animals having true lungs have de-
scended, by ordinary generation, from an ancient prototype furnished with a
swimming-​bladder” (314). And don’t be conned into thinking that the Earth is
but 6,000 years old. “Read Sir Charles Lyell, and make your mind easy that the
world is considerably older than that.” What of causes?

“See, now, how we work!” she continued, with less calmness than was
habitual to her. She walked through a herd of antelopes: every individ-
ual that was not agile to escape the lion, swift to travel to fresh pastures

Ansted was in Darwin’s debt, literally, for help given to an unsuccessful business venture, but there
is no reason to think his scientific appreciation was other than genuine. That said, especially given
that a year or two later Darwin basically forgave Ansted his debt—​a few hundred pounds, nothing to
Darwin but enough for a middle-​class family to live on for a year—​it is a lovely example of how the
Darwinians furthered their cause. The examples of Ansted and Bates and Müller show that Darwin
himself did his bit.
  Ellegård (1958), still in major respects the best introduction to the reception of the Origin by
5

the general public, makes the point about how quickly word about the Origin and its contents was
spread about. The pieces in All the Year Round were not unique. Ellegård also makes the point, made
in the last chapter, that in respects it was the general public who grabbed onto Darwin’s ideas before
the professionals; although, as you have seen, I would qualify this.
6
  Edmund Saul Dixon, born the same year as Darwin, was a parson in Norfolk from 1842–​1893.
He was an expert on the breeding of poultry. Darwin had read one of his books and in 1848 they had
  63

R ece ption 63

when the old ones were exhausted, robust to endure the perpendicular
rays of the sun, and the scorching wind of the desert —​she touched
with her golden weapon, and it fell dead! All that she left surviving
were the very few most agile, swiftest, and robustest antelopes, to repre-
sent that numerous herd.  (317)

The son does much the same. He deprives the wolves of their food. “As the pangs
of hunger became sharper and sharper, the ravenous brutes set to devouring each
other, the vigorous destroying the old, the healthy tearing the feeble limb from
limb, till none were left but a single pair, male and female, the gauntest, savagest,
and most powerful of all that savage group” (317). Get on now with reproduc-
ing, says this horrible child. Have offspring as “wolfish” as you.
Madame Selection recognizes that what she is offering is a cold and heart-
less view of nature. But if that is the way things are, then that is the way things
are. “Nature is relentless and inflexible,” she said, returning toward the refresh-
ment room. “She will not change her laws to humour the preconceived ideas,
the caprices, the blunders, and the follies of men” (317). And if that means that
strength is to prevail in the future, rather than more desirable attributes, then so
be it. Of course, this is all as Darwin says it is. Who can say he is absolutely right?
“Still the book has given me more comprehensive views than I had before …
Here we are offered a rational and a logical explanation of many things which
hitherto have been explained very unsatisfactorily, if at all. It is conscientiously
reasoned and has been patiently written. If it be not the truth, I cannot help re-
specting it as sincere effort after truth” (318).
This is all a little bit silly, but perhaps that is the point. Here we are, a couple
of years after the Origin, in a very popular magazine that is going to fall into the
hands of literally hundreds of thousands of good respectable Victorians, and there
are Darwin’s ideas—​unforced, unambiguous, no special pleading. Darwin may not
have the whole truth, but this folks is basically where we are at today, and you had
better get used to it.7 Obviously at least part of what was important here was that

a brief, friendly exchange as Darwin sought information on the workings of artificial selection. Dixon
wrote often for periodicals on a variety of subjects, including many pieces for Household Words, the
predecessor of All the Year Round.
7
  Even earlier, in May 1861 appearing in another popular magazine (Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine—​later to serialize Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness), is a much-​reprinted poem by a
Scottish Judge, Lord (Charles) Neave, a parody of a popular song (“For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”).
It links Erasmus Darwin with Charles Darwin. First the grandfather:

The original Monad, our great-​great-​grandsire,

To little or nothing at first did aspire;
But at last to have offspring it took a desire,
Which nobody can deny.
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64 Darwinism as Religion

Darwin and Lyell were very respectable members of their society—╉the sort of men
whose ideas could be brought into the drawing room and that your wives and daugh-
ters could discuss and understand. This was not the stuff of French novels. You can
laugh all you like about limpets, but Charles Darwin was a man of real substance—╉
an exciting explorer in his youth and a dedicated man of science in his prime. The
Victorians recognized and appreciated quality when they saw it, and Darwin and
Lyell were men of quality. Even Huxley, though he loved to shock and ride the edge,
was seen as both brilliant and of massive social conscience. It all paid off.

Exploring the Implications
Evolution as such became a given. Natural selection as a force of nature contin-
ued to be a theme of interest and importance right down through the century

Then the grandson:

From reptiles and fishes to birds we ascend,

And quadrupeds next their dimensions extend,
Till we rise up to monkeys and men—╉where we end,
Which nobody can deny.
Some creatures are bulky, some creatures are small,
As nature sends food for the few or for all;
And the weakest, we know, ever go to the wall,
Which nobody can deny.

Although there are certainly hints here of natural selection, the poem stresses Lamarckian
inheritance.

A deer with a neck that is longer by half

Than the rest of its family (try not to laugh),
By stretching and stretching, becomes a Giraffe,
Which nobody can deny.

Interestingly, it anticipates what we shall see was a worry later in the nineteenth century, that bad
behavior is playing with fire.

But I’m sadly afraid if we do not take care,

A relapse to low life may our prospects impair;
So of beastly propensities let us beware,
Which nobody can deny.

There is the possibility that we might decline back to the primitive origins from whence we came.

Their lofty position our children might lose,

And, reduced to all-╉fours, must then narrow their views;
Which would wholly unfit them for filling our shoes,
Which nobody can deny.

We could end up as Monads all over again.

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R ece ption 65

and into the next. Expectedly and satisfyingly some of the great creative thinkers
took up the idea and worked with it—​in ways that were in Darwin’s theorizing
but that were not developed fully by him or by others around him. For instance,
although Darwin realized that selection is a comparative process—​it is not a
question of absolute speed when running from the bear but of being faster than
the chap next to you—​he never really came to grips with this in his thinking
about humans. Winners for him really were better in some external sense. In his
powerful novel, New Grub Street, published about ten years after Darwin’s death,
George Gissing (1857–​1903) dealt with selection in a really illuminating and
sensitive fashion. He tells the story of two young men—​Edwin Reardon and
Jasper Milvain—​trying to make their ways in the London literary world around
1880. Edwin is a really gifted writer but will make no compromises to vulgar
taste. Things do not go well, externally or at home with his wife. Jasper—​well, let
him speak for himself.

“You have no faith. But just understand the difference between a man
like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist;
I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather,
he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I—​well, you may say
that at present I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my
business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius,
who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters
is your skillful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets;
when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with some-
thing new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources
of income.” (Gissing [1891] 1976, 38–​39)

In the end, Edwin dies—​as people are wont to do in Victorian novels—​and

Jasper gets Edwin’s wife and the editorship of a prized journal. They are both
pretty pleased with the outcome. “Amy sprang up and threw her arms about her
husband’s neck, uttering a cry of delight.” Jasper is appreciative. “I owe my for-
tune to you, dear girl. Now the way is smooth!” (549)
From afar, it is difficult not to write with humorous condescension about this
sort of stuff. But the story is a lot more subtle than one might think on first read-
ing. For a start, Gissing is fully aware of the nature of selection. There is a ten-
dency to think that selection is always “red in tooth and claw,” and it is true that
there is some celebrated fiction of this ilk.

His teeth closed on Spitz's left fore leg. There was a crunch of break-
ing bone, and the white dog faced him on three legs. Thrice he tried to
knock him over, then repeated the trick and broke the right fore leg.
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66 Darwinism as Religion

Despite the pain and helplessness, Spitz struggled madly to keep up.
He saw the silent circle, with gleaming eyes, lolling tongues, and sil-
very breaths drifting upward, closing in upon him as he had seen similar
circles close in upon beaten antagonists in the past. Only this time he
was the one who was beaten.
There was no hope for him. Buck was inexorable. Mercy was a thing
reserved for gentler climes. (London [1903] 1990, 24)

I do not give this example to mock it. The writing is incredibly powerful. I am
not at all surprised that there are over thirty—​thirty!—​editions of Jack London’s
Call of the Wild available today. But subtle it is not.8 Gissing is more discerning.
He knew that Darwin had stressed that the struggle is not necessarily one com-
peting organism directly against another but rather with the environment. “Two
canine animals in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other
which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle
for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be depen-
dent on the moisture” (Darwin 1859, 62). One plant is being selected rather
than another, but because it does better in the environment and not because
it beats out the other directly. So with our two writers. Gissing also saw that in
many respects Edwin is better than Jasper—​certainly when it comes to literary
talent. So Gissing saw that success is not a matter of climbing some absolute
chain of perfection.9 At the same time, however, Gissing was not about to sell
Jasper short. There are hints that success is amoral, and that in the Darwinian
world it is all a matter of being tougher and pushier than the competitor, for
people as for books.

Speaking seriously, we know that a really good book will more likely
than not receive fair treatment from two or three reviewers; yes, but
also more likely than not it will be swamped in the flood of literature
that pours forth week after week, and won't have attention fixed long
enough upon it to establish its repute. The struggle for existence among
books is nowadays as severe as among men. If a writer has friends con-
nected with the press, it is the plain duty of those friends to do their

  London (1876–​1916) read the Origin and Herbert Spencer’s First Principles in high school, car-
8

ried a copy of the Origin with him on his travels, and always spoke favorably of Darwin (Berkove 2004).
9
  American author Edith Wharton (1862–​1937) makes the same point in a delightful short story,
“The Descent of Man,” published in 1904. A learned biology professor writes a pastiche of his disci-
pline, filled chock-​a-​block full of heavy-​duty reflections and pseudoscientific speculations. Naturally,
it becomes a bestseller and, seduced by the fame and money, our professor turns full time to this kind
of literary activity.
╇ 67

R ece ption 67

utmost to help him. What matter if they exaggerate, or even lie? The
simple, sober truth has no chance whatever of being listened to, and it's
only by volume of shouting that the ear of the public is held. What use
is it to [an author] if his work struggles to slow recognition ten years
hence? Besides, as I say, the growing flood of literature swamps every-
thing but works of primary genius. If a clever and conscientious book
does not spring to success at once, there's precious small chance that it
will survive. (493)

But there is more to the story than that. Jasper may not be as gifted as Edwin, but
he has a vitality that Edwin does not have—╉more than some of his girlfriends too.

“You hear?”
Marian had just caught the far-╉off sound of the train. She looked ea-
gerly, and in a few moments saw it approaching. The front of the engine
blackened nearer and nearer, coming on with dread force and speed.
A  blinding rush, and there burst against the bridge a great volley of
sunlit steam. Milvain and his companion ran to the opposite parapet,
but already the whole train had emerged, and in a few seconds it had
disappeared round a sharp curve. The leafy branches that grew out over
the line swayed violently backwards and forwards in the perturbed air.
“If I were ten years younger,” said Jasper, laughing, “I should say that
was jolly! It enspirits me. It makes me feel eager to go back and plunge
into the fight again.”
“Upon me it has just the opposite effect,” fell from Marian, in very
low tones. (63)

As we know, Edwin was to find marital happiness elsewhere.10

Reception: Lamarckism
Expectedly, not everyone was strictly Darwinian. I  stress again that this does
not make for a non-╉Darwinian Revolution or a Darwinian non-╉Revolution.
Everyone is thinking and arguing within a framework set by Darwin—╉questions
posed by Darwin—╉even though they may explicitly or implicitly disagree with

10
╛╛I thus agree with Cleto (1992) against many who write on Gissing, uneasy with the nature of
his “winners” and his “losers,” feeling that he favors dross over gold. The critics miss the point. In
Gissing’s post-╉Darwinian world—╉“intellectual powers and energy”—╉vitality is a virtue. Not the only
one, but significant.
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68 Darwinism as Religion

Darwin’s own thinking—​with Darwin’s answers. Early Christianity housed a va-

riety of opinions, for instance, about the relationship between God and Jesus,
and these were resolved only at the Council of Nicaea, in a.d. 325, and followed
up with further meetings like the Council of Chalcedon, a.d. 451. It would be
ludicrous to say that before these meetings there was no Christian Revolution,
as one might say. Likewise with Darwin. And this is not just evolution but natu-
ral selection also. Apart from the fact that just about everyone accepted some
degree of natural selection (and perhaps even more of sexual selection), natural
selection was as it were the default position, the null hypothesis. If you wanted
to get more than Darwin gave, perhaps some kind of built-​in progression as Asa
Gray wanted, then you had to work against and beyond what Darwin had given
you. Natural selection always loomed there in the background.
Mrs. Gatty, although opposed to evolution and thinking (if it were true) that
it is all a matter of Lamarckian inheritance, shows that something big is going on.
She is part of the revolution because she is reacting against it. Analogously and
more positively we see this move into a Darwinian world perfectly in the case
of someone like Charles Kingsley. It would be as ludicrous as the Christian case
to say that he was not an ardent Darwinian, or to deny that it was Darwin who
changed him—​as incidentally was also true of Huxley—​from a strong opposi-
tion to evolution in the mid-​1850s to great enthusiasm. He wrote to Darwin and
he went around telling everybody that you could be an even better Christian if
you were a Darwinian! A point gratefully noted by the author of the Origin of
Species. “A celebrated author and divine has written to me that ‘he has gradually
learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He
created a few original forms capable of self-​development into other and needful
forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids
caused by the action of His laws’ ” (Darwin 1861, 515).
So grant the general case about there being a Darwinian Revolution. This
said, although he made a big thing about his conversion to Darwinism, in
the Water Babies Charles Kingsley (like Mrs. Gatty) sounds as Lamarckian
as he does Darwinian (meaning selection).11 Reverting to Kingsley, Mrs.
Bedonebyasyoudid shows Tom the history of the degeneration of humans into
gorillas. Some of it sounds Darwinian. Living up in trees to escape lions, both
natural and sexual selection come into play. “Yes, they are getting very strong

11
  Remember, while he always thought selection by far the most important agent of change,
Darwin accepted the inheritance of acquired characteristics. With few exceptions—​perhaps Alfred
Russel Wallace, later the already-​mentioned, German selection-​enthusiast August Weismann—​for
most people it was a question of trade-​off between selection and Lamarckism and assigning propor-
tionate importance, so Kingsley was not so very out of line here.
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R ece ption 69

now; for the ladies will not marry any but the very strongest and fiercest gentle-
men, who can help them up the trees out of the lions’ way.” But other factors also
come into play.

“Why,” said Tom, “they are growing no better than savages.”

“And look how ugly they are all getting,” said Ellie.
“Yes; when people live on poor vegetables instead of roast beef and
plum-​pudding, their jaws grow large, and their lips grow coarse, like the
poor Paddies who eat potatoes.” (Kingsley [1863] 2008, 133)

Then later:

“They are grown so stupid now, that they can hardly think: for none of
them have used their wits for many hundred years. They have almost
forgotten, too, how to talk. For each stupid child forgot some of the
words it heard from its stupid parents, and had not wits enough to make
fresh words for itself. Beside, they are grown so fierce and suspicious
and brutal that they keep out of each other’s way, and mope and sulk in
the dark forests, never hearing each other’s voice, till they have forgot-
ten almost what speech is like. I am afraid they will all be apes very
soon, and all by doing only what they liked.” (134–​135)

Later in the century we have Rudyard Kipling (1865–​1936) in the Second

Jungle Book (1895). There is a good dash of recapitulation—​“ ‘Mowgli the Frog
have I been,’ said he to himself; ‘Mowgli the Wolf have I said that I am. Now
Mowgli the Ape must I be before I am Mowgli the Buck. At the end I shall be
Mowgli the Man. Ho!’ ” ([1895] 2000, 332)—​and then Lamarckism (MacDuffie
2014). The wolf pack is being threatened by the Red Dogs. Mowgli is up a tree
baiting the leader. The dog leaps and Mowgli grabs him by the scruff of his
neck. Everything shakes and Mowgli almost falls. “But he never loosed his grip,
and inch by inch he hauled the beast, hanging like a drowned jackal, up on the
branch. With his left hand he reached for his knife and cut off the red, bushy tail,
flinging the dhole back to earth again” (334–​335). This, apparently, is going to
have lasting effects. “ ‘Nay, but consider, wise rat of the Dekkan. There will now
be many litters of little tailless red dogs, yea, with raw red stumps that sting when
the sand is hot. Go home, Red Dog, and cry that an ape has done this. Ye will not
go? Come, then, with me, and I will make you very wise!’ ” (335) Kipling wrote
of Darwin’s writings. “I’ve been trying once more to plough through the Descent
of Man and every fiber … of my body revolted against it” (Kipling 2009, 114).
Apparently so.
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70 Darwinism as Religion

The most detailed and influential writer in this mode was the novelist Samuel
Butler (1835–​1902). Initially he was a huge Darwin fan. His satire Erewhon
(1872)—​more or less “nowhere” spelled backward—​has a clever take on natu-
ral selection applied to machines (this was written around 1862)—​something
that has led to some rather ponderous philosophizing about anticipating the age
of computers. The tale of a land where everything is topsy-​turvy—​sick people
are sent to jail and criminals are treated as if unwell—​a visitor (who is the nar-
rator) sees that there are no machines. Apparently they have all been destroyed
lest they take over the world. “How many men at this hour are living in a state of
bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to
the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are
gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who
are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls
to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?” (202) They may even end up
with consciousness and where would we be then? “Assume for the sake of argu-
ment that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what
strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty
million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to
nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?” (192)
There were those who thought Butler was ribbing Darwin, but he insisted
(truthfully) that he was paying homage and seeing where the ideas led. However,
then in the 1870s he turned against Darwin and took up with some vehemence
a form of Lamarckian evolution through acquired characteristics, especially a
form where inherited memory pays a key role. He wrote several books on the
topic. Apparently, you can only change incrementally, bit by bit. Too much
change—​beyond 2 or 3%—​takes you out of focus. However:

As long as no change exceeds this percentage, and as long, also, as fresh

change does not supervene till the preceding one is well established,
there seems no limit to the amount of modification which may be ac-
cumulated in the course of generations—​provided, of course, always,
that the modification continues to be in conformity with the instinctive
habits and physical development of the organism in their collective ca-
pacity. (Butler [1887] 1920, 72–​73)

Butler then tried out these ideas fictionally, combining a deeply proto-​Freudian
view of his own very dysfunctional family—​his father was a sanctimonious
brute—​with his Lamarckian evolutionism. The Way of All Flesh did not appear
in print until 1903 (after Butler’s death), but apparently it was written in the
decade after Erewhon appeared. Telling the story of the Pontifex family through
five generations, we see the gradual rise up to the third-​generation Theobald, a
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R ece ption 71

(Church of England) clergyman. An appalling father—​“He had had no idea how

great a nuisance a baby was” (77)—​the son, Ernest, is the hero of the book. He
too becomes a clergyman, but loses his faith, ends up in prison for assaulting a
woman whom he mistakenly thought was a prostitute, then makes his way as a
tailor—​shades of Sartor Resartus and/​or Alton Locke?—​marries a former house-
maid, who turns out to be married already, fathers two children, the wonder
being that they do not both suffer from extreme fetal alcohol syndrome given
the mother’s drinking, and then conveniently inherits a fortune on his twenty-​
eighth birthday.
The main theme is that the trip to prison had no lasting bad effects. It jolted
him out of his complacency, helped him break entirely from his father—​“There
are orphanages,” he exclaimed to himself, “for children who have lost their
parents—​oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who
have not yet lost them?” (257)—​and then the positive features acquired by his
ancestors came to the fore and Ernest was a far better man than would have been
expected given the negativity of the father.

If a man is to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, he must do so, not only
as a little child, but as a little embryo, or rather as a little zoosperm—​
and not only this, but as one that has come of zoosperms which have
entered into the Kingdom of Heaven before him for many generations.
Accidents which occur for the first time, and belong to the period since
a man’s last birth, are not, as a general rule, so permanent in their effects,
though of course they may sometimes be so. (241)

Interestingly, although perceptively—​“Of course he read Mr. Darwin’s books

as fast as they came out and adopted evolution as an article of faith” (317)—​
Ernest realizes that, like his forefathers, he is more a man of action (starting a
successful clothes shop) than a man of the intellect. The same is true of his own
son, who becomes the owner-​operator of a river steamer—​“ he has a fair sense of
humour and abundance of common sense, but his instinct is clearly a practical
one” (349).
For the first half of the twentieth century, Butler was incredibly highly
regarded—​in part obviously because like Lytton Strachey (1918) he was de-
bunking the Victorians—​but also because people liked the nonreligious direc-
tion they found in his evolutionizing. William Bateson (1909), first professor of
genetics at Cambridge, praised him (probably more to irritate the Darwinians
with whom he had ongoing battles), Karl Popper (1974), who had his own dif-
ficulties with accepting natural selection, was also given to praise, and George
Bernard Shaw was an enthusiast. The playwright absolutely loathed what he saw
as the blind, uncaring materialism of Darwin and his acolytes like Thomas Henry
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72 Darwinism as Religion

Huxley. “What damns Darwinian Natural Selection as a creed is that it takes hope
out of evolution, and substitutes a paralyzing fatalism which is utterly discourag-
ing. As Butler put it, it banishes Mind from the universe” (Shaw 1921, c).

Reception: Spencerianism
Samuel Butler’s reputation has not lasted, unlike that of George Eliot, whose
Middlemarch is considered by many to be the greatest novel in the English lan-
guage.12 As it happens, she and her consort, George Lewes, were a little grumpy
when the Origin appeared, rather putting it down: “We began Darwin’s work
on “The Origin of Species” tonight. It seems to be not well written: though full
of interesting matter, it is not impressive, from want of luminous and orderly
presentation” (Harris and Johnson 1998, 82). Whatever she may have thought,
Henry James (1873) said: “Middlemarch is too often an echo of Messrs. Darwin
and Huxley” (428).13 And it is true that evolution is a major structuring theme
and this is the world opened by Darwin and Huxley. The story is of the char-
acters in an English provincial town, Middlemarch, between about 1830 and
1832 (with a postscript on the futures of the main actors). There are seven or
eight major characters and about the same number of minor figures. Dorothea
Brooke, around twenty when we meet her, beautiful and idealistic, fairly well off
in her own right, is the leading character and the story traces her marriage to a
dry old clergyman Mr. Casaubon, who is engaged in a work of scholarship that
we learn in fairly short order is hopelessly outdated before it is finished. Will
Ladislaw, a young artist distantly related to Casaubon, becomes the main rival for
Dorothea’s affections, and they end up married after Casaubon dies. The second
main couple is the doctor, Tertius Lydgate, who married Rosamond Vincy, not
a happy marriage because he wants to make his name as a medical scientist and
she only wants the conventional trappings of a middle-╉class wife and mother.
Then there is Rosamond’s brother, Fred, who is a bit of a layabout, but because
of his love for Mary Garth is prepared to take a step down socially and go to
work for Mary’s father, Caleb, who is a builder and estate manager. Fleshing out
the story we have Dorothea’s sister, Celia, married to Sir James Chettam (who
first wanted Dorothea), the sisters’ uncle, Mr. Brooke, a local businessman, Mr.

12
╛╛I  am sure I  am not alone in finding her last major novel, Daniel Deronda, more interesting
and challenging. In part, this is because it is wrestling more deeply with the Darwinian challenge.
Middlemarch is perhaps the most perfectly integrated novel ever written, and we are about to learn
the story behind this.
13
╛╛Better than James’s assessment of Dickens. “Bleak House was forced; Little Dorrit was labored;
[Our Mutual Friend] is dug out as with a spade and pickaxe” ( James 1865, 786).
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R ece ption 73

Bulstrode, who is very religious but with a bit of a shady past, the local vicar, Mr.
Farebrother, and others.
James was right. The novel is all very Darwinian. Certain characters move
forward and succeed—​Dorothea matures and gets greater control of herself
and her emotions, Will also grows and shows character in refusing easy money
(when Bulstrode tries to assuage his own conscience), and above all Fred goes
from a lazy charmer to a serious worker at a real job. Some go backward or fail
to move forward—​Casaubon, Lydgate, and Bulstrode to name three. And some
basically stay in place—​Mary and her father are good from start to finish, others,
including one Raffles who is into the blackmail business, begin and end bad, and
yet others like Brooke and Farebrother (in hopeless love with Mary) are basi-
cally ineffectual throughout. However, this is only part of the story, because as
all commentators note what is striking is the extent to which Eliot is describing
an interwoven net or web of relationships, binding the characters together in an
ever more complex whole or organic unity (Shuttleworth 1984). These are not
people just doing their own thing as in Gissing’s novel, where the success or fail-
ure of Edwin and Jasper is really quite independent of the other. Sir James is em-
ploying Caleb, Caleb is employing Fred, first Bulstrode and then Dorothea are
lending money to Lydgate, Rosamond, married to Lydgate, is also Fred’s sister,
Casaubon is (to his regret) related to Will and somewhat reluctantly support-
ing Will because Will was a bit unlucky when it came to getting family money,
Bulstrode also has a connection with Will, and so it goes. Sir James is married to
Celia and hence brother-​in-​law to Dorothea and concerned for her welfare and
upset when she does what he thinks is wrong. Dorothea gives to Mr. Farebrother
the incumbency held by Casaubon. Caleb has an interest in Fred because the lad
is in love with his daughter Mary, and Mary is clearly in love with Fred.
Eliot cleverly shows that the whole town is bound together by social arrange-
ments and the like. When Raffles conveniently dies, word gets out and about
very quickly.

"Did any doctor attend him?" said Mr. Hawley.

"Yes. Mr. Lydgate. Mr. Bulstrode sat up with him one night. He died
the third morning."
"Go on, Bambridge," said Mr. Hawley, insistently. "What did this
fellow say about Bulstrode?"
The group had already become larger, the town-​clerk's presence
being a guarantee that something worth listening to was going on there;
and Mr. Bambridge delivered his narrative in the hearing of seven….
But this gossip about Bulstrode spread through Middlemarch like
the smell of fire. Mr. Frank Hawley followed up his information by
sending a clerk whom he could trust to Stone Court on a pretext of
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74 Darwinism as Religion

inquiring about hay, but really to gather all that could be learned about
Raffles and his illness from Mrs. Abel [a servant who unknowingly gave
Raffles a shot of alcohol that proved fatal]. (Eliot [1874] 2011, 821)

It is all rather like ants in the nest passing foodstuffs around from one to the
other. But more than this. To continue with the organic metaphor, it is clear that
Eliot sees ongoing change.14 The organism evolves, to use a word. In the novel, a
major theme is how—​“ begetting new consciousness of interdependence” (Eliot
[1874] 2011, 105)—​the old eighteenth-​century system of lords and squires
living in a rural setting is giving way to the new nineteenth-​century system of
educated experts living in an urban setting (Dolin 2008). “Municipal town
and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connection—​gradually, as the
old stocking gave way to the savings-​bank, and the worship of the solar guinea
became extinct; while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived
blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of closer acquain-
tanceship” (106). Externally, there are the debates over the Reform Bill going on
and more immediately the coming of the railway that is going to change England
so very drastically—​Progress! This will happen, whether the good people of
Middlemarch want it or not.

Caleb was a powerful man and knew little of any fear except the fear of
hurting others and the fear of having to speechify. But he felt it his duty
at this moment to try and give a little harangue.…
"Why, my lads, how's this?" he began, taking as usual to brief phrases,
which seemed pregnant to himself, because he had many thoughts
lying under them, like the abundant roots of a plant that just manages
to peep above the water. "How come you to make such a mistake as
this? Somebody has been telling you lies. You thought those men up
there wanted to do mischief."
"Aw!" was the answer, dropped at intervals by each according to his
degree of uneasiness.
"Nonsense! No such thing! They're looking out to see which way the
railroad is to take. Now, my lads, you can't hinder the railroad: it will be
made whether you like it or not. And if you go fighting against it, you'll
get yourselves into trouble. The law gives those men leave to come here
on the land. The owner has nothing to say against it, and if you meddle
with them you'll have to do with the constable and Justice Blakesley,

  Critics have noted that there is more change in the later novels than in the earliest, pre-​Origin
14

work, Adam Bede.
  75

R ece ption 75

and with the handcuffs and Middlemarch jail. And you might be in for
it now, if anybody informed against you." (640–​641)

Get used to the idea. In any case, “the railway’s a good thing.”
Some of the change comes from within. Sir James is a minor figure and not always
as quick as others. But basically, unlike Mr. Brooke, he knows the score and that a
major part of the score is upkeep and improvement of his property. It is the same
with Fred.15 He “surprised his neighbors in various ways. He became rather distin-
guished in his side of the county as a theoretic and practical farmer, and produced
a work on the Cultivation of Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle-​Feeding which
won him high congratulations at agricultural meetings” (952–​953). That is what
real change is about. Few of us are going to make the big discoveries—​Lydgate did
not—​but clover and lucerne (alfalfa), now that is solid change and improvement.
Dorothea too—​she becomes a wife and mother and there are those who regret that
she did not aim higher. But change and improvement and Progress are there.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not
widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the
strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably dif-
fusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhis-
toric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might
have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life,
and rest in unvisited tombs.  (959)

“Spent itself in channels.” “Incalculably diffusive.” “Growing good.” This is an

organic view of society. Cyrus in fact broke the river Gyndes into 360 channels.
One doubts that even Dorothea is affecting quite that many people, but the point
is made. Society is an organism, slowly but surely improving, and (to use Eliot’s
own word) getting ever more interdependent. Now it is true that Darwin does
argue that “plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound to-
gether by a web of complex relations,” but this was never an organism. There is
too much intergroup tension for this. So Darwinian yes, but not quite Darwinian
in the bones as with Gissing. There was, however, another candidate for the job,
and even if one was not aware that George Eliot knew Herbert Spencer very well
and had studied his writings with great care and sympathy, one might think him

15
  Deresiewicz (1998) makes the important point that Eliot is not a blind determinist but sees
free choice as an essential element in growth, particularly moral growth. Fred does choose. Lydgate
goes under mainly because he does not have the strength to impose his own will on the circum-
stances within which he finds himself.
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76 Darwinism as Religion

a good candidate.16 From the nonconformist side to the British Midlands—​as

was Eliot—​Spencer broke onto the scene in the 1850s. With some reason, he
has a reputation as a stern advocate of a laissez faire view of society, and some
of his early writings particularly back this up. Any attempt to coddle the poor
“absolutely encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by
offering them an unfailing provision, and discourages the multiplication of the
competent and provident by heightening the prospective difficulty of maintain-
ing a family” (Spencer 1851, 323–​324). However, apart from the fact that this
was written before Spencer became an evolutionist, one should see that the use
he made of such ideas as these are not simple Darwinism, extended to society
(Richards 1987). He was less into the idea of struggle to eliminate the weak and
inadequate and more into the struggle to make people work and thus improve
themselves and, through a Lamarckian process, thereby improve society gen-
erally (Spencer 1852). He was totally committed to an organic view of society
(Spencer 1860), thinking that we are all part of one great whole—​one getting
more and more complex (“homogeneity” transforms to “heterogeneity”)—​and
he was as equally committed to Progress. “Whether it be in the development of
the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of
Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature,
Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through suc-
cessive differentiations, hold throughout” (Spencer 1857, 2–​3). This theory of
“dynamic equilibrium” describes Middlemarch and its inhabitants to a tee. Fred
and Dorothea and Ladislaw improve through effort and in a sad way in converse
Lydgate and Casaubon and Bulstrode decline.17 Contrast with the characters in
New Grub Street. Edwin and Jasper do not change. Nor do Marion and Amy.18

  Lewes, an early follower of Positivism, would have been another influence. His reading of
16

Comte had ever inclined him toward organicism. Robert J. Richards would challenge my reading of
Darwin, arguing that organicism is a central theme of the Origin and extends to all groups, not just
(as I allow) interrelated tribes or families (Richards and Ruse 2016). Overall, though, Spencer was
the key and immediate influence. Again, do not take this as denying that the revolution overall was
Darwinian, even if you put to one side that James was right in seeing Darwin in the mix that produced
Middlemarch. It was Darwin and his status as a scientist who opened it up for the others. Spencer was
hugely important. So was St. Paul. Yet it is rightly called the Christian religion, for all that the differ-
ences between the message of Jesus and the message of Paul were at least as great as those between
Darwin and Spencer.
17
  Graver (1984) sees the tensions as negating the organicist model. But the whole point of the
Spencerian model is that one does get tensions and struggle. It is through these that improvement
comes. Thanks to her suffering in her dysfunctional marriage to Casaubon, Dorothea emerges a
better, stronger person. Lydgate goes under through his marriage to Rosamond.
18
  In her strange final work, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Eliot gets explicitly Darwinian,
floating the idea that machines might get more and more sophisticated until “one sees that the pro-
cess of natural selection must drive men altogether out of the field” (Eliot [1879] 2016, 102). Samuel
Butler was not the only one to suggest that this was cribbed from Erewhon ( Jones 1919, 1, 310).
╇ 77

R ece ption 77

Reception: The Religious
Thus far we have looked at the secular thinkers and writers. Darwin had sup-
porters who wanted to blend his thinking with Christian doctrine. Mention has
been made of Asa Gray. Tennyson was one who continued on this path, basically
unchanged from before (Stevenson 1932). In “Locksley Hall” (written in 1835,
published in 1842) he is optimistic about progress. By 1886, when he published
“Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” he was a lot less optimistic, and Darwinian
evolution was part of the problem.

All diseases quench'd by Science, no man halt, or deaf or blind;

Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body, larger mind?
Earth at last a warless world, a single race, a single tongue,
I have seen her far away—╉for is not Earth as yet so young?—╉
(Tennyson 1886, 23–╉24)

So far, so good. But:

Warless? when her tens are thousands, and her thousands millions, then—╉
All her harvest all too narrow—╉who can fancy warless men?
Warless? war will die out late then. Will it ever? late or soon?
Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon dead world the moon?
(24–╉25)

Evolution seems to be as much the problem as the solution:

Is there evil but on earth? or pain in every peopled sphere?

Well be grateful for the sounding watchword, 'Evolution' here.
Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good,
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.
(28)

Yet, at the end, Tennyson’s old faith seems to have returned, as though the fifty
years previously had never occurred.

Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can escape

From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, or of ape?
Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages,
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape?
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78 Darwinism as Religion

All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade,
Prophet-​eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade,
Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric
Hallelujah to the Maker “It is finish'd. Man is made.”
(“The Making of Man,” Tennyson 1892, 85–​86)

For all there is a failure of “chiliastic concretion,” there is “incessant effort to in-
tegrate existence into a spiritual Cosmos” (Roppen 1956, 111).
Charles Dickens—​another for whom Christianity was always fundamen-
tal—​wrestled with these issues in fiction. In Our Mutual Friend (1865) he is, as
always, interestingly complex. There are two main threads, one centering on a
working-​class girl, whose father is a waterman; the other on a girl taken from her
relatively improvident family to live with a rich old couple. In the one thread, the
conflict between the two suitors for Lizzie Hexam’s hand, the indolent lawyer
Eugene Wrayburn and the oversensitive schoolteacher Bradley Headstone, is
one of the most powerful depictions of sexual selection through male combat in
the whole of fiction—​even though it may not owe that much to Darwin because
the novel appeared before the extended treatment of the topic in the Descent of
Man.19 In the other thread, the whole tenor of the novel is absolutely and com-
pletely against a Darwinian reading of society and human nature—​everyone
worthwhile in the novel is so because they reject Darwinian motives and give
through disinterested love (Fulweiler 1994). Bella Wilfer is supposed to gain a
fortune by marrying the son (now presumed dead) of the man who made all of
the money the old couple now possesses. Explicitly, she refers to her own self-
ishness. “If ever there was a mercenary plotter whose thoughts and designs were
always in her mean occupation, I am the amiable creature. But I don’t care. I hate
and detest being poor, and I won’t be poor if I can marry money” (321). But then,
there is a transformation and to the rich old couple (the Boffins) who are testing
her—Mr. Boffin (acting the role of a miser) mouths a parody of Darwinism tell-
ing Bella that we must “scrunch or be scrunched” (475)—when she meets the
man of her love (unknown to her, the son who is not in fact dead), she acts in a

19
  The brutal description of the schoolteacher owes a lot to Carlyle: “Bradley Headstone, in his
decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pan-
taloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair-​guard round
his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man of six-​and-​twenty. He was never seen in any other
dress, and yet there was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were a want of
adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics in their holiday clothes. He had acquired
mechanically a great store of teacher’s knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically,
sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church
organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage”
(Dickens [1865] 1948, 217).
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R ece ption 79

way that makes a mockery of sexual selection through female choice. She wants
no part of the money or the misers whose memory is revered. “ ‘I shall never
more think well of you,’ cried Bella, cutting him short, with intense defiance in
her expressive little eyebrows, and championship of the late Secretary [the son
who has been employed by the old couple] in every dimple. ‘No! Never again!
Your money has changed you to marble. You are a hard-​hearted Miser. You are
worse than Dancer, worse than Hopkins, worse than Blackberry Jones, worse
than any of the wretches’ ” (599). She turns her back on the money and marries
a poor man for love. Who of course fortunately turns out not to be so poor after
all!
The point to be made here is not that everyone becomes a Darwinian, even
if they are not fully aware of the fact. Not everyone became a Christian. It is
rather that even if someone like Dickens rejects pure Darwinism, he knows that
he is working in a Darwinian environment and his rejection has to be conscious
(Bown 2010). “Scrunch or be scrunched” gives that game away.20 The same is
true of those who declared Darwin irrelevant. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins (1844–​1889) knew about Darwinism and—​as did other prominent
Catholics like John Henry Newman—​at least in a more directed sense promoted
by the Catholic biologist St. George Mivart (1871) seems to have accepted
some form of evolutionism (Zaniello 1988). But it was not about to threaten
or replace his Christianity. The well-​known poem “That nature is a Heraclitean
fire and the comfort of the Resurrection” (written in 1888) is perhaps more
about meteorology than biology, but the constant turmoil and struggle come
through—​especially that humans get wiped out.

Cloud-​puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-​
Built thoroughfare: heaven-​roysterers, in gay-​gangs | they throng;
they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,

20
  Fontana (2005) argues that the Wrayburn-​Headstone rivalry is explicitly Darwin-​influenced,
but he offers no external evidence to support this claim. However, as already shown, Dickens was
sufficiently well disposed to Darwinism to allow quite favorable treatment in All the Year Round, so
one cannot rule out all possible influence. What is interesting is that although readers today (includ-
ing this author) regard Our Mutual Friend as one of Dickens’s supreme achievements—​not only the
sexual themes but the brilliant use of metaphor, the Thames dominating everything giving life and
bringing death and the refuse-​based source (dust piles, cinders and ash, of value for brick making)
of the controlling money, as well as the host of minor figures, including Bella’s appalling (and incred-
ibly amusing) mother and sister—​at the time, critics were much less enthused. This was because
in a Darwinian world already Dickens was dated. Henry James, who was to contribute to the post-​
Darwinian fiction we consider in this and later chapters, made it clear that this was the source of his
discontent. Dickens did not capture human nature as was now understood.
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80 Darwinism as Religion

Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-╉fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-╉selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned.

But the Christian story is there to trump it.

Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart's-╉clarion! Away grief 's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.21

In an important way, the fact that there has been a Darwinian Revolution gives
added meaning and understanding to Hopkins’s Christianity.

Conclusion
We have entered a Darwinian world. By about 1870, there were few who did not
accept evolution. In the professional scientific world, natural selection was less

21
╛╛“Potsherd.” This at once brings to mind the Book of Job: “So went Satan forth from the presence
of the LORD, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown. And he took
him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes” ( Job 2:7–╉8). The poet
is identifying himself with the scrap of broken pottery that Job in his agony used to relieve his pains,
and then cast away. Christ raises us up from this, the filthiest piece of trash, to “immortal diamond.”
Hopkins was deeply moved and influenced by Job and it is nigh a leitmotif for his great poem “The
Wreck of the Deutschland” (Cotter 1995). With the pressures on traditional natural theology, he was
not alone in turning to Job for insights into the nature and existence of evil in the face of a good God.
Carlyle had written: “A noble Book. All men’s Book! It is our first, noblest statement of the never-╉
ending Problem,—╉man’s destiny and God’s ways with him here in this earth” (Carlyle 1993, 43).
  81

R ece ption 81

of a success. But people knew about Darwin’s ideas and in the public realm they
were discussed, embraced, sometimes modified, sometimes disliked, but never
ignored. The biggest critics and revisers were working in Darwin’s world. Overall
Darwinian science—​evolution through selection, its supporters, its detractors,
its modifiers—​was, taken as a whole, the very paradigm of a popular science. But
was it more? This is our next question.

In the same vein, Tennyson wrote of Job as “The greatest poem of ancient and modern times”
(Singer 1963, 119). We will see more of Job as people wrestle with the implications of living in a
post-​Origin world.
82

God

The time has come to notch up the belt a hole or two, or less metaphorically to
make a stronger case than hitherto. Thus far I have argued that, after the Origin,
evolutionary thinking was raised from the status of a pseudoscience to that of a
popular science. Now, in this and the succeeding chapters I want to argue that
evolutionary thinking became something more. It became a secular religion, in
opposition to Christianity. In the second half of the nineteenth century and into
the first part of the twentieth century Darwinian evolutionary thinking, as charac-
terized in the last chapter, became a belief system countering and substituting for
the Christian religion: a new paradigm. Although there were ethical societies and
the like, I am not making claims about organization or hierarchies or whatever.
But I am saying that if you look at the belief claims of Christianity, Darwinian
evolutionism offered an alternative. We do not have two world pictures talking
past each other but right at each other. We have seen this already at times in the
pre-​Darwinian periods, but now it will intensify. Now we really do have a system
that can be elaborated and developed and accepted and believed in.1

1
  The attempt to define “religion” is notoriously difficult. One can focus on one or two salient fea-
tures. This is what I did in an earlier work, The Evolution-​Creation Struggle (Ruse 2005), arguing that
Christianity (particularly the more literalist form) and Darwinism are joined by a shared obsession
with end times, so-​called millennialism, and separated because whereas the Christians were (and are)
Providentialists in thinking that we can do nothing but prepare for the return of the Lamb (“premil­
lennialism”) the Darwinians were and are Progressionists, thinking that we can and must ourselves
prepare for a heaven here on Earth (“postmillennialism”). Now I  want to consider religion more
broadly and (as is usual) adopt a “polythetic” definition—​working from a list of features none of
which is individually considered necessary but a number of which are considered sufficient. I argue
that Darwinism can be considered a religion because like Christianity it speaks to such issues as deity,
origins, human status, morality, suffering, and more. This approach lends itself readily to a thematic
treatment rather than chronological. This is appropriate because, while there is certainly change—​
for instance, the move to a darker perspective as the century draws to a close—​there are no fixed
temporal guidelines, like the formation of a hierarchy or a convention to decide dogma—​although,
as is shown by the treatment of Mivart and Butler, the Darwinians were pretty good at making life
difficult for heretics.

82
╇ 83

God 83

Thomas Henry Huxley
This did not happen by chance. Two factors are important. First, the
Darwinians—╉Thomas Henry Huxley in particular—╉set out to make a coun-
ter case to Christianity. You might say that Darwin did not entirely approve. I
don’t think that is true. Darwin was always more cautious—╉and it suited ev-
eryone that he be more cautious—╉but his heart was in the change. However,
he was aging and sick and not inclined for battle. His supporters were and they
did sally forth. Huxley, as just about everyone who writes on him agrees, was a
complex character. He was the inventor of the term “agnostic” and at one level
one can read his whole life negatively, as an attack on the established church
(the Anglicans) and its power in Victorian Britain. There is lots of evidence in
the letters and essays pointing to this kind of reading. For instance, referring to
some lectures before the Origin was published, writing (on January 30, 1859) to
one of his close friends (W. Dyster), we have: “My screed was meant as a protest
against Theology and Parsondom in general—both of which are in my mind the
natural and irreconcilable enemies of Science. Few see it but I believe we are on
the eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live thirty years, it is that I
may see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies” (quoted by Desmond
1997, 253). He had the thirty years and a bit more and the foot did spend a lot of
time on religious necks. Thanks in no small part to Huxley. “Extinguished theo-
logians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of
Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been
fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and
crushed, if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain” (Huxley [1860] 1893, 52).
And yet, as readers soon see, there was a very positive side to what Huxley
was about. He didn’t want just to get rid of religion—╉or more precisely to get rid
of theology—╉but to replace it with an alternative. He ended his letter to Dyster
just quoted by saying: “But the new religion will not be a worship of the intel-
lect alone.” Remember the preface to this book. There was always the Calvinist
about Huxley and he wanted to replace the old Christian theology with the new
scientific theology of Darwinism.

In certain passages of his writings he rises to a pitch of prophetic de-

nunciation, and he tells his opponents that they are doomed to speedy
extinction by the nature of things, and will soon be swept away from
the universe. This extreme tone is probably due in part to the fact that
Professor Huxley has accepted the principle of evolution more abso-
lutely than any other man of science except Mr. Darwin himself, and
that consequently he represents what might be called its religious spirit
84

84 Darwinism as Religion

in the most concentrated form, and partly also to the fact that his nature
is essentially Puritanic, if not Calvinistic.

Continuing

The hypothesis of evolution thus met a real and vital want in his
nature, and he espoused it with a crusading zeal and insistence surpris-
ing enough to less ardent minds. In perfect harmony with this fea-
ture of his character, Professor Huxley has been known to express an
ardent desire for a scientific hell to which the finally impenitent, those
who persist in rejecting the new physical gospel, might be condemned.
(Baynes 1873, 261)

Robert Elsmere
The second factor to be considered is the status of Christianity itself. It cannot
be repeated too often that these things are comparative. The rise of evolutionism
was in major way a function of the decline of Christianity. We know that, sci-
ence aside, Christianity was under threat from within thanks to higher criticism
and from without thanks to the rise of the industrial state and the consequent
inability of the religion to speak to people’s needs. Matthew Arnold’s great poem
“Dover Beach” was probably written in 1851, but it was published in 1867. Its
central verses spoke directly to many a troubled heart, whose owner realized that
he (and in many cases she) was not alone in doubting his (or her) childhood
faith, nor was his loss of innocence a sign that he was an evil or immoral person.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-╉wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

The pressures continued. Essays and Reviews, a collection published four

months after the Origin appeared (Anon. 1860), authored by Anglican divines,
embraced higher criticism and in one case—╉that of the Reverend Baden Powell
(professor at Oxford and father of the scoutmaster)—╉went all of the way to evo-
lution (a view he had promoted in earlier writings). The collection caused a huge
  85

God 85

controversy—​Bishop Wilberforce took time out from criticizing the Origin to

write against this vile volume—​and naturally it sold extremely well. There were
prosecutions for heresy that eventually came to naught—​“ hell was dismissed
with costs.” Controversial though it may have been, the writing was on the wall.
One of the contributors went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury and another
Master of Balliol. Right at the heart of the establishment was recognition that
Christianity was not functioning well.
Even so, no one was quite prepared for the success of Robert Elsmere (1888)
by Mrs. Humphry Ward (1851–​1920). (Her grandfather was Thomas Arnold,
her uncle was Matthew Arnold, and her sister Julia was the daughter-​in-​law
of Thomas Henry Huxley and the mother of Julian Huxley the biologist and
of Aldous Huxley the novelist.) Picking up on all of the worries nagging at
Victorian Christians, the story is about a young Anglican clergyman who loses
his faith and who then tries to make a living doing good in the slums of London.
Early on, Darwin’s big hand in the story is made very clear. Robert is talking to
his friend Langham.

“Dirt, drains, and Darwin,” said Langham meditatively, taking up

Darwin's “Earthworms,” which lay on the study table beside him, side
by side with a volume of Grant Allen's “Sketches.” “I didn't know you
cared for this sort of thing!”
Robert did not answer for a moment, and a faint flush stole into
his face.
“Imagine, Langham!” he said presently, “I had never read even the
'Origin of Species' before I came here. We used to take the thing half for
granted, I remember, at Oxford, in a more or less modified sense. But
to drive the mind through all the details of the evidence, to force one's
self to understand the whole hypothesis and the grounds for it, is a very
different matter. It is a revelation.”
“Yes,” said Langham; and could not forbear adding, “but it is a rev-
elation, my friend, that has not always been held to square with other
revelations.” (Ward 1888, 170–​171)

In Victorian melodramas it is usually the local squire who does the dirty work,
stealing the virginity of the naïve maiden. Mrs. Ward does not disappoint.
However, her squire, a nonbelieving cynic, has his filthy desires turned toward
our innocent vicar, whom he overwhelms with vile Germanic-​type arguments.

“Do I believe in God? Surely, surely! ‘Though He slay me yet will I trust
in Him!’ Do I  believe in Christ? Yes,—​in the teacher, the martyr, the
symbol to us Westerns of all things heavenly and abiding, the image
86

86 Darwinism as Religion

and pledge of the invisible life of the spirit—​with all my soul and all
my mind!”
“But in the Man-​God, the Word from Eternity,—​in a wonder-​
working Christ, in a risen and ascended Jesus, in the living Intercessor
and Mediator for the lives of His doomed brethren?”
He waited, conscious that it was the crisis of his history, and there
rose in him, as though articulated one by one by an audible voice, words
of irrevocable meaning.
“Every human soul in which the voice of God makes itself felt,
enjoys, equally with Jesus of Nazareth, the divine sonship, and ‘miracles
do not happen!’”
It was done.  (342)

His wife is not pleased.

"I can believe no longer in an incarnation and resurrection," he said

slowly, but with a resolute plainness. "Christ is risen in our hearts, in
the Christian life of charity. Miracle is a natural product of human feel-
ing and imagination and God was in Jesus —​pre-​eminently, as He is in
all great souls, but not otherwise —​not otherwise in kind than He is
in me or you."
His voice dropped to a whisper. She grew paler and paler.
"So to you," she said presently in the same strange altered voice, "my
father —​when I saw that light on his face before he died, when I heard
him cry, ‘Master, I come!’ was dying —​deceived —​deluded. Perhaps
even," and she trembled, "you think it ends here  —​our life  —​our
love?"  (364)

Apparently, Mark 12:25—​“For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither
marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven”—​cut
little ice here.
Elsmere gets himself involved in kinds of proto-​YMCA activities, even set-
ting up a scientific Sunday school. “This was the direct result of a paragraph in
Huxley’s Lay Sermons, where the hint of such a school was first thrown out”
(475). Expectedly, as is customary in these sorts of novels, our hero does not
make it alive to the final paragraph. He mistakes something serious for a passing
attack of “clergyman’s throat,” and having thanked God that his wife’s suffering
at his illness is now over, “sinking back into her arms, he gave two or three gasp-
ing breaths, and died” (604). She, one is glad to say, spends the rest of her life
covering her options—​Church on Sunday morning, charity work for the rest of
the week.
╇ 87

God 87

This novel sold over a million copies legitimately and probably as many in
pirated copies. Not everyone liked it.2 Expectedly, Mr. Gladstone found fault,
although author and politician got on well together. “He said that he had never
read any book on the hostile side written in such a spirit of ‘generous appre-
ciation’ of the Christian side” (Peterson 1970, 453). And that in a way is what
makes the novel so very effective. Not only is the novel a blow as strong as any
essay from the pen of Thomas Henry Huxley—╉and given Mrs. Ward’s connec-
tions obviously a blow from within the same camp as Huxley3—╉it is not a harsh,
new-╉atheist polemic against a dangerous creed, but a rather sad retreat from
something that simply no longer works and is no longer relevant to the modern
age—╉of the “Sea of Faith” we now hear only “its melancholy, long, withdrawing
roar.” We need an alternative world picture. The question to be asked, therefore,
is whether Darwinism was able to provide it.

The God Question

Before we plunge in, there is a worry to be addressed, akin to the worry we ad-
dressed when looking at the science. We are going to see a wide range of views.
Does it make sense to link these all under one heading of Darwinian secular
religion or some such thing, especially since some of the views are not terribly
secular? You cannot play entirely fast and loose with the ideas here, but overall
that there is a range of views is hardly that troublesome. Think of Christianity
and of how it goes all of the way from Roman Catholicism to outer versions
of Protestantism like the Jehovah’s Witnesses who (among other things) loathe
and detest much that the Catholics hold dear. And that is before you get to
the Unitarians who probably don’t believe in God at all, not to mention the
Mormons who believe in rather too many gods for conventional Christians. So
let us apply the same tolerance to the Darwinian side. Let us agree that the es-
sence of the position now being talked of takes Darwinian theory seriously and
(we hope to show) sees it as having significant implications for our understand-
ing of the nature of God—╉his very existence even—╉not to mention other parts
of the Christian position. And by the “Darwinian theory” we mean evolution

2
╛╛Interestingly, given his grumpiness about George Eliot’s writings, Henry James was very im-
pressed (Ward 1909, xxxvi–╉xl).
3
╛╛About Mrs. Ward, Gladstone wrote to his daughter: “She is much to be liked personally but is a
fruit of what I think must be called Arnoldism” (Peterson 1970, 445). As a deeply committed, rather
conservative Christian, Gladstone felt threatened by the Arnolds’ liberal attitude toward church doc-
trines. He saw it as a major step on the road to the agnosticism of Huxley, with whom he debated
in the periodicals. Oscar Wilde joked that Robert Elsmere was Matthew Arnold’s book of criticism,
Literature and Dogma, without the literature.
88

88 Darwinism as Religion

through natural selection. That is at the very least the default position, although
it was almost always more than that.4 Such then will be the basis of our discus-
sion and conclusions.5
So let us start right at the beginning with God himself. As Christina Rossetti
(1830–​1894) reminds us, the Christian God is a being who created the universe
and all in it—​the Earth and its denizens included.

Before the mountains were brought forth, before

Earth and the world were made, then God was God:
And God will still be God, when flames shall roar
Round earth and heaven dissolving at His nod:
And this God is our God, even while His rod
Of righteous wrath falls on us smiting sore:
And this God is our God for evermore
Through life, through death, while clod returns to clod.
For though He slay us we will trust in Him;
We will flock home to Him by divers ways:
Yea, though He slay us we will vaunt His praise,
Serving and loving with the Cherubim,
Watching and loving with the Seraphim,
Our very selves His praise through endless days.
(Rossetti 1904, 73, written before 1882)

God owes us nothing, and yet having created freely in some sense He stands
over His creation and cares about it. This follows because God is not only all
powerful He is also all loving, although precisely what that might mean has
been the subject of 2,000 years of debate—​longer if you take into account the
Jewish antecedents.6 For the Christian, there is also all of the stuff about Jesus
and his nature and his role in the scene of things, and we can and will pick up on
this as we go along. Already, having dealt with Darwin, we know that bringing
up the God question is not irrelevant. Darwin held to his deism—​something

4
  Henry Adams, in England 1867–​1868, commented sardonically: “Natural Selection seemed a
dogma to be put in the place of the Athanasian creed; it was a form of religious hope; a promise of
ultimate perfection” (Adams 1918).
5
  A tempting analogy is that Darwinism focusing on natural selection stands to the rest of evolu-
tionism as (in the West) Catholicism stands to the rest of Christianity. Catholics and Lutherans differ
over the host, but the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation is clearly defined against the Catholic
doctrine of transubstantiation. This seems to me a helpful way of looking at things, as long as one
does not get too literal.
6
  In respects, to be honest, this poem seems to owe much to Job. It is not so much of what God
gives to us, but of what we owe to God—​total, unconditioned loyalty and praise.
  89

God 89

that, if anything, eased the way to evolution, for the latter confirms the former’s
commitment to the working of unbroken law—​right through the writing of the
Origin and even after for a while. In a celebrated letter to Asa Gray Darwin wrote:

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always pain-
ful to me. —​I am bewildered. —​I had no intention to write atheisti-
cally. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd.
wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There
seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself
that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the
Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the
living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not
believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly
designed. (Darwin 1985–​, 8, 224)

But Darwin did then go straight on to affirm that he had some belief of a kind.

On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonder-

ful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that every-
thing is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as
resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left
to the working out of what we may call chance.

Later in the decade after the Origin, Darwin slid into agnosticism. Not­
withstanding his worries about pain and suffering, it seems pretty clear that the
motivation toward nonbelief was primarily theological. He could not stand the
idea of eternal damnation for nonbelievers, like his own father and brother.7

7
  It is important to realize the importance of this letter. For all of Darwin’s efforts to keep out
social commentary and values, the Origin of Species, the first edition particularly, is soused in natural
theology. There are many references to the Creator, as in: “Authors of the highest eminence seem to
be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it ac-
cords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production
and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary
causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual” (Darwin 1859, 488). As Darwin
says here, what he (as a deist) did not want was the Creator getting involved on a day-​to-​day basis.
He was probably influenced here by Whewell who, although a sincere Anglican, was insistent that
God stay outside science. In turn, Whewell would have been influenced by Kant, who was deeply
indebted to his Pietist childhood, but insisted that God cannot explain in the empirical world, writ-
ing in the Critique of Pure Reason: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Kant
[1787] 1988, 117). By the time of the Descent, Darwin was much more “Darwinian” and the Creator
is absent.
90

90 Darwinism as Religion

How then did those who read Darwin react? Some seem to have accepted ev-
erything and gone on secure in their Christian faith. Charles Kingsley was one.
The Water Babies is as Christian a story as is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,
written two centuries earlier.8 We all know the beginning about Tom, the chim-
ney sweep who is maltreated by his master, Grimes, and how—​after being sent
up a chimney and, on coming down, getting in the wrong room where he meets
the beautiful daughter of the house, Ellie—​he runs away and is drowned and
turned into a water baby. But that is only the beginning for the full story is one
of Christian redemption, as Tom slowly matures morally, learning to do things
he does not like because they are the right thing to do. At the end, he helps
Grimes see the error of his ways, and for this Tom earns the reward that he again
becomes human.

“You may take him home with you now on Sundays, Ellie. He has won
his spurs in the great battle, and become fit to go with you and be a man;
because he has done the thing he did not like.”
So Tom went home with Ellie on Sundays, and sometimes on week-​
days, too; and he is now a great man of science, and can plan railroads,
and steam-​engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so
forth; and knows everything about everything, except why a hen’s egg
don’t turn into a crocodile, and two or three other little things which
no one will know till the coming of the Cocqcigrues [fantastic animals
unlike those ever seen]. And all this from what he learnt when he was a
water-​baby, underneath the sea.

No sex though.

“And of course Tom married Ellie?”

My dear child, what a silly notion! Don’t you know that no one ever
marries in a fairy tale, under the rank of a prince or a princess?

Those, like Tennyson, who were grappling with the implications of evolution
saw that God as intervener in the Creation was being pushed out. As a great
historian of the Scientific Revolution said about this process, God having made
the magnificent machine that is the universe, was now becoming a “retired en-
gineer” (Dijksterhuis 1961, 491). In other words, to some extent one had to go
in the direction of the young Darwin toward deism. In the “Higher Pantheism,”

  Straley (2007) notes perceptively that The Water Babies is truly a confused gallimaufry of
8

Lamarckian evolutionism (most probably garnered from Herbert Spencer) and undiluted Anglican
Christianity. As we saw, there are threads of selection.
╇ 91

God 91

a poem read in 1869 at the first meeting of the Metaphysical Society (a group of
believers and skeptics who met to discuss issues of mutual interest), Tennyson
rather makes a virtue out of necessity, seeing God in all of the actions of unbro-
ken law.

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,

Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?
Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why;
For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel ‘I am I’?
Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom,
Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom.
Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet —╉
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.
God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice,
For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice.
Law is God, say some: no God at all, says the fool;
For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool;
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision —╉were it not He?
(Tennyson 1870, 202–203)

Confident, but not quite as confident as before Darwin. “The fool hath said in his
heart, There is no god” (Psalm 14:1). Why then do we need to keep reassuring
ourselves that this is not true?

God in Nature—╉and What Does That Mean?

Across the Atlantic, epitomizing New England transcendentalism, writing in
a Carlyle-╉like fashion in his influential essay “The Over-╉Soul” ([1841] 2010),
Emerson also played the pantheism theme, seeing a God who somehow is in
nature but also part of us—╉not a separate distant being, but one who is at one
with his creation. “Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul.
The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for
ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable”
(66). Likewise in the pre-╉Origin religion of Walt Whitman, for despite having
given up on Christian notions like original sin, he nevertheless had a kind of spiri-
tuality focused on himself. Note, however, that although he himself is immortal,
so is everyone else! Note, moreover, echoing Carlyle’s natural supernaturalism,
that everything is wonderful—╉the miraculous (immortality) and the ordinary
(seeing, conceiving, learning to walk) are bound together in a deeper sense.
92

92 Darwinism as Religion

I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman,

Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman,
Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.
Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every one is immortal,
I know it is wonderful—​but my eye-​sight is equally wonderful, and how
I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally wonderful; …
And passed from a babe, in the creeping trance of three summers and three
winters, to articulate and walk—​All this is equally wonderful.
(Whitman 2004, 414–​415, first published 1855)

Emily Dickinson (1830–​1886) picked up on these sorts of ideas, writing to a

friend (around 1862): “I was thinking to-​day, as I noticed, that the “Supernatural”
was only the Natural disclosed” (Higginson 1891, 449).9 Her poetry reflects this
transcendentalism—​the brain, thought, covers the whole of existence and in
some sense includes it.

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—​

For—put them side by side—
​The one the other will contain
With ease—​and You—beside—
​ e Brain is deeper than the sea—
Th
​For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
​The one the other will absorb—​
As Sponges—Buckets—do—​
The Brain is just the weight of God—
​For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—​
And they will differ—if they do—
​As Syllable from Sound—
(Dickinson 1960, 312–​313—​about 1863)

Of course, you might say that none of this is very Darwinian, and that is true. But
it is a world picture against which Darwinian themes can be played out.10 And in

9
  References in this book are to the one-​volume reading text, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, pub-
lished in 1960. This is based on the variorum edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H.
Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1951, 1955
by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President
and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937,
1942, by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965, by Mary L. Hampson.
10
  “Emily Dickinson herself was imbricated in a unique web of affiliation with Darwin and dar-
winian ideas; the key New England figures in this debate were all known to Dickinson either through
  93

God 93

the darker world of natural selection—​Carlyle, Emerson, and Whitman cut their
teeth before the Origin—​we have to start asking about the nature of this God who
is so all-​pervasive.11 Do we have much more than what Aristotle would have called
an “entelechy,” a kind of animating power that is not necessarily all that conscious?
With talk of “syllable from sound,” it does seem as though God is basically the life
force of nature and it is we humans, with our brains, who make sense of things.
We go, for instance, from the primitive sound “um” to a range of syllables to which
we humans (incorporating them in words) give different meanings—​“lumbar,”
“dumber,” “gummy,” “become,” and more. Thus, as Madam Natural Selection
pointed out, don’t look for Nature/​God to give meaning to events.

The most triumphant Bird I ever knew or met

Embarked upon a twig today
And till Dominion set
I famish to behold so eminent a sight
And sang for nothing scrutable
​But intimate Delight.
Retired, and resumed his transitive Estate —​
To what delicious Accident
Does finest Glory fit!
(Dickinson 1960, 554, written about 1873)12

her family, her schooling, her library or the libraries at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke, or
through the pages of the New England periodicals to which the Dickinsons subscribed” (Kirkby
2010, 7). McIntosh (2000) suggests that she would have known of Darwin’s ideas as early as 1860
through Asa Gray’s discussions in the Atlantic. “Darwin did not create Dickinson’s instability of belief
concerning Christianity, but he certainly helped to stimulate it” (174, n.16).
11
  Peel (2010) shows the importance of science for Dickinson, especially in her imagery. More
incisively, Baym (2002) argues that overall Dickinson uses science against theology rather than as a
support. Keane (2008) makes much of Darwin’s influence on Dickinson’s thinking about pain and
suffering; Lundin (2004) stresses how Dickinson’s great poems come after the Origin was published.
Compare the earlier, almost complacency of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on the death of his daugh-
ter (in 1848).

She is not dead,—​the child of our affection,—

​But gone unto that school
Where she no longer needs our poor protection,
And Christ himself doth rule.
“There was little of the speculative philosopher about Longfellow” (Conner [1949] 1973, 177).
12
  In a more theological mode, Dickinson seems to blame God for making us as we are and then
punishing us straight off rather than giving us a decent chance to make good.
“Heavenly Father” —​take to thee
The supreme iniquity
94

94 Darwinism as Religion

Spiders
It is this lack of meaning that struck home so forcibly, and not just for Dickinson.
Either God is indifferent or God is cruel. Compare three great New England
poets (including Dickinson) writing on the shared theme of spiders. First, the
Puritan poet Edward Taylor (1642–╉1729), who uses the metaphor of the spider
catching the fly for Satan catching us and needing Christ to bring about our sal-
vation. We may be pretty pathetic, but everything makes sense in the Christian
scheme of things.

Thou sorrow, venom Elfe:

Is this thy play,╉
To spin a web out of thyselfe
To Catch a Fly?
For Why?

A fly is caught and allowed to escape.

Whereas the silly Fly,

Caught by its leg
Thou by the throate tookst hastily
And 'hinde the head
Bite Dead.

And now the interpretation.

This Frey seems thus to us.

Hells Spider gets

Fashioned by thy candid Hand

In a moment contraband —
╉Though to trust us —╉seems to us
More respectful —╉“We are Dust” —
╉We apologize to thee
For thine own Duplicity —╉
(Dickinson 1960, 619, written about 1879)

The sarcasm at the end suggests someone who might be ready to drop the whole Judeo-╉Christian
conception of God and try some alternative (Zapedowska 2006). Eberwein (2013) stresses how
Dickinson simultaneously wrestled with the twin challenges of Darwin and higher criticism.
  95

God 95

His intrails spun to whip Cords thus

And wove to nets
And sets.
To tangle Adams race
In’s stratigems
To their Destructions, spoil’d, made base
By venom things,
Damn’d Sins.

Fortunately, not all is lost.

But mighty, Gracious Lord

Communicate
Thy Grace to breake the Cord, afford
Us Glorys Gate
And State.
We’l Nightingaile sing like
When pearcht on high
In Glories Cage, thy glory, bright,
And thankfully,
For joy.
(Taylor 1989, 340–​341)

Next, Emily Dickinson, about 1869, who is rather frightening.

A Spider sewed at Night

Without a Light
Upon an Arc of White.
If Ruff it was of Dame
Or Shroud of Gnome
Himself himself inform.
Of Immortality
His Strategy
Was Physiognomy.
(Dickinson 1960, 1138)

Is the spider making a fancy piece of finery for a woman or the death cloak for
one of nature’s unfortunates? And this is how he hopes to achieve immortality?
96

96 Darwinism as Religion

Not through an act of will but simply through physical consequences? Does God
not care about intentions?13
Finally, look at Robert Frost (1874–​1963), writing around 1912.

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-​all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth —​
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth —​
A snow-​drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-​all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—​
If design govern in a thing so small.
(Frost 1969, 302)

The sonnet is ironically called “design,” but that poses the very question.
Three things, all white, come together to cause the death of the moth. Was
it chance? The flower, the heal-​all, should by rights be blue, in which case
the spider would have stood out. The spider is white and thus camouflaged.
The moth, perhaps contingently white—​although had there been no spider

  As is shown by this poem from about 1862, Dickinson could write in a lighter way about spi-
13

ders; although even here there is the theme of effort leading to beauty and then waste.

The Spider holds a Silver Ball

In unperceived Hands—​
And dancing softly to Himself
His Yarn of Pearl —​unwinds—

​ e plies from nought to nought —​

H
In unsubstantial Trade —
​Supplants our Tapestries with His—
​In half the period —

​ n Hour to rear supreme

A
His Continents of Light —​
Then dangle from the Housewife’s Broom—
​His Boundaries —​ forgot—​
(Dickinson 1960, 605)
╇ 97

God 97

it too would have been nicely camouflaged—╉is attracted to the white (as it
is to lights and flames). Is this really design, in which case what kind of God,
and if not, then how pointless it all seems. One is not surprised to learn that
Frost wrote this poem while he was teaching William James in high school
(Poirier 1990). He was reading James’s account of how Darwin blew the argu-
ment from design into smithereens: “Darwin opened our minds to the power
of chance-╉happenings to bring forth ‘fit’ results if only they have time to add
themselves together. He showed the enormous waste of nature in producing
results that get destroyed because of their unfitness. He also emphasized the
number of adaptations which, if designed, would argue an evil rather than a
good designer” ( James 1907).

Suffering
In this poem of Frost, there is worry about suffering itself. As Darwin real-
ized, a God of natural selection rather highlights this and makes it an essential
part of the creation. In a later chapter, we will look at this issue theologically.
For now, recognize that it occurs and that some seized on this in no uncer-
tain terms. Winwood Reade, the explorer and anthropologist mentioned in
the Descent and author of The Martyrdom of Man, a kind of secular history-╉
cum-╉manifesto that was another work that upset Mr. Gladstone, has a hero (if
that is the right term) in his novel The Outcast who is deeply affected by the
Darwinian message.

One day he came to me in trouble. He had been reading the great work
of Malthus —╉the “Essay on Population” —╉and said that it made him
doubt the goodness of God. I replied with the usual common-╉place re-
marks; he listened to me attentively, then sighed, shook his head, and
went away. A little while afterwards he read “The Origin of Species,”
which had just come out, and which proves that the Law of Population
is the chief agent by which Evolution has been produced. From that
time he began to show symptoms of insanity —╉which disease, it is
thought, he inherited from one of his progenitors. He dressed always
in black, and said that he was in mourning for mankind. The works of
Malthus and Darwin, bound in somber covers, were placed on a table
in his room; the first was lettered outside “The Book of Doubt,” and
the second “The Book of Despair.” (Reade [1875] 2012, 5)

Fortunately he meets a nice girl, but she dies and he ends as a suicide in a mad
house. He leaves a manuscript describing his despair, and the cruelty of the
98

98 Darwinism as Religion

Darwinian process figures high. “At first, every step in the human progress was
won by conflict, and every invention resulted from calamity. The most odious
vices and crimes were at one time useful to humanity, while war, tyranny, and
superstition assisted the development of man” (18).
Not everyone was quite so blunt about the issues as this, but the cruelty of
the natural processes is an ongoing theme in prose and poetry. Here is Emily
Dickinson on the subject. It is about a plant and the coming of cold weather, but
note the ominous word “assassin.” The poet may be reacting to the recent death
(1883) at the age of seven of a favorite nephew.

Apparently with no surprise

To any happy Flower
The Frost beheads it at its play—​
In accidental power—​
The blonde Assassin passes on—​
The Sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another Day
For an Approving God.
(Dickinson 1960, 667–​668, written about 1885)14

Almost everyone picks up on this theme. Even Yeats of all people—​the man
who never met a nutty view (like theosophy) that he didn’t like—​is sensitive to
the hurts of the Darwinian struggle (McDonald 2012). A seeker of wisdom has
gone to hear the echoes of a sacred spot.

O Rocky Voice,
Shall we in that great night rejoice?
What do we know but that we face
One another in this place?
But hush, for I have lost the theme,
Its joy or night seem but a dream;
Up there some hawk or owl has struck,
Dropping out of sky or rock,
A stricken rabbit is crying out,
And its cry distracts my thought.
(Yeats 1996, 346. From Last Poems, 1938–​1939)

  “He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down” ( Job 14:2); “By the breath of God, frost is
14

given” ( Job 37:10).

╇ 99

God 99

The Lack of Meaning

A rabbit must be torn apart to feed a predator. What kind of God is this? But, with
respect, although Darwin highlights pain and suffering, we knew about this before
the Origin. What is new for so many is the lack of meaning. Again and again, as
Emily Dickinson sensed, it is the very blindness of law rather than its consequences
as such that are crushing. Robert Browning’s poem “Caliban on Setebos,” appearing
five years after the Origin, has Caliban—╉the subhuman son of the witch Sycorax, in
Shakespeare’s Tempest—╉reflecting in a drunken way on his god Setebos. After the
Darwinian theory, in a grotesque parody of Paley, God for Browning/╉Caliban is
cruel even in—╉precisely because of—╉his indifference (Beer 1985; Loesberg 2008).

Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,

Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea,
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-╉first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do: so He.
(Browning 1981, 807)15

And then, above all others, there is Thomas Hardy, a man for whom Darwin
was his most significant guide from the very first to the very last (Hardy 1987,
259).16 The newly Darwin-╉infused Hardy rages against the absent God, wanting
rather one who does care enough to make life miserable (Stevenson 1932, 261)!
Thus his well-╉known poem “Hap” (1866).

IF but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”

15
╛╛Holmes (2009) is particularly strong on the lack of meaning after the Origin, giving an ex-
tended analysis of Browning’s poem and related works.
16
╛╛Hardy’s overall philosophical position is complex, or perhaps better diffuse, and changing over
time (Bailey 1963). He started life as a Christian and the influence showed in his works throughout his
life. Then in the early 1860s, Hardy read Darwin and became a nonbelieving pessimist, thinking all just
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100 Darwinism as Religion

Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,

Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-╉eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—╉Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan….
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
(Hardy 1994, 5)

Atheism
Does this mean then that there is no God? That it is not that God is indifferent or
cruel but rather that he is nonexistent? This is the conclusion of the Scottish poet
James Thompson (also known as Bysshe Vanolis) in his “City of the Dreadful
Night,” about London—╉a London stripped of meaning or purpose.

We bow down to the universal laws,

Which never had for man a special clause
Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:
If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,
If tigers burn with beauty and with might,
Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?
All substance lives and struggles evermore
Through countless shapes continually at war,
By countless interactions interknit:
If one is born a certain day on earth,
All times and forces tended to that birth,
Not all the world could change or hinder it.

blind chance. In the early 1880s he read Arthur Schopenhauer and came to believe in a kind of blind
world force, the “Immanent Will.” Hardy then combined this with Eduard von Hartmann’s theory of the
unconscious, thinking perhaps through human effort the Will becomes conscious. This was the theory
of the epic drama (complete with Greek-╉like choruses) of the first decade of the twentieth century, The
Dynasts. Finally, around 1910 Hardy became what he himself called an “evolutionary meliorist,” seeing
change moving upward through human effort. Be warned, however, that he himself said candidly in a
preface at the end of his life that “no harmonious philosophy is attempted in these pages—╉or in any
bygone pages of mine, for that matter.” We shall see many counterexamples to the neat fourfold division.
  101

God 101

I find no hint throughout the Universe

Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;
I find alone Necessity Supreme;
With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark,
Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
For us the flitting shadows of a dream.

There is nothing beyond what we sense and feel.

And now at last authentic word I bring,

Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no Fiend with names divine
Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
It is to satiate no Being's gall.
(Thompson [1874] 2003, 36–​37; 34)

We have gone all the way from Kingsley’s untouched Anglican faith to
Thompson’s despairing atheism. But with the possible exception of Kingsley,
there is something linking all these writers. Natural selection—​and note we are
talking about natural selection and not some warm, fuzzy notion like Lamarckism
or dynamic equilibrium—​has changed their world. Or, perhaps more accurately,
quoting more lines of Matthew Arnold’s poem—​even before Darwin we were
facing a world that “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/​Nor certitude,
nor peace, nor help for pain”—​we should say that natural selection makes this
bleak vision a reality. God is at arm’s length, say what you will. And that raises
questions of meaning. Does he care? Is he indifferent? Is he cruel? Is he a sadist?
Does he even exist? And, what is this going to mean for us? How are we to move
forward? Let us see.
102

Origins

The Christian Story
Thanks to its Jewish roots, Christianity is a story of origins. Even without an
absolutely literal reading of Genesis, no one (on the Christian side) doubted
that God was creator, that this had happened in the conceivable past, that hu-
mankind is central, and that we have a story that is dynamic in that it leads
from the past to the present and onward toward the future. The poet Christina
Rossetti, who in the last chapter captured for us the notion of God, now in this
sonnet captures for us the Genesis-╉based origins of the world and our begin-
nings. She stresses also the climax of the Christian story when God suffered
for our sins.

Thou Who didst make and knowest whereof we are made,

Oh bear in mind our dust and nothingness,
Our wordless tearless dumbness of distress:
Bear Thou in mind the burden Thou hast laid
Upon us, and our feebleness unstayed
Except Thou stay us: for the long long race
Which stretches far and far before our face
Thou knowest,—╉remember Thou whereof we are made.
If making makes us Thine, then Thine we are;
And if redemption, we are twice Thine own:
If once Thou didst come down from heaven afar
To seek us and to find us, how not save?
Comfort us, save us, leave us not alone,
Thou Who didst die our death and fill our grave.
(Rossetti 1904, 74)

102
╇ 103

O r ig ins 103

In respects—╉and one truly means no real slur—╉evolution is a bastard off-

spring of this story.1 It too is a story of origins with events in the distant past—╉
on neither side do we have eyewitness testimony of folk around today—╉and
humans are central, if only as a vehicle for people to spend a lot of time showing
that they are not! By and large, not too much time is spent worrying about the
centrality of warthogs. So in this chapter, let us see what the creative writers had
to say about origins from an evolutionary perspective. And the place to start is
with the presupposition to the story, time.

Deep Time
Stress again that the immensity of time—╉often known as “deep time”—╉was no
new discovery of Darwin. In the years before the Origin, Whitman in “Leaves of
Grass” was insisting on the nigh inconceivability of history.

It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe,

moving so exactly in its orbit forever and ever,
without one jolt, or the untruth of a single
second,
I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten
thousand years, nor ten billions of years,
Nor planned and built one thing after another, as an
architect plans and builds a house.

This said, Darwin certainly concentrated people’s thinking on the age of the
universe, so much so in fact that, in their ignorance of the warming effects
of radioactive decay, the physicists—╉led by that good Presbyterian William
Thompson (Lord Kelvin)—╉did their utmost to bring down the age to a span
that would make evolution through natural selection impossible. Thompson
had the figure at about 100  million years, although he thought it might be
less (Burchfield 1975). One feels, however, that the novelists and poets had
a better grip on things, especially that now we think the Earth over 4 billion
years, the universe nearly 14 billion years, and life down here at least 3.5 bil-
lion years old.2

1
╛╛Because of this connection, I  feel free to ignore non-╉Western religions like Buddhism. I  see
Darwinism as a rival to Christianity. I do say something about non-╉Western religions in Ruse (2015a)
and a lot more in Larson and Ruse (2016).
2
╛╛Trying to speed evolution up a little may have been a reason why the later editions of the Origin
have more Lamarckism than the earlier editions.
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104 Darwinism as Religion

As always, that dedicated Darwinian Thomas Hardy comes to the fore. There
is no more forceful or subtle treatment of time than that to be found in his
novel The Return of the Native (1878). The story itself is a bit of a soap opera.
Damon Wildeve, somewhat of a lightweight, cannot make up his mind between
Thomasin Yeobright, whom he eventually marries but then rather regrets his
actions, and Eustacia Vye, whom he does not marry but then rather regrets
his actions. Eustacia has stars in her eyes about Clym Yeobright—​cousin to
Thomasin—​who has just returned from Paris and wants to start a school. They
do marry, but then Clym starts to lose his eyesight and becomes a furze-​cutter.
This is all a bit lower class, but what really upsets Eustacia is that he enjoys his
new job. In the end, Eustacia and Damon run off, but they fall in a pool and
drown. Clym is overwhelmed with guilt and becomes a preacher. Thomasin
marries Diggery Venn, who has always had a bit of a thing for her. This atypi-
cally happy ending for a Hardy novel was not the author’s original intent but was
pushed on him by his publisher to suit the readers.
In a way, though, all this is froth on the top—​on the top of Egdon Heath (in
Hardy’s imaginary county of Wessex) which is where the action takes place. It is
the Heath that dominates the story and moves the characters forward or back-
ward, even drowning a couple of them at the end. Throughout, Hardy stresses
the timelessness of the Heath—​always was there, is there now, will be there in
the future when we are all long gone. The Heath is both hero and villain, al-
though, as in Hardy’s novels, the two notions are usually confused.

The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had
been. Civilization was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of veg-
etation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and
invariable garment of the particular formation. In its venerable one coat
lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a
heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less an anoma-
lous look. We seem to want the oldest and simplest human clothing
where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.
To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, be-
tween afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing
of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which
filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that every-
thing around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as un-
altered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change,
and harassed by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an
ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a par-
ticular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it
is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields
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O r ig ins 105

changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon re-
mained. (Hardy [1878] 1999, 11–​12)

There is an underlying pagan theme to Hardy’s novel. The Heath is a thing unto
itself—​in today’s terms, a Gaia-​like phenomenon with an existence, a life, of its
own—​never born, never to die. Hardy makes much of the symbolism of the
bonfire with its evocation of druids and like priests of the aged past. Although
the bonfires framing the story are the successive years of Guy Fawkes Night
(November the fifth), Hardy makes more of them. “The ashes of the original
British pyre which blazed from that summit lay fresh and undisturbed in the
barrow beneath their tread. The flames from funeral piles long ago kindled there
had shone down upon the lowlands as these were shining now. Festival fires to
Thor and Woden had followed on the same ground and duly had their day” (20).
Even Eustacia—​the beautiful Eustacia—​is part of the scene, with her primitive
sexuality that kills one would-​be lover and drives her husband to a life of gloomy
guilt. “She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, as it came
and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and
lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller than it usually is with English
women” (68).
I don’t think Hardy is a pagan—​certainly not at this time thinking of the
Earth as a living being worthy of worship—​but he is using pagan ideas and sen-
timents to try to express something in a world without the Christian message of
hope.3 And time is an essential part of this. We are of the Earth. We came from it.
We go back to it. That is all there is. Time goes on. There is no meaning, at least
not in any conscious, Christian sort of way. Hardy repeats this message in his
verse. Take the sad, sad poem about the lad killed in the Boer War (1899–​1902),
far from home, in a land he does not understand, buried without ceremony.
A pointless, worthless life. He is not even a fighting man. He’s just a kid who
makes a lot of noise banging a piece of wood against an animal skin.

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

Uncoffined —​just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-​crest
That breaks the veldt around:
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

3
  The manuscript of the novel is more explicitly anti-​Christian than the version that was pub-
lished (Paterson 1959). Because of its content, Hardy had a horrendous job getting the novel pub-
lished and bowdlerized the text to achieve that end (Dalziel 2000).
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106 Darwinism as Religion

Young Hodge the drummer never knew —╉

Fresh from his Wessex home —╉
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-╉eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.
(Hardy 1994, 80)

Young Hodge is now part of all eternity—╉back to the Earth, ready to be recycled
again and again. He is nothing and yet, as much as any one of us, he is something.
We are, always were, always will be, part of existence. And that—╉take it as bleak,
take it as comforting—╉is something.4

Modern Science
In a way, to use an uncomfortably apt phrase, all of this is looking backward. The
writers are exploring the notion of time—╉of deep time—╉and to do this they
are reverting to pre-╉Christian notions of ages ever-╉lasting or perhaps eternal. It
is no surprise to find that Whitman was responding at least in part to Buddhist
thinking—╉something incidentally that was significant for Emerson. Obviously
if you are going to discuss evolution, looking into the past, this is the prime way
to go—╉and as obviously this is going to challenge the Christian. But one should
not forget that, at the end of the nineteenth century, physicists—╉one thinks first
and foremost of Albert Einstein—╉were going to pull apart the whole notion of
time and put it back into science in ways unimaginable to earlier scientists. The
deepness of time then will be just one part of the overall picture.
With reason, one might say that this is not really the geologist’s or the evolu-
tionist’s concern, any more than, say, the work of Keynes on the economy is my

4
╛╛This, I take it, is Hardy more at the third stage, inclined to think of some blind life force under-
lying everything. Schopenhauer goes back to the Romantics as does von Hartmann and a debt to
Schelling. Although there are common roots and obvious overlaps, the life force of the transcenden-
talists seems more optimistic, more aware than the dark world of Schopenhauer particularly.
╇ 107

O r ig ins 107

concern as I try to balance my family’s finances—╉the mortgage, the car payment,

the college fees. But of course, this is true only to a point, of both time and our
finances. There is surely going to be interest in whether the future extends indefi-
nitely as the past apparently extends indefinitely—╉and one might say that, just as
time impinges on the Creation story, so also it impinges on the Second Coming.
We will deal more with this and related topics in a later chapter. What we can say
here is that, thinking in an evolutionary context, our writers were not indifferent
to these sorts of issues. Notably H. G. Wells (1886–╉1946), in the Time Machine
(writing a decade before Einstein), takes up the question of time and its mean-
ing. He is not original—╉he cites one Professor Simon Newcomb speaking in
New York—╉but he is forward looking.

“Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have ex-
tension in four directions:  it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness,
and—╉Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which
I  will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact.
There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes
of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an
unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter,
because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one
direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.”
(Wells [1895] 2005, 4)

He continues: “â•›Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though

some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it.
It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and
any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.â•›”
This obviously opens up the possibility of time always existing in some sense,
and from the viewpoint of the novel the possibility of time travel just as much
as space travel. Wells is not the first to think of this in a fictional context. To take
one example of many, we get something like it in Dickens’s Christmas Carol, with
the three ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future.
But in some way, given that space seems—╉or at least, seemed then—╉to have no
bounds, it all suggests that time could be boundless likewise.

Dinosaurs
We have time. Now, we turn to filling it up with life and seeing if it all makes a co-
herent story. Again, let it be stressed, the Origin entered a world that had already
done much to uncover the once-╉living past. Above all, those dinosaurs—╉down
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108 Darwinism as Religion

at the Crystal Palace park—​thrilled and puzzled the Victorians, and they only
became more pressing as the century grew on and truly fantabulous new forms
were uncovered out in the American West—​the most famous, Diplodocus carn-
egie (“Dippy”), being reproduced in plaster and given to museums, starting with
London, all over the world. They frame our time period. Lewis Carroll wrote his
famous nonsense poem about the Jabberwocky in the 1850s.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—​
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-​snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
(Carroll 1871, 9)

When the poem appeared in Alice through the Looking Glass in 1871, the il-
lustration was by John Tenniel, and the beast was a combination of Pterodactyl
wings and the long scaly neck of a sauropod (a form of dinosaur which includes
the then yet-​to-​be-​discovered Dippy). People knew what this was all about
and why it was a joke. They continued to know. In 1912 Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859–​1930) took a break from writing Sherlock Holmes stories to pen The
Lost World, about Professor Challenger and his trip to South America where on
a high plateau, isolated by cliffs, he finds a niche still occupied by brutes from
the past, notably including dinosaurs—​Iguanodon, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus,
Megalosaurus. There are also Pterodactyls! All fantasy of course, but fantasy
about the familiar.

There were, as I say, five of them, two being adults and three young ones.
In size they were enormous. Even the babies were as big as elephants,
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O r ig ins 109

while the two large ones were far beyond all creatures I have ever seen.
They had slate-╉colored skin, which was scaled like a lizard's and shim-
mered where the sun shone upon it. All five were sitting up, balancing
themselves upon their broad, powerful tails and their huge three-╉toed
hind-╉feet, while with their small five-╉fingered front-╉feet they pulled
down the branches upon which they browsed. I do not know that I can
bring their appearance home to you better than by saying that they
looked like monstrous kangaroos, twenty feet in length, and with skins
like black crocodiles. (Conan Doyle [1912] 1995, 100–╉101)

And this almost matter-╉of-╉fact description of Iguanodons at supper is in a way

the whole point. Neither Carroll nor Conan Doyle was in the religion-╉debunking
business. Carroll was an Anglican minister and, although after a Catholic child-
hood he became an agnostic, notoriously Conan Doyle was an enthusiast for
spiritualism and speaking with the departed. But they like everyone else were
going on about brutes that clearly were major items in life’s history and yet find
no mention in the Old Testament. We do not read of the troubles of Noah and
his family in finding room on the Ark for Diplodocus and friends. Did God really
make them all and then just wipe them out in the Flood? Why should they go
extinct because of the sins of humankind?

Origins of Life
Let us get more specific about the actual course of life’s history and its meaning
and causes. Turn first to the creative force that starts all of life. Erasmus Darwin
happily supposed some form of spontaneous generation. Charles Darwin be-
lieved in something of that sort, although certainly not something continuous
(which was built into Lamarck’s theory). To his great friend the botanist Joseph
Hooker, on February 1, 1871, he wrote that “it is often said that all the condi-
tions for the first production of a living being are now present, which could ever
have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm
little pond with all sort of ammonia and phosphoric salts,—╉light, heat, electric-
ity present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo
still more complex changes, at the present such matter would be instantly de-
voured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures
were formed …” (Darwin 1985–╉, 19, 53–╉54). In print cautiously Darwin re-
mained silent because it was just as the Origin appeared that in France Louis
Pasteur was putting the final nail in the coffin of naïve views of life’s origination.
But really, he was only speculating in a way that seemed pretty obvious to those
before him and those after him. Chambers speculated about electric sparks and
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110 Darwinism as Religion

Thomas Henry Huxley plunged right in with claims about deep-​sea, early life
forms.5
The poets picked up on the idea. Thus Mathilde Blind, writing in 1889:

Struck out of dim fluctuant forces and shock of electrical vapour,

Repelled and attracted the atoms flashed mingling; in union primeval,
And over the face of the waters far heaving in limitless twilight
Auroral pulsations thrilled faintly, and, striking the blank heaving surface,
The measureless speed of their motion now leaped into light on the waters.
(Blind 1899, 7)

Most poets preferred to remain fairly vague on the subject, stressing more
what one might call the metaphysical aspects of life’s beginnings rather than the
actual messy details. In his poem with the provocative title “Genesis,” Augustus
Charles Swinburne is explicit in wanting a natural origin of life as opposed to
the God-​driven origin of Christianity—​the work “a curious combination of
Romantic pantheism and Positivistic agnosticism” (Roppen 1956, 181)—​two
strands (German and French) of the idea of Progress. His story is put in direct
contrast to the creation story of the Old Testament.

In the outer world that was before this earth,

That was before all shape or space was born,
Before the blind first hour of time had birth,
Before night knew the moonlight or the morn;
Yea, before any world had any light,
Or anything called God or man drew breath,
Slowly the strong sides of the heaving night
Moved, and brought forth the strength of life and death.
And the sad shapeless horror increate
That was all things and one thing, without fruit,
Limit, or law; where love was none, nor hate,
Where no leaf came to blossom from no root;
The very darkness that time knew not of,
Nor God laid hand on, nor was man found there,
Ceased, and was cloven in several shapes; above
Light, and night under, and fire, earth, water, and air.

5
  That Darwin never speculated publicly on the origin of life, and that this is true even of (unpub-
lished) early versions of the theory of the Origin, whereas everyone else thought such speculations
came with the territory, suggests that Darwin was being very cautious, almost certainly because he
hoped to elevate evolutionary thought in one step from the pseudoscience level to the professional-​
science level. People like Huxley, having no such ambitions and happy to stay more at the popular-​
science level, felt free to hypothesize.
╇ 111

O r ig ins 111

The physical world came into being without God’s help, before God indeed. And
it seems that God is equally absent when life starts up and gains ground—╉gains
ground, that is, in a way redolent of Darwinian processes.

Then between shadow and substance, night and light,

Then between birth and death, and deeds and days,
The illimitable embrace and the amorous fight
That of itself begets, bears, rears, and slays,
The immortal war of mortal things that is
Labour and life and growth and good and ill,
The mild antiphonies that melt and kiss,
The violent symphonies that meet and kill,
All nature of all things began to be.
But chiefliest in the spirit (beast or man,
Planet of heaven or blossom of earth or sea)
The divine contraries of life began.

And this all leads to change and growth—╉in a Spencerian fashion homogene-
ity leading to heterogeneity—╉although the poet does not want to leave the im-
pression that we are going toward a happy conclusion—╉as presumably in the
Christian story. Life is and always will be a mixture of the happy and the sad, the
sweet and the bitter.

For if death were not, then should growth not be,

Change, nor the life of good nor evil things;
Nor were there night at all nor light to see,
Nor water of sweet nor water of bitter springs.
(Swinburne 1904, 2, 117–╉118)

Life’s History
I don’t think one should necessarily look for heavy-╉duty meaning in everything
that is written, not even everything that is written by Thomas Hardy! Sometimes
one is just using Darwinism (broadly construed) as background, although of
course everything adds to the overall picture. And the very fact that no mean-
ing is put in may be indicative of the author’s belief that there is no meaning.
Take next the actual course of life from the earliest beginnings up to the pres-
ent. For one who worked for the first decade and more of his scientific career
as a geologist, Charles Darwin was always curiously uninterested in the actual
paths of evolution—╉phylogenies. Of course, he had some ideas on the subject,
particularly on the evolution of barnacles. Later he speculated, correctly, that
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112 Darwinism as Religion

humans came out of Africa not Asia. But the Origin carries no picture or table
of life’s history—​nor does the Descent—​even though, as shown in Richard
Owen’s little popular book on paleontology, people had a pretty good idea of
the main outlines (Owen 1860). The only diagram in the Origin is a very styl-
ized and entirely theoretical tree of life, intended more to show the principle of
divergence than to show the paths of evolution. But, of course, there had to be
a representative tree of life, and lots of people were eager to show it and fill it
in—​indeed, generally uninterested in causes, it became the primary obsession
of professional scientists in the decades after the Origin.
Hardy was sensitive to this, using the history both as background and as a
vehicle ingeniously to put a familiar conviction—​surely mythological—​into a
modern context. He picked up on the popular belief that when one is drown-
ing or otherwise facing imminent death the whole of one’s life flashes before
one, like a movie in fast motion. In one of his early novels, A Pair of Blue Eyes
(1873), the hero on a cliff edge has slipped and is clinging on, contemplating
the end. Then suddenly in the cliff he sees a fossilized trilobite and this triggers
the stream of consciousness, not of the hero’s life but of life in general.

Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of
the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centu-
ries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carry-
ing, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the
rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hol-
lows, woods, and mud huts—​perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks.
Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine
forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of mon-
strous size, the megatherium, and the myledon—​all, for the moment,
in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched
huge-​billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shad-
owy were the sinister crocodilian outlines—​alligators and other uncouth
shapes, culminating in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind
were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles:  still underneath were
fishy beings of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of
the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things.
These images passed before Knight's inner eye in less than half a minute,
and he was again considering the actual present. Was he to die?  (143)6

6
  It is highly probable that Hardy got his description of life’s history from the sixth edition of
Gideon Mantell’s The Wonders of Geology, published in 1848, a copy of which was given to Hardy
in 1858 and that he kept all his life. There are significant overlaps of themes and language, including
shared phrases like “dragon forms” (Buckland 2008). In the Origin, Darwin simply drew on this kind
  113

O r ig ins 113

Fortunately his enterprising girlfriend tears up her underwear and fashions

a rope and he is saved. One suspects that, given today’s fashions, he might
have been less fortunate. The reader will be happy to learn that eventu-
ally Hardy does not disappoint, because before the end the girlfriend mar-
ries the wrong chap and she dies (apparently from a miscarriage). Which
seems, albeit somewhat callously, an appropriate point to pass on to our
next topic.

of knowledge, of which Mantell was giving a popular exposition, and gave it an evolutionary interpre-
tation. Hardy’s text does not make explicit reference to descent, but by the time he was writing in the
early 1870s, everyone would have taken the history in an evolutionary context.
114

Humans

Two Visions
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him;
male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). God didn’t have to create
humans. He didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t have to make humans special.
But he did, to the extent that He was prepared to die in agony on the Cross for
our salvation. Darwin didn’t have to write about humans, but he did. He didn’t
have to give us special status, but he did to the extent that he wrote a whole
book about us. Here is where the Christian-╉Darwin contrast is so interesting
and provocative. In one sense, they could not be more different. A miraculous
creation of God’s favorite against a naturalistic origin of one more species. In
another sense, they could not be more similar. A story about one species, hu-
mankind. Or at least, so it seems, for as always the full truth is a little more
complex.
How or why did Darwin think we are special? Obviously in one way because of
the role of sexual selection, but we can put this on one side for a moment. We will
return to it. For the moment, focus just on the fact that selection of one sort or an-
other was crucial in our making. The point for Darwin, however, is that we weren’t
just made. We won. Darwin does not believe in some natural, Lamarckian-╉type of
necessary progression up from blobs to humans, from monad to man as everyone
said. But he does think we have the biggest onboard computers, that this makes
us superior, and that getting big brains was something predictable given selection.
“If we look at the differentiation and specialisation of the several organs of each
being when adult (and this will include the advancement of the brain for intellec-
tual purposes) as the best standard of highness of organisation, natural selection
clearly leads towards highness …” (Darwin 1861, 134).
How did the poets and novelists deal with humans and their status? As
always, there is a range. But even for those prepared to allow that there may be
a God in some sense and that he might have a plan, there is an undercurrent of

114
  115

Humans 115

fear—​perhaps melancholy—​that evolution shows we humans might not have

the status we once thought. Mark Twain made a joke out of things.

Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years
to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for.
I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the
world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-​knob at its summit would
represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that
skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.
(Twain [1903] 2004, 221)

Hardy, almost inevitably, saw that so-​called lower forms of life are in respects
more knowledgeable than we humans. A daddy longlegs (a spider), a moth, and
a dumbledore (a bumble bee) fly in at night, while the author is writing. A fly is
already on the page.

Thus meet we five, in this still place,

At this point of time, at this point in space.
—​My guests besmear my new-​penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
“God’s humblest, they!” I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-​secrets that know not I.
(Hardy 1994, 130–​131, written about 1899)

Emily Dickinson has more metaphysical take on the issue.

It’s easy to invent a Life—​

God does it—​every Day—​
Creation—​but the Gambol
Of His Authority—​
It’s easy to efface it—​
The thrifty Deity
Could scarce afford Eternity
To Spontaneity—​
The Perished Patterns murmur—​
But His Perturbless Plan
Proceed—​inserting Here—​a Sun—​
There—​leaving out a Man—​
(Dickinson 1960, 355, written about 1863)
We may be important, but we are not that important!
116

116 Darwinism as Religion

Stone Age Fighting

Let us go at the topic systematically. There are lots of tales about our past and
the bloody battles our ancestors fought. Often the action counts a lot more
than the scientific accuracy. Typical is Zit and Xoe (1886) by Henry Curwen.
Taking to the extreme the suppositions of people like Huxley that evolution
can go in one-╉step jumps (“saltations”) from one kind to another, the story
is about two proto-╉humans who leapt from ape-╉form to human-╉form in one
generation.

“Wretched little beast!” cried my mother, as she angrily twisted her tail
round the stoutest branch she could find, and swung herself up into a
bushy banian-╉tree.
I stood below weeping bitterly —╉stood, I say, because I could do
nothing else: I had never been able to walk on all-╉fours like the others.
I could not dart from tree to tree, from branch to branch, like the very
smallest of my brothers and sisters.
In these few words I have described the loneliness and desolation of
my childhood. I was alas! tailless and hairless! I could not even chatter!

If his mother felt this way, you can imagine the shame his father felt. Fortunately,
Zit (boy) meets Xoe (girl) and nature takes its course starting a new generation
of human-╉like beings. Not, expectedly, without fights for survival.

The shore was lined with hideous monstrous forms right down to the
water’s edge. But they could not pass beyond it. We were safe now, and,
under the spell of some dreadful fascination, I turned to watch the ter-
rible drama being played out before us.
The Beasts had dared to declare war against Man, and were now
venting their disappointed fury on each other; I could see in the dis-
tance the hatchets and spears I had so prized wielded madly and fiercely
by scores of bony hands. I could hear the cries of the great beasts, as
with bleeding flanks they learned for the first time what real pain was.
Unsightly forms I knew of old leapt in and out of the seething crowd
with such prodigious rapidity that they seemed well-nigh innumerable.
Then with maddening roars each beast turned on the monstrous crea-
ture nearest, and began a combat of life and death.

There is a message here that Zit and Xoe are able to read. We humans need to
cooperate or we too will go the way of the Beasts.
  117

Humans 117

A little more realistic is Wells’s little tale A Story of the Stone Age, about such
conflict within the species. Uya, the leader of the pack, has got his eyes on Ugh-​
lomi and his girlfriend. “There was no hunting so sweet to these ancient men
as the hunting of men. Once the fierce passion of the chase was lit, the feeble
beginnings of humanity in them were thrown to the winds. And Uya in the night
had marked Ugh-​lomi with the death word. Ugh-​lomi was the day’s quarry, the
appointed feast” (Wells [1897] 1938, 651–​652). However, things don’t turn out
too well for the older man.

And the third day Ugh-​lomi came back, up the river. The plumes of
a raven were in his hair. The first axe was red-​stained, and had long
dark hairs upon it, and he carried the necklace that had marked the
favourite of Uya in his hand. He walked in the soft places, giving
no heed to his trail. Save a raw cut below his jaw there was not a
wound upon him. “Uya!” cried Ugh-​lomi exultant, and Eudena saw
it was well. He put the necklace on Eudena, and they ate and drank
together.  (658)

The reader is assured that Ugh-​lomi and Eudena do their Darwinian duty. “And
Eudena sat red in the light of the fire, gloating on him, her face flushed and her
eyes shining, and the necklace Uya had made about her neck. It was a splendid
time, and the stars that look down on us looked down on her, our ancestor—​
who has been dead now these fifty thousand years” (658).
Conan Doyle in The Lost World (1912) is more into interspecific conflict. It is
the native humans on the plateau (the Accala) versus the ape men (the Doda). It
is true that the Europeans help out, but basically it is the Accala who prove their
evolutionary worth.

Then in a moment came the panic and the collapse. Screaming and
howling, the great creatures rushed away in all directions through the
brushwood, while our allies yelled in their savage delight, following
swiftly after their flying enemies. All the feuds of countless generations,
all the hatreds and cruelties of their narrow history, all the memories of
ill-​usage and persecution were to be purged that day. At last man was
to be supreme and the man-​beast to find forever his allotted place. Fly
as they would the fugitives were too slow to escape from the active sav-
ages, and from every side in the tangled woods we heard the exultant
yells, the twanging of bows, and the crash and thud as ape-​men were
brought down from their hiding-​places in the trees. (Conan Doyle
[1912] 1995, 159)
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118 Darwinism as Religion

Progress to Humans?
What about putting together the parts of the picture? Do we end up with a progres-
sive picture up to humankind as supposed by Darwin? Obviously Hardy thinks we
have something like that, although he is very careful not to read any values into the
process. It happened. Whether it was a good thing that it happened or whether we
humans are top are questions unanswered, or at least they are in his early novel,
for as we shall see, he did later have thoughts on the subject. Winwood Reade,
however, for all that he thought the process terribly cruel, seems to have assumed
without question that the process was progressive, upward to humankind.

Monstrous reptiles and ungainly quadrupeds inhabited the primeval

marshes of the earth; and at night the croaking of enormous frogs rose
like thunder in the air. But as time flowed on the face of the earth assumed
a more gentle and benignant expression; flowers blossomed in the forest,
and the voices of singing birds were heard; the quadrupeds became less
gigantic in size, but more graceful and varied in their forms; and finally
Men appeared upon the scene, roaming in herds through the forest,
clambering the trees, jabbering semi-╉articulate sounds. But, as language
formed upon their lips, the erect posture was assumed, the fore-╉foot was
used as a hand, weapons were invented, fire was discovered, caverns in the
rock, burrows in the ground, and platforms on the trees were exchanged
for huts surrounded by gardens. (Reade [1875] 2012, 15–╉16)

And then the evaluation, with the mandatory dig against God and his angels:
“We suppose that the moral purpose of this drama is to teach the doctrine of
Improvement, and to illustrate that tendency to Progress which pervades the uni-
verse.” Continuing: “The evolution of mind from matter, by means of natural
law, shows the innate power of that tendency or force, and the efforts by which
Man achieves his own comparative perfection are no doubt intended as a protest
against that habit of quiescence and content which is perhaps the natural failing of
Immortals” (16–╉17).
In poetry too we get the upward rise and evolution of humans and their
brains. A  lot less portentous than Reade is this comical poem by Constance
Naden (1858–╉1889), “Solomon Redivivus” (1886). King Solomon is talking to
the Queen of Sheba and he is going to tell her a story from Darwin.

We were a soft Amœba
In ages past and gone,
Ere you were Queen Of Sheba,
And I King Solomon.
  119

Humans 119

Unorganed, undivided,
We lived in happy sloth,
And all that you did I did,
One dinner nourished both:
Till you incurred the odium
Of fission and divorce—​
A severed pseudopodium
You strayed your lonely course.

Evolution kept going:

Long ages passed—​our wishes

Were fetterless and free,
For we were jolly fishes,
A‐swimming in the sea.
We roamed by groves of coral,
We watched the youngsters play—​
The memory and the moral
Had vanished quite away.
Next, each became a reptile,
With fangs to sting and slay;
No wiser ever crept, I’ll
Assert, deny who may.
But now, disdaining trammels
Of scale and limbless coil,
Through every grade of mammals
We passed with upward toil.

Finally, we get to the top of the heap:

Till, anthropoid and wary

Appeared the parent ape,
And soon we grew less hairy,
And soon began to drape.
So, from that soft Amœba,
In ages past and gone,
You’ve grown the Queen of Sheba,
And I King Solomon.
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120 Darwinism as Religion

Not, one might add, that the life of King Solomon is quite everything it is made
out to be. Supposedly he was the wisest man who ever lived, but think of all
those wives he had. Jim, the runaway slave in Huckleberry Finn, has a few words
on this subject:

Mos’ likely dey has rackety times in de nussery. En I reck’n de wives

quarrels considable; en dat 'crease de racket. Yit dey say Sollermun de
wises’ man dat ever live’. I doan’ take no stock in dat. Bekase why: would
a wise man want to live in de mids’ er sich a blim-​blammin’ all de time?
No—​'deed he wouldn’t. (Twain [1884] 1985, 85)

Perhaps it was to be expected that seriousness predominated in the verse

of the German-​born poet Mathilde Blind. She wrote a whole epic on what she
called “The Ascent of Man.” She knows all about the struggle:

And lo, 'mid reeking swarms of earth

Grim struggling in the primal wood,
A new strange creature hath its birth:
Wild—​stammering—​nameless—​shameless—​nude;
Spurred on by want, held in by fear,
He hides his head in caverns drear.

Most unprotected of earth’s kin,

His fight for life that seems so vain
Sharpens his senses, till within
The twilight mazes of his brain,
Like embryos within the womb,
Thought pushes feelers through the gloom.
And slowly in the fateful race
It grows unconscious, till at length
The helpless savage dares to face
The cave-​bear in his grisly strength;
For stronger than its bulky thews
He feels a force that grows with use.

From age to dumb unnumbered age,

By dim gradations long and slow,
He reaches on from stage to stage,
Through fear and famine, weal and woe
  121

Humans 121

And, compassed round with danger, still

Prolongs his life by craft and skill.
(Blind 1899, 14–​15)

Much given to revolutionary causes, Blind worried about the innate brutality
in humankind, but at the end, as shown by some kind of veiled guide, a kind of
world-​spirit seems to overcome all through love.

And beside me in the golden morning

I beheld my shrouded phantom-​guide;
But no longer sorrow‐veiled and mourning—​
It became transfigured by my side.
And I knew—​as one escaped from prison
Sees old things again with fresh surprise—​
It was Love himself, Love re-​arisen
With the Eternal shining though his eyes.
(101–​102)

Of course—​recognizing that in the most important sense we are all

now in a Darwinian world—​the trouble with so much of this is seeing how
Darwinian (in the sense of utilizing Darwin’s mechanisms) it truly is and
if Darwinian, how firmly (biological) progress can be extracted from the
tale. Constance Naden certainly knew a lot about Darwin’s ideas and was an
astute reader (Beer 2000). But here she seems just to be having fun. Reade
certainly seems Darwinian, if not in the passages just quoted then certainly
in the earlier passages quoted to show how he used the Darwinian process
against a good God. But he certainly takes it for granted that we are going to
win in the struggle for existence and that we humans are superior to other
organisms, and not just because we won—​we are on the side of the “grace-
ful” rather than the “monstrous” and “ungainly.” But as people like Huxley
kept pointing out, often we won because we were nastier than our oppo-
nents, not because we were nicer. It was something that Mathilde Blind
wrestled with too. And her solution seems to have involved some sort of
spirit force sorting it all out. Even before she gets there, the processes seem
not terribly Darwinian—​“He feels a force that grows with use”—​being more
Lamarckian or quite possibly Spencerian (which in many respects means
the same thing). Spencer is big on the struggle. It is just that for him, rather
than the struggle wiping out some and the others then succeeding because
of nondirected variations, the struggle brings on useful features that are then
122

122 Darwinism as Religion

passed on by Lamarckian means, whatever they might be. Of course, none

of this denies that people are using evolution to provide an alternative to the
Christian story, nor that others might be truer to Darwin’s mechanisms and
come to other conclusions.

Moving to a Darwinian Position

You can run from Darwinism, meaning pure natural selection, but what
if you start to embrace it? The poet William Canton, in “Through the
Ages: A Legend of a Stone Axe” (written in 1879), starts to push us in that
direction. In three parts, the first tells of a Stone Age man, threatened by
a saber-╉toothed tiger, who has an axe to defend himself. His daughter is
looking on.

With his blue eyes agleam, and

His wild russet hair
Streaming back, the man travails,
Unwarned, unaware
Of the lithe shape that crouches, the green eyes
that glare.
And now, hark ! as he drives with
A last mighty swing
The stone blade of the axe through
The oak’s central ring.
From the blanched lips what screams of wild agony
spring ! —╉
There’s a rush through the fern-╉fronds —╉
A yell of affright —╉
And the savage and sabre-╉tooth
Close in fierce fight: —╉
And the red sunset smoulders and blackens to night.
On the swamp in the forest
One clear star is shown.
And the reeds fill the night with
A long troubled moan —╉
And the girl sits and sobs in the darkness, alone!
(Canton 1927, 51–╉52)
╇ 123

Humans 123

She is sad but safe. What has happened to father? Surely with the axe, a product
of a thinking intelligence, he has outfought the tiger. We have to wait to learn his
fate. The second part tells of the draining of the fens, under which the axe was long
deposited. Then the third part introduces us to a professor and a class of girls, and
in one of the display cases of the classroom lies the axe. One of the girls dreams of
long ago:

But for Phemie, through the trees in

Her dream forest, fact and reason
Blend with fancy, and her vision grows complete and clear
and dread:
By the swamp in the forest
The sylvan girl sings,
As his flint-╉headed hatchet
The wild woodman swings:
But the hatchet cleaves fast in the trunk he has
riven, —╉
The man stands unarmed as the sabre-╉tooth
springs !
(57–╉58)

It seems that our Stone Age man met his end. His intelligence, his tool-╉making
skills, came to naught. Not much thought of progress here. As a race, we did
survive, but the implication is that it was as much by chance as by design. We
should not confuse being on the top of the evolutionary tree, because that is
where today’s organisms are found, with being on the top of the tree, because the
tree was striving to get to that point.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Expectedly it is Thomas Hardy who pushes this insight to the extreme. We are
just animals like the rest; part of the earth from which we came; part of the earth
to which we will return. In a very non-╉Christian sort of way, the world was not
made for us. Indeed, Hardy (writing in a notebook in 1889) worried that evolu-
tion might have made humans misfits in some sense.

A woeful fact, that the human race is too extremely developed for its
corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal
in such an environment. Even the higher animals are in excess in this
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124 Darwinism as Religion

respect. It may be questioned if Nature, or what we call Nature, so far

back as when she crossed the line from invertebrates to vertebrates, did
not exceed her mission. This planet does not supply the material for
happiness to higher existences —​other planets may, although one can
hardly see how. (Stevenson 1932, 266)

All these sentiments about the status of humans and the indifference of nature
get expressed most powerfully in Hardy’s novels, above all Tess of the D’Urbervilles.1
The story is well-​known. The Durbeyfields, a large and rather poor family headed
by an inadequate father, learn that they are the descendants of a once-​powerful
family, the D’Urbervilles. Their daughter Tess is packed off to sidle up to what
is (mistakenly) thought to be a remnant of the family. She gets seduced, prob-
ably raped, by the son Alec. Returning home she has a baby who dies and then
she goes off to work at a dairy farm. There she meets Angel Clare—​she had seen
him briefly at the beginning before she went to the D’Urbervilles. Training to be
a farmer, he is an idealistic young man of higher social class than she. He falls in
love with her and, despite her guilt about her past, Tess finally marries him. She
had thought she had confessed in a note written to him before the ceremony, but
it turns out that he had not seen it and when on the wedding night she tells all
he turns from her. She goes home and then to another farm, while Angel goes
off to Brazil. Alec comes back into the story and finally Tess goes with him to be
his mistress. Angel returns, Tess stabs and kills Alec, Angel and Tess run off for a
night or two of passion before she is captured at Stonehenge. She is condemned
and hanged and Angel goes off with her younger sister.2
There are different aspects to this story and I shall return to some later. Here
I want to stress two things. First, Tess is a remarkable human being. She is stun-
ningly beautiful in a voluptuous sort of way—​she is Sophia Loren rather than
Audrey Hepburn. “She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just
now; and it was this that caused Alec d’Urberville’s eyes to rivet themselves upon
her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fulness of growth, which made her appear
more of a woman than she really was” (Hardy [1892] 2010, 45). She is the kind
of woman whose loveliness comes through most strongly not when she made up

1
  In The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis dismissed Hardy’s claims to be included, quoting Henry
James’s patronizing assessment in a letter to Robert Louis Stevenson: “The good little Thomas Hardy
has scored a great success with Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which is chock-​full of faults and falsity, and
yet has a singular charm.” James may have been right about Eliot and Darwin but “singular charm” is
just about the last predicate one would apply to Tess. Better, the “greatest work” of “the greatest artist
of the Darwinian crisis” (Robinson 1980, 149).
2
  Hardy forbears to mention what his readers would have known. The law would have forbidden
marriage between Angel and the sister of a dead wife.
  125

Humans 125

and prepared but when she is caught unawares unexpectedly. “Her great natu-
ral beauty was, if not heightened, rendered more obvious by her attire. She was
loosely wrapped in a cashmere dressing-​gown of gray-​white, embroidered in
half-​mourning tints, and she wore slippers of the same hue. Her neck rose out of
a frill of down, and her well-​remembered cable of dark-​brown hair was partially
coiled up in a mass at the back of her head and partly hanging on her shoulder—​
the evident result of haste” (447–​448). There is something deeply earthy, pagan
about her—​a point made with perhaps somewhat heavy-​handed symbolism by
the name of her Norman ancestor, Sir Pagan d’Urberville.
Second, there is a moral purity about Tess, as is stressed by the subtitle to
the work, A Pure Woman. When Angel has rejected her because of her past, the
narrator says:

With all his attempted independence of judgement this advanced and

well-​meaning young man, a sample product of the last five-​and-​twenty
years, was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised
back into his early teachings. No prophet had told him, and he was not
prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of his
was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any other woman en-
dowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reck-
oned not by achievement but by tendency. (316)

For all her earthiness, at times there is something ethereal about Tess. “Whilst all the
landscape was in neutral shade his companion’s face, which was the focus of his eyes,
rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence upon it. She
looked ghostly, as if she were merely a soul at large … . It was then, as has been said,
that she impressed him most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary
essence of woman—​a whole sex condensed into one typical form” (155).
Yet how can there be a God, how can humans be his favored, if such an
innocent—​such a sinless innocent—​is plunged into such torment? Part of it is
nature, pure chance. Why did Tess meet Alec before she met Angel, or rather—​
since there was the brief encounter at the beginning—​why did Tess and Angel
not talk and get to know each other before Alec arrived on the scene? She goes
rather to the D’Urbervilles and there the trouble starts.

In the ill-​judged execution of the well-​judged plan of things the call

seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the
hour for loving. Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature
at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply “Here!” to a
body’s cry of “Where?” till the hide-​and-​seek has become an irksome,
outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of
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126 Darwinism as Religion

the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer

intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which
now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be
prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the pres-
ent case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole
that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing coun-
terpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass ob-
tuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang
anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-​strange
destinies. (46)

And then, why does she meet men—​both Alec and Angel—​who treat her so
badly? “Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossa-
mer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a
coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates
the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many
thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of
order” (86). Is she being punished for the sins of the fathers? Are Tess’s mis-
fortunes retribution for the appalling behavior of past D’Urbervilles?3 Notice
the jab at Christianity—​ecumenical when it comes to handing out punishment,
whether merited or not—​which is reinforced when Tess—​newly violated—​
meets a preacher. He is working for “the glory of God,” writing on walls: “THY,
DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT. 2 PET. II. 3.”

“Do you believe what you paint?” she asked in low tones.

“Believe that text? Do I believe in my own existence!”
“But,” said she tremulously, “suppose your sin was not of your own seeking?”
He shook his head.
“I cannot split hairs on that burning query,” he said. (96–​97)

This is just a world of blind fate, without meaning, and we humans have no
special status (Morton 1984). Toward the end, alone in the woods, Tess hears
pheasants crying in pain, having been shot the previous day and now sinking
from loss of blood. She kills them from kindness. “With the impulse of a soul
who could feel for kindred sufferers as much as for herself, Tess’s first thought
was to put the still living birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own
hands she broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where
she had found them till the game-​keepers should come—​as they probably would

3
  As we shall see later, the attack on Tess’s purity comes from within, a function of her heritage, as
well as from without, the misfortunes she encounters.
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Humans 127

come—​to look for them a second time” (332). Her own end is too similar to be
chance. She is caught at that shrine to paganism, Stonehenge. “It is as it should
be,” she murmured. “Angel, I am almost glad—​yes, glad! This happiness could
not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live for
you to despise me!” (469). The hangman’s rope is a kindness.

Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were riv-
eted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved
slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag.
“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean
phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. (471–​472)

There is more to be said later about this remarkable novel. We are in a world of
chance, of fate, where humans—​no matter their stunning beauty, their moral
purity—​count for naught. They came from the earth, they return to the earth.
It is a world opened to us by Darwin although whether he realized fully what he
had done is another question.4

4
  The reference to the President of the Immortals suggests that Hardy is moving to thoughts
about an underlying—​blind, indifferent, possibly malignant—​life force or will.
128

Race and Class

Christianity
There are differences between human beings. Sex will get a chapter to itself. The
focus here is on race and class. Christianity has significant things to say about
both of these topics. So does Darwinism. Christianity—╉as based on both the
Old Testament and the New—╉endorses concepts of race and of class and sug-
gests that the differences can be significant. Whether or not you think that
Adam and Eve were the unique first pair—╉there were pre-╉Adamite hypotheses
around from at least the seventeenth century (Livingstone 2008)—╉the Old
Testament particularly assumes that there are different groupings and that they
are sufficiently different (whether biological or not) that some people would be
specially favored by God and others not. The Israelites are the chosen people;
the Egyptians, the Amalekites, the Edomites, the Canaanites, the Syrians
(Arameans), the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Midianites, the Philistines, the
Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Romans were not. These assumptions of dif-
ference were obviously important when in the Christian era biblical help was
sought in making sense of the diverse nature of humankind. There was the mark
on Cain, there was the story of Noah after the Flood—╉the curse on Ham (actu-
ally on his son Canaan) and his descendants was thought very helpful because it
not only explained the darker-╉skinned races but also why they are inferior—╉and
the Tower of Babel with the consequent different languages was also brought
into play. Almost paradoxically when you think of it, the bible was also used to
paint the Jews themselves as inferior. The Gospel of John came to the fore here,
with the condemnation of the Jews for ignoring the Messiah and being the cause
of his death. Thus: “After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about
in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him” ( John 7:1).
Of course these things were never quite that straightforward. The Story of
Ruth, one of most beautiful and moving tales in scripture, tells of a Moabite
woman who shows great devotion to her mother-╉in-╉law, Naomi. She ends up
married to Boaz and the great-╉grandmother of David as well as (according to

128
╇ 129

R ace and  Cla s s 129

Matthew) an ancestor of Jesus. In the New Testament, one of the most impor-
tant of the parables is that of the Good Samaritan, who is portrayed as a far better
person than the Jews who passed by the suffering man. Jesus himself is willing
to cure the child of a Roman, and most important, Paul explicitly reaches out to
the Gentiles with the good news of the messiah. In short there is lots of grist for
the mill and the same is true or even truer of class, particularly as it extends to
servitude and to slavery. That people are of different classes is taken as a given—╉
as indeed is slavery—╉and often these are phenomena that are at least accepted if
not endorsed. Abraham’s covenant with God does not mean freeing up all of the
servants and slaves.

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian
slave-╉girl whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abram, “You see
that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my
slave-╉girl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram lis-
tened to the voice of Sarai. So, after Abram had lived ten years in the
land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave-╉
girl, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. (Genesis 16:1–╉3)

This all sounds like a Southern plantation before the Civil War, a fact that did
not go unnoted or unappreciated. The New Testament is not a lot better. The
story of the runaway slave, who goes to St. Paul, as well as the apostle’s general
thinking on the subject, was likewise cherished by those seeking biblical evi-
dence for their beliefs. “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do
it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of
heart and reverence for the Lord” (Colossians 3:22). Again, though, these things
are never completely clean cut. Certainly, the abolitionists had little trouble find-
ing support for their position—╉remember, the evangelicals who take the word
of the bible as foundational were those leading the charge against slavery. The
Sermon on the Mount is tilted toward those disadvantaged, and the whole of
Jesus’s own life was spent among the humble and oppressed. He was not a big
friend of the rich and powerful. Part of the problem facing someone like Paul
was that his message did appeal to slaves and he had to tread carefully not to
upset the social order because of this.

Darwinism
It is important to stress these ambiguities in the Christian position, because
they are echoed in Darwinism and in the literary responses and interpreta-
tions. Although in Britain we were now at the time when the Empire was hitting
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130 Darwinism as Religion

its peak and in America when the battle against slavery was over but the fight
for racial equality had hardly begun, many of the tools of understanding were
formed long before. With Darwin himself, two things before all else. He came
from a family absolutely and completely dedicated to the abolition of slavery.
This above all was the moral and social cause binding and driving the Darwin-​
Wedgwood family (Desmond and Moore 2009). The older generation felt that
way and so did Charles and his contemporaries—​something grounded particu-
larly in the influence of his older sisters. Second, the experience of the Tierra del
Fuegians shocked and upset him perhaps more than anything in his whole life.
He had never dreamed of “savages” like these.

At a subsequent period the Beagle anchored for a couple of days under

Wollaston Island, which is a short way to the northward. While going
on shore we pulled alongside a canoe with six Fuegians. These were the
most abject and miserable creatures I any where beheld. . . . [T]‌hese
Fuegians in the canoe were quite naked, and even one full-​grown
woman was absolutely so. It was raining heavily, and the fresh water,
together with the spray, trickled down her body. In another harbour
not far distant, a woman, who was suckling a recently-​born child, came
one day alongside the vessel, and remained there whilst the sleet fell
and thawed on her naked bosom, and on the skin of her naked child.
These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces
bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair en-
tangled, their voices discordant, their gestures violent and without
dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe they
are fellow-​creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. (Darwin 1839,
234–​235)

These twin influences—​together no doubt with the views of people like Cuvier
who were convinced of the reality of the divisions—​stand behind Darwin’s
discussions of race, especially in the Descent. All humans are one stock, and yet
there are massive differences within the species. And obviously, we Europeans
have come out on top.

There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully com-
pared and measured, differ much from each other,—​as in the texture of
the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of
the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolu-
tions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the nu-
merous points of structural difference. The races differ also in constitu-
tion, in acclimatisation, and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental
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R ace and  Cla s s 131

characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear

in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual, faculties. (Darwin
1871, 1, 16)

This is not to say that they are different species. “The inferior vitality of mulattoes
is spoken of in a trustworthy work as a well-​known phenomenon; but this is a
different consideration from their lessened fertility; and can hardly be advanced
as a proof of the specific distinctness of the parent races” (1, 221).
Of course, the civilized peoples are going to triumph over those less so—​“The
grade of civilisation seems a most important element in the success of nations
which come in competition” (1, 239)—​although interestingly Darwin seems to
have thought that disease would do a lot rather than sheer brute force. He ob-
viously had in mind the ways in which so many native peoples succumbed to
Western illnesses. All this said, however, Darwin was not convinced that either
Lamarckian factors or natural selective factors could account for all of the differ-
ences between races. While he clearly thought that intelligence and those sorts
of things mattered—​“The belief that there exists in man some close relation be-
tween the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties is
supported by the comparison of the skulls of savage and civilised races, of an-
cient and modern people, and by the analogy of the whole vertebrate series”
(1,  145–​146)—​Darwin just didn’t see the sorts of physical factors separating
races as having had much to do with natural selection or the inheritance of ac-
quired characteristics (a mechanism that he always accepted). Something like
skin color doesn’t seem explicable this way. Black, white, in between, something
else, it just doesn’t matter. Here as we know is where he brought in sexual selec-
tion to do the job—​something we shall discuss in detail in a later chapter.
What about class? Charles Darwin was very solidly upper middle class. He
appreciated servants and was respected, even loved, by them. He was more than
willing to give a helping hand to someone less fortunate than himself. Remember
how, in gratitude for the supportive work that he had done on mimicry, Darwin
arranged that the lower-​middle-​class Henry Walter Bates should get a good job
as secretary to the Royal Geographical Society. But he had no inherent troubles
with the class system and tied it into his biology.

In all civilised countries man accumulates property and bequeaths it

to his children. So that the children in the same country do not by any
means start fair in the race for success. But this is far from an unmixed
evil; for without the accumulation of capital the arts could not pro­
gress; and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have
extended, and are now everywhere extending, their range, so as to take
the place of the lower races. (1, 169)
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132 Darwinism as Religion

It is remarkable the extent to which people were able simultaneously to argue

for the abolition of slavery and for unfettered laissez faire in their own factories.
The Darwin-╉Wedgwood family had little time for unions. Writing to a German
correspondent in 1872, Darwin said: “I much wish that you would sometimes
take occasion to discuss an allied point, if it holds good on the continent,—╉
namely the rule insisted on by all our Trades-╉Unions, that all workmen,—╉the
good and bad, the strong and weak,—╉sh[oul]d all work for the same number of
hours and receive the same wages.” Adding: “I fear that Cooperative Societies,
which many look at as the main hope for the future, likewise exclude competi-
tion. This seems to me a great evil for the future progress of mankind” (Darwin
1985–╉, 20, 324). To the end, Darwin was a Whig, more sympathetic to the man-
ufacturing class of which he was a beneficiary than to other segments of society.
He was as much John Thornton as Roger Hamley.

Novelists on Race
H. Rider Haggard (1856–╉1925), author of some of the most stirring adventure
stories ever penned, was sufficiently well informed about science that in his sto-
ries he could make informed jokes about sexual and natural selection, and use
the name of Darwin as he did so—╉“Women hated the sight of me. Only a week
before I had heard one call me a ‘monster’ when she thought I was out of hear-
ing, and say that I had converted her to Darwin’s theory” (Haggard [1886] 1991,
17).1 As a young man Haggard spent time in Africa and his work reflects both
the location and the racial attitudes. In King Solomon’s Mines, one of the white
characters gets emotionally entangled with a native girl, and the narrator ex-
presses solid satisfaction when she gets crushed to death and hence is no longer
a threat to the established order. And yet, albeit in language that today makes
us squirm a little, we are told in no uncertain terms that condescension is not in
order. “What is a gentleman? I don’t quite know, and yet I have had to do with
niggers—╉no, I will scratch out that word ‘niggers,’ for I do not like it. I’ve known
natives who are, and so you will say, Harry, my boy, before you have done with
this tale, and I have known mean whites with lots of money and fresh out from
home, too, who are not” (Haggard [1885] 2006, 10). 2

1
╛╛In the version of the novel that he published first in the Graphic magazine, Haggard wrote of
“Darwin’s” theory. In the subsequent book version of the novel, he made things a little more popular
and wrote of the “monkey” theory.
2
╛╛Prester John, a boy’s adventure story by John Buchan, written a few years later (1910), shows the
same mix of condescension toward yet huge respect for Africans. The black messiah, John Laputa, is
way ahead the bravest, most noble, and best-╉educated character in the novel.
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R ace and  Cla s s 133

Again, Rudyard Kipling, so often (with reason) derided as a crude imperial-

ist, shows the same ambivalence. Take the poem “In the Neolithic Age.” He uses
the past to throw light on the present. First the past—​the killing, the success:

IN THE Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage

For food and fame and woolly horses’ pelt
I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

And then the sage’s reflection that what you have done is perhaps not quite as
glorious as you think.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting-​dogs fed full,

And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;
And I wiped my mouth and said, “It is well that they are dead,
For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.”
But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-​shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night: —​
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
“And every single one of them is right!”

On to the moral for today:

Still the world is wondrous large,—​seven seas from marge to marge—​

And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;
And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu
And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.
Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
And the reindeer roamed where Paris roars to-​night:—​
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
“And—​every—​single—​one—​of—​them—​is—​right!”
(Kipling 2001, 354–​345)

For all that you are a “civilized” person, don’t think you have an absolute lien on
what is right and proper.
As it happens, we know that Kipling was not very keen on the Descent—​which
is not to say that he did not take it seriously—​but he was not beyond poking fun
at Herbert Spencer and suggesting that his thoughts of progress might not be
quite as straightforward as he supposed. In that greatest of all novels written by
an Englishman about the Raj, Kim, the grotesque Hurree Babu—​a fat, greasy,
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134 Darwinism as Religion

Bengali clerk, whose main claim to fame is a series of rejected notes to the Asiatic
Quarterly Review—╉is just the sort of person to spout half-╉baked gems of wisdom
from Spencer. Of native devils: “They are, of course, dematerialized phenom-
ena. Spencer says.” And yet, who in the end is the cleverest, the bravest, when
it comes to the battle for rivalry in Asia—╉playing the Great Game? None other
than Hurree Babu, for all that he expresses great fear of the Russians.

“By Jove, they are not black people. I  can do all sorts of things with
black people, of course. They are Russians, and highly unscrupulous
people. I—╉I do not want to consort with them without a witness.”
“Will they kill thee?”
“Oah, thatt is nothing. I  am good enough Herbert Spencerian,
I trust, to meet little thing like death, which is all in my fate, you know.
But—╉but they may beat me.” (Kipling [1901] 1994, 297)

Why is the Babu so scared? Because he is a Bengali! “It was process of Evolution,
I think, from Primal Necessity, but the fact remains in all the cui bono. I am, oh,
awfully fearful!—╉” Fearful he may have been, but the Babu gets the goods and
the reader knows it—╉and thrills along with him and realizes that he is the sort of
man who earns our real respect.

Under the striped umbrella Hurree Babu was straining ear and brain
to follow the quick-╉poured French [of the Russian agents], and keep-
ing both eyes on a kilta full of maps and documents—╉an extra-╉large
one with a double red oil-╉skin cover. He did not wish to steal anything.
He only desired to know what to steal, and, incidentally, how to get
away when he had stolen it. He thanked all the Gods of Hindustan, and
Herbert Spencer, that there remained some valuables to steal.3

The Heart of Darkness

Note the point being made, and it is very instructive to compare this with the
Christian position. It is not so much the existence of race and its reality—╉
whether objectively out there, subjectively constructed in here, people see it and
generally accept it as a given. It is not so much that one side lords it over the

3
╛╛Kim underlines strongly Kipling’s views on the equal claims of different belief systems. The one
truly holy man is the former abbot from Tibet, Teshoo Lama, searching for the River of the Arrow.
The Anglican padre, Arthur Bennett, is (to say the least) insensitive to the point of stupidity. As dis-
ciple, Kim, a white man—╉a sahib—╉serves faithfully the aged lama.
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R ace and  Cla s s 135

other and thinks that God or science backs up this judgment. They do think this.
It is rather that the authority—​God or Darwin—​subtly undermines this confi-
dence and makes us, particularly if we are part of the dominant group, wonder
about ourselves and our beliefs and our actions. That is the mark of a powerful
and sophisticated religion. All this comes tumbling out in that most wonderful
of American novels, Huckleberry Finn, written by a man who openly acknowl-
edged his debts to Darwin. (Twain read the early, crucial part of the Descent the
year it appeared.) Culturally Huck feels he should tell the authorities about Jim,
the runaway slave. After all, he is someone’s property. But Huck has come to
know and like and respect Jim, and finds he cannot do this. The letter he has writ-
ten betraying Jim cannot be sent. “ ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’—​and tore it up.”
Yet, although race is important in the book—​tremendously, hugely impor-
tant—​one senses that the real theme is the moral growth of the title character—​
a kid who cannot tell a truth to save his soul, although perhaps in the end that
does save his soul.4 For a more direct treatment, turn to one of the most sear-
ing pieces of creative writing on the race issue—​Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of
Darkness. Apparently Conrad (1857–​1924) was much influenced by Huxley’s
late essay on evolution and ethics (Najder 2007). This shows to the extent that
both Huxley’s essay and Conrad’s novella start with the story of Caesar and his
troops coming to invade Britain some 2,000 years ago. Especially influential was
Huxley’s introductory preface where he speaks of nature as a jungle and of us
civilized people making and trying to maintain a garden in this wilderness. Even
in success, there is a tension, a sense of unease, with the threat from outsiders,
including “bipedal intruders.”

That the “state of Art,” thus created in the state of nature by man, is
sustained by and dependent on him, would at once become apparent,
if the watchful supervision of the gardener were withdrawn, and the
antagonistic influences of the general cosmic process were no longer
sedulously warded off, or counteracted. The walls and gates would
decay; quadrupedal and bipedal intruders would devour and tread
down the useful and beautiful plants; birds, insects, blight, and mildew
would work their will; the seeds of the native plants, carried by winds
or other agencies, would immigrate, and in virtue of their long-​earned
special adaptation to the local conditions, these despised native weeds
would soon choke their choice exotic rivals. A century or two hence,
little beyond the foundations of the wall and of the houses and frames

4
  Although Huck does develop morally, as does Pip in Great Expectations, this does not neces-
sarily imply that we have an evolutionary novel. This said, development can be important in such a
novel, as with Middlemarch.
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136 Darwinism as Religion

would be left, in evidence of the victory of the cosmic powers at work in

the state of nature, over the temporary obstacles to their supremacy, set
up by the art of the horticulturist. (Huxley [1893] 2009, 9–​10)

The jungle is all around us and waiting to take over. The plants and trees, the
inhabitants, wait to move in and strike. “We could have fancied ourselves the
first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the
cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled
round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-​roofs, a
burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping,
of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foli-
age” (Conrad [1899] 1990, 32).
The story of The Heart of Darkness is well known. An Englishman, Marlow, gets
a job with a Belgian company (dealing in ivory) to captain a boat up the river in
the Congo, to the station where there is one of their agents, Kurtz, who is very ef-
ficient but apparently completely unstable. There is the metaphor as civilization
is left and the boat goes deeper into the heart of darkness, total savagery. “The
steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.
The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—​who could
tell?” (32)5 In the end, although Kurtz is found, he dies distraught—​crying “the
horror, the horror”—​and Marlow returns to England, lying to Kurtz’s fiancée
about the last words, saying that it was her name on his lips as he died.
There is much to discuss here, including the existential significance of those
last words—​Is this the ultimate Darwinian note of despair in the face of Godless
nothingness?—​but focus on the racial question. I want to make a virtue out of
what many find puzzling and upsetting, perhaps without answer (Brantlinger
1988). Where, ultimately, did Conrad stand on imperialism and the racial issue?
At times, he describes the situation so fully and nigh lovingly one suspects that
he endorses the system.6 Look at the way we come into the Congo. First the
natives.

Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time con-
tracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they
sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away

5
  Note the implication that we are dealing with a world at a more primitive stage of development
than Europe (Schmitt 2014, 27).
6
  Notoriously, in 1975, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe accused Conrad of being a “bloody
racist” and added for good measure that “Conrad had a problem with niggers.” He suggested even
that the novelist’s fondness for that word suggested a place for psychoanalysis (Tredell 1998, 81).
Well, yes, but … As we are about to see, things are a bit more complex in the Darwinian world.
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R ace and  Cla s s 137

and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air—​and nearly as thin.
I began to distinguish the gleam of eyes under the trees. Then, glancing
down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length
with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the
sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind,
white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. (Conrad
1899, 14)

Absolutely appalling. Not their fault, but still. Then the European who, it is made
clear, is a functionary not someone important.

When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected el-
egance of get-​up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision.
I  saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy
trousers, a clear necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted,
brushed, oiled, under a green-​lined parasol held in a big white hand. He
was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear. (15)

Say and think what you like, in the hands of a brilliant writer like Conrad,
the effect and the contrast sink in. And things don’t get a lot better as you get
to know the natives more intimately. “An athletic black belonging to some coast
tribe, and educated by my poor predecessor, was the helmsman. He sported a
pair of brass earrings, wore a blue cloth wrapper from the waist to the ankles,
and thought all the world of himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I had
ever seen. He steered with no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost
sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject funk, and would let that
cripple of a steamboat get the upper hand of him in a minute” (40). But then the
native is killed.

I missed my late helmsman awfully,—​I missed him even while his

body was still lying in the pilot-​house. Perhaps you will think it passing
strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of
sand in a black Sahara. Well, don’t you see, he had done something, he
had steered; for months I had him at my back—​a help—​an instrument.
It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me—​I had to look after him,
I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been cre-
ated, of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And
the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his
hurt remains to this day in my memory—​like a claim of distant kinship
affirmed in a supreme moment. (46)
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138 Darwinism as Religion

It wasn’t so easily obvious, so very different and apart, after all. “Distant kin-
ship” is there and means a great deal. Conrad affirms this point unambiguously.
The Darwinian component to existence—​we are all part of the same tree of
life—​undermines a surface reading of the situation, no less than does (let us say)
the Story of Ruth or the parable of the Good Samaritan—​“There is neither Jew
nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all
one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). There are deeper truths. Marlow tells of those
terrifying natives in the jungle edging to the banks of the river.

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shack-
led form of a conquered monster, but there—​there you could look at
a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—​No,
they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—​this
suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one.
They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what
thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—​like yours—​the
thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.
Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would
admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a re-
sponse to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there
being a meaning in it which you—​you so remote from the night of first
ages—​could comprehend.  (32)

In a way, recognizing this fact is as human an activity as the savagery from the
bank. “Let the fool gape and shudder—​the man knows, and can look on without
a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must
meet that truth with his own true stuff—​with his own inborn strength” (32).7
Conrad is ambivalent and scared at what he senses, and that is what makes
Heart of Darkness a religious novel—​a Darwinian religious novel.8

7
  One could continue with the racial theme, for instance, about Conrad’s thinking of the relative
fitnesses of Europeans compared to natives. For all his efficiency—​“an emissary of pity and science
and progress”—​Kurtz doesn’t make it to the end of the tale alive.
8
  This ambiguity and ambivalence runs right through the fiction (and poetry) of this era, as
though the writers simply cannot fathom the huge challenges and changes occurring in their hitherto
safe and—​secure—​world. It worries the Christians as well as the nonbelievers. Consider Greenmantle
(1916) by the good Presbyterian John Buchan written in the depths of the Great War. The villain,
Colonel Ulrich von Stumm, is a grotesque caricature of a German officer: “He was a perfect moun-
tain of a fellow, six and a half feet if he was an inch, with shoulders on him like a shorthorn bull. He
was in uniform and the black-​and-​white ribbon of the Iron Cross showed at a buttonhole. His tunic
was all wrinkled and strained as if it could scarcely contain his huge chest, and mighty hands were
clasped over his stomach. That man must have had the length of reach of a gorilla. He had a great,
lazy, smiling face, with a square cleft chin which stuck out beyond the rest. His brow retreated and the
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R ace and  Cla s s 139

Daniel Deronda
Turn now to the Jewish question, a theme running right through our period.9
Remarks on the prejudice are truisms, although few were as explicit as the poet
T. S. Eliot. He links Jews with degeneration or perhaps lack of advance—╉beneath
even the rats looking up from “protozoic slime.”10

But this or such was Bleistein’s way:

A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese.
A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs.11

stubby back of his head ran forward to meet it, while his neck below bulged out over his collar. His
head was exactly the shape of a pear with the sharp end topmost” ([1916] 1992, 146). Interestingly,
to make things even worse, in his private quarters, he has a very suspicious taste in knickknacks and
dainty furniture, not to mention embroidery. Against this, thanks to a chance encounter at a railway
station, is a hugely sympathetic depiction of the Kaiser: “a far bigger tragedy than any I had seen in
action” (170). He is no monster, but a man crushed by his responsibilities.
9
╛╛With regret, I will leave untouched related issues, like that of the “Yellow Peril” in the writings of
Jack London. I suspect the conclusions in the end would be similar to those dealing with blacks and
Jews and other peoples who have suffered prejudice.
10
╛╛Not strictly temporal, as in “Proterozoic,” the long period before the Cambrian, but with impli-
cations of “proto”—╉earliest or beginning—╉“zoic”—╉animals. Also note the Jew is at the lowest level,
even below the rat.
11
╛╛To be fair, the first part of this poem –╉“Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” –╉does
not portray the presumed Gentile Burbank very well.

Burbank crossed a little bridge

Descending at a small hotel;
Princess Volupine arrived,
They were together, and he fell.

Eliot was not peculiarly anti-╉Semitic, given that he grew up in a society where anti-╉Semitism was the
norm and particularly virulent in his home town of St. Louis. More an explanation than an excuse.
Note the ape-╉like connotations of bended elbows and knees and outturned palms. Apparently this
can also be linked to a love of the British music hall and the mannerisms of comics (Knowles 1998).
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140 Darwinism as Religion

Most writers were more sensitive than this; even when they fall they strive
to rise again. Dickens was one who had already stumbled and then regained his
footing. Oliver Twist, the story of an orphan lad who runs away to London and
falls into the clutches of a Jewish fence, Fagin, is not the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion. It is true that Fagin is vile physically and in intent—​if he corrupts Oliver, he
is to get money from the lad’s half-​brother—​but he is no worse than the thuggish
thief, Bill Sykes. Dickens protested with reason that there were notorious Jewish
fences—​best known was Ikey Solomon—​and he was just being true to life.
Nevertheless, it is crude and hurtful and expectedly Jews were upset. Dickens
understood and responded, drawing a portrait of Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend,
the protector of Jenny Wren and as good a man as Fagin is evil. An important
symbol, because, in the years after the Origin, the Jewish question became some-
thing of immediate urgency to the Victorians. Along with Gladstone, the other
great leader was Benjamin Disraeli, admittedly a convert but in respects almost
playing up to the stereotype of a Jew. I don’t mean this disrespectfully. This was
Disraeli’s style. You couldn’t pretend that he was not a Jew. His novels stressed
Jewish virtues (Brantlinger 2012). He forced on people their prejudices, made
them bring them out, and put them on one side—​or not. As many people have
found today with sexual orientation, they had to confront themselves. And that
is the heart of religion.
The novelists picked up on these themes. Two of Anthony Trollope’s mid-​
1870s novels—​The Prime Minister and The Way We Live Now—​feature major
characters of less than sterling quality who are pretty clearly intended as Jewish.
This is not to mention the odious evangelical clergyman Mr. Emilius—​“of
whom it was said he was born a Jew in Hungary”—​who (bigamously) mar-
ries Lizzie Eustace in the Eustace Diamonds (1871) and who commits murder,
a crime that at first is pinned on the title character, in Phineas Redux (1873).
At the end of the century, in McTeague, a novel we shall discuss, the American
writer Frank Norris (1870–​1902) gave another less than subtle depiction of a
Jew. But here, George Eliot is our key person and her novel Daniel Deronda our
key document (Himmelfarb 2009). It is a strange story—​although I shall later
contest this reading, it is often with reason taken to be two stories. The first tells
of the bewitching Gwendolen Harleth, penniless, who choses between poten-
tial husbands, and ends by marrying Mallinger Grandcourt, heir to the estate
of Sir Hugo Mallinger. The second tells of the young man (in his mid-​twenties)
Daniel Deronda, the former ward of Sir Hugo. Focusing here on the Deronda
side to the story (in a later chapter we shall pick up on Gwendolen too), the
main theme is the search for identity and Daniel’s discovery both of the Jewish
faith and race and at the same time of Daniel’s own background, where it turns
out that he was not (as many including himself thought) the illegitimate son of
Sir Hugo but of a European Jewish singer and her likewise Jewish husband. In
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R ace and  Cla s s 141

other words, of Daniel’s discovery that he is not a Protestant Englishman as he

thought, but that he is himself a Jew. It is important to distinguish cause and
effect. It is not that Daniel discovers himself a Jew and then searches out the
Jewish religion and customs. Nor is it the case that Daniel is being primarily
motivated by a growing attraction to a Jewish girl, Mirah, who has made it clear
that she will not marry anyone but a co-​religionist. Daniel’s instinctive search
for Jewish identity precedes this, and that is the mystifying, almost creepy,
background of this novel.
It is about race and very much about the biological as well as cultural nature
of race. You cannot flip in and out of being a Jew just by choice. “ ‘But I could not
make myself not a Jewess,’ said Mirah, insistently, ‘even if I changed my belief ’ ”
(Eliot [1876] 1967, 425). Another character (Hans) loves Mirah, but it is made
clear that she can never be for him because he is not Jewish. Although evolution-​
based, you many think that the treatment of race is not particularly Darwinian
at all—​except perhaps as one might say that Mirah choses Daniel because she
senses that there is something Jewish about him.

“Some minds naturally rebel against whatever they were brought up in,
and like the opposite; they see the faults in what is nearest to them,” said
Deronda apologetically.
“But you are not like that,” said Mirah, looking at him with uncon-
scious fixedness.
“No, I think not,” said Deronda; “but you know I was not brought
up as a Jew.”
“Ah, I am always forgetting,” said Mirah, with a look of disappointed
recollection, and slightly blushing.  (425)

Eliot’s treatment of race does not come unvarnished out of the Descent of
Man. It seems in respects significantly more Lamarckian and less to do with
the physical and more with the emotional, the spiritual. This suggests that like
Middlemarch the key influence here might be Spencer, but my suspicion is that
it may be a work that we know Eliot studied in preparation for writing her novel,
Darwin’s follow-​up book on humans, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
in Animals, published a year after the Descent in 1872. It is about the emotional
rather than the physical and as commentators have noted it has nothing about
selection and yet a huge amount about the inheritance of acquired characteris-
tics. This fits the novel.

If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the

nations—​if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they
are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land—​if
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142 Darwinism as Religion

a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what

shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in
which the poets and the actors were also the heroes? (575)

Yes, but does this get into the blood, as one might say? Eliot implies this in the
follow-​up passage, which suggests incidentally that she was not quite as outside
the Victorian mold as one might expect. Daniel is visiting the family of Ezra
Cohen, a pawnbroker, who have taken pity on Mordecai, the brother of Mirah—​
weak (he is dying of tuberculosis) and yet with great inner spiritual force.

Ezra Cohen was not clad in the sublime pathos of the martyr, and his
taste for money-​getting seemed to be favored with that success which
has been the most exasperating difference in the greed of Jews during
all the ages of their dispersion. This Jeshurun of a pawnbroker was not
a symbol of the great Jewish tragedy; and yet was there not something
typical in the fact that a life like Mordecai’s—​a frail incorporation of the
national consciousness, breathing with difficult breath—​was nested in
the self-​gratulating ignorant prosperity of the Cohens?  (575)

That this aura of national consciousness is not purely cultural is made clear
when we learn that Daniel has it too in some respects, inherited from a pious
grandfather he not only did not know but of whom he was totally unaware. He
goes to visit an old Jew in Mainz (Kalonymos) who sits him down and looks
piercingly at him. Daniel “seemed to himself to be touching the electric chain
of his own ancestry; and he bore the scrutinizing look of Kalonymos with a de-
lighted awe, something like what one feels in the solemn commemoration of
acts done long ago but still telling markedly on the life of to-​day” (787). It is
this chain with the past that determines Daniel’s future destiny. His grandfather
wanted above all to preserve the identity of the Jews. Daniel, finally married to
Mirah, sets off to the East to start a homeland for the Jews.12

I will not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have
believed. Our fathers themselves changed the horizon of their belief
and learned of other races. But I think I can maintain my grandfather’s
notion of separateness with communication. I hold that my first duty is
to my own people, and if there is anything to be done toward restoring
or perfecting their common life, I shall make that my vocation. (792)

12
  The analogy between Daniel and Moses is unmistakable. Both are raised as non-​Jews, both
discover and embrace their Jewish identity, and both are then directed to the making or founding of
a homeland for their fellow Jews.
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R ace and  Cla s s 143

Of course, this notion of a throwback to a feature that skips a generation—╉

atavism—╉was well-╉known to Darwin who often mentioned it. So perhaps Eliot
was not so far from Darwin in other respects as well.

Darwinians on Class
George Eliot is not just telling a story. She never does that! She is wrestling mor-
ally, socially, culturally, religiously with issues of race, touching at points at the
most sensitive in her own society What about the other side to human variation,
namely, that of class? This is not something new after Darwin. It is an ongoing
theme in Dickens. In Bleak House, realistically it is discussed and tackled when
the son of Robert Rouncewell, the ironmaster, falls in love with the maid of Lady
Dedlock. Even though he has raised himself and thus his family from the lower
classes right into the prosperous middle classes, the father is agreeable to this
match. It is realized, however, that class matters and if Rosa the maid is to marry
the son, first she must be educated up to her future station.

All this is so frequent, Lady Dedlock, where I live, and among the class to
which I belong, that what would be generally called unequal marriages
are not of such rare occurrence with us as elsewhere. A son will some-
times make it known to his father that he has fallen in love, say, with a
young woman in the factory. The father, who once worked in a factory
himself, will be a little disappointed at first very possibly. It may be that
he had other views for his son. However, the chances are that having as-
certained the young woman to be of unblemished character, he will say
to his son, “I must be quite sure you are in earnest here. This is a serious
matter for both of you. Therefore I shall have this girl educated for two
years,” or it may be, “I shall place this girl at the same school with your
sisters for such a time, during which you will give me your word and
honour to see her only so often. If at the expiration of that time, when
she has so far profited by her advantages as that you may be upon a fair
equality, you are both in the same mind, I will do my part to make you
happy.” I know of several cases such as I describe, my Lady, and I think
they indicate to me my own course now. (Dickens [1853] 1948, 396)

Class matters and it is a cause of great tension in Our Mutual Friend when
Eugene Wrayburn, a lawyer, falls for Lizzie Hexam, the daughter of a waterman.
Dickens’s resolution in this story is far less realistic because Lizzie agrees to
marry Eugene after he has been attacked and he lies hurt in danger of death. In a
way, this is backward looking, because (as often in this novel) Dickens is relying
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144 Darwinism as Religion

on a Christian generosity of spirit that is going to leap across all and any difficul-
ties. In the Darwinian world, things are tougher and grimmer, although how it
all plays out is open to different interpretations. In respects, much depended on
how one interpreted class differences and their causes. Were they a reflection of
biology, like race only perhaps a little less so? One suspects many thought that
way, including people like Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, who was busily trying
to measure the IQs and like factors across and within groups. The presence of
large numbers of Irish in the population would have reinforced this prejudice.
It is noteworthy how, from the moment the Origin was published, cartoonists
would portray the Irish—​Paddy and Biddy—​as ape-​like, and many were the
jokes in places like Punch about Mr. G. O’Rilla. These sorts of views were often
reinforced with supposed Lamarckian mechanisms. People lead degraded lives,
and this reflects into future generations—​or conversely. We have seen a version
of this kind of thinking in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.
Obviously not all felt this way. Rouncewell, the ironmaster, came up from the
lower classes—​not the very lowest, his mother is a housekeeper—​and thinks
that others can do likewise. If they get the right education, the potential wives
of his children and others of his class can rise up and take their new places in so-
ciety. Thomas Hardy more than anyone felt that class differences are significant
and yet artificial. Darwinism does not guarantee a good or fair society. It is all a
matter of chance at what level you are born and chance as to what level you can
rise to—​tradition and power are the determinants, not ability or potential in any
great degree.13 In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the heroine is better educated than
other members of her family and clearly a much nicer person. A lot of good it
does her. She goes to the faux D’Urbervilles where she is treated like a serf by the
mother and seduced by the son. Then she meets up with Angel. One wonders
had she been the daughter of an earl whether, after confession time on the wed-
ding night, he would have rejected her. As it is, when he has vanished from the
scene to South America, Tess goes to seek help from his family. The class barriers
are so great that she makes no contact and returns with so little hope that she
ends as the mistress of Alec.
In The Return of the Native, Clym goes near-​blind, has to give up hopes of
becoming a schoolteacher, drops a social class by becoming a furze-​cutter, rather
enjoys it, and that basically is the end of his relationship with Eustacia. In The
Woodlanders, the story is sparked by the fact that, although the very decent Giles
Winterbourne seems all set to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace Melbury,
she unfortunately has been educated out of her class. Her father thinks that she
is too good for Giles and directs her toward the more socially desirable—​he is

13
  This is the unspoken background to “Drummer Hodge.” The wretched, ignorant child dies for
the Empire, to the glory and riches of others (Riquelme 1999).
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R ace and  Cla s s 145

a doctor—​Edgar Fitzpiers. This man turns out to be a cad of the first order, off
with his mistress until she drops him. And then poor Giles gives shelter to the
fleeing Grace, protecting her virtue by sleeping outside in appalling weather, and
promptly dies—​lamented only by a poor girl, Marty South, who earlier in the
novel had sold her beautiful hair to the woman who becomes Edgar’s mistress.
Even attempts to escape your class seem dogged by disaster since Grace is re-
united with Edgar, who clearly will not remain faithful for ten minutes beyond
the final page.
Most crushing of all is the class system in Hardy’s last completed and most
pessimistic novel, Jude the Obscure.14 It is the story of Jude Fawley, a young man
who becomes a stonemason but who teaches himself Latin and Greek, hoping
thereby to go to the university at Christminster (Oxford). He fails in his aims in
part because he gets entangled with his false on-​again, off-​again, on-​again wife
Arabella, who starts their relationship by tricking him into marriage (by pre-
tending she is pregnant)—​an act the author makes clear is precisely the sort of
thing that might happen at (and probably only at) the social level of Jude and
Arabella. But his failure is not just or even primarily a function of Jude’s passions
and weaknesses. Jude is clearly gifted and desperately keen to better himself. The
respect and approval that he gets is less than zero, from his childhood where he
is berated for having his thoughts on other things, to where he goes to work in
Christminster and gets a rebuff from the college authorities.

Biblioll College.
Sir,—​I have read your letter with interest; and, judging from your de-
scription of yourself as a working-​man, I venture to think that you
will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your
own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other
course. That, therefore, is what I advise you to do. Yours faithfully,
T. Tetuphenay.
To Mr. J. Fawley, Stone-​mason. (Hardy [1895] 1960, 138)

Jude is destined, as he says later, to be an “outsider” to the end of his days.

Arabella clears off to Australia and Jude takes up with his already-​married cousin
Sue. But they too get entangled in class and convention. Although both Jude
and Sue get divorces from their respective spouses, there is still the stigma, quite
apart from the fact that Sue can no longer bring herself to enter another marriage
with another man. At the end of the book, even as he lies dying (of pneumonia),
Jude is scorned and made to remember his position. “Certain sounds from with-
out revealed that the town was in festivity, though little of the festival, whatever it

  This novel is way gloomier than anything warranted by Darwin. The influence of Schopenhauer
14

would fit the bill.

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146 Darwinism as Religion

might have been, could be seen here. Bells began to ring, and the notes came into
the room through the open window, and travelled round Jude’s head in a hum”
(486). Then there is a musical performance.

The powerful notes of that concert rolled forth through the swing-
ing yellow blinds of the open windows, over the housetops, and into
the still air of the lanes. They reached so far as to the room in which
Jude lay; and it was about this time that his cough began again and
awakened him.
As soon as he could speak he murmured, his eyes still closed: “A little
water, please.”
Nothing but the deserted room received his appeal, and he
coughed to exhaustion again—​saying still more feebly: “Water—​some
water—​Sue—​Arabella!”
The room remained still as before. Presently he gasped again:
“Throat—​water—​Sue—​darling—​drop of water—​please—​oh please!”
No water came, and the organ notes, faint as a bee’s hum, rolled in
as before.  (487)

As always with Hardy, the bleakness of the Darwinian vision is complemented

by the complicity of the Christian religion in failing entirely to ameliorate the
emptiness of existence. Christminster, the institution that turns its back on Jude,
who wants above all to become a minister of religion, is itself a bastion of estab-
lished Christianity. And the comforts of Christianity are false and destructive.
When we first meet Sue, she is nigh pagan. She buys plaster statuettes of Venus
and Apollo for her room. Then later, when she is living with Jude, Little Father
Time—​the sadly named child of Jude and Arabella—​fearing that they were a
burden on the family’s strained finances, kills himself and the two children of
Jude and Sue: “a piece of paper was found upon the floor, on which was written,
in the boy’s hand, with the bit of lead pencil that he carried: Done because we are
too menny” (405). Poor Sue has a miscarriage and a religious crisis. Are her trag-
edies punishment for leaving her original husband and living unwed with Jude?
She leaves Jude whom she does love and returns to this husband whom she does
not love and forces herself to have (very unwelcome) sex with him, because now
she believes that this is the Christian thing to do.15 To what end? In response to

15
  As Eagleton ([1974] 1988) notes about Sue’s behavior, “there isn’t, when one comes down
to it, much to be said in her defence” (41). Note that, throughout the novel, Sue seems to be a free
agent—​as not marrying Jude—​in a way that many (or all) of the characters in earlier novels are not.
Everyone in The Return of the Native seems controlled by the heath.
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R ace and  Cla s s 147

an optimistic hope, Jude’s official wife—​speaking the truth for once in her life—​
makes the final sour comment:

“Well—​poor little thing, ’tis to be believed she’s found forgiveness

somewhere! She said she had found peace!
“She may swear that on her knees to the holy cross upon her neck-
lace till she’s hoarse, but it won’t be true!” said Arabella. “She’s never
found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till she’s as he
is now!” (494)16

As always, our Darwinian writers are doing more than just describing facts. They
are offering social commentary in a way redolent of a religious world picture.
A secular world picture against the spiritual world picture of Christianity.

16
  Explicitly, Jude the Obscure is Hardy’s retelling of the Book of Job, except, as the critic Harold
Bloom notes, this is the world of Thomas Hardy not that of the God of the Old Testament. “A spirit
like Jude’s is condemned to die whispering the Jobean lament: “Let the day perish wherein I was
born.” [ Job 3:3] Jude the Obscure is Hardy’s book of Job, and like Job is too dark for tragedy, while
unlike Job it is just the reverse of theodicy, being Hardy’s ultimate declaration that the ways of the
Immanent Will towards man are unjustifiable” (Bloom 2005, 4). Apparently an earlier version of the
novel had Jude cursing God on his deathbed.
148

Morality

The Problem of Morality

After her death, a perceptive friend wrote of a meeting with George Eliot:

I remember how, at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows’

Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred some-
what beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which
have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-╉calls of men—╉the
words God, Immortality, Duty—╉pronounced, with terrible earnestness,
how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet
how peremptory and absolute the third. Never perhaps have sterner ac-
cents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing Law.
I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward
me like a sibyl’s in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my
grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll
only, awful with inevitable fates. And when we stood at length and
parted amid that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last
twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem,
on vacant seats and empty halls—╉on a sanctuary with no Presence to
hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God.

╉(Myers 1881)

This was the big problem. If God is gone or at least pushed back to a position
of irrelevance, what then of morality? This was the worry in Nemesis of Faith.
Without God, can there be a moral code, and even if there is one will anyone
take note of it? The one thing one can say above all else of Christianity is that
it filled a need. What should one do? How should one treat one’s family, one’s
neighbors, one’s fellow countrymen, the inhabitants of other lands? And what
about the non-╉human animals and plants? Christianity had answers. Have no

148
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Moralit y 149

God other than me. Don’t murder people. Have respect for your mother and
father. Treat others as you would want to be treated yourself.

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got to-
gether. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this ques-
tion: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and
with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest
commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as your-
self.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
(Matthew 22:34–​40)

And there are many other commands, particularly about gender relationships
and sexual behavior. So significant was the role of Christianity that Darwin wor-
ried that, without it, all would fall into moral chaos, and Thomas Henry Huxley,
of all people, elected to the first London School Board, argued strongly for reli-
gious instruction in state schools.
Darwinism sets the problem. How can something based on the struggle for
existence make room for morality? As she prepares to leave Jude, Sue puts the
matter starkly. “Your worldly failure, if you have failed, is to your credit rather
than to your blame. Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are
those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or
less a selfish man. The devoted fail … ‘Charity seeketh not her own’ ” (Hardy
[1895] 1960, 437).1 The evolutionists had responses. In the Descent, Darwin
took very seriously the evolution of morality and as we saw he thought a moral
group, a tribe, would have an advantage over other groups without such moral-
ity. Getting down to details, he offered ways in which natural selection might
bring on belief in something like the Love Commandment. One cause might
have been what is today known as “reciprocal altruism.” You scratch my back
and I’ll scratch yours. “In the first place, as the reasoning powers and foresight of
the members became improved, each man would soon learn that if he aided his
fellow-​men, he would commonly receive aid in return. From this low motive he
might acquire the habit of aiding his fellows; and the habit of performing benev-
olent actions certainly strengthens the feeling of sympathy which gives the first

1
  Unlike others—​Gaskell, London, Gissing, Wharton—​one senses that Hardy’s sympathies are
with the losers. For some like Tess in losing they triumph—​“Angel, I am almost glad—​yes, glad! This
happiness could not have lasted.” For others it is because the losers are good people and like Jude go
under because of this. Marty South’s lament for the dead Giles: “If ever I forget your name, let me
forget home and Heaven!—​But no, no, my love, I never can forget ‘ee; for you was a GOOD man, and
did good things!” (Ingham 2003, 115)
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150 Darwinism as Religion

impulse to benevolent actions. Habits, moreover, followed during many genera-

tions probably tend to be inherited” (Darwin 1871, 1, 163–​164). Then Darwin
added: “But there is another and much more powerful stimulus to the develop-
ment of the social virtues, namely, the praise and the blame of our fellow-​men.
The love of approbation and the dread of infamy, as well as the bestowal of praise
of blame, are primarily due, as we have seen in the third chapter, to the instinct
of sympathy; and this instinct no doubt was originally acquired, like all the other
social instincts, through natural selection” (1, 164). He elaborated: “To do good
unto others—​to do unto others as ye would they should do unto you,—​is the
foundation-​stone of morality. It is, therefore, hardly possible to exaggerate the
importance during rude times of the love of praise and the dread of blame”
(1, 165).
Herbert Spencer went a different way, arguing that thanks to the progressive
nature of the evolutionary process—​progress in everything from biology through
language and on to culture—​what we find is that morality emerges and our duties are
to ensure that this happens by removing barriers and facilitating the process. “Ethics
has for its subject-​matter, that form which universal conduct assumes during the last
stages of its evolution” (Spencer 1879, 21). Continuing: “And there has followed the
corollary that conduct gains ethical sanction in proportion as the activities, becom-
ing less and less militant and more and more industrial, are such as do not necessitate
mutual injury or hindrance, but consist with, and are furthered by, co-​operation and
mutual aid.” As noted earlier, Spencer’s thinking is rather more subtle than many give
him credit for. Although at times he does sound totally committed to an extreme and
harsh form of laissez faire, the essence of his evolutionism was that with progress the
struggle will fall away and organisms will live in harmony. It was precisely because of
this that he felt that he could identify the end point of evolution with that which is
the ethically highest. What distorts our understanding is that often his followers were
given to pushing a far more stern position than he. Thus William Graham Sumner,
the American sociologist: “The glib generalities in which we sometimes hear people
talk, as if you could set moral and economic forces separate from and in antithesis to
each other, and discard the one to accept and work by the other, gravely misconstrue
the realities of the social order” (Sumner 1914).
This kind of thinking, known today as “Social Darwinism,”2 did not go unchal-
lenged. Philosophers like Henry Sidgwick (1876) and his student G. E. Moore

2
  I am uncomfortable with this terminology. It was hardly used in the nineteenth century and
gained currency only after 1940 with its use by Richard Hofstadter in an admittedly seminal study of
nineteenth-​century social evolutionism. Although it is now so standard that I will continue to use it,
what worries me is that there is a tendency to separate “Social Darwinism” (bad) from “Darwinism”
(good), and to suggest that it is not really a Darwinian idea but owes more to others, particularly
Spencer. As a hitherto-​egregious sinner in this regard now repenting: the ideas are in Darwin—​he
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Moralit y 151

(1903) thought that it is fallacious philosophically to identify that which evolved

with that which is good. For Moore, this was an paradigmatic example of what he
called the “naturalistic fallacy.” Thomas Henry Huxley, in the essay on evolution
and ethics mentioned several times already, likewise took great exception to the
thinking—╉he argued that it is far from the case that those attributes that lead to
success in the struggle are necessarily those that we think good. Indeed, often it is
the very opposite. “Man, the animal, in fact, has worked his way to the headship of
the sentient world, and has become the superb animal which he is, in virtue of his
success in the struggle for existence” (Huxley 1893, 51). Continuing:

For his successful progress, throughout the savage state, man has been
largely indebted to those qualities which he shares with the ape and the
tiger; his exceptional physical organization; his cunning, his sociability,
his curiosity, and his imitativeness; his ruthless and ferocious destruc-
tiveness when his anger is roused by opposition.
But, in proportion as men have passed from anarchy to social orga-
nization, and in proportion as civilization has grown in worth, these
deeply ingrained serviceable qualities have become defects. After the
manner of successful persons, civilized man would gladly kick down
the ladder by which he has climbed. He would be only too pleased to
see “the ape and tiger die.”3

The Christian Opposition

With this kind of background among the evolutionists, as you can imagine the
novelists and poets were all over the map, united only in their agreement with
George Eliot that this issue is really, really important and that after Darwin things
cannot stand still. Expectedly, there were those who went on arguing that only
with religion can one have a sound basis for moral behavior, and just as expect-
edly, Disraeli was one of these voices. Lothair (1870) tells the story of a young
nobleman who has two guardians, one a Presbyterian and the other a Catholic
convert, a cardinal. The hero is entangled with Theodora, a young woman with

endorsed capitalism fully and we saw his views on unions—╉and Spencer’s responsibility is there but
not uniquely so.
3
╛╛Notwithstanding the comments in the last footnote, by the 1890s Darwin was dead but Spencer
was not only alive but still pushing strongly his philosophy of the benefits of struggle and the end
point of social Progress. In writing this essay, Huxley explicitly had Spencer in his sights. For Spencer,
and for Darwin in respects too, the bloody struggle leads to moral sentiments. For Huxley, this is
never so. Morality is opposed to the products of the struggle.
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152 Darwinism as Religion

very radical ideas, but he knows only too well that the state of bliss that this
brings on cannot last indefinitely. And then what? The scientists are of little help.

Chance, necessity, atomic theories, nebular hypotheses, development,

evolution, the origin of worlds, human ancestry—​here were high topics,
on none of which was there lack of argument; and, in a certain sense, of
evidence; and what then? There must be design. The reasoning and the
research of all philosophy could not be valid against that conviction. If
there were no design, why, it would all be nonsense… Atheism may be
consistent with fine taste, and fine taste under certain conditions may for
a time regulate a polished society; but ethics with atheism are impossible;
and without ethics no human order can be strong or permanent. (197)

As Disraeli said, when it came to apes or angels, he was with the heavenly choir.
At the end of the century, the Irish novelist George Moore made the same
points. Evelyn Innes tells the story of a young woman who runs off to Paris with
her lover (Sir Owen Asher) and becomes an opera singer. Give Sir Owen credit,
he knows his way to a girl’s heart, not to mention the lower parts of her anatomy.

That she was at that moment preparing to receive him brought a little
dizziness into his eyes, and compelled him to tear off his necktie. Then,
vaguely, like one in a dream, he began to undress, very slowly, for she had
told him to wait a quarter of an hour before coming to her room. He exam-
ined his thin waist as he tied himself in blue silk pyjamas, and he paused
to admire his long, straight feet before slipping them into a pair of black
velvet slippers. He turned to glance at his watch, and to kill the last five
minutes of the prescribed time he thought of Evelyn’s scruples. She would
have to read certain books—​Darwin and Huxley he relied upon, and he
reposed considerable faith in Herbert Spencer. (Moore 1898, 146–​147)4

Fortunately for her immortal soul—​tiring of Owen she has even had sex with
a man during a performance of Tristan and Isolde—​the heroine falls in with a
Monsignor.

With a little pathetic air, Evelyn admitted that Owen had used every
possible argument to destroy her faith. She had read Huxley, Darwin,
and a little Herbert Spencer.

4
  The American reprint of 1923 neatly excises (without mention) this and the succeeding para-
graphs. One assumes it was the sex that offended the American publisher and not the reference to
Darwin.
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Moralit y 153

“Herbert Spencer! Miserable collections of trivial facts, bearing

upon nothing. Of what value, I ask, can it be to suffering humanity to
know that such and such a fact has been observed and described? Then
the general law! rubbish, ridiculous rubbish!” (332–╉333)

It is not easy for one who has fallen so low to regain the higher moral ground.

That sense of right and wrong which, like a whip, had driven her here
could be nothing else but the voice of her soul; therefore there was a
soul, and if there was a soul it could not die, and if it did not die it must
go somewhere; therefore there was a heaven and a hell. But in spite
of her desire to convince herself, remembrance of Owen’s arguments
whistled like a wind through her pious exhortations, and all that she
had read in Huxley and Darwin and Spencer; the very words came back
thick and distinct, and like one who finds progress impossible in the
face of the gale, she stopped thinking. (391–╉392)

But thank God—╉thank God—╉the faith conquers all. “That you should think
like this is part of the teaching of the man whose object was to undermine your
faith; it is part of the teaching of Darwin and Huxley and Spencer. You were per-
suaded that to live with a man to whom you were not married differed in no wise
from living with your husband. The result has proved how false is such teaching”
(397). In the end, it is not quite certain who saves her soul—╉God Almighty
or Richard Wagner—╉although perhaps there is not much difference between
the two. Having been led into sin through one opera, through another—╉though
tempted, Tannhäuser never returns to the Venusberg—╉she finds her guide and
support. 5

The Evolutionist Response

What did the evolutionists have to say? Someone like Kingsley hardly counts,
inasmuch as his position seems unchanged after Darwin from before. We ought

5
╛╛Evelyn is not alone in being led astray by her dreadful influences. The heroine of Arnold
Bennett’s Sacred and Profane Love (1905) is another with a rocky sexual career, likewise finding
Tristan somewhat of an aphrodisiac. “He held me; he clasped me, and, despite my innocence, I knew
at once that those hands were as expert to caress as to make music. I was proud and glad that he was
not clumsy, that he was a master. And at that point I ceased to have volition ….” ([1905] 1906,
61). She was primed. “I discovered The Origin of Species in the Free Library. It finished the work
of corruption. Spencer had shown me how to think; Darwin told me what to think. The whole of
my upbringing went for naught thenceforward” (23). As with Evelyn, lifelong guilt was close at
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154 Darwinism as Religion

to behave in a good Christian way. Tom finds salvation in following God’s rule.
“He has won his spurs in the great battle, and become fit to go with you and be
a man; because he has done the thing he did not like” (Kingsley [1863] 2008,
188). Among those more inclined to the view that the good is more or less de-
fined by the outcome of evolution, one senses that—​at a reasonably restrained
level—​Gissing endorses something along these lines. Certainly there seems a
respect for Jasper Milvain over Edwin Reardon for simply having the energy and
nous to make a life for himself. Edwin’s girlfriend, Marian Yule, ends without
man or money, and her willingness to do whatever is right and “good” does not
entirely endear her to the author. We have already been told that she is a bit of a
wimp, and this kind of conversation rather confirms this judgment.

“Decide my fate for me, Marian,” he pursued, magnanimously. “Let us

make up our minds and do what we decide to do. Indeed, it doesn’t
concern me so much as yourself. Are you content to lead a simple, un-
ambitious life? Or should you prefer your husband to be a man of some
distinction?”
“I know so well what your own wish is. But to wait for years—​you will
cease to love me, and will only think of me as a hindrance in your way.”
“Well now, when I said five years, of course I took a round number.
Three—​two might make all the difference to me.”
“Let it be just as you wish. I  can bear anything rather than lose
your love.”
“You feel, then, that it will decidedly be wise not to marry whilst we
are still so poor?”
“Yes; whatever you are convinced of is right.”
​(Gissing [1891] 1976, 509–​510)

It is little wonder that Jasper goes off with Amy, who is a woman who knows her
mind and appreciates success and its benefits.
There is expectedly some fairly standard Social Darwinian writing. All the
tales of humans winning out over apes or lower forms—​as in the Lost World—​
fall into this category. The same is true of much of Jack London’s work. Spitz
is beaten by Buck. “Only Spitz quivered and bristled as he staggered back and
forth, snarling with horrible menace, as though to frighten off impending death.
Then Buck sprang in and out; but while he was in, shoulder had at last squarely
met shoulder. The dark circle became a dot on the moon-​flooded snow as Spitz

hand. That very night she was being carried away in Wagnerian ecstasies, the aunt who reared her
died suddenly, having had the forethought to leave her niece “a magnificently-​bound copy of The
Imitation of Christ” (78).
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Moralit y 155

disappeared from view. Buck stood and looked on, the successful champion, the
dominant primordial beast who had made his kill and found it good” (London
[1903] 1990, 24). But it is more than just this. Everyone now benefits from
Buck’s success, dogs and men. “Highly as the dog-​driver had forevalued Buck,
with his two devils, he found, while the day was yet young, that he had underval-
ued. At a bound Buck took up the duties of leadership; and where judgment was
required, and quick thinking and quick acting, he showed himself the superior
even of Spitz, of whom Francois had never seen an equal” (26). And slackers are
pulled back into line.

Pike, who pulled at Buck’s heels, and who never put an ounce more of his
weight against the breast-​band than he was compelled to do, was swiftly
and repeatedly shaken for loafing; and ere the first day was done he was
pulling more than ever before in his life. The first night in camp, Joe, the
sour one, was punished roundly—​a thing that Spitz had never succeeded
in doing. Buck simply smothered him by virtue of superior weight, and
cut him up till he ceased snapping and began to whine for mercy. (26)6

There was a fair amount of poetry along Social Darwinian lines. Robert
Bridges’s “To a Socialist in London” (1903) is a good example. You think God
has made everything nice and easy for us?

—​‘Simple it is, (you say) God is good,—​Nature is ample,—​

‘Earth yields plenty for all,—​and all might share in abundance, …

Friend, you forget the Malthusian pressures.

When goods are increas’d, mouths are increas’d to devour them:

If the famine be reliev’d this season in India, next dearth
Will be a worse.

How can we interpret nature but to say LIFE LIVETH ON LIFE?

That the select creatures, who inherit earth’s domination,

Whose happy existence is Nature’s intelligent smile,
Are bloody survivors of a mortal combat, a-​tweenwhiles
Chanting a brief pæan for victory on the battlefield?

6
  Notice how this cooperation fits in with Spencer’s organicism. “From the lowest living forms
upwards, the degree of development is marked by the degree in which the several parts constitute a
co-​operative assemblage” (Naso 1981, 17, quoting Spencer 1862).
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156 Darwinism as Religion

Since that of all their kinds most owe their prosperous estate

Unto the art, whereby they more successfully destroy’d
Their weaker brethren, more insatiably devour’d them;
And all fine qualities, their forms pictorial, admired,
Their symmetries, their grace, & beauty, the loveliness of them,
Were by Murder evolv’d, to 'scape from it or to effect it.
(Bridges 1953, 426–╉428)

The Critics
Others were not so sure that throwing over conventional morality and grab-
bing what you can is necessarily the way to go. Jack London was one! He knew
his Huxley as well as his Darwin and Spencer, and he was well up on the debate
over ethics, finding it very stimulating. Obviously this did not mean giving up on
Darwin-╉Spencer, but in some of his stories he clearly worked in pro-╉Huxley senti-
ments. In London’s story The Scarlet Plague (1912), a new disease wipes out almost
all human beings. One of the survivors, a professor of classics, ruminates on the ap-
palling behavior of people under such huge stresses, not to mention the often gro-
tesque actions of those who do survive. One of the most successful was “an iniq-
uitous, moral monster, a blot on the face of nature, a cruel, relentless, bestial cheat
as well.” The professor concludes in a very non-╉Spencerian fashion that Progress is
never permanent and that the best we can do is fight the beast within us.7

“The gunpowder will come. Nothing can stop it—╉the same old story
over and over. Man will increase, and men will fight. The gunpowder
will enable men to kill millions of men, and in this way only, by fire and
blood, will a new civilization, in some remote day, be evolved. And of
what profit will it be? Just as the old civilization passed, so will the new.
It may take fifty thousand years to build, but it will pass. All things pass.”
(Spencer 1912, 540)8

7
╛╛To be fair to Spencer, he was not unaware that societies do break down and dissolve (Spencer
1867). The problem is that so often he seems to acknowledge counterinstances to his main theses
without making much effort to harmonize the whole.
8
╛╛London died young, in 1916 at the age of forty. It is easiest to say that his inconsistent positions
are the mark of a man who did not live long enough to work out a mature philosophy. Better to say
that he is reflecting what we have just seen in Gissing (and earlier in Gaskell) and shall see later in
Edith Wharton—╉a sense that morality has to be more than just Malthusian struggle but yet an ad-
miration for those with the strength to go out and compete and the drive to win. The Christian idea
of humility and acceptance of life’s woes—╉“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth”
(Matthew 5:5)—╉something with which Sue consoles Jude—╉cuts little ice here.
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Moralit y 157

Others felt the same way about the limitations of simplistic moral evolution-
ism. In Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, the heroine has got herself nicely set up
as a mistress. But is this what morality is about?

For all the liberal analysis of Spencer and our modern naturalistic
philosophers, we have but an infantile perception of morals. There is
more in the subject than mere conformity to a law of evolution. It is
yet deeper than conformity to things of earth alone. It is more involved
than we, as yet, perceive. Answer, first, why the heart thrills; explain
wherefore some plaintive note goes wandering about the world, un-
dying; make clear the rose’s subtle alchemy evolving its ruddy lamp
in light and rain. In the essence of these facts lie the first principles of
morals.
“Oh,” thought Drouet, “how delicious is my conquest.”
“Ah,” thought Carrie, with mournful misgivings, “what is it I have lost?”
Before this world-​old proposition we stand, serious, interested,
confused; endeavouring to evolve the true theory of morals—​the true
answer to what is right. ​(Dreiser [1900] 1991, 68–​69)

Moreover, as some perceptive people realized, it is one thing to talk about tri-
umph and might and so forth, but there is always the threat from the poor and
the weak and the disposed. Bitterness can lead to dreadful vengeance. Thus
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, writing against the British occupation of Ireland.

Scientists tell us the world has no direction or plan,

Only a struggle of Nature, each beast and nation at grips,
Still the fittest surviving and he the fittest who can.
You are that fittest, the lion to-day in your strength. To-morrow?
Well, who knows what other will come with a wider jaw?

Indeed:

Granted your creed of destruction, your right of the strong to devour,

Granted your law of Nature that he shall live who can kill,
Find me the law of submission shall stay the weak in his hour,
His single hour of vengeance, or set a rein on his will.

Better a Christian ethic, than that of Darwin.

I hold the justice of Heaven

Larger than all the science, and welled from a purer fount;
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158 Darwinism as Religion

God as greater than Nature, His law than the wonders seven,

Darwin’s sermon on Man redeemed by that on the Mount.
(Blunt 1914, 2, 251–​252)

Some critics thought that it was religion precisely that was a major nega-
tive factor in this discussion. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair (1878–​1968), tells
the horrific story of a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, who comes to
America and works in the stockyards in Chicago at the turn of the century.
He and his family suffer appalling hardships—​his wife Ona is pushed into
prostitution before she dies in childbirth, his only surviving child drowns in
a puddle on an unkempt road, the house is lost when he is jailed for beating
up the man who misused Ona, and so the awful tale continues. The descrip-
tions of the sausage making turn the stomach—​so much so that Sinclair was
a major force in the enactment of food-​safety laws. A striking metaphor is of
Sinclair’s human beasts being used by the system as much as the hogs led to
slaughter.

There was a long line of hogs, with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away
together; until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into
a huge vat of boiling water.
It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was
porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics. And
yet somehow the most matter-​of-​fact person could not help thinking of
the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they
were so very human in their protests—​and so perfectly within their
rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult
to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-​
blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense of apology, without the
homage of a tear. (Sinclair [1906] 2001, 29)

Jurgis reflects: “And now was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of
hogs, to whom this hog personality was precious, to whom these hog squeals
and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort
him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sac-
rifice?” (30) Later he comes to see how it all applies to him and his family, and
indeed to everyone up and down the food chain: “a hog was just what he had
been—​one of the packers’ hogs. What they wanted from a hog was all the profits
that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the working-
man, and also that was what they wanted from the public. What the hog thought
of it, and what he suffered, were not considered; and no more was it with labor,
and no more with the purchaser of meat” (264).
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This is not a writer who has much truck with religion. Sinclair speaks of re-
ligion as the “Archfiend’s deadliest weapon” (279) against the poor and suffer-
ing. Expectedly, therefore, notwithstanding the trials of the downcast, Sinclair
is a strong believer in the possibility of Progress. In fact, one of the major criti-
cisms of religion is that it stands against this philosophy—​“Religion oppressed
his mind, and poisoned the stream of progress at its source” (279). However,
Progress is not going to happen in some Spencerian fashion by making people
better. Most of the downtrodden in The Jungle end up dead or pushed into crime
or prostitution, and those at the other end of the scale are certainly not the high-
est by any standard. There is an encounter between Jurgis and the son of one of
the owners of the meatpacking business, a young man who seems taken straight
from the pages of a P. G. Wodehouse farce.9 Crucially, Sinclair does not dispute
the Malthus-​Darwin system of economic laws or the thinking of these men
about the way they usually function in a cruel fashion. How then are things to be
improved? By using the laws of nature to our own ends. Sinclair was a committed
socialist and he puts this thinking into the mouth of a journalist:

It was a process of economic evolution, he said, and he exhibited its

laws and methods. Life was a struggle for existence, and the strong over-
came the weak, and in turn were overcome by the strongest. Those who
lost in the struggle were generally exterminated; but now and then they
had been known to save themselves by combination—​which was a new
and higher kind of strength. It was so that the gregarious animals had
overcome the predaceous; it was so, in human history, that the people
had mastered the kings. The workers were simply the citizens of indus-
try, and the Socialist movement was the expression of their will to sur-
vive. The inevitability of the revolution depended upon this fact, that
they had no choice but to unite or be exterminated; this fact, grim and
inexorable, depended upon no human will, it was the law of the eco-
nomic process, of which the editor showed the details with the most
marvelous precision. (273)

In The Jungle there is no explicit reference to Darwin; perhaps reflecting the

Germanic origins of much American socialism, there is a reference to Friedrich
Nietzsche as the “prophet of evolution”—​but notice how the struggle for exis-
tence makes a key appearance. This fits the pattern. Whether or not there are
explicit references—​and often there are—​everyone has Darwin and his work

9
  Sinclair is not subtle. It would have been interesting had he tackled the fact that many Chicago
business owners were major philanthropists, whose legacy includes the Chicago Art Institute, one of
the great collections of the world.
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160 Darwinism as Religion

at the back—╉often at the front—╉of their mind. This is true whether or not they
have grasped the details of Darwin’s own work or have some version of it (as in
the case of Sinclair) that might owe more to other thinkers, not necessarily sym-
pathetic to Darwin. As always, this overall grappling with Darwin and evolution
confirms the kind of case being made. Do not look for nor expect uniformity
of belief. One does not get it with Christianity. Why should one expect it of
Darwinism?

Thomas Hardy
What do our two great novelists have to say on these issues about morality and
proper conduct? The heavily Darwin-╉influenced Hardy does not look for mean-
ing as such in nature—╉that is the very point of his overall position. Nature after
Darwin has no interest in us. Even when the Immanent Will appears on the scene
there is not much joy for humans. Hardy would endorse Richard Dawkins’s take
on a passage by A. E. Housman:

For Nature, heartless, witless Nature

Will neither know nor care.
DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
(Dawkins 1995, 133)

This said, Hardy is an intensely moral man. The discussion of class showed
us that. Perhaps more than any of our writers, he is the one who worries about
free will. As all agree, if we are to be moral beings, then we must have some di-
mension of free choice. A rock falling under the laws of physics has no freedom,
and hence no moral standing. If the rock by chance hits a robber thus allowing
the victim to escape, it merits no praise. If the rock by chance smashes a wind-
screen thus causing a fatal accident, it merits no blame. Most, although not all,
Christians endorse some version of what is known as “libertarianism,” mean-
ing nothing to do with political freedom and everything to do with free actions
lying outside the causal nexus. For someone like Kant, it is not that causation
is denied but that it is thought irrelevant (and impossible) for choice. If I do X,
I could have done otherwise, and this is not an option when all is determined.
Others endorse “compatibilism.” Here the opposition is not between freedom
and determinism but between freedom and restraint or lack of it. If I do X freely,
then I am not restrained. I am not in chains, I am not hallucinating or hypnotized
or whatever. Someone like Hume argues that not only is freedom possible given
determinism, but it would not be possible without determinism. If I were not, for
example, controlled by childhood training, I would not be acting freely. I would
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Moralit y 161

be the pawn of my emotions. This may not be a popular Christian option, but
there are some—​Calvinists particularly—​who are drawn to it.
For obvious reasons, Darwinians are going to be drawn to compatibilism.
The more you argue that the world is law-​like, the more ready you are to include
human beings in the system. This was certainly Darwin’s position, from the very
start. It wasn’t a matter of tension. It just seemed obvious: “thinking over these
things, one doubts the existence of free will, every action determined by herede-
tary [sic] constitution, example of others, or teaching of others” (Barrett et al.
1987, M. 27). It was also Hardy’s. Tess is a fascinating example of a novelist work-
ing out these ideas in fiction. Life is pretty mean to Tess. She has a sad family
background—​her mum is nice but weak and limited, and her dad is a total loser;
she is pushed into sex by Alec; she gets pregnant and loses the kid; and we are not
yet halfway through the novel! Yet, she is a good-​looking girl, she is intelligent,
she has a reasonably good education, she is a nice person, and much more. Is she
just a victim of circumstances, or is she responsible for her fate? In part, obviously
she is a victim. I think she really was raped by Alec and had no choice on that. In
part, though, she is not. When her baby dies, she is determined that it be buried in
consecrated ground and it is. “So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under
an ancient woman’s shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-​
light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner
of God’s allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized in-
fants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are
laid” (Hardy [1892] 2010, 116). Don’t we give Tess great moral credit for this?
My reading is that Hardy does allow free will and judgment. I don’t see much of
a moral issue about Tess stabbing Alec—​perhaps I should, but he had it coming—​
however, I do see more of a moral issue about her having become his mistress. Not
much, given the way she has been cast aside by her husband, Angel. But allow that
it does sully her purity. It still fits beautifully with a Darwinian reading of freedom—​
“every action determined by hereditary constitution” (let us correct Darwin’s spell-
ing). As we shall see in detail shortly, a huge leitmotiv of the novel is the degenerate
blood of the D’Urbervilles. They have sunk since the founder came over with Duke
William in 1066. Tess is the end point of this, both victim but also perpetrator. In a
way, it is all very Calvinistic. She is part of the causal network, but she is still respon-
sible. You may think this an inadequate analysis of freedom, but it is what Darwin
offers (and is not idiosyncratic) and it is what Hardy takes up and uses and illustrates.
What about the morality in Hardy? Sometimes his poetry seems almost
unimaginably bleak, suggesting that there is no point to life and that morality
counts for naught. No surprise that World War I brought out these feelings. Take
first a sonnet—​“The Pity of It”—​written in the early years of the war. It stresses
the way in which the killing is going on between cousins, close kin, not aliens or
total strangers. Note also how nonjingoistic it is. It may be Kaiser Wilhelm who
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162 Darwinism as Religion

was to blame. But it equally could be people on our side. The point is that they
are causing great suffering and deserve condemnation.

I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar

From rail-​track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like “Thu bist,” “Er war,”
“Ich woll”, “Er sholl”, and by-​talk similar,
Nigh as they speak who in this month’s moon gird
At England’s very loins, thereunto spurred
By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.
Then seemed a Heart crying: “Whosoever they be
At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame
Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,
“Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame;
May their familiars grow to shun their name,
And their brood perish everlastingly.”
(Hardy 1994, 500)10

See how after the war Hardy feels no triumph, no sense that right has prevailed.
In “Christmas 1924,” there is bitterness at what was done—​poison gas was the
ultimate obscenity—​and contempt at the ineffectiveness of Christianity. This
poem is as brilliantly short as it is brilliantly brutal.

“Peace upon earth!” was said. We sing it,

And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison-​gas.
(Hardy 1994, 848)

Yet, the pagan theme that runs right through Hardy’s work suggests not just a
oneness with the earth—​as in Drummer Hodge—​but also a oneness with each
other. There is no God or gods, there is no supernatural salvation, but we humans

10
  Christians likewise were bemused by the violent conflict between relatives and neighbors. In
Greenmantle the hero, racked with fever, stays with the family of a woodcutter, the man away fighting.
“I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medi-
cine. But that woodcutter’s cottage cured me of such nightmares” (Buchan [1916] 1992, 191). There
was hatred of those who caused the war. But the sentiments are Hardy’s. “What good would it do
Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children’s bodies by the wayside? To be able
to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.”
  163

Moralit y 163

can and must hang together. There is a kind of blind force—​the Immanent
Will—​that infuses everything. Herein lie morality and duty. We see this in the
poem “A Plaint to Man” written around 1910. God is speaking to us, saying first
that for some reason as we evolved we had need of God and so created Him.

When you slowly emerged from the den of Time,

And gained percipience as you grew,
And fleshed you fair out of shapeless slime,
Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you
The unhappy need of creating me —​
A form like your own for praying to?

But now that need is vanishing or gone, and we humans are on our own.

And now that I dwindle day by day

Beneath the deicide eyes of seers
In a light that will not let me stay,
And to-​morrow the whole of me disappears,
The truth should be told, and the fact be faced
That had best been faced in earlier years:
The fact of life with dependence placed
On the human heart’s resource alone,
In brotherhood bonded close and graced
With loving-​kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.
​(296)

Find the resources within yourself, for they are not to be found elsewhere. One
cannot but be struck by the similarity of thought to that of existentialism. In
The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Dostoevsky has one of his characters say: “God
does not exist, so all things are permitted.”11 Of course, neither Dostoevsky
nor any who followed him—​notably Jean Paul Sartre who popularized that

11
  A modern translation (with the key phrase in bold) runs: “Rakitin now—​he doesn't like God,
doesn't like Him at all. To people like him, God is a sore spot. But they hide it, they lie, they pretend.
'Will you,' I asked him, 'try to develop these ideas in your literary criticism?' 'They won't let me do
it too openly,' he said, and laughed. 'But tell me,' I asked him, 'what will happen to men? If there's
no God and no life beyond the grave, doesn't that mean that men will be allowed to do whatever
they want?' 'Didn't you know that already?' he said and laughed again. 'An intelligent man can do
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164 Darwinism as Religion

saying—╉thought that was the end of the matter. It is rather the beginning of
moral inquiry. We are seeing parallel thoughts in that most English of writers,
Thomas Hardy.12

George Eliot
And so to George Eliot. We see in her novels an attempt to work out a secular
account of morality, against a background of Spencer and Darwin too, for all
that she grumbled about Darwin’s thinking. She and Lewes studied Darwin and
thought deeply about the evolution of morality, although perhaps with respect
to the Descent being more inclined to give the social a bigger role than the biolog-
ical. But these were differences within the paradigm, as it were, and they agreed
fully with the overall naturalistic approach. This comes through particularly in
Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, and is the reason why I see it as more integrated
than do other readers. Although clearly in living unmarried with Lewes she was
not about to be constrained by the norms of society, Eliot was no radical trying
to destroy them.13 In the twin characters of Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel
Deronda, Eliot is showing us the consequences of our actions and using these
as justification for (good) moral behavior.14 There is nothing very mysterious.
We are told right from the beginning that Gwen is a wonderful person, beau-
tiful in her distinctive way, intelligent, interesting, and a very attractive young

anything he likes as long as he's clever enough to get away with it. But you, you got caught after you
killed, so today you have to rot in prison.' He's real swine to say that to my face; a few months ago I
used to throw people like that out of the window. But now I just sit and listen to him” (Dostoevsky
[1880] 1983, 788). The speaker is one brother Mitya (Dmitri), falsely accused of the murder of his
father, to another brother Aloysha (Alexei). Ratikin is a journalist, repeating ideas he got from the
third brother, Ivan.
12
╛╛Inasmuch as we ever do, we are seeing a move to evolutionary meliorism. Hardy studied Henri
Bergson’s Creative Evolution with care, although expectedly far from uncritically.
13
╛╛Although some (including Huxley) would not bring their wives to meet her, socially George
Eliot was no pariah. The Darwins, not being bourgeois in the way of the Huxleys, had no reservations.
Charles met her several times, explicitly asked that his daughter be allowed to visit, and a very thrilled
Emma finally had the opportunity to tell the novelist to her face how much she enjoyed her fiction
(Browne 2002, 405).
14
╛╛As noted earlier, Eliot had translated David Strauss, so although Eliot is searching for a non-
religious backing for morality, it is surely the case that biblical scholarship along with evolution was
behind this drive. Expectedly, this is not the only place in her fiction where Eliot makes this kind of
argument. Of Middlemarch, a very perceptive critic writes: “At its simplest level, George Eliot wants
to suggest that crime does not pay. If organic social harmony is to be preserved, wrongdoing must
be shown to have undesired consequences for the perpetrator” (Shuttleworth 1984, 153). Newton
(1974) also picks up on this theme in Middlemarch, suggesting that Dorothea gains happiness thanks
to her essential goodness and Lydgate does not because of his self-╉centered attitude to life.
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Moralit y 165

woman. She is also spoiled and incredibly self-​centered. If life isn’t directed to
Gwen’s pleasures and comforts, she doesn’t want to know about it. We learn that
at once from the title of Book One—​“The Spoiled Child.” The plot of the story
is sparked by the failure of a bank in which her family has parked its money.
“The first effect of this letter on Gwendolen was half-​stupefying. The implicit
confidence that her destiny must be one of luxurious ease, where any trouble
that occurred would be well clad and provided for, had been stronger in her own
mind than in her mamma’s, being fed there by her youthful blood and that sense
of superior claims which made a large part of her consciousness” (Eliot [1876]
1967, 44). Not a thought for poor old mother or anyone else. All “poor Gwen.”
“There was no inward exclamation of ‘Poor mamma!’ Her mamma had never
seemed to get much enjoyment out of life, and if Gwendolen had been at this
moment disposed to feel pity [she is more angry than anything other] she would
have bestowed it on herself—​for was she not naturally and rightfully the chief
object of her mamma’s anxiety too?” (45)
This is just the beginning. Gwen is not a monster and it is made clear through
the novel that she does have redeeming features—​she is fun to be with: “even
those ladies who did not quite like her, felt a comfort in having a new, striking girl
to invite” (72)—​but it is me, me, me, all the time. And this leads her into making
the disastrous marriage with a rich man, Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, who
turns out to be a thoroughly unpleasant human being, without a modicum of
feeling for anyone but himself. And so Gwen ends up really unhappy. Even when
Grandcourt drowns—​and note that there is some ambiguity about how much
she did or did not help him in distress—​the misery persists. And she finally real-
izes what she has done. “It is because I was always wicked that I am miserable
now” (825). But it is too late. Daniel, whom she really does fancy, has a differ-
ent girlfriend (Mirah) and is about to get married and head off East to found a
Jewish homeland.
Now take Daniel. He has been brought up as a gentleman with no clear aim
of getting a profession. He doesn’t know where he comes from but as Sir Hugo’s
ward he is in pretty good hands. He too is blessed with looks, social decency, and
so forth. But, from the start, it is the well-​being of others that is his concern. Even
in Chapter One, before he knows anything of Gwen, he is rescuing her brace-
let for her from the pawnbrokers where she has taken it after her losses at the
gambling table. And this kind of behavior continues. In what is really rather
heavy-​handed symbolism, Daniel too has the chance to rescue someone from
drowning (Mirah who is in despair). He not only succeeds but takes her to the
family of his friend (Hans) and from then on is concerned about her welfare,
even before he falls in love with her. When his friend has eyesight troubles,
Daniel sacrifices his own time (and hence his chances at a scholarship) to help
because the friend needs to succeed (and get money) more than he does. “Daniel
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166 Darwinism as Religion

had the stamp of rarity in a subdued fervor of sympathy, an activity of imagina-

tion on behalf of others which did not show itself effusively, but was continually
seen in acts of considerateness that struck his companions as moral eccentric-
ity” (218). And his moral goodness continues, not just to Mirah but also to her
ailing brother, Mordecai. And in the end, he finds true contentment, not only in
his relationship with Mirah but in the real course of action and plan that he has
found for his life. In following his plan, he will serve others and find personal
happiness.
Is this Darwinian? Is this Spencerian? It doesn’t matter. What matters is
Eliot’s finding a solution to her own demand in the Fellows’ Garden at Trinity.
A solution making no appeal to the will of the Almighty but firmly grounded
within the space opened by the evolutionists.15 She was an exceptional thinker,
one of the truly great contributors to the English literary tradition. In our con-
text, she was another helping shape and articulate the Darwinian alternative to
the Christian religion.16

15
  Note the difference in this respect between Nemesis of Faith and Robert Elsmere (Ashton 1989).
In Froude’s novel, loss of faith leads the hero into a very morally ambiguous relationship with another
man’s wife. In Ward’s post-George Eliot novel, the hero’s loss of faith leads him into even-​greater
moral behavior in the slums of London. Mrs. Ward herself was nigh-​Kantian in her belief in an unfal-
tering and categorical moral code, and in respects socially conservative (Peterson 1976). She always
opposed women’s suffrage.
16
  It has been suggested that George Eliot’s early novel Silas Marner (1861) could be her rework-
ing of the story of Job (Fisher 2003). It is the tale of a weaver unfairly cast out of his community
apparently by the will of God (lots are thrown and he is the loser), who then has his savings stolen,
and only slowly regains his sense of self-​worth and happiness—​coming back to the beginning like
Job—​through his caring love for a little girl who appears at his fire hearth, her golden curls a far better
exchange for his lost sovereigns. This would fit nicely with Eliot’s secular perspective, that the way to
recoup from life’s undeserved misfortunes lies less in worshiping the deity and more through making
an effort yourself to buck up and get on with things. There are interesting parallels and contrasts
here with Dickens’s Bleak House, a novel written pre-​Origin by a Christian. Job laments: “Let the day
perish wherein I was born” ( Job 3:3). The central figure of Esther is told by her stern godmother
(aunt): “It would have been far better, little Esther, that you had had no birthday, that you had never
been born!” (Dickens [1853] 1948, 17). But whereas Job resolves things through repentance and
faith, Esther—​brimming with love—​resolves things by confronting her own insecurities and rising
above them. The Esther searching for her mother is a very different Esther from the one who left her
godmother’s house. Progress is starting to edge out Providence (Larson 1985, 161–​162).
╇ 167

10

Sex

Christianity
Sex can be a rotten business sometimes.

“It was all Mrs. Bumble. She would do it,” urged Mr. Bumble; first look-
ing round to ascertain that his partner had left the room.
“That is no excuse,” replied Mr. Brownlow. “You were present on the
occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and indeed are the more
guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your
wife acts under your direction.”
“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat em-
phatically in both hands, “the law is a ass—╉a idiot. If that’s the eye of
the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his
eye may be opened by experience—╉by experience.” (Dickens [1837]
1948, 399)

This is humorous, but the Victorians felt the power and dread of sexuality.
Kipling expressed feelings that many felt.

When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

This does not hold just in the animal world.

When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,

They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

167
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168 Darwinism as Religion

And note how it all gets tangled up with religion, with the poor sap of a
male trying to appeal to his God to justify his superiority, with but limited
effect.

And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern—​shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.
(Kipling 2001, 379–​380)

Sex plays a big part in religions, and this is especially true of the Christian
religion. It just has to, if religion is to have any grip on the human imagi-
nation. From our births, sex is just about the most important thing in our
lives, starting with (at least as it was in my childhood) whether we are to be
dressed in blue or in pink! Families are based on sex—​that is why the con-
troversy over gay marriage is so important for both sides—​huge amounts
of our daily lives, physical and emotional, are based on sex, and almost all
social decisions and consequences involve sex at some level. The story of
Christianity highlights sex, starting with Adam and Eve, and going through
to the gospels and on to the story of Paul. It is also prescriptive—​sexual
requirements and prohibitions—​and this has been ongoing. Christianity
and sexuality did not stop with Revelation but continue down to the pres-
ent. Witness, for instance, the battles over women priests and bishops in the
Anglican Church.
It is virtually impossible to say briefly what the attitude of Christianity is to-
wards sex, but surely one can say that there are two, somewhat conflicting, main
themes. On the one hand, sex is a good thing. God created Adam and Eve, man
and woman, for companionship but also for procreation. Having children is a
good thing both personally and for society. It is right and proper to fall in love, to
reproduce, to cherish one’s offspring and also more generally to support one an-
other in these activities. On the other hand, sex is a worrisome thing. Adam and
Eve sinned and were kicked out of Eden where they had to work for their livings
and childbirth would be difficult and painful; the Messiah was apparently celibate
which seems prima facie a little bit odd if he is supposed to be fully human; and
so it goes on to the various restrictions on priesthood, on sex outside marriage,
and even on sex within marriage—​with respect to contraception for instance.
Often—​usually—​males are given the dominant role in Christian discussions—​
“Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord” (Colossians
3:18)—​but the power (and danger) of women is fully recognized. We are sinners
because Adam sinned, but it was Eve who put him up to it. Sex is important but
it isn’t easy.
╇ 169

Se x 169

Darwinism and Sexuality

Darwinism is as obsessed with sex as is Christianity.1 Darwin wrote of the
struggle for existence, but he knew and at once made clear that mere ex-
istence means nothing. “I should premise that I  use the term Struggle for
Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one
being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the
life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny” (Darwin 1859, 62).
Without sex, evolution grinds to a rapid halt. When it came to humankind,
sex took on an even greater role and importance, because it was here that
sexual selection kicked in in a big way. Remember that there are two kinds
of sexual selection, selection through male combat and selection through
female choice, although Darwin made it clear that neither variety was the
exclusive lien of one sex. Of North American Indians Darwin quotes one
observer: “It has ever been the custom among these people for the men to
wrestle for any woman to whom they are attached; and, of course, the stron-
gest party always carries off the prize” (Darwin 1871, 2,  324). This is as
typical a case of male combat as two stags fighting. But often we get cases of
males choosing their mates on beauty rather than females doing the choos-
ing. Indeed:  “In civilised life man is largely, but by no means exclusively,
influenced in the choice of his wife by external appearance …” (2,  338).
Actually Darwin is a bit more nuanced and realistic than this. “Civilised men
are largely attracted by the mental charms of women, by their wealth, and es-
pecially by their social position; for men rarely marry into a much lower rank
of life” (2, 355–╉356). That, of course, is why the Eugene Wrayburn-╉Lizzie
Hexam union was such a fraught business.
Sexual selection through female choice in humans goes the other way too.

In Northern Africa “a man requires a period of from ‘eight to ten

years to perfect his coiffure.’ With other nations the head is shaved, and
in parts of South America and Africa even the eyebrows are eradicated.
The natives of the Upper Nile knock out the four front teeth, saying
that they do not wish to resemble brutes. Further south, the Batokas
knock out the two upper incisors, which, as Livingstone remarks, gives
the face a hideous appearance, owing to the growth of the lower jaw;
but these people think the presence of the incisors most unsightly, and

1
╛╛This is a major reason why there is so much material to be discussed, and not just in this chap-
ter. Given the obsession, evolutionary themes were a means through which the somewhat socially
repressed Victorians could think and write legitimately about sexuality.
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170 Darwinism as Religion

on beholding some Europeans, cried out, ‘Look at the great teeth!’”

(2, 340)

As always though, Darwin knew the power of social position and money. “With
respect to the opposite form of selection, namely of the more attractive men by
the women, although in civilised nations women have free or almost free choice,
which is not the case with barbarous races, yet their choice is largely influenced
by the social position and wealth of the men; and the success of the latter in life
largely depends on their intellectual powers and energy, or on the fruits of these
same powers in their forefathers” (2, 356).

Sexual Selection in Fiction

Novelists and poets loved this sort of stuff, and expectedly it runs right through
our period—╉at all levels. Famously, at the end of Tarzan of the Apes, Jane sup-
presses “the psychological appeal of the primeval man to the primeval woman in
her nature” and, on very Darwinian lines, makes the sensible decision to marry
the apparent Lord Greystoke (William Cecil Clayton) instead of the (unac-
knowledged) true Lord Greystoke (Tarzan).

Did not her best judgment point to this young English nobleman,
whose love she knew to be of the sort a civilized woman should crave,
as the logical mate for such as herself?
Could she love Clayton? She could see no reason why she could not.
Jane was not coldly calculating by nature, but training, environment
and heredity had all combined to teach her to reason even in matters of
the heart. (Burroughs [1912] 2008, 340)

Fortunately, for those whose lives would be lessened without the twenty-╉five
sequels, this proves not to be a lasting commitment.2
Sexual selection is likewise the underlying theme of George Meredith’s The
Egoist (1879), a novel about a young woman trying to wriggle out of an unfor-
tunate engagement.

A deeper student of Science than his rivals, he appreciated Nature’s com-

pliment in the fair one’s choice of you. We now scientifically know that

╛╛Edgar Rice Burroughs owned a copy of the Descent of Man and it was a big influence on a
2

Martian science-╉fiction trilogy, penned at just the time of Tarzan (Parrett 2004, xviii). He believed in
God but could not stand established religion because of its perceived opposition to science.
  171

Se x 171

in this department of the universal struggle, success is awarded to the

bettermost. You spread a handsomer tail than your fellows, you dress a
finer top-​knot, you pipe a newer note, have a longer stride; she reviews
you in competition, and selects you. The superlative is magnetic to her.
She may be looking elsewhere, and you will see—​the superlative will
simply have to beckon, away she glides. She cannot help herself; it is
her nature, and her nature is the guarantee for the noblest races of men
to come of her. In complimenting you, she is a promise of superior off-
spring. Science thus—​or it is better to say—​an acquaintance with sci-
ence facilitates the cultivation of aristocracy. Consequently a successful
pursuit and a wresting of her from a body of competitors, tells you that
you are the best man. What is more, it tells the world so. (Meredith
[1879] 1968, 71–​72)

As it happens, Meredith (1828–​1909) is poking fun at the chap who thinks

this way. The gist of the novel is that sexual selection does work, but it is a lot
more subtle than many take it to be. Young women don’t necessarily go for the
most obvious choice—​intelligence, sensitivity and a lot of other things come
into play too (Smith 1995; Williams 1983). That said, it was seen that Darwin
was right about the lure of power and status. For all that there is a snide remark
about how ugly men who choose pretty women as mates do not guarantee
beauty in the offspring, George Eliot is no less committed to sexual selection
in Daniel Deronda (1876).3 The Darwinian theme is unmistakable (Beer 1983).

Some readers of this history will doubtless regard it as incredible that

people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that
a bachelor of good fortune and possibilities was coming within reach,
and will reject the statement as a mere outflow of gall: they will aver that
neither they nor their first cousins have minds so unbridled; and that in
fact this is not human nature, which would know that such speculations
might turn out to be fallacious, and would therefore not entertain them.
(Eliot [1876] 1967, 123)

3
  About a young woman who inherited from her father her plain looks—​“underhung and with re-
ceding brow resembling that of the more intelligent fishes”—​Eliot wrote “considering the importance
which is given to such an accident in female offspring, marriageable men, or what the new English calls
"intending bridegrooms," should look at themselves dispassionately in the glass, since their natural
selection of a mate prettier than themselves is not certain to bar the effect of their own ugliness” (Eliot
[1876] 1967, 149). In the Descent, Darwin had said that the British aristocracy “from having chosen
during many generations from all classes the more beautiful women as their wives, have become hand-
somer, according to the European standard of beauty, than the middle classes” (Darwin 1871, 2, 356).
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172 Darwinism as Religion

Eliot begs to differ. A woman has beauty and youth to sell. A man has power and
money and status to offer. It is a business transition pure and simple. Gwendolen
escapes the dreary life of a governess through the bargain of her marriage to
Grandcourt.

All the while they were looking at each other; and Grandcourt said,
slowly and languidly, as if it were of no importance, other things having
been settled—​
“You will tell me now, I hope, that Mrs. Davilow’s [Gwen’s mother]
loss of fortune will not trouble you further. You will trust me to pre-
vent it from weighing upon her. You will give me the claim to provide
against that.”
The little pauses and refined drawlings with which this speech was ut-
tered, gave time for Gwendolen to go through the dream of a life. As the
words penetrated her, they had the effect of a draught of wine, which sud-
denly makes all things easier, desirable things not so wrong, and people in
general less disagreeable. She had a momentary phantasmal love for this
man who chose his words so well, and who was a mere incarnation of deli-
cate homage. Repugnance, dread, scruples—​these were dim as remem-
bered pains, while she was already tasting relief under the immediate pain
of hopelessness. She imagined herself already springing to her mother, and
being playful again. Yet when Grandcourt had ceased to speak, there was
an instant in which she was conscious of being at the turning of the ways.
“You are very generous,” she said, not moving her eyes, and speaking
with a gentle intonation.
“You accept what will make such things a matter of course?”  said
Grandcourt, without any new eagerness. “You consent to become my
wife?”  (347)

And so she does. But Grandcourt is playing the same game. He wants a charm-
ing, attractive woman as his wife—​one who is not “used goods” like the mistress
we learn that he had. He also wants a woman of spirit whom he can control and
break. It certainly doesn’t sound like the usual passions.

“I am going to marry the other girl.”

“Have you fallen in love?” This question carried a strong sneer.
“I am going to marry her.”  (163)4

4
  Given that Eliot read Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in preparation for
this book, it is interesting to note that Darwin gives a very full discussion of blushing and that blushing
is a major attribute of both of Eliot’s central young women, as in (Gwendolen) “She knew Grandcourt's
╇ 173

Se x 173

Thomas Hardy
George Eliot is a truly great artist, but there is always something a little bit ce-
rebral even in the most intense of her fictional relationships. Perhaps it was the
pagan in him, but Hardy had the sense of raw animal passion. In the Descent,
Darwin has an extended discussion of music and our feelings for it. It puzzles
him, obviously, because he doesn’t see the immediate utility. “With man song is
generally admitted to be the basis or origin of instrumental music. As neither the
enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least
direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked
amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed” (Darwin 1871, 2, 333).
However, in a very familiar pattern, going back to such things as bird songs and
their sexual power, Darwin relates this to humankind: “the suspicion does not
appear improbable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females, or
both sexes, before they had acquired the power of expressing their mutual love
in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and
rhythm” (2, 337). Adding: “The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when
with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hear-
ers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which, at an extremely remote
period, his half-╉human ancestors aroused each other’s ardent passions, during
their mutual courtship and rivalry” (337).
Hardy picks up on this.5 Tess is working with three other girls as a milkmaid.
Angel turns up to train as a farmer and carries all four girls across a puddle when
they are on the way to church. They all fall for him and the sexual tension is high.
You can smell the pheromones.

The air of the sleeping-╉chamber seemed to palpitate with the hope-

less passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly under the oppressive-
ness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature’s law—╉an emotion

indistinct handwriting, and her mother was not surprised to see her blush deeply” (336) and (Mirah)
“But when she uttered the words she blushed deeply” (680). If you check (taking almost at random) a
pre-╉Origin novel like Bleak House, you find a lot of blushing there too, so perhaps one should be careful
at drawing firm lines of descent. That said, in a way that is not true of Dickens, Eliot makes blushing
work for her and picks up on specific Darwinian points, for instance, about the link between blushing
and confusion. “Her annoyance at what she imagined to be the obviousness of her confusion robbed
her of her usual facility in carrying it off by playful speech, and turning up her face to look at the roof,
she wheeled away in that attitude. If any had noticed her blush as significant, they had certainly not
interpreted it by the secret windings and recesses of her feeling. A blush is no language: only a dubious
flag-╉signal which may mean either of two contradictories” (Eliot [1876] 1967, 474).
5
╛╛So does Sherlock Holmes in The Study in Scarlet, telling Watson that Darwin thinks musical ability
predates speech. “Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our
souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood" (Conan Doyle [1887] 2003, 33).
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174 Darwinism as Religion

which they had neither expected nor desired. The incident of the day
had fanned the flame that was burning the inside of their hearts out,
and the torture was almost more than they could endure. The differ-
ences which distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by this
passion, and each was but portion of one organism called sex. (Hardy
[1892] 2010, 175)

Angel makes his choice, Tess. Now he must catch her. It is his playing on the harp
that does it.

Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head. Dim, flattened,
constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed to her as now,
when they wandered in the still air with a stark quality like that of nudity.
To speak absolutely, both instrument and execution were poor; but the
relative is all, and as she listened Tess, like a fascinated bird, could not
leave the spot. Far from leaving she drew up towards the performer, keep-
ing behind the hedge that he might not guess her presence. (146–​147)

“A stark quality like that of nudity”!6 “Tess was conscious of neither time nor
space. The exaltation which she had described as being producible at will by
gazing at a star came now without any determination of hers; she undulated
upon the thin notes of the second-​hand harp, and their harmonies passed like
breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to
be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the
garden’s sensibility” (147). This animal-​like girl—​remember her lushness, her
full-​breastedness, her passionate nature—​is captured—​“the dampness of the
garden” ready for the “floating pollen.” This is of the order of—​and plays the
same essential but unsettling role as—​David’s lust for Bathsheba. Sex is good,
but oh it is so animal and hence so dangerous.7

6
  Music has the same erotic undertones in the end-​of-​the-​century novel, The Awakening, by Kate
Chopin. “One piece which that lady played Edna had entitled ‘Solitude.’ It was a short, plaintive,
minor strain. The name of the piece was something else, but she called it ‘Solitude.’ When she heard
it there came before her imagination the figure of a man standing beside a desolate rock on the sea-
shore. He was naked” (Chopin [1899] 1994, 25).
7
  There are many other places in Hardy’s writings where one can look profitably for themes of
sexual selection (Ebbatson 1982). Two recent writers have drawn attention to Darwin’s discussion
of blushing in the Expression and the major role that blushing plays in A Pair of Blue Eyes—​as in
“'Forgive me,' she said, laughing a little, a little frightened, and blushing very deeply” (Mallet 2009;
Richardson 1998). Perhaps so, although given that Darwin’s work did not appear until late in 1872
by which time Hardy was already serializing his novel, it might be safest to say simply that Hardy was
writing in a Darwinian mode.
╇ 175

Se x 175

Women on Darwinism on Sex
Darwin (and Huxley) had some pretty Victorian ideas about the sexes. Neither
of them thought that women could compete with men. Their brains are not big
enough. They just don’t have the intelligence needed; nor do they have the drive.
Expectedly, this was fodder for that enterprising duo, Gilbert and Sullivan. Their
1884 operetta Princess Ida, based on Tennyson’s poem “The Princess,” tells the
story of a school for young women, isolated from men. Poking fun at the great
evolutionists, one of the mistresses expresses a Darwin-╉inspired perspective on
things with a very different conclusion.

A Lady fair, of lineage high,

Was loved by an Ape, in the days gone by
The Maid was radiant as the sun,
The Ape was a most unsightly one.
So it would not do;

The ardent primate does his best.

With a view to rise in the social scale,

He shaved his bristles, and he docked his tail,
He grew moustachios, and he took his tub,
And he paid a guinea to a toilet club

Still no luck. He continued as “the apiest Ape that ever was seen!” So desperate
measures are taken.

He bought white ties, and he bought dress suits,

He crammed his feet into bright tight boots
And to start in life on a bran new plan,
He christened himself Darwinian Man!

Again, however, he was out of luck.

For the Maiden fair, whom the Monkey craved,

Was a radiant Being,
With a brain far-╉seeing
While a Man, however well-╉behaved,
At best is only a monkey shaved!
(Bradley 1988, 261–╉263)
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176 Darwinism as Religion

Ultimately, though, the women jump back into line and do their Darwinian
duty, getting married.
This is parody. More than one female author was made of sterner stuff, willing
to accept the overall Darwinian picture but taking a serious view of the alterna-
tives. In “The Ballad of the Ichthyosaurus,” a poem published in Punch in 1885,
May Kendall wrote semihumorously about the struggle.

Ere Man was developed, our brother,

We swam and we ducked and we dived,
And we dined, as a rule, on each other —​
What matter, the toughest survived.
(Kendall 1887, 14)

She recognized women’s lowly role, but (in “Woman’s Future”) expected evolu-
tion (perhaps in a Spencerian fashion) to put things right.

Complacent they tell us, hard hearts and derisive,

In vain is our ardour; in vain are our sighs:
Our intellects, bound by a limit decisive,
To the level of Homer’s may never arise.
We heed not the falsehood, the base innuendo,
The laws of the universe, these are our friends,
Our talents shall rise in a mighty crescendo,
We trust Evolution to make us amends.

It is in part our own faults because we spend our time drinking tea and knitting.
More effort is needed.

Oh, rouse to a lifework —​do something worth doing!

Invent a new planet, a flying-​machine.
Mere charms superficial, mere feminine graces,
That fade or that flourish, no more you may prize;
But the knowledge of Newton will beam from your faces,
The soul of a Spencer will shine in your eyes.
(Kendall 1887, 38–​39)

One suspects that someone’s leg is being pulled a little here.

Certainly, if you want leg pulling to a serious purpose, look no further than
the poetry of Constance Naden. She knew all about sexual selection and she
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Se x 177

knew that it did not work always as well as an aged, upper-​middle-​class male like
Charles Darwin might suppose. Her delightful poem “Natural Selection” (actu-
ally more about sexual selection), written around 1885, hits the nail right on the
head. Ultimately, none of us are really that clever. We are driven by forces over
which we don’t have much control. Reason and common sense don’t have much
say in these things.

I HAD found out a gift for my fair,

I had found where the cave men were laid:
Skulls, femur and pelvis were there,
And spears that of silex they made.
But he ne’er could be true, she averred,       
Who would dig up an ancestor’s grave—​
And I loved her the more when I heard
Such foolish regard for the cave.
My shelves they are furnished with stones,
All sorted and labelled with care;
And a splendid collection of bones,
Each one of them ancient and rare;
One would think she might like to retire
To my study—​she calls it a “hole”!
Not a fossil I heard her admire
But I begged it, or borrowed, or stole.
But there comes an idealess lad,
With a strut and a stare and a smirk;
And I watch, scientific, though sad,
The Law of Selection at work.
Of Science he had not a trace,
He seeks not the How and the Why,
But he sings with an amateur’s grace,
And he dances much better than I.
And we know the more dandified males
By dance and by song win their wives—​
’Tis a law that with avis prevails,
And ever in Homo survives.
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178 Darwinism as Religion

Shall I rage as they whirl in the valse?

Shall I sneer as they carol and coo?
Ah no! for since Chloe is false
I’m certain that Darwin is true.8
 (Naden 1999, 207–​208)

There was always something a little bit pompous about Herbert Spencer.
He was the sort of man who, if you commented favorably on his genius in his
presence, would accept your judgment gravely with thanks and agreement.
Constance Naden too cannot help teasing him, at the same time respecting his
work and Darwin’s. Another of her poems, “The New Orthodoxy,” like “Natural
Selection” from a collection called “Evolutionary Erotics,” has a young woman
joshing her boyfriend for his stick-​in-​the-​mud ways.

Things with fin, and claw, and hoof

Join to give us perfect proof
That our being’s warp and woof
We from near and far win;
Yet your flippant doubts you vaunt,
And—​to please a maiden aunt—​
You’ve been heard to say you can’t
Pin your faith to Darwin!

Then you jest, because Laplace

Said this Earth was nought but gas
Till the vast rotating mass
Denser grew and denser:
Something worse they whisper too,
But I’m sure it can’t be true—​
For they tell me, Fred, that you
Scoff at Herbert Spencer!
(205)

We learn in this poem that although Fred went to Oxford, she (Amy) went to
the women’s college at Cambridge, Girton. Both May Kendall and Constance

8
  I do not see Naden putting down women in this poem, suggesting that the girl alone is flighty
and shallow (Murphy 2002). Here and elsewhere I see her astutely poking fun at young people of
both sexes, suggesting that often they are dominated by their (Darwinian) emotions and that reason
doesn’t come into things very much. This all fits in with a philosophical theory she elaborated and
embraced, “Hylo-​Idealism,” a kind of evolutionary monism that sees everything as part of a world
force or spirit, that in some sense she identified with the feminine (Thain 2003).
╇ 179

Se x 179

Naden were educated women, with strong social consciousness. One senses the
self-╉respect in the poems. Like those formidable mother superiors in the middle
ages who were not about to let males run over them, so these women repre-
sented a new age of female awareness. To his credit, Spencer was not unappre-
ciative, writing on Naden’s far-╉too-╉early death: “I can think of no woman, save
‘George Eliot,’ in whom there has been this union of high philosophical capacity
with extensive acquisition. Unquestionably her subtle intelligence would have
done much in furtherance of rational thought; and her death has entailed a seri-
ous loss” (Hughes 1890, 89–╉90). He felt the need to qualify his judgment by
adding: “While I say this, however, I cannot let pass the occasion for remarking
that in her case, as in other cases, the mental powers so highly developed in a
woman are in some measure abnormal, and involve a physiological cost which
the feminine organization will not bear without injury more or less profound.”
Naden died after an operation to remove ovarian cysts. Female readers take note.

Darwinian Sex: The American Dark Side

Henry James’s first truly great novel, Portrait of a Lady (1881), has a heroine
who owes much to Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolen Harleth (Levine 1963).
Isabel Archer is a young American who comes to England and is unexpectedly
left a fortune by a somewhat distant relative. She has already refused two suit-
ors, the English nobleman Lord Warburton and the American businessman
Caspar Goodwood, but then is enchanted into marriage by an older, penniless
American living in Italy, Gilbert Osmond. The story is of Isabel’s growing dis-
taste for Osmond, and her realization that he married her only for her fortune,
needing it to launch his own daughter, Pansy—╉who it turns out at the end of the
novel was the result of an adulterous relationship with a woman, Madame Merle,
who was the force behind the trapping of Isabel.
Isabel is faced with options like Gwendolen but much resembles Dorothea
and her choice of Casaubon, taking as husband a man with few visible virtues
but whom romantically she has vested with desirability.

She had had a more wondrous vision of him, fed through charmed
senses and oh such a stirred fancy!—╉she had not read him right. A cer-
tain combination of features had touched her, and in them she had seen
the most striking of figures. That he was poor and lonely and yet that
somehow he was noble—╉that was what had interested her and seemed
to give her her opportunity. There had been an indefinable beauty
about him—╉in his situation, in his mind, in his face. She had felt at the
same time that he was helpless and ineffectual, but the feeling had taken
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180 Darwinism as Religion

the form of a tenderness which was the very flower of respect. He was
like a sceptical voyager strolling on the beach while he waited for the
tide, looking seaward yet not putting to sea. It was in all this she had
found her occasion. She would launch his boat for him; she would be
his providence; it would be a good thing to love him. ( James [1881]
2011, 449)

Henry James (1843–​1916) had met Darwin ten years before he started on
the novel, and later got to know both George Eliot and George Lewes as well as
Herbert Spencer. He also had a brother, William James, who, especially in the
realm of psychology, was rapidly moving into being the most sensitive thinker of
his age about the implications of Darwin’s theorizing ( James 1880a, b).9 There
is little surprise that it is Darwinian sexual selection that sets much of the back-
ground of the novel, combined with dashes of Spencerian thinking about the
ways in which women have adapted to please men (Bender 1996, 136).10 First
Spencer:  “the men of the conquering races which gave origin to the civilized
races, were men in whom the brutal characteristics were dominant; and necessar-
ily the women of such races, having to deal with brutal men, prospered in propor-
tion as they possessed, or acquired, fit adjustments of nature” (Spencer [1873]
1889, 375). Then James: “It was astonishing what happiness she could still find in
the idea of procuring a pleasure for her husband” (437). This said, James is obvi-
ously using Darwinian theory as a foil to see what combinations are permissible.
Some of the thinking is fairly straightforward.11 Osmond wants Isabel’s money,
especially to launch his own child. Isabel’s friends cannot believe that she will not
choose either Warburton or Goodwood, conventional choices—​Warburton and
Goodwood are a bit taken aback too. But as with Eliot and Dorothea, James sees
that the sexual dance is not always straightforward and that some people are able
to deceive (as with Osmond) or open to deception (as with Isabel). Portrait of a
Lady is anything but anti-​Darwinian. The Descent of Man sets the background. But
it does set out to show—​as did Constance Naden—​that the foreground can be a
great deal more complex than Darwin suggests.

9
  The rapidity and enthusiasm with which the American Pragmatists—​very professional philoso-
phers and psychologists—​took up not just evolution but Darwinian evolution through natural selec-
tion is another good reason for regarding very cautiously claims about non-​Darwinian Revolutions,
and so forth (Ruse 2009).
10
  We saw earlier how in a rather condescending way, James saw Darwinism seeping right through
Middlemarch ( James 1873). Sauce for the English goose was sauce for the American gander.
11
  One is hardly being unduly dirty-​minded in noting that there are times when James lays it on
with a trowel, as when writing of Goodwood’s “disagreeably strong push, a kind of hardness of pres-
ence in his way of rising before her,” or of his parting kiss to Isabel “as if he were pressing something
that hurt her.” He was out of luck: “I can’t understand, I can’t penetrate you!”
  181

Se x 181

Many of the same things apply to Edith Wharton, another novelist so influ-
enced by Darwinian thinking that in her autobiography she wrote of Darwin as
an “Awakener” and acknowledged the “wonder-​world of nineteenth century sci-
ence” that included the Origin and such writers as Huxley, Spencer, and Haeckel
(Singley 1998).12 Again, it is sexual selection that sets the background of her
story, The House of Mirth, although in a cruder and more overt fashion than any
of our other writers (Saunders 2009). Lily Bart, age twenty-​nine and unmarried,
belongs to the highest level of the New York social scene. Time is moving on and
her options are stark—​get married or face poverty and exclusion. Fortunately
she is stunningly beautiful, so she has an asset to sell. The story chronicles her
failure to catch a husband—​a rich young socialite, Percy Gryce; a clever lawyer,
Lawrence Selden; a master of finance, Simon Rosedale; another woman’s hus-
band, George Dorset. Ever more in need of money—​she loses through bridge
playing, her clothing expenses are high, Lily’s aunt cuts Lily almost entirely out
of her will—​Lily sinks lower and lower in the social circle, until she is forced to
work in a hat factory. In the end, she overdoses on chloral [hydrate], probably
accidentally, but by then she does not much care.
Why is Lily so unsuccessful? In each case, there is a good answer. Gryce is
totally boring. Selden doesn’t make much money. Rosedale is a Jew. Dorset?
Well, he is someone else’s husband. But before the book is over, you start to get
a sense that there is a pattern here, particularly when you learn that years earlier
she had had these issues with an Italian count. Prima facie it is because Lily is a
woman of intelligence and morality. She couldn’t marry Gryce. She would go
mad within minutes. She couldn’t go after Dorset. He is already married. When
she is almost down and out, Rosedale is still prepared to take her on, as long as
she gets on side with Dorset’s wife, who (for reasons to do with her own behav-
ior) has taken after Lily. All she needs to do is blackmail this woman, which Lily
is able to do since she has come into possession of some incriminating letters.
But Lily cannot. And so the story goes.
And yet, one senses that our author shares somewhat of the sentiment toward
Lily that George Gissing has toward his losers. This is a tough hard world, and
if you are not prepared to play the game, you have only yourself to blame. It
is made very clear that Lily is no angel. She likes material possessions and she
doesn’t want to work for them. She knows she would look “hideous in dowdy
clothes” (Wharton [1905] 2002, 59). She has an “incurable dread of discom-
fort and poverty” and fears “that mounting tide of dinginess against which her
mother had so passionately warned her” (204). She is not unaware of her nature

12
  A full analysis of the work of Edith Wharton, and of others like Frank Norris, would bring in
the influence of the French naturalist writer, Émile Zola. This complements, not contradicts, what is
being said about these Anglophone writers (Lehan 2005).
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182 Darwinism as Religion

but she is powerless to change. Nor indeed is her creator about to condemn her
for that. The Darwinian world in which we all live had made her one way and not
another, adapted for one lifestyle and not another.

She had learned by experience that she had neither the aptitude nor the
moral constancy to remake her life on new lines; to become a worker
among workers, and let the world of luxury and pleasure sweep by her
unregarded. She could not hold herself much to blame for this ineffec-
tiveness, and she was perhaps less to blame than she believed. Inherited
tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly
specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow
range as the sea-​anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned
to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-​
leaf and paint the humming-​bird’s breast? And was it her fault that
the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled
among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be
hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples?
(244–​245)

Lily’s trouble is not so much that she is too moral, although it is true that she
does invoke morality (genuinely) to justify some of her actions, but that when
push comes to shove she simply will not buckle down and do the necessary—​
pretend to a boring rich young man, marry a Jew, be willing to give up posses-
sions to go with a man she really likes. Take the woman who is destroying Lily
socially. Comparing her to Lily, a good friend says: “Every one knows you’re a
thousand times handsomer and cleverer than Bertha; but then you’re not nasty.
And for always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty
woman” (34–​35). And then when the chance comes Lily’s way, she can do noth-
ing. The husband George Dorset comes to Lily and begs her to use information
against his wife.

Here was a man who turned to her in the extremity of his loneliness and
his humiliation: if she came to him at such a moment he would be hers
with all the force of his deluded faith. And the power to make him so lay
in her hand—​lay there in a completeness he could not even remotely
conjecture. Revenge and rehabilitation might be hers at a stroke—​there
was something dazzling in the completeness of the opportunity.
She stood silent, gazing away from him down the autumnal stretch
of the deserted lane. And suddenly fear possessed her—​fear of herself,
and of the terrible force of the temptation. All her past weaknesses were
like so many eager accomplices drawing her toward the path their feet
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Se x 183

had already smoothed. She turned quickly, and held out her hand to
Dorset.
“Goodbye—​I’m sorry; there’s nothing in the world that I  can
do.”  (198)

Thomas Henry Huxley would have said that this is the mark of a civilized person.
I doubt that is fully Wharton’s view. Morality is one ingredient in the stew, but
not the only one.13 She does not agree with Spencer that what has evolved is
by definition right, but she does think that success is what counts and that ulti-
mately that is all that there is to be said.14 Lily would have agreed fully with the
prescription of Marion in New Grub Street for the desirable mate:

He was so human, and a youth of all but monastic seclusion had pre-
pared her to love the man who aimed with frank energy at the joys of
life. A taint of pedantry would have repelled her. She did not ask for
high intellect or great attainments; but vivacity, courage, determina-
tion to succeed, were delightful to her senses. Her ideal would not have
been a literary man at all; certainly not a man likely to be prominent
in journalism; rather a man of action, one who had no restraints of
commerce or official routine. But in Jasper she saw the qualities that
attracted her apart from the accidents of his position. (Gissing [1891]
1976, 219–​220)

Like Marion, unfortunately, Lily doesn’t have the guts to go out and grab what
she wants. In Gissing’s novel it was Amy who seized her chances and won the
prize. Next time around Marion and Lily should take note of Amy’s philosophi-
cal guides: “though she could not undertake the volumes of Herbert Spencer,
she was intelligently acquainted with the tenor of their contents; and though she
had never opened one of Darwin’s books, her knowledge of his main theories
and illustrations was respectable” (397). Enough said.15

13
  No one learning of Edith Wharton’s heroic work in World War I for the suffering in France and
Belgium can have any doubts about her moral backbone; but her indefatigable efforts for those in
need make the very point I am arguing.
14
  Not quite all. What makes the House of Mirth deeply tragic is that at some level Lily’s lack of
vigor stems from a realization that the society in which she mixes is shallow and trivial. Its prizes are
not worth having (Singley 1995, 69). The title is taken from Ecclesiastes (7:4). The first part refers
to Lily; the second to the society she rejects. “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but
the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” In a sense, Lily is more free than Lydgate –​she is not just
a victim of fate –​but less so than Fred –​she is not able to take up the reins of life and move forward.
15
  Theodore Dreiser in Sister Carrie has a negative attitude to evolutionary success. His main
character succeeds. She drags herself up from nowhere to success and riches. But to what end? “In
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184 Darwinism as Religion

H.╇ Rider Haggard

Women get crushed by the Darwinian world. But Kipling flags us that things are
more complex. Men suffer too. She (1886), by H. Rider Haggard, hints at the be-
ginning that this is going to be a Darwinian story. It tells the tale of a Cambridge
don, Horace Holly, and his ward, Leo Vincey. Leo at the start of the adventure
is just twenty-╉five and handsome to the point of being beautiful, with curly fair
hair. Holly is tremendously intelligent, speaks many languages, is very strong
physically, and is incredibly ugly. Remember how he was so simian in appear-
ance he had converted a woman to Darwin’s theory!
They set off for Africa with their servant Job and end up with a group of na-
tives, the Amahaggers, who worship a mysterious woman, Ayesha, “She-╉who-╉
must-╉be-╉obeyed.” Leo starts a relationship with one of the women of the tribe,
Ustane, but this is a preliminary to meeting Ayesha. She is 2,000 years old and
has been waiting for the incarnation of her lover Kallikrates, whom she killed
in a rage. At the very sight of her face, both Holly and Leo fall desperately in
love with her, but Leo is the chosen one, apparently being Kallikrates reborn.
Ayesha intends that she and Leo will unite and rule the world—╉shades of Cecil
Rhodes—╉but first he must stand in the sacred fire. She shows him how, but un-
fortunately it has the reverse effect on her. She ages before their horrified eyes
and ends a mere withered mummy.16 Job dies of fright, but Leo is comforted by
her assurance that she will return.17
This is a Darwinian nightmare with sexual selection gone completely out
of control. Apart from poor Holly’s problems, when the adventurers meet the
Amahaggers it turns out that men are virtually powerless when it comes to
sexual encounters and liaisons. “When a woman took a fancy to a man she signi-
fied her preference by advancing and embracing him publicly, in the same way
that this handsome and exceedingly prompt young lady, who was called Ustane,
had embraced Leo. If he kissed her back it was a token that he accepted her, and
the arrangement continued until one of them wearied of it” (Haggard [1886]
1991, 79). But that is a mere preliminary to the shenanigans of Ayesha. She is
the Platonic form of femme fatale. A man has no choice but to fall in love with her

your rocking-╉chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-╉chair, by your
window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel” (Dreiser [1900] 1991, 369).
16
╛╛Actually, more interesting and revealing than a mummy. “There, too, lay the hideous little
monkey frame, covered with crinkled yellow parchment, that once had been the glorious She.”
Ayesha has reverted to an earlier form of being—╉recapitulation in reverse (Ruddick 2007).
17
╛╛Hunter (1983) argues convincingly that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is in an important sense
a riff on She. This is supported not only by the similarity of plot—╉Europeans going into darkest
Africa to find the horrifying being at its center—╉but also by the almost plagiaristic use by Conrad
of Haggard’s language, starting with the light that pierced through “the heart of the darkness” (240).
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Se x 185

once he sees her face. Holly insists on seeing her and is trapped for the rest of his
life. And yet, it is a sick attraction, for with the great beauty comes an aura of evil,
of something entirely wrong.

About the waist her white kirtle was fastened by a double-​headed snake
of solid gold, above which her gracious form swelled up in lines as pure
as they were lovely, till the kirtle ended on the snowy argent of her breast,
whereon her arms were folded. I gazed above them at her face, and—​I
do not exaggerate—​shrank back blinded and amazed. I have heard of
the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its
awful loveliness and purity, was evil—​at least, at the time, it struck me as
evil. How am I to describe it? I cannot—​simply I cannot! The man does
not live whose pen could convey a sense of what I saw.  (143)

One starts to sense why this novel, published in 1886, was a best-​seller from
the moment it appeared, having sold almost 100 million copies in the years
since. (The Da Vinci Code has sold rather less than half of that number.) In a
way found only in the bible—​think Delilah, think Jezebel, think Salome—​it
mixes fabulous beauty with evil intent or consequences. Sex is overwhelming,
but it comes at great cost—​and it is generally women who are the cause of all
the problems. And take note that Ayesha is not yet finished. Ustane makes the
mistake of refusing to relinquish Leo. Ayesha says nothing; she merely looks
at the poor woman. “Ustane put her hands to her head, uttered one piercing
scream, turned round twice, and then fell backwards with a thud—​prone upon
the floor. Both Leo and myself rushed to her—​she was stone dead—​blasted into
death by some mysterious electric agency or overwhelming will-​force whereof
the dread She had command” (202–​203). This really is a perverted form of male
combat. And Leo, who is understandably very upset at the loss of what Holly
assures the reader is the legitimate African equivalent of a wife, is next. “I saw
him struggle—​I saw him even turn to fly; but her eyes drew him more strongly
than iron bonds, and the magic of her beauty and concentrated will and passion
entered into him and overpowered him—​ay, even there, in the presence of the
body of the woman who had loved him well enough to die for him” (204–​205).
Apparently no blame should be attached, although Leo is not pleased with him-
self. To no avail. “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not
do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15).
She is a fairy story so Haggard is able to put things right in the end. We learn
that the Amahaggers’ women’s power is tolerated only up to a point. Finally
men get mad. “ ‘Then,’ he answered, with a faint smile, ‘we rise, and kill the old
ones as an example to the young ones, and to show them that we are the stron-
gest. My poor wife was killed in that way three years ago. It was very sad, but to
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186 Darwinism as Religion

tell thee the truth, my son, life has been happier since, for my age protects me
from the young ones’â•›” (107). And of course She-╉who-╉must-╉be-╉obeyed also gets
her comeuppance as she withers away in a kind of reverse evolution back to the
monkey stage and beyond. But the “damage,” if that is the right term, has been
done. Sexual selection has been turned on its head, to reveal the awful powers
of sexuality and what can happen when it gets out of hand. And even in death, it
holds its power. Holly and Leo are broken men. “For we felt—╉yes, both of us—╉
that having once looked Ayesha in the eyes, we could not forget her for ever and
ever while memory and identity remained. We both loved her now and for all
time, she was stamped and carven on our hearts, and no other woman or interest
could ever raze that splendid die” (262).18

D. H. Lawrence
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-╉-╉
It gives a lovely light.
╉(Millay 1922, 9)

The American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–╉1950) made no bones
about her not-╉very-╉private life. This little squib probably refers not only to her
bisexuality but also to her huge bedroom appetite. But none of it seems very
deep or long-╉lasting.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; …
(Millay 1956)

She saw the biological side to things, but thought it really went no further.

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
18
╛╛Confirming these deep-╉seated fears of the female, Adams (1989) notes perceptively that Nature
in both Tennyson’s In Memoriam—╉“red in tooth and claw”—╉and Darwin’s Origin—╉“constantly de-
stroying life”—╉is female. She is our mother, but she is not about to spoil the child. Remember that
Dixon’s Natural Selection was “Madame” not “Monsieur.” As with Haggard, Tennyson shows a rather
shaky confidence that men will prevail when in The Princess (echoed by Gilbert and Sullivan) he has
Ida eventually realize her proper role as a wife and mother.
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Se x 187

As we enter fully into the twentieth century, is there not another option,
one that breaks with the constraints of the Victorian era but does not at once
embrace the Playboy philosophy, seeing sexuality as little more than sophisti-
cated farmyard activity? Agree that sex can be repressive and soul-​destroying,
especially if it goes unchanneled. Is it not possible that sex is liberating—​not
just a good thing but the good thing and the source of all things creative? The
ultimate font of life? This is something one associates more with pagan customs
and religions with their various fertility rites and sacred sexual orgies and the
like. But, if only at a folk level, this kind of thinking is important in many places
where Christianity is the dominant religion. One would expect aspects of this
kind of thinking to find their way into Darwinism—​or perhaps someone influ-
enced by Darwinism would seize upon it precisely to show how Darwinism (or
evolutionary thinking generally) takes one away from the sterile and repressive
thinking of Christianity and opens up a new, freer, more authentic form of life
and expression.
D. H.  Lawrence (1885–​1930) is promising, fertile territory, although one
realizes at once that this will not be an easy task. After all, this is the man who
wrote: “Myself, I don’t believe in evolution, like a string hooked onto a first cause …
I prefer to believe in what the Aztecs call Suns: that is, worlds successively cre-
ated and destroyed” (Lawrence [1927] 1974, 12). However we do know that
as a young man he had read Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, and Spencer and at least
for a while fallen under their spell (Granofsky 2003, 13). One can find these
influences if one looks carefully, especially if one is willing to blend in some of
the popular ideas—​the philosophy of the Frenchman Henri Bergson, who (in
L’Évolution créatrice, 1907) supposed a vital force (élan vital) infusing and guid-
ing evolution—​when Lawrence was writing. The novels that spring to mind are
The Rainbow (1915) and its sequel Women in Love (1921).19 To take the novels
together, it is the story of the Brangwen family. We start with Tom, who marries
a Polish widow, Lydia, with a child, Anna. Tom and Anna forge a bond and, after
Anna marries Tom’s nephew Will, Tom eventually comes to give them support.
Neither Tom and Lydia nor Anna and Will seem terribly well suited, but they
do connect strongly sexually. Anna and Will have eight children, the oldest of

19
  One cannot overemphasize the influence that Bergson (translated as Creative Evolution,
1911)  had on intellectual society in the second decade of the twentieth century (Canales 2015).
Julian Huxley’s first book, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom (1912), was typical in its slavish de-
votion to the Frenchman’s philosophy (Ruse 1996). Lawrence read Bergson in 1913 and was a little
contemptuous: “the Bergson book was very dull. Bergson bores me. He feels a bit thin” (Lawrence
1979, 544). This would not have been the first (or last) time he encountered Bergson’s ideas. He wrote
for places where Bergsonian themes were discussed, especially the English Review, and he mixed with
fellow contributors and Bergsonian enthusiasts like the Huxley brothers, Julian and Aldous (Meyers
1990; Vogeler 2008). So one should take Lawrence’s snide remark with a pinch of salt. At times,
particularly in Women in Love, he is virtually quoting Creative Evolution.
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188 Darwinism as Religion

whom is Ursula, and it is her story that occupies the rest of the first novel, The
Rainbow. She hitches up with Anton Skrebensky, the son of a family friend, and
after a lesbian fling with one of her teachers, has a continued affair with Anton
until he goes off to India. She finds herself pregnant (but then miscarries) and
having tried unsuccessfully to contact Anton faces life on her own. Except now,
in the second novel, her younger sister Gudrun comes on the scene. Ursula gets
involved with a school inspector, Rupert Birkin (Lawrence himself lightly dis-
guised) and Gudrun with Gerald Crich, the son of a local mine owner. Gerald
takes over the family business and his relationship with Gudrun deteriorates.
Ursula and Rupert, however, realize that they can and do love each other, while
keeping their own independence. At the climax, the two couples go off for a
skiing holiday in the Swiss Alps. Gerald and Gudrun quarrel and he walks out
into the snow and freezes to death. Rupert and Ursula stay content together after
Ursula persuades Rupert that although he rather wanted a second (parallel) re-
lationship with Gerald, one marriage at a time is enough.
This is a story through time and it is a story of change, of Progress. Rupert
and Ursula are way advanced beyond Tom and Lydia. Lawrence flags us from the
beginning that we are dealing with something biological. Anna is in childbirth.
“The rent was not in his body, but it was of his body. On her the blows fell, but
the quiver ran through to him, to his last fibre. She must be torn asunder for life
to come forth, yet still they were one flesh, and still, from further back, the life
came out of him to her, and still he was the unbroken that has the broken rock in
its arms, their flesh was one rock from which the life gushed, out of her who was
smitten and rent, from him who quivered and yielded” (Lawrence [1915] 1949,
74). But what is the meaning of these people’s existence? What is it that drives
them forward, making for advance and purpose? It has to be something mystical,
ethereal almost. Lydia, reared a Catholic, finds it in her religion. “She shone and
gleamed to the Mystery, Whom she knew through all her senses, she glanced
with strange, mystic superstitions that never found expression in the English
language, never mounted to thought in English” (103). But this can never do for
the next generations. Ursula loses her religious beliefs. Religion “became a tale, a
myth, an illusion, which, however much one might assert it to be true as histori-
cal fact, one knew was not true—​at least, for this present-​day life of ours” (283).
All is not lost. Lawrence in some primeval, pagan way reaches out to sexual
activity as the alternative, authentic option. It is the ultimate source of creativity
and freedom. Will and Anna may not altogether care for each other, but bedtime
is another matter.

But now he had given way, and with infinite sensual violence gave him-
self to the realization of this supreme, immoral, Absolute Beauty, in the
body of woman. It seemed to him, that it came to being in the body of
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Se x 189

woman, under his touch. Under his touch, even under his sight, it was
there. But when he neither saw nor touched the perfect place, it was not
perfect, it was not there. And he must make it exist.
But still the thing terrified him. Awful and threatening it was, danger-
ous to a degree, even whilst he gave himself to it. It was pure darkness,
also. All the shameful things of the body revealed themselves to him
now with a sort of sinister, tropical beauty. All the shameful, natural and
unnatural acts of sensual voluptuousness which he and the woman par-
took of together, created together, they had their heavy beauty and their
delight. Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme delight. It was that
part of delight of which man is usually afraid. Why afraid? The secret,
shameful things are most terribly beautiful.
They accepted shame, and were one with it in their most unlicensed
pleasures. It was incorporated. It was a bud that blossomed into beauty
and heavy, fundamental gratification. (237–​238)

It doesn’t take much insight to see that it is anal sex that they are practicing here
and that that is the very point—​one is breaking through convention, going
beyond shame, to the ultimate point of creativity. Lawrence stresses immedi-
ately that Will has now a new dimension of freedom that expresses itself in cre-
ative activity. “And gradually, Brangwen began to find himself free to attend to
the outside life as well. His intimate life was so violently active, that it set another
man in him free. And this new man turned with interest to public life, to see what
part he could take in it” (238).
One senses a vital force, an élan vital, at work here—​the metaphor that
Lawrence uses repeatedly is that of “blood”—​“ he transferred to her the hot,
fecund darkness that possessed his own blood” (446); “she had the potent
dark stream of her own blood” (449); “the rainbow was arched in their blood
and would quiver to life in their spirit” (496). The key is a dimension of free-
dom that explicitly Bergson finds wanting in conventional Darwinism. For all
that he sees humans as the outcome, not only does the French philosopher
stress the increased freedom potential as evolution takes us upward—​the ner-
vous system becomes a “reservoir of indetermination”—​he makes absolutely
central the possibility of different routes of change (“divergent directions”)
and stresses that this too points to creative possibilities. Lawrence’s debt to
this thinking continues through to the end of the novels. Ursula is taking a
biology course and discussing the nature of life with her teacher. “May it not
be that life consists in a complexity of physical and chemical activities, of the
same order as the activities we already know in science? I don’t see, really, why
we should imagine there is a special order of life, and life alone—​” (440). Can
this be enough? Can one thus explain life’s purpose? “For what purpose were
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190 Darwinism as Religion

the incalculable physical and chemical activities nodalized in this shadowy,

moving speck under her microscope? What was the will which nodalized
them and created the one thing she saw? What was its intention? To be itself?
Was its purpose just mechanical and limited to itself?” (441) There has to be
more—​however much we know physically and chemically, “it does not follow
that chemistry and physics will ever give us the key to life”—​and this is the
continuing theme of Women in Love. Ursula and Rupert explore the dimen-
sions of their existence through their sexual relationship. They too are into
anal sex as a prerequisite to freedom.20

They might do as they liked—​this she realised as she went to sleep.

How could anything that gave one satisfaction be excluded? What was
degrading? Who cared? Degrading things were real, with a different re-
ality. And he was so unabashed and unrestrained. Wasn’t it rather hor-
rible, a man who could be so soulful and spiritual, now to be so—​she
balked at her own thoughts and memories: then she added—​so bes-
tial? So bestial, they two!—​so degraded! She winced. But after all, why
not? She exulted as well. Why not be bestial, and go the whole round
of experience? She exulted in it. She was bestial. How good it was to be
really shameful! There would be no shameful thing she had not experi-
enced. Yet she was unabashed, she was herself. Why not? She was free,
when she knew everything, and no dark shameful things were denied
her. (Lawrence [1921] 1960, 464)

But true freedom demands more. It comes in the sexual union but one that pre-
serves the individual. Rupert fears that we (white people) are finished as a race.
“Was there left now nothing but to break off from the happy creative being, was
the time up? Is our day of creative life finished?” Then he sees the way forward.
“There was the paradisal entry into pure, single being, the individual soul taking
precedence over love and desire for union, stronger than any pangs of emotion, a
lovely state of free proud singleness, which accepted the obligation of the perma-
nent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash

20
  Is this obsession with heterosexual anal sex—​it occurs also in Lady Chatterley’s Lover—​a meta-
phor for homosexual activity? It could be, especially if we read the activity not as Rupert penetrating
Ursula’s anus with his penis but as Ursula shoving her finger up his behind (prostate massage). “She
had thought there was no source deeper than the phallic source. And now, behold, from the smitten
rock of the man's body, from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery
than the phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches” (354). For all
that in this novel Lawrence’s attitude to homosexuality is accepting and positive, outside his fiction,
Lawrence was aggressively homophobic. In parallel, Lawrence’s ambivalence here is another good
reason for not taking as definitive his stated, negative attitude to Bergson.
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Se x 191

of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves
and yields” (287).
Gerald’s relationship with Gudrun fails because (in a Bergsonian fashion)
she sees that people like him are machines and thus never free. “The essence
of mechanical explanation, in fact, is to regard the future and the past as calcu-
lable functions of the present, and thus to claim that all is given” (Bergson 1911,
40). Such people are automata. “Let them become instruments, pure machines,
pure wills, that work like clock-​work, in perpetual repetition. Let them be this,
let them be taken up entirely in their work, let them be perfect parts of a great
machine, having a slumber of constant repetition. Let Gerald manage his firm”
(Lawrence [1921] 1960, 524). And this, in the end, revealing that Lawrence is
telling a tale about evolution, is where it is at. In the sexual act, properly under-
stood and performed, lies true freedom and creativity and the way forward to
the future.

God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the
mastodon. These monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the cre-
ative mystery, dispensed with them. In the same way the mystery could
dispense with man, should he too fail creatively to change and develop.
The eternal creative mystery could dispose of man, and replace him with a
finer created being. Just as the horse has taken the place of the mastodon.
It was very consoling to Birkin, to think this. If humanity ran into a CUL
DE SAC and expended itself, the timeless creative mystery would bring
forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely
race, to carry on the embodiment of creation. The game was never up.
The mystery of creation was fathomless, infallible, inexhaustible, forever.
Races came and went, species passed away, but ever new species arose,
more lovely, or equally lovely, always surpassing wonder. The fountain-​
head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits. (538)

My very strong suspicion is that Charles Darwin would not have enjoyed The
Rainbow or Women in Love. One doubts that, however pretty the girl and however
happy the ending, people doing such rude things to their bodies could ever fit his
formula for a good novel. But Lawrence is playing his part in our story. Sex—​the
ecstasy and the guilt—​are right up there as fundamental to the human experi-
ence. As Christianity makes sex a central part of its story, so Lawrence made sex a
central part of his evolutionary story. It has a very different role from that played
in Christianity—​and yet, and this reinforces the Darwinism-​as-​religion theme,
sex is still not the happy coupling of healthy young animals. It is as fraught with
meaning and cosmic responsibility as for a young Catholic pair who, after an elab-
orate ceremony, have just been given the go-​ahead by their priest.
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11

Sin and Redemption

The Problem of Evil

Take up now the oft-╉mentioned problem of evil, the biggest challenge to
Christianity. If God is both all good and all powerful, why is there so much suf-
fering in the world? Why is there natural or physical evil, such as the Lisbon
earthquake, and why is there moral evil, such as the carnage in the French
Revolution? There are standard responses. In the case of natural evil, the reply
is a version of an argument made popular by Leibniz and parodied by Voltaire.
God can only do the possible. God cannot make 2 + 2 = 5 and God cannot make
us safe from fire without making it very painful if we get burned. Natural evil is
the cost of a functioning universe. In the case of moral evil, it is argued that it
happens as a function of human free will. The Christian agrees with Lawrence
that it is better that we have such will than that we be automata, machines. But
why, even given free will, should we cause such pain and harm? Because we are
tainted with original sin. There are different traditions on this, but the standard
response is that God made us good but we fell into sin—╉Adam and Eve dis-
obeyed the Lord—╉and the rest of us are thereby tainted.
Unlike Christians, Darwinians do not see that natural evil is a problem.
Obviously they do not like it and may feel one has a moral obligation to reduce
it, but it is just something that happens. No one causes it, no one is to blame.1
Moral evil is something fairly readily explicable given Darwinism. We have

1
╛╛In handling both natural and moral evil, post-╉Darwinians (believers and nonbelievers) felt free
to invoke and as appropriate modify traditional, theistic responses. This is why the argument from
Job seemed increasingly attractive. “I’m God; I created the world; I make the rules; don’t whine.”
Hopkins responded by using the Resurrection as the second part of the story, the secular novelists
Hardy and Eliot had their takes on things. Expectedly, we find a poet like Robert Frost, wrestling with
pain and suffering, using Job (Faggen 1997, 222). In “Home Burial” (Frost 1969, 54, written 1914),
a husband’s frustration at not getting through to his grieving wife—╉“I shall laugh the worst laugh
I ever laughed./╉I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.”—╉reflects the biblical language and
thoughts—╉“Curse God and die” ( Job 2:9).

192
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Sin and R ed empti on 193

a natural inclination to selfishness. That is to be expected given that selection

works for the individual. In many cases this inclination is countered or masked
by the biological virtues of cooperation. But not always, and so we are going
to expect humans to be a mix of (what we would call) the good and the bad.
Given natural variations and circumstances, we would expect some people to be
better than others. Clearly things like technology are also going to be involved.
A homicidal maniac armed with an iron axe is going to be a lot more danger-
ous than such a maniac with but his fists. Huxley, as we have seen, was pretty
good on these sorts of issues, and he was opposed to Spencer who would have
been more likely to endorse any product of evolution as in some sense good
and would have thought it wrong to oppose the workings of evolution. For that
reason, a Spencerian might be more likely to argue that we should let nature’s
inadequates decline and die. Darwin himself was more nuanced, although note
that in respects he does seem to think morality was “incidental.” “The aid which
we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the in-
stinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts,
but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender
and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard
reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature” (Darwin 1871,
1, 168–​169).
All this said, there is no doubt that, as the century moved along, unsul-
lied thoughts of social Progress began to decline. Prosperity brought its own
problems—​appalling inner-​city slums where the unfortunate and unwanted
tended to gather. Also, there were increasing tensions and conflicts between na-
tions, especially among Europeans over the race to control Africa. Britain and
Germany exemplified the unease with both sides starting a massive naval buildup.
This unease was reflected in evolutionary thinking and many was the article or
treatise devoted to the ubiquity of biological degeneration. E. Ray Lankester, one
of the most prominent evolutionists toward the end of the century—​a student of
Huxley, professor at Oxford, and then director of the British Museum (Natural
History)—​harped incessantly on this theme. Following then-​general practice,
he tied it in with the biogenetic law of Haeckel, that ontogeny recapitulates phy-
logeny, seeing organisms reverting to earlier less advanced stages of their evolu-
tionary history. The ascidian or sea squirt starts life as a tadpole-​like creature but
ends as a sponge-​like invertebrate stuck to the sea bottom. Apparently it is all a
matter of ease of getting food and other necessities of life. “Any new set of condi-
tions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained,
seems to lead as a rule to Degeneration” (Lankester 1880, 33). Lankester’s own
life was fraught with psychosexual problems—​he could only relate sexually to
prostitutes and not to women of his own social class—​and he thought them
a function of his earlier easy life—​as a student at all-​male institutions, first at
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194 Darwinism as Religion

school and then at Oxford (Ruse 1996). It was natural therefore to read this into
the history and present state of humankind. “The traditional history of mankind
furnishes us with notable examples of degeneration. High states of civilisation
have decayed and given place to low and degenerate states” (58). He added omi-
nously, in case people thought he was writing in the abstract, “Possibly we are all
drifting, tending to the condition of intellectual Barnacles or Ascidians” (60). It
hardly needs adding that one mark of degenerate people is that they are going to
be a lot less moral than advanced people.

Robert Louis Stevenson

How do our writers respond to these kinds of issues? Start with the ever-�
fascinating novella by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–╉1894), The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). This is the well-╉known story of a respectable
medical doctor, Dr. Henry Jekyll, who invents a potion that turns him into a
monster, Mr. Edward Hyde. The latter starts off by trampling all over a young
girl, for which transgression he is forced to pay £100, most of it in the form of a
check drawn to the account of the respectable Dr. Jekyll. Then, with a cane, Hyde
beats to death a man—╉Sir Danvers Carew M.P.—╉an incident that again can be
connected to Dr. Jekyll. Finally, after another man has died of shock from some
unknown incident involving Jekyll, very worried friends burst in on Dr. Jekyll, to
find the body of Hyde in Jekyll’s clothing. A suicide note tells them that Jekyll,
given to dreadful private vices, had discovered a way to turn himself into Hyde
to avoid detection, but that unfortunately increasingly he ( Jekyll) was unable to
control the transformations and was becoming Hyde all of the time. So Jekyll
killed himself to avoid the inevitable capture and execution.2
What makes this story particularly pertinent to our study is that it can be read
two ways—╉underlining that Christianity and Darwinism are rivals, different re-
flections of the same reality. First, it can be seen as a Christian story about origi-
nal sin. Even the best of us have this dark side with which we are besmirched. We
cannot escape it. There is reason to think that Stevenson—╉a Scot, so he would
have known all about original sin from living in that dour Presbyterian land

2
╛╛“Such irregularities as I was guilty of ”? Could these involve homosexuality? Reference is made
to the “very pretty manner of politeness” of “beautiful” Sir Danvers when he “accosted” Mr. Hyde.
Why was he in a lonely street at night in the first place? Perhaps pertinently, the novella was com-
posed just at a time when homosexuality was much discussed and a law making such practices illegal
was passed in Parliament (Showalter 1990). Interestingly, adaptations, like the excellent 1931 movie
starring Frederick March, give Jekyll a girlfriend, not to mention a future father-╉in-╉law who is trying
to put off the marriage. Add a girl of easy virtue to whom Jekyll is attracted and whom Hyde finally
kills, and the Freudian stew is complete.
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Sin and R ed empti on 195

of the North—​was inspired by the history of Deacon Brodie, an eighteenth-​

century Edinburgh worthy, a respectable cabinet maker and city counselor by
day and a burglar by night, whose life ended on the gallows. Second, the story
can be read as an evolutionary parable, about the animal always within and the
risk of degeneration to an earlier lower form. There are many hints in the text
for both readings. On the one hand, Hyde is identified as Satanic, the ultimate
personification of good turned to evil.

Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity

without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had
borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timid-
ity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat
broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these
together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and
fear with which Mr. Utterson [a lawyer friend of Jekyll] regarded him.
“There must be something else,” said the perplexed gentleman. “There
is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man
seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be
the old story of Dr. Fell? or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus
transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think;
for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a
face, it is on that of your new friend.” (Stevenson [1886] 2003, 17)

Then the other side. Dr.  Jekyll’s terrified servant tells of what he has seen.
“Well, when that masked thing like a monkey jumped from among the chemi-
cals and whipped into the cabinet, it went down my spine like ice. Oh, I know
it’s not evidence, Mr. Utterson. I’m book-​learned enough for that; but a man has
his feelings, and I give you my Bible-​word it was Mr. Hyde!” (37) And in the
suicide note there is more reference to the simian nature of Hyde. “Hence the
ape-​like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies
on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my
father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have
ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin” (61). We have here a being
who has regressed to an earlier stage of development and with this comes evil.3

3
  Freud did not look upon homosexuality as evil. In his “letter to an American mother” he is re-
markably tolerant and understanding (Ruse 1988b). However, regression does play a significant role
in his thinking about the etiology of homosexuality, and we do know how very important were evo-
lutionary themes (especially those of recapitulation) in his theorizing (Sulloway 1979). Influenced
by the same biology, savvy readers would have known the score. Darwin was certainly empathetic to
notions of recapitulation, although how much is a matter of some controversy (Richards and Ruse
2016). His study of barnacles underlined the belief that same-​sex activity is primitive: “my species
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196 Darwinism as Religion

Bram Stoker
Some of these same themes are to be found in another famous work of fiction
from that era, Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–╉1912). The story of a
Transylvanian vampire who decides to set up shop in England, it (deservedly)
continues to spark countless spinoffs particularly in the world of the movies.4
Dracula invites a London lawyer, Jonathan Harker, to his castle to do the legal
paperwork on real estate purchases in England, intending after his own departure
to leave the poor man to the mercies of his three undead females. Fortunately,
Harker escapes and, although he falls sick, his girlfriend Mina is able to join him
and they at once get married. Meanwhile Dracula, who (in the form of a dog)
jumps ashore at Whitby in Yorkshire, has started to prey on Mina’s friend, Lucy.
Her neck punctured by his teeth, he is drinking her blood and she is getting
weaker daily. Unfortunately, even though the knowledgeable Dr. Van Helsing is
summoned from Holland, nothing can save her and she dies. Except she doesn’t,
she becomes one of the undead, the “bloofer lady” preying on small children in
the Hampstead region. Finally, she finds peace after a stake is driven through her
heart, her head cut off, and her mouth filled with garlic. Van Helsing and friends
chase Dracula back to Transylvania where finally he is killed—╉just as well, since
he had started to do to Mina what he had done to Lucy.
As with Jekyll and Hyde, the combination—╉the entwining—╉of Christian and
evolutionary symbolism is remarkable. Dracula is the apotheosis of the corrupt
and vile. He is the one beyond Christian salvation, who draws back before the
crucifix and whose undead female partners dread the communion wafer—╉poor,
polluted Mina gets a scar on her forehead from the touch of one. At the same time,
he is the ultimate symbol of evolutionary degeneration. He has—╉a fact that Mina
states explicitly—╉just the signs that criminologists like Cesare Lombroso were as-
suring people is the mark of atavism, of regression to a more primitive state.5

theory convinced me, that an hermaphrodite species must pass into a bisexual species [meaning a
species with separate sexes] by insensibly small stages, & here we have it, for the male organs in the
hermaphrodite are beginning to fail, & independent males ready formed” (Darwin 1985–╉, 4: 140.
Letter to Joseph Hooker, May 10, 1848). Note how Lankester picks on barnacles as the epitome of
the degenerate.
4
╛╛W hy England? It could be part of a general concern about Britain’s increasingly fragile hold on
world supremacy, threatened by the growth of Germany and America (Arata 1990). In She, Ayesha
has plans for going off to London and usurping Queen Victoria.
5
╛╛Is Dracula a Jew with all the implications that this might be taken to have about degeneracy?
There is a lot of stuff about blood and contamination, about gold and hoarding, and even a com-
ment about the Count’s “ook nose.” Add to this the fact that the book was published just at a time
when England was worrying about an influx of poor Eastern European Jews, that Stoker was the
theater manager for Sir Henry Irving, who played Shylock 250 times, and that so much of the story
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Sin and R ed empti on 197

His face was a strong—​a very strong—​aquiline, with high bridge of the
thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead,
and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere.
His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and
with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth,
so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather
cruel-​looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over
the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a
man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops ex-
tremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm
though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor. (Stoker
[1897] 1993, 24–​25)

In case we have any doubt, we are told explicitly that Dracula used to be a great
man, but now he has regressed to the state of being childlike. “Soldier, statesman,
and alchemist—​which latter was the highest development of the science-​knowl-
edge of his time. He had a mighty brain, a learning beyond compare, and a heart
that knew no fear and no remorse. He dared even to attend the Scholomance,
and there was no branch of knowledge of his time that he did not essay. Well,
in him the brain powers survived the physical death; though it would seem that
memory was not all complete. In some faculties of mind he has been, and is, only
a child …” (321–​322).6
Note also how his powers come to him through a perverted parody of
Christianity. As we are reminded many times in the novel, central to the
Christian faith—​to the Roman Catholic faith—​is the miracle of transubstantia-
tion, where the bread and the wine are turned into the body and blood of Christ.
It is the physical presence of the Savior that is so important. Closing up the tomb
of Lucy, for example, van Helsing uses putty filled with something that crumbles.
What is it? “ ‘The Host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an Indulgence.’ It
was an answer that appalled the most sceptical of us, and we felt individually
that in the presence of such earnest purpose as the Professor’s, a purpose which
could thus use the to him most sacred of things, it was impossible to distrust”
(224). For Dracula and his minions, it is equally the life force within the body
of a human, his or her blood, that gives power and, if not eternal life, renewing

is consciously putting Christianity up front in the fight against Dracula, and the idea is at least plau-
sible (Halberstam 1993). Although Stoker’s full first name was Abraham, he was not himself a Jew,
although he was probably homosexual, which strikes me as rather less relevant than others seem
to think.
6
  The Scholomance was a school of black magic, run by the Devil, reputedly located in
Transylvania.
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198 Darwinism as Religion

life. Opening up his coffin, there “lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had
been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-╉
grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-╉red underneath;
the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which
trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck” (59).7
Readers of Dracula note that gender roles in the novel are remarkably com-
plex. Lucy seems the apotheosis of the fragile Victorian maiden. She has no less
than three suitors for her hand, all of whom prove eager to have blood transfused
when she is in dire need.8 She finds lasting peace only when she is symbolically
penetrated with the stake through her heart. Mina, however, comes across as
significantly more enterprising and intelligent than her new husband, Jonathan
Harker. There are references to her status as one of the “New Women”—╉the kind
of young female who went biking in bloomers and who made her own decisions
about careers and marriage. “Some of the ‘New Women’ writers will someday
start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep
before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won’t condescend
in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will
make of it, too!” (99). It will come as no surprise to learn van Helsing’s opinion.
“She has man’s brain—╉a brain that a man should have were he much gifted—╉and
a woman’s heart.” He does cover his tracks by adding: “The good God fashioned
her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good combination” (250).

Frank Norris
Cross the Atlantic for a third instance of evolutionary degeneration, to be found
in Frank Norris’s McTeague, published in 1899 two years after Dracula. In re-
spects the American novel could not be farther from Robert Louis Stevenson’s
British fantasy. In grim, realistic terms it tells the story of an inadequate, un-
trained man practicing dentistry in San Francisco. He falls in love with one of his
patients, Trina Sieppe, and they marry. Trina has won $5,000 in a lottery, but she
refuses to use her capital, insisting that they live on his earnings plus a little that
she can earn. Unfortunately, a rival for Trina’s hand, Marcus Schouler, tells the
authorities that McTeague is unlicensed, he loses his job, and the pair descend
into poverty. They split, she becomes a total miser reveling in her wealth, he

7
╛╛The crucial role of blood reminds one of Lawrence, and in both cases blood does seem to be a
life force. But whereas for Lawrence it is creative, for Stoker it is degenerate.
8
╛╛In good Darwinian fashion she opts for the lord, leaving the asylum doctor and the Texan with
dashed hopes.
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Sin and R ed empti on 199

returns and kills her, and then with a little avian pet makes for the desert where,
having killed his rival, he faces certain death from lack of water.

As McTeague rose to his feet, he felt a pull at his right wrist; something
held it fast. Looking down, he saw that Marcus in that last struggle had
found strength to handcuff their wrists together. Marcus was dead now;
McTeague was locked to the body. All about him, vast interminable,
stretched the measureless leagues of Death Valley.
McTeague remained stupidly looking around him, now at the dis-
tant horizon, now at the ground, now at the half-​dead canary chittering
feebly in its little gilt prison. (Norris 1899, 442)

Yet it was the Scotsman’s reading of evolutionary degeneration that lay deep
in the heart of Norris’s tale (McElrath and Crisler 2010). McTeague is a brute,
and when he has Trina under the chloroform he cannot help himself. “Suddenly
the animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts that in him were so
close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring” (30). Let us say
that the brute within wins out, although to his credit McTeague does propose
when she comes around. Not that Trina turns out to be a great deal better. We
learn that Jews have the lust for gold in their blood. “It was impossible to look at
Zerkow [a local junk man] and not know instantly that greed—​inordinate, insa-
tiable greed—​was the dominant passion of the man. He was the Man with the
Rake, groping hourly in the muck-​heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold. It
was his dream, his passion; at every instant he seemed to feel the generous solid
weight of the crude fat metal in his palms” (43).9 Trina has the same affliction, to
a really quite perverted degree.

She had her money, that was the main thing. Her passion for it excluded
every other sentiment. There it was in the bottom of her trunk, in the
canvas sack, the chamois-​skin bag, and the little brass match-​safe. Not
a day passed that Trina did not have it out where she could see and
touch it. One evening she had even spread all the gold pieces between
the sheets, and had then gone to bed, stripping herself, and had slept

  As a student at Berkeley, the future novelist had fallen under the spell of the geologist Joseph
9

Le Conte. A native of Georgia, a one-​time slave owner, and violent racist, Le Conte (1891) argued
strongly against the degenerate evolutionary effects of mixing different peoples, and this is reflected
strongly in McTeague (Bender 2004, 35). Zerkow marries Maria, a Mexican. Their child is doomed,
dead within ten days. No wonder really, “combining in its puny little body the blood of the Hebrew,
the Pole, and the Spaniard” (Norris 1899, 240). Remember Darwin’s worries about the effects of
mixed breeding on vitality.
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200 Darwinism as Religion

all night upon the money, taking a strange and ecstatic pleasure in the
touch of the smooth flat pieces the length of her entire body. (360–╉361)

Shades of Zeus and Daneä. It is a wonder she did not end up pregnant.
Is anyone a free agent? That is an open question. What is clear is that good
and evil in McTeague are set in an evolutionary context as much as, say, good and
evil in Pilgrim’s Progress are set in a Christian context. “Do not store up for your-
selves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves
break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19).10

Thomas Hardy
Degeneration. Can one say more about this in a broader context, perhaps edging
on causal questions? Against the indifference of nature, it is a running theme
through Tess of the D’Urbervilles. We start right off at the beginning of Tess with
establishing the previously high status of the D’Urbervilles:

Your ancestor was one of the twelve knights who assisted the Lord of
Estremavilla in Normandy in his conquest of Glamorganshire. Branches
of your family held manors over all this part of England; their names
appear in the Pipe Rolls in the time of King Stephen. In the reign of
King John one of them was rich enough to give a manor to the Knights
Hospitallers; and in Edward the Second’s time your forefather Brian
was summoned to Westminster to attend the great Council there. You
declined a little in Oliver Cromwell’s time, but to no serious extent, and
in Charles the Second’s reign you were made Knights of the Royal Oak
for your loyalty. (Hardy [1892] 2010, 4)

Already though we are being primed for the worst. We learn of Tess’s
father:  “Yes, that’s the d’Urberville nose and chin—╉a little debased” (4). And
don’t get your hopes up:  “chasten yourself with the thought of ‘how are the
mighty fallen.’â•›” That is the constant message through the book. After Tess marries
Angel, they are about to leave the church in their carriage and for some unknown

10
╛╛Le Conte stressed that the human “is possessed of two natures—╉a lower, in common with ani-
mals, and a higher, peculiar to himself. The whole mission and life-╉work of man is the progressive and
finally the complete dominance, both in the individual and in the race, of the higher over the lower.
The whole meaning of sin is the humiliating bondage of the higher to the lower” (Le Conte 1891,
330). McTeague clearly therefore has some dimension of freedom and subsequent responsibility;
unfortunately, his reason fails to control his animal inheritance (Pizer 1961).
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Sin and R ed empti on 201

reason Tess shudders at its sight. Angel enlightens her. “A certain d’Urberville of
the sixteenth or seventeenth century committed a dreadful crime in his family
coach; and since that time members of the family see or hear the old coach
whenever—╉But I’ll tell you another day—╉it is rather gloomy” (256). Apparently
that crime stayed in Angel’s memory for when he has abandoned Tess he blames
himself for having been false to his own standards. “He was embittered by the
conviction that all this desolation had been brought about by the accident of her
being a d’Urberville. When he found that Tess came of that exhausted ancient
line, and was not of the new tribes from below, as he had fondly dreamed, why
had he not stoically abandoned her in fidelity to his principles?” (311) Angel
really should have checked first. The place he rented for their wedding night once
belonged to the D’Urbervilles. Two portraits are still in place. “The long pointed
features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery;
the bill-╉hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other suggesting arrogance to
the point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams” (260). If that
isn’t enough warning, the pictures don’t only upset Tess: “her fine features were
unquestionably traceable in these exaggerated forms.”11 As I said earlier, for all of
her purity, it is little wonder that she ends as Alec’s mistress before she kills him.12

H. G. Wells
Darwinian though Hardy may have been, he is not very informative about how
the degeneration gets into the blood. It all seems very Lamarckian. H. G. Wells

╛╛
11

I am the family face;

Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
(Hardy 1994, 395, written around 1890)

12
╛╛Was the killing of Alec simply a matter of biological determinism, or did Tess have choice?
Hardy himself suggested the former:  “The murder that Tess commits is the heredity quality, to
which I more than once allude, working out in this impoverished descendent of a once noble family”
(quoted in Greenslade 1994, 162). Perhaps—╉although because Angel rejected her as used goods,
there is the suggestion that she acted deliberately. “How can we live together while that man lives?—╉
he being your husband in nature, and not I. If he were dead it might be different” (290). In killing
Alec, Tess puts things right. “It came to me as a shining light that I should get you back that way”
(457). Although a compatibilist would allow both determinism and freedom at this point, I doubt
that the implied sense of fate sits well with freedom.
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202 Darwinism as Religion

in the Time Machine makes much more of a scientific effort to explain things. The
traveler has gone forward in time and meets the Eloi, friendly rather naïve folk. It
is noteworthy how the differences between the sexes seem less pronounced than
they are for us humans today.

Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt
that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would
expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the in-
stitution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere
militant necessities of an age of physical force; where population is bal-
anced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a
blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and off-​spring are
secure, there is less necessity—​indeed there is no necessity—​for an ef-
ficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their
children’s needs disappears. (Wells [1895] 2005, 29–​30)

As Darwin could have told you, with his views about women being child-​men,
this is not necessarily a good thing. “What, unless biological science is a mass
of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and free-
dom:  conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the
weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of
capable men, upon self-​restraint, patience, and decision” (32). We need struggle
for advance and without it degeneration sets in. The traveler adds that he fears
that this is already starting to become true of our own society. I  am not sure
that Wells’s traveler entirely approved of the New Woman with her aspirations
to take the roles of males.
However, the traveler realizes that this cannot be all of the true story. If the
Eloi are doing so little, if they have given up using machines, how is it that they
have great palaces to sleep in, and nice clothes and sandals with complex metal
ware? There has to be a second species, doing all of the hard work. And, of course,
there is, the subterranean Morlocks. These are in their way as degenerate as the
Eloi. But it wasn’t simply that the Eloi had gone one way and the Morlocks an-
other, the latter living underground and degenerating in their own way separate
from the Eloi. “So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing
pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-​nots, the Workers
getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour” (48). In an almost
Hegelian fashion, the master-​slave relationship means that as the master exploits
the slave, so the slave exploits the master. The Morlocks start using the Eloi for
their own ends. “The Upper-​world people might once have been the favoured
aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants: but that had long since
passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were
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Sin and R ed empti on 203

sliding down towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship”
(57). The Eloi were living courtesy of the Morlocks, who provided them with
food and lodging and clothing, but as wanted took them for food! The Eloi were
like cattle or sheep.

So, as I see it, the Upper-╉world man had drifted towards his feeble pret-
tiness, and the Under-╉world to mere mechanical industry. But that
perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection—╉
absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the
Under-╉world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother
Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back
again, and she began below. The Under-╉world being in contact with ma-
chinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside
habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of
every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat
failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden. (79)

Wells gives an account both of speciation and of degeneration. There is not too
much in the way of details, but it seems that this comes through selective pro-
cesses. As always in these accounts, we are getting more than just a story. The
author is giving us a moral message. If we let things slide as they are going today,
with the rich getting ever softer and idler, and the poor ever more exploited and
degraded, we are making for no future paradise. “For you know very well that
the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying,
“Peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a
pregnant woman, and they will not escape” (1 Thessalonians, 5:2–3)

Salvation
Is there no way forward? In the Christian story we may be tainted by sin, but we
can hope for salvation through the Blood of the Lamb. And there is the com-
mand laid on us to help others, although there is some debate as to whether
helping others is at all to gain credit or whether to mark our gratitude for having
ourselves been saved. There were those who wrote in evolutionary terms who
simply kept the old Christian solutions. Charles Kingsley was a prime example.13

13
╛╛So unchanged was Kingsley that in the 1870s, after the Descent of Man, he broke with what he
took to be Darwin’s materialism, even endorsing the critical but spiritually infused Genesis of Species
(1871) by St. George Mivart (Hale 2013). This despite the fact that Mivart was a Roman Catholic
and Kingsley was the arch-╉Protestant whose attack on the integrity of John Henry Newman had
spurred the latter to write his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864).
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204 Darwinism as Religion

Grimes the chimney sweep, the master of Tom, is a pretty dreadful person. He
broke his poor old mother’s heart. “I ran away from her and took up with the
sweeps, and never let her know where I was, nor sent her a penny to help her”
(Kingsley [1863] 2008, 182). He is sorry. “I’ve made my bed, and I must lie on
it. Foul I would be, and foul I am, as an Irishwoman said to me once; and little
I heeded it. It’s all my own fault: but it’s too late” (183). It is never too late, he
learns. He is forgiven, although he is sent off to sweep the crater of Mount Etna.
“And for aught I know, or do not know, he is sweeping the crater of Etna to this
very day” (184). Better, one supposes, than being stuck up a chimney with a fire
warming your backside, which was his earlier punishment for having inflicted
such a dreadful thing upon Tom.
In the end Evelyn Innes was saved by confession of her sins and a return
to faith. Although how permanent the change would be is left somewhat up
in the air. “She strove to distinguish her soul; it seemed flying before her like
a bird, making straight for some goal which she could not distinguish. She
could distinguish its wings in the blue air, and then she lost sight of them;
then she caught sight of them again, and they were then no more than a tremu-
lous sparkle in the air. Suddenly the vision vanished, and she found herself
face to face with herself—​her prosaic self which she had known always, and
would know until she ceased to know everything” (Moore 1898, 477). Was
that really going to make it all of the way? She was pretty certain that she would
never again lead a life of nonstop sin. But the casual sin? For all that there will
be remorse, it could happen. “He who repents, he who had once felt the ache
of sin, may fall into sin again.” Best not to worry perhaps: “his sinning is of no
long duration!”14
Hardy, we know, was not very keen on any of this. You might repent and
return (or go) to faith. Whether it will make you really better and truly happy is
another matter. You could be just stuck in some sterile miserable mode of exis-
tence that gives comfort to neither you nor anybody else. This is the fate of poor
Sue in Jude the Obscure. She has gone back to her husband and remarried him.
Now comes the penalty.

He gloomily considered her thin and fragile form a moment longer as

she crouched before him in her night-​clothes. “Well, I thought it might

14
  Moore wrote a sequel, Sister Teresa, and could not make up his mind quite what was going to
happen to his heroine—​join a monastery (first edition, 1901) or set up a home for handicapped
children (second edition, 1909). Either way, Sir Owen is out of luck. “The gates of love open, and we
pass into the garden and out of it by another gate, which never opens for us again” (Moore [1909]
1929, 279–280).
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Sin and R ed empti on 205

end like this,” he said presently. “I owe you nothing, after these signs;
but I’ll take you in at your word, and forgive you.”
He put his arm round her to lift her up. Sue started back.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, speaking for the first time sternly.
“You shrink from me again?—╉just as formerly!”
“No, Richard—╉I—╉I—╉was not thinking—╉“
“You wish to come in here?”
“Yes.”
“You still bear in mind what it means?”
“Yes. It is my duty!”
Placing the candlestick on the chest of drawers he led her through
the doorway, and lifting her bodily, kissed her. A quick look of aversion
passed over her face, but clenching her teeth she uttered no cry. (Hardy
[1895] 1960, 480)

As the landlady says: “Ah! Poor soul! Weddings be funerals 'a b’lieve nowadays.
Fifty-╉five years ago, come Fall, since my man and I married! Times have changed
since then!” (408)

George Eliot
Is there then no hope of redemption for the person caught in an evolutionary
novel? In The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler suggests that the shock of prison
changes Ernest Pontifex, although whether he was truly a sinner when he went
to prison (rather than rather naïve and stupid) is a moot point. George Eliot as
always is more balanced and thought-╉provoking than most. Given the challenge
that she has set herself, it would be unthinkable were she not to see some way
forward. She does not think everyone is a saint or could be converted to even
a moderately good form of life. Lapidoth, the father of Mirah and Mordecai in
Daniel Deronda, is a truly dreadful man. He enters the novel wanting to make
his daughter the mistress of a middle-╉aged count, in order it seems to get the
count to pay off his gambling debts. When he appears again later in the novel, it
is but to sponge off his children. And it gets no better. He is thinking of cadging
from Daniel but then sees that foolishly Daniel has taken off his ring and has
no hesitation in stealing it. As he reasons, “any property of Deronda’s (available
without his formal consent) was all one with his children’s property, since their
father would never be prosecuted for taking it.” No great matter. Daniel loses
his ring but gets the daughter. “Mirah, let me think that he is my father as well
as yours—╉that we can have no sorrow, no disgrace, no joy apart. I will rather
206

206 Darwinism as Religion

take your grief to be mine than I would take the brightest joy of another woman”
(Eliot [1876] 1967, 863).
I am not sure—​I doubt that George Eliot is sure—​whether Gwendolen
reforms, although undoubtedly her own suffering and the influence and ex-
ample of Daniel do lead to a much greater self-​awareness. But Fred Vincy in
Middlemarch certainly does change his ways for the better. He is never an evil
person like Lapidoth—​I think Eliot would not believe herself if she reformed
that sort of person—​but Fred is careless and selfish and causes others—​
especially including those he has greatest reason to thank—​great distress. He
has had Mary Garth’s father, Caleb, cosign a loan for him and instead of repay-
ing when he has some money he goes off and buys a horse that turns out to
be absolutely worthless. There is at least a suggestion that Fred is rather casual
about the money he owes because his family is of a higher social class than the
Garths. Then he changes. He doesn’t get a legacy that he expected. Mary whom
he loves makes it very clear that she thinks his behavior leaves much to be de-
sired. He realizes that a better man than he, the local vicar, also loves Mary but
is magnanimous in standing aside. Caleb offers Fred a job—​“The lad is good at
bottom, and clever enough to do, if he’s put in the right way; and he loves and
honors my daughter beyond anything, and she has given him a sort of promise
according to what he turns out. I say, that young man’s soul is in my hand; and
I’ll do the best I can for him, so help me God!” (Eliot [1874] 2011, 647)—​and
Fred knuckles down to work. He doesn’t always find it easy and temptations lie
along the way.

As to money just now, Fred had in his mind the heroic project of
saving almost all of the eighty pounds that Mr. Garth offered him, and
returning it, which he could easily do by giving up all futile money-​
spending, since he had a superfluous stock of clothes, and no expense
in his board. In that way he could, in one year, go a good way towards
repaying the ninety pounds of which he had deprived Mrs. Garth, un-
happily at a time when she needed that sum more than she did now.
Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that on this evening, which
was the fifth of his recent visits to the billiard-​room, Fred had, not
in his pocket, but in his mind, the ten pounds which he meant to re-
serve for himself from his half-​year’s salary (having before him the
pleasure of carrying thirty to Mrs. Garth when Mary was likely to be
come home again)—​he had those ten pounds in his mind as a fund
from which he might risk something, if there were a chance of a good
bet. Why? Well, when sovereigns were flying about, why shouldn’t he
catch a few?  (771)
  207

Sin and R ed empti on 207

But he does succeed. “Fred remained unswervingly steady” (953). He ends up

writing books on agriculture, happy with a good wife and three little boys. Eliot
shows how on her secular approach to morality, as with Christianity, there are
failures but there can be successes too. People after Darwin continued to recog-
nize sin but knew that it must and could be dealt with.
208

12

The Future

Promises, Promises
This is surely the most optimistic—╉or naïve—╉chapter of them all. Christianity
makes big promises. Heaven, eternal life, bliss with the Creator. There is some
considerable debate about the exact form this afterlife is going to resemble. I like
to think of it as a new Mozart opera every night, fish and chips in the intermis-
sion, and no student papers to mark when I get home. I suspect most people
if pushed have something like this in mind—╉existence down here only better.
Rupert Brooke pokes gentle fun at this.

Fish (fly-╉replete, in depth of June,

Dawdling away their wat’ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?

The fish rather think there is.

We darkly know, by Faith we cry,

The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud! —╉Death eddies near —╉╉
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time.
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin,

208
╇ 209

The Fut ure 209

The littlest fish may enter in.

Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook, …
Paradise!
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.

Gentle fun, but one that does actually conceal a hook. Does heaven make sense,
is it plausible, or is it nothing but a projected wish fulfillment? If God exists, one
presumes that at least heaven is in some sense an option. But what if God does not
exist? Is there hope of some kind of heaven here on Earth? And if so, what would
it be like? There is a range of answers.1 Let us begin at the bottom, as it were, with
those who are doubtful about any kind of heaven, up there or down here.

Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy begs us to take him first. In the end, where does he stand on
the God question and the implications for immortality? For the early Hardy
(1860s): Nothing. No meaning. Nothing. Thus “Nature’s Questioning.”

“Has some Vast Imbecility,

Mighty to build and blend,
But impotent to tend,
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?

“Or come we of an Automaton

Unconscious of our pains?…
Or are we live remains
Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone?

“Or is it that some high Plan betides,

As yet not understood,
Of Evil stormed by Good,
We the Forlorn Hope over which Achievement strides?”

Thus things around. No answerer I…â•›.

Meanwhile the winds, and rains,

╛╛W hile there is hardly going to be exact overlap, I much doubt that there is any less of a range
1

among Christian answers.

210

210 Darwinism as Religion

And Earth’s old glooms and pains

Are still the same, and gladdest Life Death neighbors nigh.
(Hardy 1994, 58)

Is life the end result of some crazy divinity, a machine, a dying God, or just noth-
ing? Who knows? Who cares? The laws of nature just keep grinding on and
death awaits us all.
Things seem not to get much better. In “God’s Funeral,” written around 1910,
Hardy sees a procession of people following the body of the Almighty.

I saw a slowly-​stepping train —​

Lined on the brows, scoop-​eyed and bent and hoar —​
Following in files across a twilit plain
A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.

He reflects how we invented God and worked on Him through the ages.2

O man-​projected Figure, of late

Imaged as we, thy knell who shall survive?
Whence came it we were tempted to create
One whom we can no longer keep alive?
Framing him jealous, fierce, at first,
We gave him justice as the ages rolled,
Will to bless those by circumstance accurst,
And longsuffering, and mercies manifold.
And, tricked by our own early dream
And need of solace, we grew self-​deceived,
Our making soon our maker did we deem,
And what we had imagined we believed,

But now the God idea has run out of steam and usefulness. It had to go.

Till, in Time’s stayless stealthy swing,

Uncompromising rude reality
Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning,
Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.
(Hardy 1994, 297–​299)

2
  Almost certainly this reflects Feuerbach’s belief (in The Essence of Christianity translated into
English by George Eliot) that God is a human invention (Schweik 1999).
  211

The Fut ure 211

Hardy does not speak for everyone. In fact, one is not sure he speaks for
himself all of the time. Much of the time he is pagan-​like—​w hether there be
an Immanent Will or not—​seeing things just having existence and going on
indefinitely. Neither good nor bad, just there. This is certainly the theme of
a novel like The Return of the Native. Egdon Heath always was, is now, and
always will be. We are just puppets who dance on its surface for a while.
Sometimes, he is quite negative. This comes across, understandably, in late
poems after the Great War. Yet, at the end of “God’s Funeral” he is less ab-
solutely negative than one might expect. He is still ruminating on the death
of God.

Still, how to bear such loss I deemed

The insistent question for each animate mind,
And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed
A pale yet positive gleam low down behind,
Whereof, to lift the general night,
A certain few who stood aloof had said,
‘See you upon the horizon that small light -​-​
Swelling somewhat?’ Each mourner shook his head.
And they composed a crowd of whom
Some were right good, and many nigh the best….
Thus dazed and puzzled 'twixt the gleam and gloom
Mechanically I followed with the rest.

The last stanza is slightly ambiguous about whom the crowd might be. I take it
that it is the “certain few” of the previous stanza and not everyone. So although
the speaker doesn’t at once pick up positively, at least he or she is “dazed and
puzzled.” In an entirely secular way this would mesh with the thoughts we have
seen by him of the possibility of humans going it alone and improving things.
It also ties in with the optimism he expresses (around 1908) at the end of the
Dynasts (Bailey 1956). We start (back around 1903) with the Immanent Will, an
unconscious force driving things along.

SHADE OF THE EARTH
What of the Immanent Will and Its designs?

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
It works unconsciously, as heretofore,
Eternal artistries in Circumstance,
Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,
212

212 Darwinism as Religion

Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,

And not their consequence.

CHORUS OF THE PITIES [aerial music]

Still thus? Still thus?
Ever unconscious!
An automatic sense
Unweeting why or whence?
Be, then, the inevitable, as of old,
Although that SO it be we dare not hold!

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
Hold what ye list, fond believing Sprites,
You cannot swerve the pulsion of the Byss,
Which thinking on, yet weighing not Its thought,
Unchecks Its clock-​like laws.
(Hardy [1903-​1906-​1908] 2013, 11)

Echoing Tess of the D’Urbervilles, it is possible for the Spirit Sinister (one of the
emanations of the Immanent Will) to play havoc with human life. In direct de-
scent from Job, Hardy used the Spirit Sinister to bring on the Napoleonic Wars
by getting George III to reject Napoleon’s peaceful overtures (Bailey 1946).
Yet at the end, through the Will achieving consciousness thanks to human
effort, things ahead look brighter. Perhaps we are on the way to evolutionary
meliorism.

CHORUS
But—​a stirring thrills the air
Like to sounds of joyance there
That the rages
Of the ages
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts
that were,
Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair!
(423)

Pulling back however, in the second decade of the new century, Hardy writes
about the sinking of the Titanic, explicitly linking the building of the ship with
  213

The Fut ure 213

the formation of the iceberg, things that through blind destiny were fated to
collide.

VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her —​so gaily great —​
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

X
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
(Hardy 1994, 279)

Not much evolutionary meliorism there or much help from the Immanent Will.
And this was before the Great War, when the poison gas ruined everything.3

3
  Hardy told his wife that he would not have ended The Dynasts as he did had he known the Great
War was coming (Dean 1977, 34).
214

214 Darwinism as Religion

H. G. Wells
After Darwin, Hardy saw no meaning in life or the world. At times he tried
to break from this through a faith in humankind possibly informing and di-
recting an Immanent Will or possibly humans acting alone—╉and perhaps he
did—╉but then (whatever he said) despair and pessimism crushed much human
hope.4 Others were negative for a slightly different reason. Like Spencer—╉like
Darwin himself—╉they were quite prepared in principle to see an upward rise in
both society and evolution. It was just that they thought that this was no longer
true. With E. Ray Lankester they thought that evolutionary progress had run
its course and now they were in a time of decay and loss. For some perhaps this
was a cyclical thing. Now you get rise. Then decay and degeneration. Then rise
again. Others were not so sure. It was not only the social factors that influenced
them. The science did also. In particular, the second law of thermodynamics
stated definitively that although, for a while, you may stop things running down
in certain parts of the universe, in the end all is futile. The future is heat decay
with everything grinding to a halt.5 H. G. Wells was sensitive to this belief. (He
makes explicit mention, in the 1931 edition of the Time Machine, of the influ-
ence of the second law on his thinking in the 1890s.) The final stops of the
time traveler (i.e., before he takes off again and vanishes for evermore) are ever-╉
closer to the end of time. He has pushed way into the future and what he finds
does not please.

The sky was no longer blue. North-╉eastward it was inky black, and
out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars.
Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-╉eastward it
grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the
huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of

4
╛╛To be fair, for all that Hardy denied that he was trying overly hard to be fully consistent, he was
aware of the tensions in his thinking, and toward the end (in 1922) we find him saying that seeing the
downside to things is a necessary stage to seeing the upside: “If way to the Better there be, it exacts
a full look at the Worst: that is to say, by the exploration of reality, and its frank recognition stage by
stage along the survey, with an eye to the best consummation possible: briefly, evolutionary melior-
ism” (quoted by Bailey 1963, 585).
5
╛╛Darwin worried about this one. To Hooker, he wrote: “I quite agree how humiliating the slow
progress of man is; but everyone has his own pet horror, & this slow progress, or even personal an-
nihilation sinks in my mind into insignificance compared with the idea, or rather I presume certainty,
of the sun some day cooling & we all freezing. To think of the progress of millions of years, with every
continent swarming with good & enlightened men all ending in this; & with probably no fresh start
until this our own planetary system has been again converted into red-╉hot gas.—╉Sic transit gloria
mundi, with a vengeance” (Darwin 1985–╉, 13, 56, written February 9, 1865).
╇ 215

The Fut ure 215

a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first
was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point
on their south-╉eastern face. It was the same rich green that one sees on
forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which like these grow in a
perpetual twilight. (Wells [1895] 2005, 82)

There is worse to come. He sees a monstrous creature and then many more. “Can
you imagine a crab as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and
uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters’ whips, waving
and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic
front? Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a
greenish incrustation blotched it here and there. I could see the many palps of its
complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved” (83).
He moves on through time. “At last, more than thirty million years hence,
the huge red-╉hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of
the darkling heavens” (84). The crabs are gone. “I saw nothing moving, in earth
or sky or sea. The green slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not ex-
tinct.” All was quiet in a dreadful manner. “â•›‘The darkness grew apace; a cold
wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white
flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple
and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent” (85). There was
no light. “The sky was absolutely black.” But then. Was it just a rock? Was it an
illusion? “As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the
shoal—╉there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing—╉against the red
water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be,
bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering
blood-╉red water, and it was hopping fitfully about.” The traveler had had enough.
“So I came back” (86).

Transcendentalism
Turn now to those who did see some glimmers of hope. The American tran-
scendentalists might be fertile territory. Walt Whitman modifies a strand of
Lamarckism—╉probably taken from Chambers—╉to suggest that something
might persist after death.

How can the real body ever die and be buried?

Of your real body and any man’s or woman’s real body,
Item for item it will elude the hands of the corpse-╉cleaners and
pass to fitting spheres,
216

216 Darwinism as Religion

Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of birth to the

moment of death.
​(Whitman 2004, 58)

Emily Dickinson is not exactly positive, but then again she is not exactly nega-
tive either. Did she believe, or not? There is certainly an empathy for belief and
perhaps a yearning for the hereafter. Somewhat poignantly she remarked in a
letter of 1872 to Elizabeth Holland, drawing the connection between joy and
sadness: “Why the Thief ingredient accompanies all Sweetness Darwin does not
tell us.” The sentiment is echoed in this poem.

That it will never come again

Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we don’t believe
Does not exhilarate.
That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate —​
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.
(Dickinson 1960, 706, date unknown)

Somewhat amusingly, the first two lines were posted on the London Underground
in 2009 as part of the British Humanist’s Association “Atheist Bus” campaign.
Perhaps so. “Ablative” means distant or separation. I sense more regret and sense
of loss in some way, reflecting into our emotions here and almost a need to be
happy and enjoy life. Other poems strike me as more positive about the hereaf-
ter, even if hardly as confident as Billy Graham at one of his revivalist meetings.
Take that most famous poem, “Because I could not stop for Death.”

Because I could not stop for Death —​

He kindly stopped for me —​
The Carriage held but just Ourselves —​
And Immortality.
We slowly drove —​He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility —​
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess —​in the Ring —​
  217

The Fut ure 217

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain —​

We passed the Setting Sun —​
Or rather —​He passed Us —​
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –​
For only Gossamer, my Gown –​
My Tippet —​only Tulle —​
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground —​
The Roof was scarcely visible —​
The Cornice —​in the Ground —​
Since then —​’tis Centuries —​and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity —​
(Dickinson 1960, 350, written about 1863)

There is initial promise here of immortality and moreover of something es-

sentially good. Death “kindly” stopped for me and took me, apparently without
regret or longing, past children and the cornfields and the beauty of the sun going
down. Then at the end of the poem, we learn that the speaker died long ago. Not
much seems to have happened since then, but at the same time one senses that
that “not much” was not a stress or a bad thing. It is more a gentle peace in a quiet
grave—​“a swelling of the ground.” This fits with the kind of transcendentalism
so crucial in understanding this poet—​a metaphysics which might or might not
involve a personal God but which also somewhat paradoxically makes a personal
God rather less important. Although note that there is a shade of worry (Vendler
2010, 225–​230). This is not necessarily the revivalist’s happy hereafter. There is a
chill in the air and we might not be adequately clothed. And the final promise is
of eternity not immortality. This meshes with the understated natural theology
that pervades Dickinson’s poetry—​there is a point to everything, but don’t push
to get the immediate understanding thrust on you by Paley’s eye, and be pre-
pared for a kind of indifference that is alien to Christianity. A worm is eaten by a
bird. At first, the worm’s existence had seemed senseless. Now it all fits together.

Our little Kinsmen —​after Rain

In plenty may be seen,
A Pink and Pulpy multitude
The tepid Ground upon.
A needless life, it seemed to me
218

218 Darwinism as Religion

Until a little Bird
As to a Hospitality
Advanced and breakfasted —╉
As I of He, so God of Me
I pondered, may have judged,
And left the little Angle Worm
With Modesties enlarged.
(Dickinson 1960, 420, written about 1864)

Note that we are kinsmen to the worm, not to the bird (who seems more God-╉
like). It all makes sense, but the sense is not necessarily focused on our well-╉
being. Cold comfort for us—╉and Upton Sinclair’s pigs!6

Optimism
And so we come to those more positive. For all of his doubts and his worries in
the post-╉Origin era, ultimately Tennyson continued to believe. Moreover, he be-
lieved not just in a god or gods but in a personal God. One who cares for us and
who in some sense is guaranteeing that this life is not all. This comes through in
a short poem—╉“God and the Universe”—╉written late in his life, about worries
stemming from the vastness of the universe. The world we live in is huge, it is
scary, but “fear not.” There still exists the “Power which alone is great.”

Will my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights?
Must my day be dark by reason, O ye Heavens, of your boundless nights,
Rush of Suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites?
“Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state,
Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is great,
Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the silent Opener of the Gate.”
(Tennyson 1892, 110–╉111)

The old man never lost faith in evolution or, ultimately, in the conviction of “In
Memoriam” that we have evolved upward and yet God has plans for further

6
╛╛There are obvious parallels here with Hardy’s Immanent Will, hardly surprising since ultimately
they both stem from German Romanticism and the idea of the deity as a kind of unthinking world
force –╉as in Carlyle also –╉rather than the super-╉rational, creator being of Christianity. As with the
turn to Job, we are seeing people looking for meaning and explanation in a world that is not the one
of their childhood.
  219

The Fut ure 219

upward movement. Even to the end, as in “The Making of Man” (1892), with
“the crowning Age of ages,” we get the whiff of Chambers!7
One did not have to be a believer to be positive, although obviously a non-
believer is going to restrict his positive outlook to this world and not to the
next. George Eliot, writing before the themes of degeneration became practi-
cally the norm, and obviously in respects in the glow of Spencer, was positive
about the prospects of social Progress. This was the sentiment expressed at the
end of Middlemarch, and in the case of Daniel Deronda (although probably not
Gwendolen) there is a bright future anticipated. Daniel tells Gwen of his plans.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, at last, very mildly. “Can I un-
derstand the ideas, or am I too ignorant?”
“I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition
of my race in various countries there,” said Deronda, gently—​anxious to
be as explanatory as he could on what was the impersonal part of their
separateness from each other. “The idea that I am possessed with is that of
restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again,
giving them a national center, such as the English have, though they too
are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a task which presents itself
to me as a duty; I am resolved to begin it, however feebly. I am resolved
to devote my life to it. At the least, I may awaken a movement in other
minds, such as has been awakened in my own.” (Eliot [1876] 1967, 875)

As for the Jews, so also for women. Remember May Kendall and her hopes for
the rise of women. Stop knitting and crocheting and start using your minds.

Alas, is it woolwork you take for your mission,

Or Art that your fingers so gaily attack?
Can patchwork atone for the mind’s inanition?
Can the soul, oh my sisters, be fed on a plaque?
Is this your vocation? My goal is another,
And empty and vain is the end you pursue.
In antimacassars the world you may smother;
But intellect marches o’er them and o’er you.
​(Kendall 1887, 38–​39)

7
  Should Tennyson really be included on the Darwinian side? Surely yes, if you think of him as
compared to Disraeli and Christina Rossetti. But he does show that the divisions between the rival
positions is not a clear-​cut black-​and-​white affair, as one expects in a Kuhn-​style revolution. Stress
again that, without considering Darwinism, Christianity itself shows huge variation with some as-
serting things that others think heretical and some denying things that others think crucial. You can
hardly fault Darwinism for having a similar range or that there is overlap.
220

220 Darwinism as Religion

One suspects strongly that Mina Harker, from Dracula, would have loved
this poem.
The same might not have been entirely true for D. H. Lawrence, although his
Bergsonian enthusiasms certainly inclined him to an optimistic view of the future.

The fountain-╉head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits.

It could bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species,
in its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new
units of being. To be man was as nothing compared to the possibili-
ties of the creative mystery. To have one’s pulse beating direct from the
mystery, this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction. Human or inhu-
man mattered nothing. The perfect pulse throbbed with indescribable
being, miraculous unborn species. (Lawrence [1921] 1960, 538–╉539)

One wonders whether these unborn species will show quite the same obsession
with male power and the phallus as does Lawrence. Is this the heaven on Earth
we should hope for? Reading Women in Love one gets the impression that while
Ursula’s various orifices serve the end of Progress, the same can hardly be said
of her clitoris. It seems curiously idle—╉at least unmentioned—╉in the energetic
activities, shameful or not, between her and Rupert.

George Meredith
End our survey of reactions to Darwinism with George Meredith. Overall, unlike
his friend Thomas Hardy, he was an optimist. He saw the problems posed by
Darwinism, but in the end thought that life moves up and that this is good. He was,
however, remarkably clear-╉headed about how we ought to behave toward the future.

The lover of life holds life in his hand,

Like a ring for the bride.
The lover of life is free of dread:
The lover of life holds life in his hand,
As the hills hold the day.
But lust after life waves life like a brand,
For an ensign of pride.
The lust after life is life half-╉dead:
Yea, lust after life hugs life like a brand,
Dreading air and the ray.
  221

The Fut ure 221

For the sake of life,

For that life is dear,
The lust after life
Clings to it fast.
For the sake of life,
For that life is fair,
The lover of life
Flings it broadcast.
The lover of life knows his labour divine,
And therein is at peace.
The lust after life craves a touch and a sign
That the life shall increase.
The lust after life in the chills of its lust
Claims a passport of death.
The lover of life sees the flame in our dust
And a gift in our breath.
(Meredith 1870, 182–​183)

What is the poet saying? He is dealing with the theme that we have seen in the
poetry of Emily Dickinson. He says that life is good. Enjoy it for what it is and
focus on the present not the future. Above all, don’t let your life here and now be
ruined by the fear of death and the thought that life will end. That is the way to
making up fables about the future and how we will endure—​thinking we have
a “passport of death.” Take up the gift that we have and don’t spoil it because it
is not all that you want. It is a good in itself and needs no encore to have great
value. Heaven is now.
That is not a bad note on which to end this survey.
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13

Darwinism as Background

Professional Evolution
In the early part of the twentieth century, biologists developed a theory of he-
redity based on the insights of the nineteenth-╉century Moravian monk Gregor
Mendel. Around 1930, a number of mathematically gifted biologists used this
theory to create a new theoretical discipline, “population genetics,” a picture
of the nature and change of genetic ratios in populations, as impacted upon by
mutation and above all natural (and sexual) selection (Provine 1971). With the
theory in place, empirical scientists moved in and by mid-╉century there was an
active field of neo-╉Darwinian studies, one that saw Darwinian selection as cen-
tral and effective because of the underlying genetic foundations—╉genetic foun-
dations that with the discovery of the double helix by James Watson and Francis
Crick in 1953 were soon to be put in molecular terms. Evolutionary biology as
science finally had a basis from which people could study the many areas noted
by Darwin—╉behavior (especially social behavior), paleontology, biogeography,
classification (taxonomy), anatomy, and embryology, to name the major items
(Ruse 2006). Some of the most exciting work focused on our species. At the
time of Darwin, although Neanderthals were known, there were no “missing
links.” Then at the end of the century, the first genuine fossil of a pre-╉human
form—╉Java Man (now known to be Homo erectus)—╉was uncovered. In 1924,
the first Australopithecine (the genus before Homo, our genus) was found in
South Africa, and by the 1950s the science was going flat out (Ruse 2012).1

1
╛╛In the second decade of the century, things were thrown off course by what was probably the
greatest scientific fraud of all time: Piltdown Man, discovered in Britain, a being with a human-╉sized
brain and an ape-╉like jaw. It was revealed as a fraud in the 1950s. In Anglo-╉Saxon Attitudes (1956),
the novelist Angus Wilson wrote a wonderful fantasy based on the Piltdown incident, conceiving
of the fraud in terms of a Lawrencian figurine (i.e., a pagan model with a massively erect penis) put in
the grave of the saintly bishop who converted the British heathen.

222
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Dar w inism a s B ack g round 223

With the rise of neo-​Darwinism—​more commonly in the United States

known as the “synthetic” theory of evolution—​came full-​blooded professional-
ism (Ruse 1996). Evolutionists moved from the museums into university depart-
ments, training was formalized with new crops of doctoral students—​influential
here were E. B. Ford in England and the Russian-​born Theodosius Dobzhansky
in the United States—​grants were applied for and obtained, and new journals
like Heredity and Evolution were founded and flourished. Darwin’s dream had
finally been recognized. From pseudoscience to popular science, and now from
popular science to professional science. So what does all this mean for our story?
You might think that it brings it to an end. One of the most distinctive marks of
professional science as opposed to pseudoscience and even to popular science
is that although it is ruled by “epistemic values”—​norms for doing good science
like predictive fertility and internal consistency—​it expels social and cultural
values. In a museum you might say or at least hint that Earth is better than Mars
because it can support life, but as a geologist or astronomer this is forbidden. So
when we look at all of the things that might lead one to speak of evolutionism/​
Darwinism as a religion or as working from a religious perspective, you might
think that these would all be expelled from professional science—​and since that
is what we have from around 1930, that is the end of our story.
And yet, things are never quite this simple. Professional evolutionary biology
may have arrived, but that did not spell the demise of popular evolutionary biol-
ogy. People were still going to be interested in issues like religion, about morality,
about class, about so many of the things that had obsessed earlier evolutionists.
It is just that one might now expect somewhat of a change of emphasis. Given
that evolution is now so integral a part of culture, perhaps people pretty much
accepted some form of Darwinism and moved on. Christianity is certainly not
gone, especially not in America, where the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, when a
young man was prosecuted for teaching evolution in the classrooms of Tennessee,
was still a very public and raw memory. But overall the science-​religion conflict
was not the major burning topic (Larson 1997).2 One would expect writers to
be more concerned with the big issues of the day—​social conditions like racism
(particularly for those living in the South of the United States), the Depression,
World War II, the subsequent Cold War—​that sort of thing. Evolution will be
there—​but more as background.3 Let us illustrate this point by turning to three

2
  Keep this point in mind. My story is not “evolution/​Darwinism in popular culture” or some
such thing, but “Darwinism as religion.” If by 1930 that battle had been fought, the interesting ques-
tion is why—​to contrast with something comparable like female suffrage—​this was not the end of
the story. Given this change of emphasis, against the background of my large survey, I now feel able
to be more focused and representative, with less need to be comprehensive.
3
  Paradoxically, just as Darwin’s theorizing was achieving professional status, the rise of interest
in Freud and Marx, rival bases for secular world pictures, pushed Darwinism in the public domain
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224 Darwinism as Religion

major novelists, two American and one British, two prewar and one postwar, all
of whom won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner (1897–1962) who won the Prize in 1949 lived in Mississippi,
and Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional setting of many of his novels, is set in
that state. His novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is not easy to read, using multiple
flashbacks, different narrators not all of whom are (or are intended to be) reli-
able, and with stream-╉of-╉consciousness sentences so gargantuan that the reader
nigh expires for want of a full stop. Rather spoiling the fun, my brief synopsis will
follow the author’s own helpful chronology that he gives at the end of the book.
The central figure, one hesitates to call him a hero, is Thomas Sutpen, born in
what is now West Virginia of poor white stock around 1807. While he was still
a child, the family moved South, where he not only encountered Negro slaves
for the first time but realized that his family was very low on the social scale.4 At
about the age of fourteen he ran away and ended up in Haiti, where some years
later he married his first wife, had a son, deserted them (when he discovered that
she was one-eighth Negro), and moved back to the United States and to the state
of Mississippi. There, with a gang of slaves, he built a large house on a hundred
square miles of land he had acquired somewhat shadily, had a daughter (Clytie)
with one of his female slaves, married a local white woman (Ellen), and had two
more children, Henry and Judith. At college, Henry became friends with one
Charles Bon who turned out to be Thomas’s son from Haiti (suspicion was that
his mother engineered the meeting) and Charles (with Henry’s knowledge of
the relationship) became the fiancé of his half-╉sister Judith.
The Civil War now intervened, with Thomas, Henry and Charles serving the
South. Rosa, Ellen’s sister, moved in after their father starved himself in the attic
lest he be coopted into the war. At the end, Thomas and Henry returned to the
family homestead, where Henry shot Charles when he learnt of his black blood
–╉“So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear” (Faulkner
[1936] 1986, 285). Henry vanished, Thomas returned, and tried to marry Rosa,
but was rejected when he said the condition is that she have a son. So instead

to one side a bit. Remember the Freud-╉like revisions in the (1931) movie version of the Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde story. Likewise in 1931—╉the year it was written—╉Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
owes as much to Freud as it does to Darwin. Mark Greif (2015), discussing American novels of the
mid-╉twentieth century, suggests that—╉thanks to the influx of European scholars fleeing Hitler—╉ex-
istentialism became a major influence. Freud and Marx make appearances but Darwin is virtually
invisible.
4
╛╛I use Faulkner’s language for African-╉Americans.
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Dar w inism a s B ack g round 225

Thomas impregnated the granddaughter of a poor white man working on the

property, but when she had a daughter he repudiated her, at which point grand-
father killed her and daughter, having first murdered Thomas. Meanwhile ap-
pearing on the scene was Charles Etienne St. Valery Bon, Charles’s son, whose
mother was an octoroon (one-eighth Negro) from New Orleans. Before he died
(as does Judith) of yellow fever, he married a Negro woman and had a son, Jim
Bond. At the end, Henry turned up and Clytie burnt down the house with both
of them in it, lest he get arrested for the murder of Charles. Jim Bond was the sole
survivor, and the forecast was that his type “are going to conquer the western
hemisphere” (302).
Like a Verdi opera, Absalom, Absalom! is a lot more rewarding that than one
might guess from the program notes. Focusing here on possible Darwinian ele-
ments, and avoiding fascinating side issues like the Freudian nature of the rela-
tionship between Henry and Charles, let alone Charles and Judith, one can be
sure that, thanks to the Scopes Trial of 1925, Faulkner like every other educated
Southerner would have been up on the evolution question. More specifically,
we know that he was sufficiently interested in (and presumably sympathetic to)
Darwin’s ideas that a year after the novel appeared he prompted his step-​son
Mac to begin study of anthropology and biology and gave him a copy of the
Origin of Species for Christmas. The internal evidence of the novel also bears out
the interest in evolution. Two things in particular stand out.
First, the whole scope of the story. It reminds one of nothing so much as that
ultra-​Darwinian novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. We learn (and I work chrono-
logically now) right from the beginning that heredity counts. Sutpen like Tess
comes from a really inadequate family, describable in animal terms–​“as cattle, as
cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without
hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious
prolixity, populate, double treble and compound” (190). Like Tess, Sutpen
seems to have a slightly better education than the rest and this is put down to
his biological heritage –​some of his blood had been “bred in mountains” and
“did permit him to listen when the teacher read aloud” (195). Crushed when
(on moving South) a Negro servant tells him not to use the front door but to
go around the back, he gets the grand “design” to make money and have social
power himself. Hence the move to the West Indies and then, when he has some
capital, to Mississippi with his band of slaves.
But, as with Tess, there is degenerate blood there and its effects cannot be
blocked. We learn (admittedly from a not-​entirely-​reliable reporter) that Thomas
“looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and
saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead
since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call
him by it strangers and whatever dragon's outcropping of Sutpen blood the son
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226 Darwinism as Religion

might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on
the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and
upon and among people who will never have heard the right one” (148). Thanks
to Thomas’s own actions, thanks to chance happenings outside his control (the
war particularly), the grand house that he has built ends a degenerate ruin, his
land is gone, and the only surviving successor is Jim Bond, an “idiot negro”
(301). As in Hardy’s post-​Darwinian world, there is no God, there is no false
hope, there is only chance from the luck of the genes and the fortunes of nature.
Tess’s hopes collapse and so do Sutpen’s designs. The novels are not identical.
Tess is a much nicer person than Sutpen. But the metaphysics is similar.
Then second, there is the whole race and (to a lesser extent) class thing.
Obviously Faulkner’s thinking is not straight out of the Descent of Man. There
was quite enough home-​grown material to fill the novel and fifty more. But it is
all very much in the pattern given credence by the evolutionists and especially
the hierarchy of races one finds in Darwin and subsequent writers. Let there
be no mistake about it. Negroes are seen as much ape-​like as is Stevenson’s Mr.
Hyde. The language is non-​stop. When Sutpen turns up with his twenty slaves in
tow, they are described as “his band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk
upright like men” (4). This is nothing to the description of Charles Etienne’s
wife. She is a “coal black and ape-​like Woman” (166). He flaunts the “ape-​like
body of his charcoal companion” (167). She is a “black gargoyle” (170) and she
resembles “something in a zoo” (169). The very violence of the language, how-
ever, cautions one to take care. No matter the shock for Darwin from the Tierra
del Fuegians, Faulkner’s is not the language or the sentiment of the Descent.
Apart from anything else, Darwin had seen Fuegians who had gone to England
and had taken on Western ways. He knew that much of the difference between
us and natives in their habitats was cultural. More than this. Darwin is the man
who abhors slavery—“this odious deadly subject” (Darwin 1985–​, 3, 242, letter
to Charles Lyell, August 25, 1845). The absolute moral stand oozes out of every
pore of his body. It is his King Charles’s head. From the Journal of Researches talk-
ing of the land of "Brava Gente"—“I bear them no good will—​a land also of slav-
ery, and therefore of moral debasement” (Darwin 1839, 592)—to the Descent of
Man—“The great sin of Slavery has been almost universal, and slaves have often
been treated in an infamous manner” (Darwin 1871, 1, 94). During the civil
war, Asa Gray the botanist promoter of Darwinism in America, an ardent aboli-
tionist, told his English friend: “You are the only Britisher I ever write to on this
subject, and, in fact, for whose opinions about our country I care at all” (Darwin
1985–​, 11, 302, letter from Gray to Darwin, April 11, 1863).
In Absalom, Absalom! slavery is taken as a fact and the emancipation that takes
place in the middle of the time-​line is something that makes absolutely no differ-
ence to the way that the white people treat the black people. This is not a novel
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Dar w inism a s B ack g round 227

that celebrates Negro freedom. It is certainly not Huckleberry Finn. I do not in

any sense imply that this indifference, or the characterizations above, convey the
sentiments of Faulkner. He is a novelist, putting words into the mouths of his
characters. And this flags us to the fact that however much of a Darwinian back-
ground there may be in this novel, and there is and it is genuine, this is not really
a Darwinian novel in the way true of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Hardy’s theme is
the cruelty of fate in a Darwinian universe. Faulkner’s theme is the complex re-
lationships between whites and blacks in the American South. There is nothing
in Darwin to say that someone who is one-sixteenth Negro is therefore Negro.
In fact, one suspects the very opposite. It is like saying that because we now
know that all white people have some Neanderthal DNA, all white people are
Neanderthals (as opposed to black people who have none). Darwin’s ultimate
story is that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin.
Faulkner is examining how and why people can take such stands as they do.
They all live in such symbiotic relationship with those very people they dis-
parage. Sutpen lives with and works with and eats with and wrestles with his
Negroes. He has no qualms about sex with his female slaves or bringing up the
offspring in his own house. And yet he turns from a son who is virtually white
because of those few drops of blood that was “tainted and corrupt” (263). And
then he couples with the granddaughter of the lowest menial on the estate be-
cause she is pure white and might give him the all-╉desired son, Henry having
now vanished. This son is no better. He has no objection to a half-╉brother marry-
ing their sister but then balks because the man is one-sixteenth Negro. A woman
(Rosa) is the daughter of a man who kills himself rather than fight for the South,
and yet she is horrified when a half-╉black woman (Clytie) addresses her by her
first name and dares to touch her and to stop her from dashing upstairs to the
room with the body of Charles—“that black arresting and untimorous hand on
my white woman’s flesh” (111). I am not saying that Faulkner solves any of these
issues, or even sets out to solve them. I am not sure as a novelist he had to. What
he is doing is pushing these sorts of facts up before us, telling us that if we are to
understand human nature—if we are to understand the American South—then
we had better start right here. How can people all of one species get themselves
into such an appalling cultural mess? This is an important theme handled quite
brilliantly, but it is not primarily a Darwinian theme and it is certainly not some-
thing taking on the role of religion in all of this. These are not Faulkner’s issues.

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck (1902–╉1968), who won the Nobel Prize in 1962, was from
California. The Grapes of Wrath, his novel set in the Depression about the
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228 Darwinism as Religion

migrants to California and their horrendous challenges and trials, has been con-
troversial since it was published in 1939. Some see it as a searing, profound in-
dictment in fiction of America and its culture. Others a sentimental tale, way
overexaggerated. It is perhaps something of both, but its narrative power endures
and no one can read it without being deeply disturbed and if not inspired then
with a huge sense of admiration for people who simply refuse to be crushed by
life’s adversities. The story is a simple one of a family, ruined by the dust storms
and leaving their native Oklahoma for the West and the hope of work and a new
life. The Joads are Granma and Granpa; Ma and Pa; various children, including
Tom, just out of jail where he has spent four years for killing a chap in a fight;
Noah, the oldest and a bit odd; Rose of Sharon (the name of a local flower),
pregnant, and her husband, Connie; sixteen-​year-​old Al, who is good at cars and
who has the hormones of a randy billy goat; other assorted small children; Uncle
John Joad, ever sad because he did not save his wife from peritonitis; and, tag-
ging along with them, the Reverend Jim Casy who used to be a preacher but is no
longer. It is the story of their journey along Route 66 to the Promised Land and
of the grave disappointments—​no work, no money, gross prejudice, appalling
weather, and more—​when they arrive in California. It is the story of violence, of
killings, and of sad failures to survive, ending with the stillborn child of Rose of
Sharon. It is also the story of human endurance and of the will to persist despite
all misfortunes. It is the story of those who grow stronger as the days go by—​Ma
Joad, the matriarch of the family, and Tom Joad, her favorite son—​and those
who fade away—​Granma and Granpa who die on the road, Noah Joad who just
walks away from the family, and Connie, the son-​in-​law who deserts his wife. It is
despite all a story of hope in some sense, although ominously the narrator warns
of social explosions that might occur if the valve of inequality and injustice is not
released.
We know that Steinbeck was deeply influenced by evolutionary ideas, both
at college—​he spent some undergraduate years at Stanford—​and then in the
1930s, when he became a close friend of Ed Ricketts, a professional biologist
(who had studied at the University of Chicago) and owner of a biological supply
house (Astro 1973). Through both sources, Steinbeck absorbed the truth and
importance of evolution, but (especially through Ricketts) an evolution of a dis-
tinctive kind (that was the trademark of Chicago), a form of holism that saw
the key features of the process as promoting unity and integration (Ruse 2013).
There was Bergson in the background with his creative notions of evolutionary
change, there was Clyde Warder Allee at Chicago arguing for animal aggrega-
tions and seeing phenomena like the ants’ nest as the paradigm for future prog-
ress, and above all there was the holistic thinking of the South African statesman
Jan Smuts. “Evolution is not merely a process of change, of regrouping of the
old into new forms; it is creative, its new forms are not merely fashioned out
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Dar w inism a s B ack g round 229

of the old materials; it creates both new materials and new forms from the syn-
thesis of the new with the old materials” (Smuts 1926, 89). Evolution tends to
create wholes, to bring parts together, but transforming into new higher enti-
ties that could not simply be deduced from the components. “We must have
time to think and to look and to consider. And the modern process—​that of
looking quickly at the whole field and then diving down to a particular—​was re-
versed by Darwin. Out of long long consideration of the parts he emerged with a
sense of the whole” (Steinbeck [1942] 1962, 60). See how Steinbeck weaves this
philosophy into a condemnation of the way in which the big banks, which had,
through their mortgages, driven people like the Joads off their land and now,
using mega-​tractors, were plowing it all up to grow (the soil-​depleting) cotton.

And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a
stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are
not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is
not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is
all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much
more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking
on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles
to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that
man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its
analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does
not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptu-
ous of the land and of himself. (Steinbeck [1939] 2006, 115–​116)

Infusing this kind of thinking with a good dose of Emersonian transcendental-

ism about universal world souls, and the mix was complete.5 Steinbeck had a
philosophy that structures the Grapes of Wrath from beginning to end. For all
the trials and tribulations, the picture is one of Progress, of things improving or
about to improve, no matter what the setbacks.

To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and
dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something
of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting,
to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike any

5
  Apparently Steinbeck thought the Emersonian flavor was more a matter of parallel thinking
than direct influence (Railsback 1995, 48). Perhaps so, but there was a huge amount of this kind of
thought among the Chicago biologists. “Ricketts’ world-​view … finds an understanding response
in Goethe, Wordsworth, and Whitman” (28). The point is that not only did Steinbeck’s book reflect
evolutionary thinking, it reflected evolutionary thinking 1930s-​style.
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230 Darwinism as Religion

other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his

work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his ac-
complishments. This you may say of man—​when theories change and
crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought,
national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches,
stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped
forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.
This you may say and know it and know it. (150)

I am not sure how Darwinian any of this is, but it is certainly evolutionary and
progressive. We know he read Bergson with ideas of P/​progress coming through
our facing suffering and stress (Railsback 1995). In addition, for Steinbeck, as
he makes clear repeatedly, some form of organicism, holism, is a key feature of
the picture. Again and again, the point is made about the importance of family.
“The eyes of the whole family shifted back to Ma. She was the power. She had
taken control. ‘The money we’d make wouldn’t do no good,’ she said. ‘All we got
is the family unbroke. Like a bunch a cows, when the lobos are ranging, stick all
together. I ain’t scared while we’re all here, all that’s alive, but I ain’t gonna see us
bust up’” (169–​170).6 On the road, come the evenings, we see the formation of a
group, even just a temporary one, as migrant families camp together and make a
mini-​society, with its own rules and ways of living together. “Every night a world
created, complete with furniture—​friends made and enemies established; a
world complete with braggarts and with cowards, with quiet men, with humble
men, with kindly men. Every night relationships that make a world, established;
and every morning the world torn down like a circus” (194).
And through it all is the transcendentalists’ world soul. When Tom kills a
man and has to leave the family he promises that he will be there whenever there
is injustice or unkindness or people suffering.

Tom laughed uneasily, “Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a
soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one—​an’ then—​”
“Then what, Tom?”
“Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be
ever’where—​wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry
people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll
be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re
mad an’—​I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they

6
  According to Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol, Steinbeck made Ma the key figure because he was
influenced by the claims of the social anthropologist Robert Briffault that the female is the dominant
figure in the family or clan (Astro 1973, 133).
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Dar w inism a s B ack g round 231

know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live
in the houses they build—​why, I’ll be there.” (419)

Does Steinbeck take up the question of religion and does he see it as anti-
thetical to the holistic evolutionary thinking that underlies his story? At one
level, this is surely the case. Christians are portrayed in a hostile way as oppos-
ing the creative forces driving humans forward. For a while the Joads end up in
a government-​run camp—​portrayed very favorably as an example of what can
be done when people of good will band together for the common weal. There
are hot showers, flush lavatories, Saturday evening get-​togethers and dances,
and overall a general sense of cooperation and goodwill. The naysayers are the
Christians. “The string band took a reel tune up and played loudly, for they
were not practicing any more. In front of their tents the Jesus-​lovers sat and
watched, their faces hard and contemptuous. They did not speak to one another,
they watched for sin, and their faces condemned the whole proceeding” (335).
Likewise, preachers are not given much praise—​it is implied that they are only
in it for money—​and a crazy old woman scares the wits out of the pregnant Joad
daughter, Rose of Sharon, telling her that she is going to have a stillborn child
because she danced and that sort of thing.
And yet, there is the central character of the Reverend Jim Casy, a former
preacher and nonstop seducer, and now a repentant sinner. He wrestles with his
guilt and with his faith. But when the time comes, he proves himself a Christ-​
like figure—​in case the reader does not quite get it, the two share initials. Tom
cannot afford to get in trouble in California, else he will be shipped back to
Oklahoma for breaking parole. It is Casy who steps up to the plate, getting ar-
rested in Tom’s place. Then later, it is Casy who leads the strike for higher wages
and gets murdered for his troubles. “We come to work there. They says it’s gonna
be fi’ cents. They was a hell of a lot of us. We got there an’ they says they’re payin’
two an’ a half cents. A fella can’t even eat on that, an’ if he got kids—​So we says we
won’t take it. So they druv us off. An’ all the cops in the worl’ come down on us”
(382–​383). It is the man who killed Casy who gets retribution from Tom: “Tom
leaped silently. He wrenched the club free. The first time he knew he had missed
and struck a shoulder, but the second time his crushing blow found the head,
and as the heavy man sank down, three more blows found his head” (386).
Evolution is in The Grapes of Wrath and so is Christianity in various ways. The
two interact—​in some forms Steinbeck finds it stultifying and opposed to true
creativity; in other forms, Steinbeck finds it a key element in the push forward.
Casy did important things and left a legacy, most important, he left Tom deter-
mined now to carry on and use and spread the Emersonian message. Casy may
not have redeemed all of mankind, but he provided a moral light, to go with Ma’s
fundamental stability and determinism to move forward as family, and Tom’s
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232 Darwinism as Religion

new role as ever-╉present force and conscience. At the end, Rose of Sharon, her
baby stillborn but with a new force herself, opens her full breast to give suck to
a starving man. Perhaps more Freudian than Darwinian, but part of the picture.
“â•›‘There!’ she said. ‘There.’ Her hand moved behind his head and supported it.
Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her
lips came together and smiled mysteriously” (455). If not Christian, then at least
in some sense deeply spiritual.7
Yet, to leave things here would be misleading. The background is evolution-
ary and religion plays a key role, but the story is not about the science-╉religion
relationship. It is about the Depression, its nature, how it affected people, how
they responded. It is about human need and human greed. It is about hope and
the crushed spirit. It’s an important novel because the Depression was important
and demanded a response from the nation’s novelists and other creative artists—╉
The Grapes of Wrath was made into a truly great movie, a work in its own right,
directed by John Ford whose excesses for once became virtues, and with pain-
fully moving performances by Henry Fonda as Tom Joad and Jane Darwell as
Ma. (The movie is more optimistic and focuses more exclusively on the family.)
None of this is criticism, far from it. Rather, it is to place the novel in its time and
to point to the factors that did (as one would expect) influence the author.

The Inheritors
William Golding (1911–╉1993), an Englishman who won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1983, will always be famous for his first novel, The Lord of the Flies
(1954), the story of original sin emerging in a group of schoolboys stranded on a
South Sea island. However, it was his second novel, The Inheritors (1955), about
human origins, that was his personal favorite. This has as its background the sci-
ence of paleoanthropology, the study of human evolution. Somewhat naturally,
by the 1950s, with the discrediting of Piltdown and the findings from Africa, this
field of science attracted the attention of novelists and has indeed given rise to a
whole genre labeled “prehistorical fiction.” The structure of The Inheritors, one of
the earliest and certainly most distinguished examples, is simple. To their utter

7
╛╛Does one also see the Book of Job? “Then said his wife unto him, ‘Dost thou still retain thine
integrity? Curse God, and die’. But he said unto her, ‘Thou speakest as one of the foolish women spea-
keth. What! Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?’â•›” ( Job 2:10).
There is a spirit in Ma and Tom that is very Job-╉ean. Don’t curse God. Don’t die. Fight and triumph
over hardship. This is the spirit of Gaskell, of Gissing, of Wharton, of London. In the Darwinian
world, having guts is a moral virtue. The contrast with Matthew 5:5—“Blessed are the meek: for they
shall inherit the earth”—could not be greater.
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Dar w inism a s B ack g round 233

disaster, a small band of Neanderthals comes into contact with modern humans,
Homo sapiens. The Neanderthals die—​often killed—​one by one. The humans
survive and go off at the end, carrying their somewhat ambiguous trophy, the
last surviving Neanderthal, a baby.
On this story Golding erects a very sophisticated metaphorical framework.
Almost everything is told from the viewpoint of one of the Neanderthals, Lok,
and Golding presents his thought processes as very different from those of
humans. Although one of the Neanderthals (Fa, a female) shows rudiments of
being able to think things through, the assumption is that overall the group does
not have much in the way of reasoning power. All experiences and interactions
are presented as immediate, mainly through the senses, which are (especially the
nose) conceived as very much more powerful than those of humans. Thus when
one of the humans shoots an arrow at the Neanderthals, we get a phenomeno-
logical description of the stick that comes close by Lok’s head and of the point at
one end and the feathers at the other. Sexual intercourse between the humans,
observed by uncomprehending Neanderthals, gets a similar treatment.

The two people beneath the tree were making the noises fiercely as
though they were quarrelling. In particular the fat woman had begun to
hoot like an owl and Lok could hear Tuami gasping like man who fights
with an animal and does not think he will win. He looked down at them
and saw that Tuami was not only lying with the fat woman, but eating
her as well, for there was black blood running from the lobe of her ear.
(Golding [1955] 1962, 175)

The humans come across as—​well, as humans. They can reason, they have
technology—​they can make canoes that can be paddled upstream against the
current—​they have complicated and rather violent religious practices centered
on stags (which they hunt and kill), and very obviously they are violent, trying
to kill the other, the strangers. At the end of the novel we find that they regard
the Neanderthals as dangerous, referring to them as “devils.” They are also ap-
parently caste or class conscious because the youthful male is planning on killing
the older, still-​dominant male, and to take his place as leader.
The Neanderthals are peaceful by nature. They feel themselves as at one
with their surroundings, and their god, Oa, seems to be somewhat of an Earth
mother. They eat meat but only that which is from animals killed by others. Most
important, a lot of their insights come from picture making or conceiving. These
seem to be not just internal but to give information about external events. When
Ha (a Neanderthal male) disappears, the old male Mal gets pictures of what has
happened. Ha runs toward a cliff. “There is another smell of a nobody. Going
up the cliff and coming back. But the smell of Ha stops. There is Ha going up
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234 Darwinism as Religion

the cliff over the weed-​tails when the sun has gone down; and then nothing”
(66). This the end of Ha who presumably got pushed over the edge by a human.
“There is the scent of others.” Not only do the Neanderthals have this telepathic
or clairvoyant capacity, but it is something that is shared in the group.

Quite without warning, all the people shared a picture inside their
heads. This was a picture of Mal, seeming a little removed from them,
illuminated, sharply defined in all his gaunt misery. They saw not only
Mal’s body, but the slow pictures that were waxing and waning in his
head. One above all was displacing the others, dawning through the
cloudy arguments and doubts and conjectures until they knew what it
was he was thinking with such dull conviction.
“Tomorrow or the day after, I shall die.”  (39)

Critics of prehistorical fiction complain that the authors do not take enough
care to ensure that their claims about earlier hominins are in line with contem-
porary scientific research. Certainly this charge can be leveled against Golding’s
picture of the Neanderthals. There was little evidence for his supposition of their
nigh-​saintly and in respects extremely naïve natures, making them so different
from humans. Even when he was writing, the assumptions were that Neanderthal
life internal and external was not so very different from ours. But this really is
to miss the point and confirms the wisdom of Golding’s publisher who refused
to send the manuscript to experts on human evolution (Carey 2009). This is a
work of imaginative fiction, not a scientific treatise. This said, The Inheritors is
obviously a work that is based on an evolutionary understanding of human pre-
history. First there were the gentle folk like the Neanderthals. Then there were
the violent folk like the humans. You can even put it in Darwinian terms, because
the humans pretty much stamp out the Neanderthals and they do so because
of their superior technology and so forth, not to mention their desire to elimi-
nate possible threats from the Neanderthals. Yet there are very non-​Darwinian
elements, notably the peaceful nature of the Neanderthals, their picture imagi-
nations, and especially their clairvoyant powers. This is much more like Alfred
Russel Wallace than Darwin. Golding’s recent biographer ( John Carey) suggests
that the picturing comes from Wells, who had speculated that “Primitive man
probably thought very much as a child thinks, that is to say, in a series of imagina-
tive pictures” (Carey 2009, 180). This could well be true, although overall there
is an older and deeper source. As a young man, Golding had fallen under the
spell of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian esoteric thinker, the founder of the system
known as “anthroposophy,” as well as of the Waldorf School system, based on his
principles. By the time he was writing his novels, Golding had rejected the basic
claims of Steiner—​which are an imaginative fusion of theosophy and German
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Dar w inism a s B ack g round 235

Naturphilosophie—​but he always had a sympathy for the overall organicist view

of Steiner and used various ideas in his fiction. For instance, Golding’s next book
after The Inheritors, Pincher Martin (1956), is based on Steiner’s thinking about
the Doppelgänger (Ruse 2013).
If you look at Steiner’s major work, Occult Science: An Outline, you find that
(among all sorts of weird claims about beings on other planets, not to mention
the sun and moon) Golding cherry-​picked a number of ideas, including picture
thinking—​in earlier times humans had “a predominating picture consciousness”
(Steiner [1914] 2005, 164)—​that tells about real events—​“ he experiences in-
wardly in pictures what is going on outside him” (174)—​and group thinking—​
“the soul felt a kind of Group Ego reaching back to distant ancestors, and the in-
dividual man felt himself a member of the group” (186). Unfortunately, during
evolution—​Steiner was deeply influenced by the idealistic morphological
thinking of the late nineteenth-​century German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel—​
“this common consciousness, uniting individuals with their forefathers, was
gradually lost” (196). One suspects that the idea of group thinking, to be found
both in Golding’s novel and through the notion of “group soul” in Steinbeck’s
novel, have different sources. Golding from Steiner, although similar ideas in
Olaf Stapeldon’s science fiction novel from 1930, Last and First Men, may have
been important. Steinbeck from Emerson (or other transcendentalist thinkers).
This is no big matter because both Steiner and Emerson go back to shared ele-
ments of German thought, particularly that of Friedrich Schelling.
Steiner also gives us a clue to the overall intent of Golding’s novel. It is clearly
not about evolution as such, and even less is it about the conflict between sci-
ence and religion. Like The Lord of the Flies before it, the novel is about human
nature—​in particular about original sin, the natural depravity in us all. We are
tainted, a view that Golding got from his experiences in World War II, and that
infuses not only the first two novels but the third, Pincher Martin, as well. The
novel is certainly about P/​progress of a kind. The humans are far more advanced
than the Neanderthals when it comes to rational thought and technology. But
it has been at a cost, namely, the loss of innocence and of our more spiritual
side that binds us together in a peaceful group and makes us one with our fel-
lows and the world as a whole. This explicitly is Steiner’s message. In what is (or
should be) as much an embarrassment to today’s devotees as Noah’s Flood is to
Christians, Steiner embraced the idea of Atlantis, a long-​disappeared land in the
middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Humans were there and then left. And (without
in any sense implying that Golding accepted Atlantis) while there was a rise up
in some sense of the word, there was a falling off in another sense. Apparently
“the post-​Atlantean evolution of mankind had meant for the physical world
an ascent—​but at the same time a decline for the spiritual world” (Steiner
[1914] 2005, 217). I  spoke of a metaphorical framework. For Golding, the
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236 Darwinism as Religion

Neanderthals are our innocent ancestors or cousins (who may or may not have
actually existed); the humans—​the “inheritors”—​are Homo sapiens today (who
certainly do exist). “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was
very good” (Genesis 1: 31). That was no longer a given in the Darwin-​produced,
mid-​twentieth-​century world of William Golding.
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14

Darwinian Theory Comes of Age

This would seem to be the end of our story. By the mid-​twentieth century, evo-
lutionary ideas—​owing more or less to Darwin’s actual science—​were com-
monplace and natural groundings for serious writers of fiction. But the battle,
whether won or lost, had moved on. It was no longer the science-​religion debate
that was people’s immediate focus. Minds had been made up on that. Novelists
were now—​as one might very much expect—​turning to the pressing themes
of their day—​the Depression and social inequality, the wars of the century and
what they tell about human nature, and more. Yet to cry “finis” now would be
premature. In part—​a part we shall explore in this chapter—​the reason is inter-
nal to evolutionary studies. In part—​a part we shall explore in Chapters 15 and
16, the final chapters of this book—​the reason is external to evolutionary stud-
ies. Let us move briskly to the first part.
The year 1959 was the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Origin
of Species. In the world of professional science, evolutionary biology was now a
well-​established branch of science and about to take off with stunning conceptual
advances as well as the gathering of huge amounts of pertinent empirical informa-
tion. In the area of social behavior, the then-​graduate student William Hamilton
(1964) was formulating his model of (what came to be known as) “kin selection,”
where one sees natural selection benefiting the individual inasmuch as it benefits
close relatives. Following this explanatory breakthrough came other models, and
these and related discoveries were brought together in one massive volume in
1975, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson.
Other areas of evolutionary biology likewise were moving forward rapidly, often
because of the application of molecular techniques to old and hitherto-​insoluble
problems (Lewontin 1974). Computers were important too—​paleontology (or
as it came to be known, “paleobiology”) was totally revamped. The father did the
science (Sepkoski 1994) and the son wrote the history (Sepkoski 2012). These
new and very successful expansions and extensions of evolutionary theory—​
firmly Darwinian in that natural selection was seen increasingly to be the key to full
understanding—​led to new confidence in professional evolutionary biologists.

237
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238 Darwinism as Religion

This confidence reflected an optimism about the worth and correctness of the ap-
proach they were taking, together with a willingness to proselytize, to share their
enthusiasm with others. There were always popularizers of evolution—╉but now
the numbers increased by an order of magnitude—╉and naturally, since this was
popular science, value issues and the like, including religious issues, came to the
fore. Picking out just one example—╉the best of them all—╉the late Stephen Jay
Gould, Harvard professor, paleontologist, baseball fanatic, choral singer, wrote
a monthly column—╉“This View of Life”—╉for thirty years (from around 1970 to
around 2000) in the popular magazine, Natural History. He covered just about
everything—╉racism, war, family, America, sports (naturally!), and religion. He
spun off best-╉selling collections of his essays, as well as independent books on
evolution, and included here was one work devoted exclusively to the science-╉
religion relationship: Rocks of Ages (1999).
Expectedly, this kind of activity—╉and Gould was the best of many—╉attracted
the attention of creative writers, novelists, and poets, and we find that they
turned increasingly to evolution, not as with writers like Steinbeck and Golding
as a foundation for tackling other issues but as a source of problems and topics
to be written about in their own right.1 The focus was less a matter of evolu-
tion’s conflict with religion and more a matter of picking up on problems raised
by nineteenth-╉century thinkers, problems that today’s writers felt merited more
attention—╉both in light of new knowledge about evolution’s processes and in
light of new thinking at what one might call the theological or philosophical
level. Let us look at three representative examples.2

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Set back in the 1860s, the third novel of John Fowles (1926–╉2005), published in
1969, is an early exemplar of so-╉called neo-╉Victorian fiction (Glendening 2013).
It is also, and here one needs to know the jargon, a notable instance of that kind
of postmodern writing known (perhaps a little pretentiously) as “metafiction,”

1
╛╛Of course, people like Faulkner and Steinbeck and Golding went beyond the professional sci-
ence finally being produced. Writers are interested in values, just the sorts of things that professional
science excludes. The point is that now there was a flood of popular science, often raising precisely
the sorts of things of interest to writers.
2
╛╛Refreshed interest in Darwinism might also have been a function of the fact that, as the second
half of the twentieth century got under way, enthusiasm for the rival pictures of Freud and Marx was
ebbing. Not completely so. Think Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth: “Who does Mommy love more
than anything in the whole wide world? I am absolutely punchy with delight, and meanwhile follow
in their tight, slow, agonizingly delicious journey up her legs the transparent stockings that give her
flesh a hue of stirring dimensions” (Roth [1969] 1994, 45). But even here, we have as much debunk-
ing parody as acceptance.
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Dar w inian Theor y Come s   o f   A g e 239

meaning that the author plays games with both the characters and the readers,
manipulating the former rather like a puppeteer and sometimes making them do
one thing and sometimes another, whether they want to or not, and stepping out
of authorial role and commenting to the latter on aspects of what is happening or
not happening or could happen. It is “metafiction” because, as metamathematics
is not mathematics but about mathematics, so metafiction is not just the story
but comments on the story. Most famously, going one up on Caleb Williams
and Great Expectations, Fowles offers three endings to his novel—​rearranging
the lives of his characters—​and discusses these endings—​inviting the reader to
share in the authorial process.
The main story is fairly simple. A well-​connected young man, Charles
Smithson—​he has a private income of his own and he is the presumptive heir of
an unmarried uncle who has both estates and a baronetcy—​is engaged to a young
woman, Ernestina Freeman—​the only daughter of a very rich store owner. (The
model is clearly Selfridges in England or Macy’s in the United States.) They are
in love if not entirely passionately so, and spending time before the marriage
with relatives, in the town of Lyme Regis, on the South Coast of England. They
see a strange-​looking young woman on the quay looking out to sea. It turns out
that she is one Sarah Woodruff, a former governess, who fell in love with a young
French naval officer who was rescued from the sea and spent time recovering at
her place of employ. He left for home and she quit her job and now spends all her
time apparently mourning his departure and waiting for his return. There was
some question about their actual relationship and she has become known as the
“French Lieutenant’s Woman.”
The story takes a predictable course. Charles is fascinated by Sarah, who has
managed to get another job as companion to a demanding old woman. Charles
meets with Sarah on her afternoon walks and his feeling grows. Sarah gets the
sack for walking in places that the old woman has forbidden and goes off to stay
in a hotel in Exeter. Meanwhile Charles’s uncle declares his intention of marry-
ing and starting a family. Although he is no longer so good a catch, Ernestina
declares her fidelity and her father in London, whom Charles goes up to see,
backs his daughter, although he does suggest that now Charles has no prospects
as a landed squire he might think about joining the family business—​trade, an
unappealing prospect to the upper-​class Charles. On the way home, the train
passes through Exeter. Charles stays onboard and returns home to Ernestina.
They marry, have lots of kids, Sarah is forgotten, and Charles ends by going into
the business and rather liking it.
But this is only the first ending. The second version of the story has Charles
leaving the train in Exeter, going to Sarah’s hotel, where they have sex, Charles
then realizing that Sarah was a virgin—​even though on their last meeting she
had told him that she and the Frenchman had consummated their relationship.
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240 Darwinism as Religion

Charles is understandably upset and confused but writes to Sarah that he means
to break off with Ernestina and join up with her. Unfortunately his servant does
not deliver the letter, and though poor Charles breaks with Ernestina and earns
the enmity of her father, Sarah has vanished. Charles goes off to America and
finally discovers the whereabouts of Sarah in London. He returns, declares his
love, discovers that their brief bout led to a daughter, and happiness for the three
seems assured.
Then there is the third ending. Charles comes back to Sarah, she basically
says she was leading him along all of the time and doesn’t give a fig for him, but
she will marry him still if that is what he wants. It turns out that that is not what
Charles wants and he is left out in the cold—​and although a sadder man never-
theless a wiser man.

He walks towards an imminent, self-​given death? I think not; for he has

at last found an atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness, on which to
build; has already begun, though he would still bitterly deny it, though
there are tears in his eyes to support his denial, to realize that life, how-
ever advantageously Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of
Sphinx, is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is
not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after losing one throw
of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into
the city’s iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb’d, salt,
estranging sea. (Fowles [1969] 1998, 467)

Why is this sometimes enjoyable, sometimes irritating, story relevant to

our tale?3 Charles has a hobby—​fossil hunting and the paleontology behind it.
(Lyme Regis was noted for its important fossil beds.) This—​the story opens in
1868—​leads easily into discussions of Darwin and the Origin of Species. As in the
novels of Hardy, it is less the science as such that is fundamental and more the
metaphysical implications. In particular—​and although Fowles locates his dis-
cussion in the Victorian era, one suspects he must have had more recent writings
also in mind—​the implications for humans and their freedom. “Darwinism, as
its shrewder opponents realized, let open the floodgates to something far more
serious than the undermining of the Biblical accounts of the origins of man; its
deepest implications lay in the direction of determinism and behaviorism, that
is, towards philosophies that reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw
hut in a hurricane” (120).
A lot of the novel is concerned with showing how the characters are driven
by forces over which they have no control. Sarah obsesses about the French

3
  I am sure I am not alone in wishing Sarah would be a bit more positive about Charles.
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Dar w inian Theor y Come s   o f   A g e 241

lieutenant. Charles obsesses about Sarah. The local doctor gives Charles a book
about a Frenchman in a situation similar to his who ended up accused and tried.
“The day that other French lieutenant was condemned was the very same day
that Charles had come into the world. For a moment, in that silent Dorset night,
reason and science dissolved; life was a dark machine, a sinister astrology, a ver-
dict at birth and without appeal, a zero over all.” Adding: “He had never felt less
free” (235).
Or when Sarah and Charles fall for each other.

“My dear Miss Woodruff, pray control yourself. I –​”

“I cannot.”
The words were barely audible, but they silenced Charles. He tried
to tell himself that she meant she could not control the gratitude for his
charity … he tried, he tried. But there came on him a fleeting memory
of Catullus: “Whenever I see you, sound fails, my tongue falters, thin
fire steals through my limbs, an inner roar, and darkness shrouds my
ears and eyes.” (249)

But we have been primed for more than this. The author is going to com-
plexify things. Is Charles really so bound? Yes, in version one of the story. Not
so obviously in versions two and three of the story. Charles had a choice: “and
while one part of him hated having to choose, we come near the secret of his
state on that journey west when we know that another part of him felt intoler-
ably excited by the proximity of the moment of choice. He had not the benefit
of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was really a very clear case of the
anxiety of freedom—​that is, the realization that one is free and the realization
that being free is a situation of terror” (340–​341).
Charles had been caught in the conventions of the day—​marrying a pretty
heiress whom he did not really love. He breaks from this to engage with a woman
who was by any standards half mad. “You know your choice. You stay in prison,
what your time calls duty, honor, self-​respect, and you are comfortably safe. Or
you are free and crucified. Your only companions, the stones, the thorns, the
turning backs; the silence of cities, and their hate” (362). Hitherto he had been
caught in the mechanistic grind of modern life. “That was what had deceived
him; and it was totally without love or freedom … but also without thought,
without intention, without malice, because the deception was in its very nature;
and it was not human, but a machine” (363). It is an in joke that the family name
of Ernestina and her father is “Freeman.”
Surely if you are crucified on the Cross you are hardly free? Somehow, how-
ever, this leads to “uncrucifixion.” “What he saw now was like a glimpse of an-
other world: a new reality, a new causality, a new creation. A cascade of concrete
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242 Darwinism as Religion

visions​—​if you like, another chapter from his hypothetical autobiography—​

poured through his mind” (365). And this is freedom. Thinking of taking Sarah
to Italy, “did stand, however banally, for the pure essence of cruel but necessary
(if we are to survive—​and yes, still today) freedom” (366). Freedom, despite
Darwinism’s implication of determinism. Does this work? There are still grave
problems. Fowles himself throws water on his own claims. Consider when
Charles enters Sarah’s room in the hotel in Exeter.

Again his eyes were fixed on her. The nightgown buttoned high at the
neck and at her wrists. Its whiteness shimmered rose in the firelight, for
the lamp on the table beside him was not turned up very high. And her
hair, already enhanced by the green shawl, was ravishingly alive where
the firelight touched it; as if all her mystery, this most intimate self,
was exposed before him: proud and submissive, bound and unbound,
his slave and his equal. He knew why he had come; it was to see her
again. Seeing her was the need; like an intolerable thirst that had to be
assuaged.  (346)

No prizes for guessing what is about to happen. “Her legs parted. With a frantic
brutality, as he felt his ejaculation about to burst, he found the place and thrust”
(349–​350). This, to be honest, does not sound much like a man in control of
himself.
Three possibilities suggest themselves. Remember the two schools of (phil-
osophical) thought about free will. “Compatibilism” argues that you can have
both free will and determinism, suggesting the true dichotomy is between
freedom and constraint. A man walking down the road is free. A man dragged
down the road in chains is not. We could argue—​our first possibility—​that in
some sense Charles is significantly freer in the second and (especially) the third
endings, because he is not constrained by the norms of a repressive society but
makes up his own mind about what he values and wants to do. As in the hotel
room, he does not always seem that free, but overall his actions are those of a
man who is as they say “doing his own thing.”
Rivaling compatibilism there is “libertarianism” (not to be confused with
social philosophies like those of Ayn Rand), arguing that freedom exists outside
the causal chain. This was the position of Immanuel Kant, and it is often put
in terms of reasons versus causes. Freedom belongs to the realm of reason and
can exist no matter what the underlying causal structure. I live and breathe and
so forth, but I reason whether to stay onside with the comfortable option (first
ending) or to go for something more desirable if fraught with problems (second
and third endings). In the novel—​our second possibility—​there is some warrant
  243

Dar w inian Theor y Come s   o f   A g e 243

for this approach. The final chapter has as a second epigraph a line from one of
Matthew Arnold’s notebooks: “True piety is acting what one knows.” The author
comments that in pursuing our ends: “The fundamental principle that should
guide these actions, that I believe myself always guided Sarah’s, I have set as the
second epigraph. A modern existentialist would no doubt substitute “human-
ity” or “authenticity” for “piety,” but he would recognize Arnold’s intent” (466–​
467). This certainly suggests that the Charles of the second and perhaps even
more the third ending has greater freedom than the Charles of the first ending.
The third possibility is to go to the metalevel and think about the fact that we
do have three endings. Is the author trying to bring in freedom here, if not for the
characters directly more in the cosmic scheme of things? Fowles suggests that this
might be so, for at one point he enters the story himself, sitting looking at Charles
in a railway carriage (on the way to London to find Sarah). He likens himself to
God and asks what is he to do with his characters now? Charles he knows wants
to find Sarah. Sarah is ambiguous. Does she want to be found or not? Normally
the author fixes the fight and we get the solution the author wants. Fowles does
not want to do this. He does not want to fix the fight. “That leaves me with two
alternatives. I let the fight proceed and take no more than a recording part in it; or
I take both sides in it. I stare at that vaguely effete, but not completely futile face.
And as we near London, I think I see a solution; that is, I see the dilemma is false.
The only way I can take no part in the fight is to show two versions of it” (406).
Does this solve the problem of freedom? I am not sure that it does. It seems
almost that chance is deciding the fate of the characters. At most, the characters
will realize that there might have been other possibilities—​of the first ending,
the author writes “the last few pages you have read are not what happened, but
what he spent the hours between London and Exeter imagining might happen”
(339). Fate—​or the stern laws of nature—​decreed otherwise. This is a faint
notion of freedom. The happy note for us is that we here do not have to decide
among these options nor do we have to judge whether any of them work. It is
enough for us to recognize here that we have a novelist grasping—​as did Hardy a
century before him—​that Darwinism challenges complacent notions of human
freedom. Hardy wrestled with the problem and had stimulating insights but
hardly solved the problem—​did Tess freely murder Alec or not? Fowles legiti-
mately picks up the challenge and tries to move the discussion forward. That in
itself makes his novel worth discussing.4

4
  Another notable neo-​Victorian addition to the literature, likewise dealing with the problem of
free will, is A. S. Byatt’s novella Morpho Eugenia (1992).
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244 Darwinism as Religion

The Honorary Consul
Fowles deals with one problem still festering from Victorian times, but one that
blows up in our time, the possibility of freedom in a Darwinian world. Although
the notion of “uncrucifixion” is central, he stresses that after early enthusiasms
Charles no longer has religious convictions and that the recognition of the impor-
tance of Christ was not a “St. Paul on the road to Damascus” experience (Fowles
[1969] 1998, 365). Now we turn to a writer who was a committed Christian.
Sensitive to the ways in which religion is always under secular attack, where sci-
ence particularly is a favorite battering ram against the gates of faith, he deals with
another problem, at least if not more important, that of evil—╉not so much specifi-
cally the pain and suffering raised by the Darwinian process—╉that is for the next
chapter—╉but the problem of evil more generally, for from the start of his early
conversion to Catholicism, the English novelist Graham Greene (1904–╉1991) la-
bored, through the often-╉tortured world of his fictional characters, to make sense
of God, of humans, of their relationships. How do we reconcile the evil that lies in
people’s hearts and the terrible things that they do with the existence of a loving
Creator God?5 In later life, by his own admission, Greene was much attracted to
the theology of the French Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin (1955). The
priest, who was deeply influenced by the creative evolutionism of Henri Bergson,
was one of a number—╉as we shall see his thinking bears resemblances to pro-
cess theology reaching back to the Anglo-╉American philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead (1929)—╉who strove to move from the immovable, unchanging deity
of classical theology—╉much influenced by Platonic thought, Augustine thought
of God as being akin to the Form of the Good, in a sense being like a mathematical
concept outside time and space—╉to a God who is here with us now, who works
alongside us and who co-╉creates and has human-╉like features including suffering
with us. For Teilhard de Chardin therefore evil was not so much a consequence
of a world thanks to Darwin bereft of a God—╉as it is in Tess of the D’Urbervilles—╉
but something to be conquered and transcended in an evolutionary fashion by
humans working with God. Evolution is not the problem; it is the solution.
This world picture infuses Greene’s late novel, The Honorary Consul.
A  character—╉almost a parody of a Greene figure, a priest who has married

5
╛╛Expectedly we find elements of Job in Greene’s thinking, perhaps most fervently in Brighton
Rock (1938) where an old priest in the confessional speaks about God to Rose, the girl who has
married the central figure, the young criminal Pinky. She wishes she had committed suicide as had
he, so they could be damned together: “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anybody the …
appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God” (Greene [1938] 1991, 246). It is all a bit Hardy-╉like
though, because Rose thinks that Pinky’s love for her will redeem the situation whereas we know his
final (recorded) message to her is one of hate—╉“the worst horror of all” (267).
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Dar w inian Theor y Come s   o f   A g e 245

and now joined a revolutionary group who wanted to seize the Argentinian
American Ambassador and force the Paraguayan dictatorship to hand over
captured rebels (and who even more typically has seized the wrong person)—​
explains the Teilhard-​influenced theology that drives him forward.6 “He made
us in His image—​so our evil is His evil too. How could I love God if He were
not like me? Divided like me. Tempted like me” (Greene [1973] 1974, 260).
Continuing: “The God I believe in must be responsible for all the evil as well as
all the saints. He has to be a God made in our image with a night side as well as a
day side … It is a long struggle and a long suffering, evolution, and I believe God
is suffering the same evolution that we are, but perhaps with more pain” (261).
Then: “God when he is evil demands evil things. He can create monsters like
Hitler. He destroys children and cities. But one day with our help he will be able
to tear his evil mask off forever. How often the saints have worn an evil mask for
a time, even Paul. God is joined to us in a sort of blood transfusion. His blood is
in our veins and our tainted blood runs through his” (262–​263).
This last passage is remarkably parallel to a powerful but negative poem
written around the same time by the English poet Ted Hughes, about a dark
Doppelgänger of God called “Crow”:

When God, disgusted with man,

Turned towards heaven.
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.
But Crow. . Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing Heaven and earth together —​
So man cried, but with God’s voice.
And God bled, but with man’s blood.

The poet continues, reading this as the beginning of true evil.

Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint

Which became gangrenous and stank -​
A horror beyond redemption.
The agony did not diminish.

  In the 1940s, the English weekly The New Statesman and Nation ran a competition asking for
6

parodies of Greene’s style. Entering under a pseudonym, the author—​alas—​came only second.
246

246 Darwinism as Religion

Man could not be man nor God God.

The agony
Grew.
Crow
Grinned
Crying: “This is my Creation,”
Flying the black flag of himself.7
(Hughes 1971, 57)8

Hughes, like Greene/​Teilhard de Chardin, sees God in human terms. He sees

also that humans and God are forever joined together. For the poet, this points
to dark, dark evil—​“a horror beyond redemption.” For Greene, however, the
priest’s theology points to the triumph of God. Teilhard de Chardin believed
that evolution proceeds upward and at some point it reaches what he called the
noösphere, where we find the Omega Point that he identified with Jesus Christ,
the Redeemer (Teilhard de Chardin 1955). The struggle for man and God ends
in success. “I believe in the Cross and the Redemption. The Redemption of God
as well as of Man. I believe that the day side of God, in one moment of happy
creation, produced perfect goodness, as a man might paint one perfect picture.
God’s intention for once was completely fulfilled so that the night side can never
win more than a little victory here and there.” He continues: “With our help.
Because the evolution of God depends on our evolution. Every evil act of ours
strengthens his night side, and every good one helps his day side. We belong to
him and he belongs to us. But now at least we can be sure where evolution will
end one day—​it will end in a goodness like Christ’s. It is a terrible process all
the same, and the God I believe in suffers as we suffer while he struggles against
himself—​against his evil side” (Greene [1973] 1974 , 262).

7
  “Crow Blacker Than Ever” from COLLECTED POEMS by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 2003
by The Estate of Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber and Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, LLC.
8
  In Dracula, Arthur (Lord Godalming), having given blood to Lucy, felt “since then as if they two
had been really married and that she was his wife in the sight of God.” The fact that Lucy’s two other
suitors had also given blood, not to mention Dr. Van Helsing, and so on Arthur’s reading we have
a bit of a group thing going here, is passed over in dignified silence. “None of us said a word of the
other operations, and none of us ever shall.” Later in the novel, Dracula and Mina actually drink each
other’s blood, and remember that the now-​polluted Mina is scarred by a holy wafer that touches her
forehead. Fortunately, the death of Dracula restores her purity although the blood of Dracula does
live on in her son.
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Dar w inian Theor y Come s   o f   A g e 247

Note that although Greene, as always, is wrestling with evil, and although he
brings evolution to bear on the issue, and although he sees that the evolution-
ary process involves pain and struggle, he is obviously not thinking at a directly
biological level. Nevertheless, he is relying on a particular interpretation of the
biological world. A novelist, a poet, is entitled to a certain artistic elasticity. It
is no real criticism of Golding to say that his Neanderthals were not like those
that we now know, or even as they were known back in the 1950s. But if you go
with ideas that are completely repudiated by scientists, then the extent to which
you can be said to be working with the authority of science becomes question-
able. This is particularly pertinent in the case of Teilhard de Chardin, for (as we
shall see in the next chapter) his thinking was savaged by a very distinguished
member of the scientific community, and there are reasons why—​starting with
the fact that selection was never his main force of change, but rather a form of
Lamarckian striving.
This said, although the details of his science were questioned, not all evolu-
tionists rejected his vision (Ruse 1996). Theodosius Dobzhansky in America
and Julian Huxley in England, two of the leading evolutionists in the mid-​cen-
tury, were enthusiastic Teilhardians—​even though paradoxically Dobzhansky
was a (Russian) Orthodox Christian and Huxley an atheist (although ever with a
liking for Bergsonian vitalism).9 One should not therefore think that Greene was
totally out of the scientific loop. Somewhat humorously, while no one had too
much time for the Lamarckian elements in Teilhard’s thought, although Gould
spoke strongly against the evolutionary progressivism that is so crucial to the
Teilhardian picture—​in an attempt to destroy his reputation as a scientist, Gould
(1980) even went so far as to pin the Piltdown hoax on Teilhard de Chardin (a
suggestion treated with the contempt it merited)—​many other prominent pro-
fessional scientists are ardent evolutionary progressionists. They may not have
too much time for the Omega Point, but the science (interpreted in a Darwinian
fashion) they accept. Also, paradoxically one suspects that Teilhard de Chardin’s

  As an undergraduate at Oxford, Julian Huxley won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. Later in life,
9

he broke into verse about the virtues of progress.

The Ant herself cannot philosophize–​

While Man does that, and sees, and keeps a wife,
And flies, and talks, and is extremely wise...
Yet our Philosophy to later Life
Will seem but crudeness of the planet’s youth,
Our Wisdom but a parasite of Truth.

This is from a sonnet entitled “Man the Philosophizer” (Huxley 1932, 53). That it should come from
the same family that two generations before had produced “Dover Beach” surely proves that, not-
withstanding my enthusiasm for the power of the Internet, not all change is Progress.
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248 Darwinism as Religion

theology, firmly repudiated by his Church when he wrote—╉he was forbidden

to publish and his masterwork, The Phenomenon of Man, appeared only after his
death—╉now finds more favor. Again, however, none of this is really our worry.
As with Fowles, we are seeing an attempt to move things forward in a post-╉
Darwinian world.

Galapagos
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut (1922–╉2007) was a force—╉a moral, uncompromis-
ing, uncomfortable force—╉unto himself. Thrown into the Battle of the Bulge in
1944 as a lowly private, he was captured, shipped to Dresden, and survived the
allied firebombing only because he was incarcerated in an underground slaugh-
terhouse. This led to his celebrated novel, Slaughterhouse Five, combining as did
other of his novels hair-╉raising and deeply moving factual episodes with science-╉
fiction fantasy about ghosts and other worlds. His fiction and his life was one of
protest against the evils of society—╉especially his own American society—╉and
typically at the end of his life he was to be found raging against the invasion of
Iraq. In a memorable line that will take some topping, on comparing President
George W. Bush with Adolf Hitler, Vonnegut’s judgment was that at least Hitler
had been elected. Expectedly he was a fervent nonbeliever, and although for
a while he worshipped with the Unitarian-╉Universalists, he was essentially an
agnostic at the least and at his death was president of the American Humanist
Association.
Stylistically and in content Galapagos is a novel that could have been written
only by Vonnegut. Mixing magic with realism, it tells the story about events in
1986 (a year to the future of the date of the novel’s appearance), from the sup-
posed present a million years hence, using as narrator (Leon Trout) a ghost. The
action takes place around a cruise ship, the Bahía de Darwin, about to depart
from Ecuador for the Galapagos Archipelago, on what has been billed as the
“nature cruise of the century.” All had looked pretty good and the celebrity list
signed up for the journey was highly impressive╉—╉Jackie Kennedy Onassis was
one of the intended participants. However, a world financial crisis brought all of
the wonderful dreams crashing down (Vonnegut was using a South American
financial crisis as material) and after war breaks out between neighboring South
American states only a motley group manage a getaway. These include the cap-
tain, Adolf von Kleist, who it turns out has not the slightest idea about steering
the ship; Mary Hepburn, a widow of good intentions; James Wait, a confidence
man who preys on unsuspecting females, who dies moments after marrying
Hepburn (on board ship); Hisako Hiroguchi, a pregnant Japanese woman who
will give birth to Akiko Hiroguchi, who thanks to a mutation passed on from
  249

Dar w inian Theor y Come s   o f   A g e 249

the effects of Hiroshima will have a furry covering over her whole body; and six
young native women who don’t seem to speak anyone’s language very much.
“These were orphans from the Ecuadorian rainforest across the mountains to
the east—​from far, far away. Their parents had all been killed by insecticides
sprayed from the air, and a bush pilot had brought them to Guayaquil, where
they had become children of the streets” (Vonnegut [1985] 1999, 164).
The boat ends up beached on one of the Galapagos Islands, Santa Rosalia
(not a real one). It turns out that there is lots to eat—​boobies, finches, iguanas,
crabs, penguins—​so they can survive. Reproduction is a little bit of a problem,
because with Wait gone the only people really ready for sex are the captain and
Mary Hepburn, and she is past her reproductive stage. But over time, Akiko and
the native girls come on reproductive-​ready board, and with some imaginative
action by Mary—​after intercourse with the captain, she dips her finger into her
sperm-​full vagina and then shoves it appropriately (as one might say) into the
girls—​they all get pregnant and the human race continues. Which is just as well,
because on the mainland, and indeed all around the world, starting at the annual
Frankfurt Book Fair—​one supposes that one place was as good as any—​a new
parasite appeared that eats up all of the eggs in the human ovary.
What is going on here, or rather what has gone wrong here? And what is going
to happen? What has gone wrong is hammered into the reader’s consciousness
again and again. It is the Thomas Hardy problem. Humans have overevolved. We
have massive great brains and they only lead us into trouble. At the beginning,
talking about the confidence trickster, James Wait:

It is hard to believe nowadays that people could ever have been as bril-
liantly duplicitous as James Wait—​until I remind myself that just about
every human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilo-
grams! There was no end to the evil schemes that thought machines
that oversized couldn’t imagine and execute.
So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer
it: Can it be doubted that three-​kilogram brains were once nearly fatal
defects in the evolution of the human race?
A second query:  What source was there back then, save for our
overly elaborate nervous circuitry, for the evils we were seeing or hear-
ing about simply everywhere?
My answer:  There was no other source. This was a very innocent
planet, except for those great big brains.   (8–​9)

They led to monstrous machines of war, to famine, to misery and destruction.

They are nothing but a source of evil and suffering.
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250 Darwinism as Religion

What happens? Vonnegut makes it clear that improvement does not come
from our planning or execution. Pure luck saves the human race. The captain
certainly did not steer the ship to the island intentionally. He had no idea how he
was doing. The islands were not provided for our necessities by design. It just so
happened that they did. “Nature chose to be generous, so there was enough to
eat” (297). And what happened in the future—​now past from the viewpoint of
the narrator—​was not intended. Over the years, thanks particularly to the boost
given by the furry Japanese girl, humans evolved through natural selection into
seal-​like beings. And with this went a diminution of brain size and in turn a lack
of interest in doing the things that led to destruction, quite apart from a physical
inability to get up to mischief.

As for human beings making a comeback, of starting to use tools and

build houses and play musical instruments and so on again: They would
have to do it with their beaks this time. Their arms have become flippers
in which the hand bones are almost entirely imprisoned and immobi-
lized. Each flipper is studded with five purely ornamental nubbins, at-
tractive to members of the opposite sex at mating time. These are in fact
the tips of four suppressed fingers and a thumb. Those parts of people’s
brains, which used to control their hands, moreover, simply don’t exist
anymore, and human skulls are now much more streamlined on that
account. The more streamlined the skull, the more successful the fisher
person. (201–​202)

Vonnegut is what you might call a blunt-​instrument thinker. Nothing very

subtle here. He is against what conventionally is called Progress at the techno-
logical level but also at the social level, and he is obviously dubious about medi-
cal Progress also given the apparent inability to control the egg-​eating parasite.
He is clearly also much more relativistic about the course of biological history.
He doesn’t see much progress to humans and basically looks upon the future
seal-​people as just as good as us, if not better. You might wonder if Vonnegut is
flailing at windmills because he is attacking nineteenth-​century notions of bio-
logical progress, but as noted earlier this is not so. Whatever they may say pro-
fessionally, it is rarely so for evolutionists. Most of them tend to have a sneaking
feeling that humans overall are better and we have won the evolutionary battle.
A popular argument for such progress, going back through Julian Huxley’s first
little book—​The Individual in the Animal Kingdom (1912)—​and reaching back
to Darwin himself, invokes what are known today as biological “arms races”—​
lines respond to each other with better adaptations, prey get faster and so preda-
tors get faster. Enthusiasts argue that, as in real arms races, where electronics
have become more and more important, so in biological arms races on-​board
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Dar w inian Theor y Come s   o f   A g e 251

computers (a.k.a. brains) have become increasingly important. Ideas like this
were increasingly being pushed just at the time that Vonnegut was writing (early
1980s) so I am not sure that there is cause and effect, but the novelist was cer-
tainly writing against real targets.
One might also add, as a kind of ironic footnote, that in the 1950s with atomic
testing in the air, many were worried about the knock-╉on effects of mutations.
People like Dobzhansky, who argued for (what molecular biology revealed) the
normal existence of much variation in natural populations, were not that con-
cerned. Bomb radiation might even be a good thing, adding to the pot. Again
there is no reason to think that Vonnegut was writing in the light of this, but
his fantasy about the furry Japanese girl—╉different because of the bomb—╉fits
nicely with this. I am not sure Vonnegut thought of this as a good thing, but he
would have appreciated the irony. One stupid thing leads by chance to another
thing, something that can be used for good. In a way, we have Thomas Hardy’s
message updated. People are kidding themselves if they think that evolution is
going to give them slick and comfortable answers. But perhaps there is hope de-
spite this. The epigraph to his book, a quotation from the diary of Anne Frank,
leads us full circle to suggest that Vonnegut is not such a cynical curmudgeon
after all. “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” If
she of all people could say that, who are the rest of us to naysay?

Conclusion
What we have seen in this and the previous chapter makes good sense. Evolution
(usually meaning Darwinism) is generally accepted. Some writers pick up on
this and use it as background against (what are for them) more pressing social
issues. Then as the professional science itself developed and flourished, there
was in tandem an increase in evolution at the popular science level, and this
stimulated writers to pick up on some of the issues that had so concerned the
Victorians. They hoped to bring some clarity and new insights to the divisions
between modern evolutionists and those many (like social scientists and phi-
losophers) who take a keen interest in these sorts of things. A conclusion that
might seem to be the end to our story. As we shall see, however, ours is a tale that
ends with a bang not a whimper.
252

15

The Divide Continues

Although people are still interested in evolution and religion, apparently the
focus had moved away from direct interest in the science-​religion relationship—​
particularly the relationship as something meaning warfare between competing
belief systems—​to broader, more pressing issues. Sputnik, launched in 1957,
brought earlier concerns right back into the limelight. Terrified that they were
losing the Cold War to the Russians, Americans poured money into science pro-
motion including education, and evolutionary theory, now building on thirty
years of professional activity, was made a central component of this new and
vigorous drive.1 This in turn sparked a reaction by concerned Christians who,
already frightened (and elated) that the Cold War spelled the end of time and
the promised return of Christ, were increasingly sensitive to what they saw as the
materialistic and antireligious odor of modern science. Even those who were not
out and out biblical literalists feared that evolution posed a considerable threat
to their faith commitments. Expectedly, scientists in turn reacted to the religious
responses and so there was and continues to be increased tension on the science-​
religion front, with Darwinian evolution right at the heart of things.
Starting on the side of science, even in 1961, in Britain we find the Nobel
Prize–Winning biologist Peter Medawar reviewing Teilhard de Chardin’s mas-
terwork, The Phenomenon of Man, writing of “a feeling of suffocation, a gasp-
ing and flailing around for sense”; “a feeble argument, abominably expressed”;
“the illusion of content”; and “alarming apocalyptic seizures” (1961, 99–​100).
And that was just the first paragraph. In the next decade, in America, Edward
O. Wilson followed his big work on sociobiology with a Pulitzer Prize–winning
sequel about our own species, On Human Nature (1978). In a book that he di-
rected to the general public he argued for the relevance of evolution—​of the
genes as naturally selected—​to the widest range of issues, including morality,
individual variation (like sexual orientation), and religion. He was blunt in his

1
  Although most prominent and immediate, expectedly, Sputnik was not the only factor sparking
concern about the Russians outstripping the Americans (Rudolph 2015).

252
╇ 253

The D iv id e Continue s 253

thinking. The “epic” of evolution means only one thing: “Theology is not likely
to survive as an independent intellectual discipline” (192).
And then above all, back in Britain, there was and is Richard Dawkins—╉
perhaps not so much the Charles Darwin of his day but the Herbert Spencer,
inasmuch as he clearly aimed both to speak to and to stimulate and provoke his
fellow professional biologists, and also—╉thanks to his felicitous style and genius
with metaphor—╉to address the general public (Dawkins 1976, 1986). He has
shown no hesitation in assuming that a fluidity in writing about science qualifies
him to talk (very critically) on matters philosophical and theological. Cheetahs
seem wonderfully designed to kill antelopes. “The teeth, claws, eyes, nose, leg
muscles, backbone and brain of a cheetah are all precisely what we should expect
if God’s purpose in designing cheetahs was to maximize deaths among ante-
lopes” (Dawkins 1995, 105). Conversely, “we find equally impressive evidence
of design for precisely the opposite end: the survival of antelopes and starva-
tion among cheetahs.” One could almost imagine that we have two gods, making
the different animals, and then competing. If there is indeed but one god who
made both animals, then what is going on? What sort of god makes this sort of
encounter? “Is He a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? Is He trying to
avoid overpopulation in the mammals of Africa? Is He maneuvering to maxi-
mize David Attenborough’s television ratings?” (105) The answer is inevitable.

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some

people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and
you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe
we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at
bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind,
pitiless indifference. (133)

There is thank God—╉or perhaps thank Darwin—╉an alternative. “The feeling of

awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which
the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest
that music and poetry can deliver” (1998, x).
Expectedly, the creative writers started to weigh in.

Philip Appleman
A long-╉time professor at Indiana University, Philip Appleman (b. 1926) is a
poet whose credentials include the editing (through three versions) of Darwin:
Norton Critical Edition, which means he has probably had a greater influ-
ence than any other human on the average American undergraduate’s grasp
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254 Darwinism as Religion

of Darwinism. One of his deservedly best-​known poems is an evolutionary-​

themed ode to the automobile. The Indianapolis 500, the famous race, is held
in the capital of the state every year and Appleman gives a kind of ironic and yet
at times almost melancholic reflection on his state’s obsession with that mode
of transport. First there is reference to the race and (here is the irony) that at
the end the cars are back where they started. Then a very Darwinian reflection
on the evolution of the automobile as—​in the pursuit of ever-​more efficient
performance and greater speed—​one kind of part gives way to a superior part.
And how the losers—​the fêted of yesteryear—​are simply cast aside, unwanted
and unloved.

In Indianapolis they drive
five hundred miles and end up
where they started: survival
of the fittest. In the swamps
of Auburn and Elkhart,
in the jungles of South Bend,
one-​cylinder chain-​driven runabouts fall
to air-​cooled V-​4’s, a-​speed gearboxes,
16-​horse flat-​twin midships engines—​
carcasses left behind
by monobloc motors, electric starters,
3-​speed gears, six cylinders, 2-​chain drive,
overhead cams, supercharged
to 88 miles an hour in second gear, the age
of Leviathan …

Then an interlude and an italicized passage from the end of the Origin itself,
and a genuine appreciation of the tremendous new racing machines that keep
appearing—​powerful and stunning to look at, truly awesome.

There is grandeur in this view of life,

as endless forms
most beautiful and wonderful
are being evolved.

Finally, and here is the melancholy, a likening of the glorious automobiles of the
past to the dinosaurs and other fabulous beasts of the past, once the masters of
all that they could see, and now dead and buried, as if they had never existed.
A nice echoing of the race itself—​huge effort, great innovations, tremendously
exciting, but at the end—​going nowhere!
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The D iv id e Continue s 255

And then
the drying up, the panic,
the monsters dying: Elcar, Cord,
Auburn, Duesenberg, Stutz—​somewhere
out there, the chassis of Studebakers,
Marmons, Lafayettes, Bendixes, all
rusting in high-​octane smog,
ashes to ashes, they
end up where they started.
(Appleman [1984] 2009, 65)

For Appleman, Darwinian evolutionary theory is the greatest discovery of

all time and it behooves us as humans to accept this and explore the full impli-
cations of what it means to be evolved beings—​no more, but certainly no less.
Knowledge, morality, good behavior, and everything else can only be based on
our human nature as fashioned by natural selection. “If we come to maturity by
recognizing what is outside us, we come to wisdom by knowing what is inside”
(Appleman 2014, 37). Those automobiles. In one sense, such a triumph of sci-
ence and engineering. We are nigh God-​like in what we can achieve. And yet,
at another level, in the end without ultimate meaning. But seeing that is in itself
important. Things are born, they grow, they live, they decline, they die, they rot.
That’s it. And that in its way is wonderful. That’s enough. We don’t and shouldn’t
look for spiritual or divine purpose and all the dangerous nonsense that goes with
such a search. Above all, we must recognize that religion, a natural belief develop-
ment of ignorant and frightened ancestors, something that claims to give those
ultimate answers, has long outlived its usefulness and now is positively harmful.
“Religion stalks across the face of human history, knee-​deep in the blood of in-
nocents, clasping its red hands in hymns of praise to an approving God” (27).
Appleman pulls no punches in his poetry. Noah is told to build a boat and the
materials and dimensions are specified carefully.

And then
the Voice tells him why.

His sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, just cannot handle this news.

“He’s going to drown them all?” Japheth whispers,

“Every last woman and child? What for?”
Noah’s mind is not what it used to be; lately
it strays like a lost lamb, his ancient voice
A bleat: “Ahh —​
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256 Darwinism as Religion

wickedness, I think that’s
what He said —​yes, wickedness.”

The sons are outraged.

“He’s going to murder

the lot of them, just
for making a few mistakes? For being —​human?”

But being dutiful sons they do it.

“Ours not to reason why,” says Shem, the firstborn

and something of a prig. “Ours but to build the ark.”

Not easy, as you might expect, keeping the lambs away from the lions, and get-
ting in a year’s supply of bananas for the monkeys. But they do it and the rains
come and the ark floats clear. Of course the boys look out of the windows and
see the fate of one particularly beautiful friend.

Japheth caught
one final glimpse, and of course it had to be Zillah,
holding her baby over her head
till water rolled over her
and she sank, and the baby
splashed a little, and then
there was silence upon the waters,
and God was well pleased.

And so the story draws to its end. The waters subside and humans and animals
disembark.

And Noah knows, in his tired bones,

that now he will have to be fruitful, once more,
and multiply, and replenish the earth
with a pure new race of people who
would never, never sin again,
for if they did,
all that killing would be for nothing,
a terrible embarrassment
to God.
(Appleman 1996, 178–​186)
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The D iv id e Continue s 257

Not much more you can say after that, except to turn to today’s holy men for
poetic inspiration.

The first time?
So long ago —​that brown-​eyed boy …
How can I say this, Your Reverences,
so you’ll understand? Maybe
it was the tilt of his pretty neck
when he pondered the mysteries –​ Grace,
the Trinity —​the way his lower lip
curled like a petal, the way …
But you know what I mean —​ down
from your pulpits and into the dirty streets —​
you know, there are some provocations
the good Lord made no sinew
strong enough to resist.

In any case, we have the love of David for Jonathan to guide us in our conduct.
After all, was it really so very wrong?

What? I? “Ruined their lives”?

Wait a minute, let’s get this straight —​
my passion gave them a life, gave them
something rich and ripe in their green youth,
something to measure all intimate flesh against,
forever. After that,
they ruined their own lives, maybe.
But with me they were full of a love
firmer than anything their meager years
had ever tasted …

And let’s not be hypocrites. We all know how this is going to be resolved.

Oh, I know where I’m headed —​

to “therapy” as we always say,
a little paid vacation
with others who loved not wisely
but too young —​and also, of course,
with the usual slew of dehydrating
whiskey priests. But don’t forget
that when they say I’m “recovered” again,
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258 Darwinism as Religion

they’ll send me off to another parish,

with more of those little lambs —╉a priest,
after all, is a priest forever.2
(251–╉255)

Religion is evil and its offerings are corrupt. True happiness, true joy, “does not
depend upon mysticism or dogma or priestly admonition. It is the joy of human
life, here and now, unblemished by the dark shadow of whimsical forces in the sky.
Charles Darwin’s example, both in his work and in his life, helps us to understand
that that is the only ‘heaven’ we will ever know. And it is the only one we need”
(Appleman 2014, 69). It isn’t just that Appleman thinks that God doesn’t exist. He
loathes and detests all that is done and said in the name of God. Morality has been
a constant theme of my story. No one engages in the science-╉religion issue just as
a matter of epistemology, as a matter of true or false. It is always a moral issue. Can
you believe in God? Should you believe in God? Where does science take you? Is
evolution the route to license and immorality? Appleman’s rage is something we
should understand and respect, even if we do not necessarily share it.

The Christian Opposition

To be strictly accurate, Christians had not all waited until Sputnik before they
were awoken from their slumber. Already in the 1930s and 1940s, the Christian
apologist and fantasy novelist C. S. Lewis and his fellow writers (most famous
of whom was J. R. R. Tolkien of hobbit fame)—╉the so-╉called Inklings—╉were
showing that they did not much care for science, and that they cared for the
scientists (notable representative Julian Huxley) even less (Bud 2013). Lewis’s
Space Trilogy—╉especially the final volume, That Hideous Strength (published in
1945)—╉shows all the marks of the mind-╉set. There are masses of stuff about
the ways in which scientific thought leads to materialism and a downgrading of
human nature, something truly revealed only through the Christian religion. The
main action takes place in and around a place known as the National Institute for
Co-╉ordinated Experiments. There is some question as to who runs this place,
and about its purpose, but you can be sure that it is up to no good.

The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already,

even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, and had been subtly

2
╛╛Appleman (1996). Copyright 1996 by The University of Arkansas Press. Reproduced with the
permission of the University of Arkansas Press, www.uapress.com.
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The D iv id e Continue s 259

maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been

increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a con-
centration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the
élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore
the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny
of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old
dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and
the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling
of all deep-​set repugnances was the first essential for progress. (Lewis
[1945] 1996, 203)3

And so on and so forth, at great length.

Lewis’s writings have had a curiously switchback existence (McGrath 2013).
Popular in the 1940s and 1950s—​I was brought up on the Screwtape Letters—​
they fell out of favor. Then suddenly, perhaps because of the filming of his Narnia
series of children’s books, he was taken up and now is the darling of the evan-
gelicals, something that he as a rather conservative Anglican would have found
ironic to say the least. He is not alone. I do not want to imply that the contem-
porary science-​religion debate (especially coming from the side of religion) is
exclusively American, but in the Christian West it very much tends to be, and
elsewhere is often—​like Coca-​Cola—​an American import. The debate or clash
occurs most obviously and vehemently where extreme evangelicals—​literalists
or Creationists—​are involved (Ruse 1988a). So also for the fiction.

He approached the bed, knowing what he would find. The indented

pillow, the wrinkled covers. He could smell her, though he knew the
bed would be cold. He carefully peeled back the blankets and sheet
to reveal her locket, which carried a picture of him. Her flannel night-
gown, the one he always kidded her about and which she wore only
when he was not home, evidenced her now departed form.
His throat tight, his eyes full, he noticed her wedding ring near the
pillow, where she always supported her cheek with her hand. It was too
much to bear, and he broke down. He gathered the ring into his palm
and sat on the edge of the bed, his body racked with fatigue and grief.
He put the ring in his jacket pocket and noticed the package she had
mailed. Tearing it open, he found two of his favorite homemade cook-
ies with hearts drawn on the top in chocolate.

3
  Actually, with the Bergsonian references, the problem is not materialism but its opposite, vital-
ism. Lewis and his somewhat precious drinking pals would have thought this the road to heresy.
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260 Darwinism as Religion

What a sweet, sweet woman! he thought. I never deserved her, never

loved her enough! He set the cookies on the bedside table, their essence
filling the air. With wooden fingers he removed his clothes and let them
fall to the floor. He climbed into the bed and lay facedown, gathering
Irene’s nightgown in his arms so he could smell her and imagine her
close to him.
And Rayford cried himself to sleep. (LaHaye and Jenkins
1995, 75–╉76)

It is not often that one feels a huge sympathy for airline pilots, especially when
apparently they spend most of their time in the air trying to get into the panties
of the prettiest flight attendant, but it is hard not to shed a tear for Rayford Steele
(Captain, Pan-╉Continental Airlines). He has come home to find his wife miss-
ing. She has not, as one might presume, run off with the milkman. Rather, the
End of Time is on its way, and she and other true believers have been raptured
up to heaven to join Jesus.
This is an extract from the Left Behind series, by Tim LaHay and Jerry
B.  Jenkins, dealing with life after the Rapture.4 It is one of a very successful
series—╉sixteen volumes so far and with over 65 million sales starting to assume
Rider Haggard proportions—╉that is backed by video games and toys and chil-
dren’s versions and much more. And this is but the tip of an iceberg. Yet, with
some regret, in the spirit of my earlier discussions—╉literalism is not traditional
Christianity but an idiosyncratic American invention of the first part of the
nineteenth century to speak to social and other needs facing a new nation in a
hostile land (Noll 2002; Numbers 2006)—╉I am going to stay with mainstream
Christians who accept evolution—╉Darwinism even—╉but who think that this is
the beginning rather than the end of the discussion. So let us look as a counter
to Philip Appleman at a woman who is one of America’s leading Christian poets.

Pattiann Rogers
Deeply religious in a nonpreachy sort of way—╉she was raised first Presbyterian
and then in a fundamentalist group but has moved on—╉Pattiann Rogers (b.

4
╛╛According to Dispensationalist theology, the history of Earth is divided into periods at the end
of which major upheavals occur. Noah’s Flood, for instance, is the end of one such dispensation. The
final end is on its way. First true believers will be lifted up to heaven (“raptured”) to join Jesus in fully
resurrected bodies. Next will be the Great Tribulation, when at least 75% of the remaining humans
will be destroyed. After this, Jesus will come back to Earth, defeat Satan in the battle of Armageddon,
and then rule for 1,000 years (the millennium) before the Day of Judgment.
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The D iv id e Continue s 261

1940)  expresses a profound love of nature and appreciation of the science

behind it. One thinks obviously again of Hopkins and she admits the influence
and also (as one would expect) of Dickinson, but her main source of inspiration
is Whitman.

I swear I think now that everything without exception has an eternal Soul!

The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weeds of the sea have! the animals!
(Whitman 2004, 455)

One looks therefore for transcendentalism—​“Matter is not dead but alive, not
dumb but aware” (Conner [1949] 1973, 100–​101)—​and it is there. In par-
ticular, there is the value placed on the very fact of life itself—​the mystery, the
insistence, the worth. The world throbs with life and that is good. Take “Opus
from Space.” In a way, it almost comes across as pagan—​but not really. There is a
“raging to be born” and that this is a “singular honor.”

Almost everything I know is glad

to be born —​not only the desert orangetip,
on the twist flower or tansy, shaking
birth moisture from its wings, but also the naked
warbler nesting, head wavering toward sky,
and the honey possum, the pygmy possum,
blind, hairless thimbles of forward,
press and part.

All of nature pushes and shoves, trying to be born and to savor existence.

Almost everything I know rages to be born,

the obsession founding itself explicitly
in the coming bone harps and ladders,
the heart-​thrusts, vessels and voices
of all those speeding with clear and total
fury toward this singular honor.
(Rogers 2001, 426–​428)

Note, however, that although within this poem there is force and pushing and
so forth, it is not the struggle for existence and there is no blind force leading to
tragedy as easily as to comedy or to happiness. There is just an urge to being. One
does not really have to bring God into the story, although He may well be there.
Life itself is of value. We are right back with Emerson. “In the morning I awake,
and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear
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262 Darwinism as Religion

old spiritual world, and even the dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good
we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are
not got by analysis” (Emerson [1844] 1920, 197).
This said, Rogers wrestles with the problem of pain and suffering brought on
by the evolutionary process and of how we might reconcile this with a caring
God. She explores several possible ways of doing this, including two which have
both found favor recently by those traveling in the same direction as she. Again
one finds a turning to the Book of Job and an exploration of the theology given
there.5 God’s creation comes tumbling out. Forget pain and suffering. Things
are alive.
First God:

39 Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth?
or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve?
2
Canst thou number the months that they fulfil? or knowest thou
the time when they bring forth?
3
They bow themselves, they bring forth their young ones, they cast
out their sorrows.
4
Their young ones are in good liking, they grow up with corn; they
go forth, and return not unto them.
5
Who hath sent out the wild ass free? or who hath loosed the bands
of the wild ass?

Don’t argue with me. Don’t question me. I am God. I give life.
Now Rogers.

This is the only rite of holiness

I know: fierce barb of bacteria, that hot,
hot, coal, that smoldering challenge
clearing, for twelve millennia at least,
in all directions from its dark, subzero
cellar of frozen glacial rock.
This is the noise of heavenly
hosts: trumpet-​blaring chaparrals
and shinneries, cymbal-​banking greasewood
and jojodba deserts, bubble of hellbinders, slips

5
  Holmes (2009) notes the importance of Job for contemporary poets. I have tried to show that
this is a tradition with roots back through the nineteenth century—​as one might have expected.
Deliberately I quote from the King James Version to bring out the poetic parallels.
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The D iv id e Continue s 263

of heliotropes, tweakings of brush mice

and big-​eared bats, wheezings of rusty wheels,
grasshopper sparrows, autumn leaves ticking
across gravel on their paper pricks.

Continuing and concluding:

This is the only stinging, magenta-​cruel,

fire-​green huffing, bellowing mayhemic
spirituality I will ever recognize:
the one shuddering with veined lightning,
cackling with seeded consolations, howling
with winter pities, posturing with speared
and fisted indignities, surly as rock, ruder
as weeds, riotous as billbugs, tumultuous
as grapevine beetles, as large black, burying
beetles, bare, uncovered to every perception
of god, and never, never once forgiving
death.
(440–​441)

A world created, take it for what it is, and ask not about good or bad. “If God or
a Creator or a spiritual presence is all-​good and all-​powerful, as we often posit
in the Judeo-​Christian tradition, how can suffering of the innocent occur? It’s an
old, old question. Archibald MacLeish put it like this in his play J.B., based on the
story of Job: If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God” (Perry
and Zade 2012, 92, interviewing Rogers).
Contrasting, we find another approach in Rogers’s poetry, one that in a sense
makes a virtue of pain and suffering. We have seen hints of this kind of approach
in Steinbeck’s thinking—​strife and hardship lead to Progress. In Rogers’s case,
the way forward is found in the already-​mentioned, related “process philoso-
phy/​theology” of Alfred North Whitehead (1929). As in the case of Bergson
and Teilhard de Chardin, one stresses the constant motion, of becoming, of ev-
erything, and in particular one sees evolution as the greatest proof and manifes-
tation of this. Converting this thinking into theological terms, one argues—​in a
way that traditional thinkers like Augustine, not to mention Aquinas and Calvin,
would think deeply heretical—​that God and his creation too are in a state of
becoming, and that in some sense the world in which we find ourselves is as
yet incomplete (Ruse 2015a). God under this conception is co-​creator, having
voluntarily relinquished his absolute powers—​this is known as “kenosis”—​and
thus in a sense although God suffers when pain occurs he cannot prevent it. In
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264 Darwinism as Religion

fact, he suffers precisely because he cannot prevent it. All this is expressed in her
poem, “The Possible Suffering of a God during Creation.” We set right out with
a God who feels that most human of emotions, despair. Trying to get it right and
not succeeding.

It might be continuous —​the despair he experiences

Over the imperfections of the unfinished, the weaving
Body of the imprisoned moonfish, for instance,
Whose invisible arms in the mid-​waters of the deep sea
Are not yet free, or the velvet-​blue vervain
Whose grainy tongue will not move to speak, or the ear
Of the spitting spider still oblivious to sound.

Then there is the pain from the act and method of creation—​that awful
Darwinian process.

And maybe he suffers from the suffering

Inherent to the transitory, feeling grief himself
For the grief of shattered beaches, disembodied bones
And claws, twisted squid, piles of ripped and tangled,
Uprooted turtles and crowd rock crabs and Jonah crabs,
Sand bugs, seaweed and kelp.

And in the end, he doesn’t know if he has succeeded or will succeed. A feeling
that it was or will be all worthwhile.

Maybe he wakes periodically at night,

Wiping away the tears he doesn’t know
He has cried in his sleep, not having had time yet to tell
Himself precisely how it is he must mourn, not having had time yet
To elicit from his creation its invention
Of his own solace.6
(182–​183)

See here how there is nothing but unremitting labor and strife and hardship.
God cannot even take pleasure from the hoped-​for end point. He is too bound
up with what he is doing to pull back and admire or to take hope from what he

6
  “Opus from Space,” “Against the Ethereal,” and “The Possible Suffering of a God during
Creation” from Rogers (2001). Copyright © 2001 by Pattiann Rogers. Reprinted with permission
from Milkweed Editions. www.milkweed.org.
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The D iv id e Continue s 265

has done and what lies ahead and the joys of completion. Unlike Teilhard de
Chardin, who likewise sees a continuous process of creation, there is no upward
progress, nor is there the promise of Christ at the end. This could be read as a
message of despair, but process theologians draw the opposite conclusion. Our
lives are made meaningful because we are not alone. The knowledge that we are
sufficiently responsible to share with God the trials of creation is in itself a great
good and source of joy. This hardly comes through in Rogers’s poem, but it is
there in the background.
Rogers is not very consistent. On the one hand, she suggests that God is
so powerful that anything He does or says goes. On the other hand, God is so
weak that He is down in the world of evil like the rest of us. In a sense, so what?
Thomas Hardy would have empathized. A poet has the license to try out differ-
ent approaches. In another sense, why is this a fault? Surely it is open to anyone
who takes seriously the problem of evil to explore different approaches finding
value in each and all and leaving matters at that. It is the same problem. Rogers
(before her Graham Greene, and before him John Steinbeck and others) is
trying to see evil less as a problem to be explained away in the face of a good God
and more something as itself part of the positive creative process. She like the
others, therefore, turns to evolution and finds not yet further challenges to her
faith—​“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would
have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their
feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with
mice”—​but a way forward because of evolution. At the end of the nineteenth
century, the High-​Church Anglican theologian Aubrey Moore wrote: “Science
had pushed the deist’s God farther and farther away, and at the moment when
it seemed as if He would be thrust out altogether, Darwinism appeared, and,
under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend.” Continuing: “In nature every-
thing must be His work or nothing. We must frankly return to the Christian view
of direct Divine agency, the immanence of Divine power from end to end, the
belief in a God in Whom not only we, but all things have their being, or we must
banish him altogether” (Moore 1890, 99–​100). Christian authors like Rogers
would agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment.7 Appleman has it all wrong.
Darwinism does not vanquish Christianity. Christianity absorbs Darwinism and
thereby grows.

7
  With the turn to evolution, should Rogers be considered outside or opposed to the paradigm?
As with Tennyson, in part it is all a matter of self-​identification. Rogers is clearly on the other side
from Appleman. But over the 150 years or so since the Origin, there has surely been somewhat of a
shift of the dividing line (for conventional Christians) with a move toward greater acceptance of evo-
lutionary ideas. As with Copernicus so with Darwin—​what it means to be a Christian has changed.
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16

Conflicting Visions

Twin Towers
One could continue looking at other poets also trying to make the case for
Christianity in a Darwinian world. Amy Clampitt (1920–╉1994), born of Quaker
parents and raised in the Midwest (Iowa), did not start seriously to write poetry
until midlife and published only in later life. A perceptive friend wrote of Clampitt
having “periods of religious experience in adulthood that ranged from doubt
to intense Episcopalianism to disillusionment, and then to some sort of private
peace with her enduring inconsistencies,” and it comes out in Clampitt’s poetry
(Salter 1997, xiv). Influenced by Frost and before him Hardy, she dwells on life’s
pains and miseries. Charles Darwin and the death in childhood of his beloved
daughter Annie.

Think of Charles Darwin mulling over

whether to take out his patent on
the way the shape of things can alter,
hearing the whir, in his own household,
of the winnowing fan no system
(it appears) can put a stop to,
winnowing out another little girl,
for no good reason other than
the docile accident of the unfit,
before she quite turned seven.1
(68)

╛╛Actually, Annie Darwin was ten when she died.

1

266
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Con flic ting Vis ions 267

And yet this is from a poem with the title “Good Friday,” that sacred day when
the blameless Christian God met his death on the cross to save us from our
sins. How literally Clampitt believes any of this—​she writes of Good Friday as
a “therapeutic outlet”—​one feels the mystical Quakerism that senses but does
not comprehend. One has another intimation of the theology of Job, of a God
who allows and perhaps even commits what we judge evil. A Creator God whose
power is absolute and who is above good and evil. “Who has a claim against me
that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me” ( Job 41:11). This is
not the Leibnizian God, constrained by the law of noncontradiction. This is a
God of whom we are aware and in whom we are in awe, but a God who ulti-
mately is hidden from us.

4
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare,
if thou hast understanding.
5
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath
stretched the line upon it?
6
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the
corner stone thereof;
7
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God
shouted for joy?

For Clampitt, all of this is close to what is known as “apophatic” theology, where
one can only say of God what He is not—​we cannot speak of God yet to say that in
some sense He is beyond our ken and understanding. Clampitt wrestles with evil
generally and with evil as a function of nature’s creative processes. The language
may be that of earlier poets, but she should be read almost in a post-​modern way
as she tries to move on beyond the nihilism of the Darwinian world of Thomas
Hardy.
Of course, this does not end the debate and it probably never will be over.
Expectedly, Appleman had a few choice things to say about Job.

God horns in with that scandalous

non sequitur. “No,” he says,
“You don’t suffer because you sin.
You suffer because I say so.”
(Appleman 1996, 206)

In the end, all turns out nicely for Job, because God rewards him for his fidelity.
“As I always say, toadying is good for business.” Let’s just hope that God is busy
now with other things.
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268 Darwinism as Religion

It’s hard enough to bring up a family

in these troubled times, without admitting
that almighty God has morals
of a Babylonian butcher. (207)

An ongoing debate that may wax and wane but that will probably outlast us all.
Climax more than enough for now are reactions to the terrible events of 9/╉11. It
was Muslims who flew the airliners into the World Trade Center, but this made little
difference. The nonbelievers exploded with rage. Finally, will people see the damage
that religion does? Will they recognize the evil that lurks at the heart of every faith
system? “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character
in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-╉freak; a vin-
dictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infantici-
dal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously
malevolent bully” (Dawkins 2006, 31). The works poured forth, especially from a
central four, the New Atheists. The God Delusion (2006), by Richard Dawkins; The
End of Faith (2004), by then-╉student Sam Harris; God Is Not Great (2007), by jour-
nalist Christopher Hitchens; and Breaking the Spell (2006), by philosopher Daniel
Dennett. And to counter them, works by Christians showing that things are not
as simple as the nonbelievers suggest. The Dawkins Delusion (2007), by Protestant
theologian Alister McGrath and his wife Joanna; God and the New Atheism (2008),
by Catholic theologian John Haught; God’s Undertaker (2009), by Oxford math-
ematician John Lennox; and so the story goes on in large numbers. Expectedly
Darwinism is in the thick of it. If only you would accept Darwinism fully—╉meaning
something along the lines of Thomas Hardy’s views cubed—╉you would see that
Christianity is false and pernicious. If only you would accept Darwinism at its true
worth—╉an epistemological pimple on the unwashed nether regions of life—╉you
would see how our sensus divinitatis—╉a kind of theological equivalent of Skype with
God at the other end—╉makes all else irrelevant. Expectedly, just as there are athe-
ist novelists, so there are Christian novelists. Let us conclude our story by turning
to two of today’s most-╉praised writers of fiction, both of whom hold very strong
views on the significance of Darwinism, both of whom write in the light of these
views, and both of whom write in the knowledge of the renewed tensions between
evolution and Christianity. Two of today’s most-╉praised writers of fiction who hold
completely diametric views on these subjects.

Ian McEwan (b. 1948)

Not always approvingly, critics have noted how Ian McEwan’s plots are often
melodramatic, perhaps owing more to pulp fiction than they should, but for
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once this tendency plays well.2 The story Enduring Love (1997) opens with a
picnic shared by a couple, Joe Rose, a science writer, and his long-​term partner,
Clarissa Mellon, an academic. They see a hot-​air balloon in trouble—​a young
child is aboard and it threatens to take off without an adult—​and Joe (along
with five other men) rushes to help. Unfortunately, five of the six let go and the
balloon soars carrying aloft the sixth, a physician, John Logan, who finally lets
go and falls to his death. It turns out that one of the other would-​be helpers is a
young man, Jed Parry, who has a psychological affliction known as erotomania
or de Clérambault’s syndrome, so named after the French psychiatrist who first
described it. On the basis of their balloon encounter, Jed falls obsessively in love
with Joe, convinced that the feeling is reciprocated. The rest of the story is about
how this works out. For a long time, Joe’s girlfriend—​and police included—​
thinks that Joe is exaggerating. Even when Jed’s obsession turns to resentment
and he pays to have Joe assassinated—​something that fails to come off—​no one
takes Joe seriously. This all leads to so much tension that Clarissa walks out on
Joe. (Up to this point they had been very much in love but one senses underlying
issues because Clarissa is infertile.) Finally, Joe gets a gun (illicitly) and when Jed
threatens Clarissa, Joe shoots Jed (nonfatally), the police now believe him, and
Jed gets locked up in an asylum, where he spends his days writing declarations of
love to Joe. A subplot about Logan’s presence is resolved when we learn (to his
wife’s relief) that he was not there with a girlfriend but because he had given a
pair of private lovers (a fifty-​year-​old professor and his twenty-​year-​old student)
a lift, and in an almost offhand manner we learn that Joe and Clarissa get back
together and adopt a child. One presumes that this last fact is true, although
readers of another of McEwan’s novels, Atonement, will know that he is not above
playing John Fowles’s trick of multiple endings, not all of which give the reader
the happy ending he or she is hoping for.
Ian McEwan has always had a keen interest in science and this comes through
strongly in this novel—​most particularly by making Joe a science writer. One of
McEwan’s great strengths is in showing how people’s professional lives can be in-
teresting, and we get a real sense of Joe as a man who uncannily gets into the feel-
ings of scientists and their work. Although as a writer it is evolutionary biology
that really interests him—​Joe made his breakthrough into the field with a book
on dinosaurs and now we learn that it is neo-​Darwinism, particularly evolution-
ary psychology and genetics, that are the hot fields—​a basic underlying theme
of the book is that of science generally versus irrationality, especially irrationality

2
  Bradley (2009), having noted how the New Atheists speak of the world of evolution in nigh-​
biblical terms of awe and wonderment, stressing its beauty, suggests that perhaps we can think of
novelists like Ian McEwan as akin to the authors of the Judeo-​Christian fables, attempting to use
metaphor and myth to convey deep truths.
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270 Darwinism as Religion

as found in religious mania.3 Joe stands for a world run by unbroken law and the
attempt of humans to ferret out its nature. We learn that he is an atheist without
religious belief. Jed to the contrary is a man of emotions and deep religious con-
viction. From the beginning he is trying to convert (a very unwilling) Joe. On
their first meeting:

‘Look, we don’t know each other and there’s no reason why you should
trust me. Except that God has brought us together in this tragedy and
we have to, you know, make whatever sense of it we can?’ Then, seeing
me make no move, he added, ‘I think you have a special need for
prayer?’
I shrugged and said, ‘Sorry. But you go right on ahead.’ I Americanised
my tone to suggest a lightheartedness I did not feel.

It continues:

‘I don’t think you understand. You shouldn’t, you know, think of this as
some kind of duty. It’s like, your own needs of being answered? It’s got
nothing to do with me, really, I’m just the messenger. It’s a gift.’
As he pressed harder, so the last traces of my embarrassment disap-
peared. ‘Thanks, but no.’ (McEwan 1997, 25)

More specifically, expectedly, it is evolutionary biology that counts. Joe puts the
balloon incident in the language of the sociobiologists or (in human terms) evo-
lutionary psychologists. Surely letting go was the reasonable thing to do?

No failure. So can we accept that it was right, every man for himself?
Were we all happy afterwards that this was a reasonable course? We
never had that comfort, for there was a deeper covenant, ancient and
automatic, written in our nature. Co-​operation—​the basis of our earli-
est hunting successes, the force behind our evolving capacity for lan-
guage, the glue of our social cohesion. Our misery in the aftermath
was proof that we knew we had failed ourselves. But letting go is in our
nature too. Selfishness is also written on our hearts. This is our mamma-
lian conflict—​what to give to the others, and what to keep for yourself.
Treading that line, keeping the others in check, and being kept in check
by them, is what we call morality. (14)

  The English writer on things evolutionary, Adrian Desmond, wrote a best-​seller published in
3

1976: The Hot-​Blooded Dinosaurs: A Revolution in Palaeontology.

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Con flic ting Vis ions 271

A major theme of the book is the wrestling match with this dilemma. Why did
Logan do what he did when it led to his death and the others did what they did
and survived—​yet felt awful? Clearly in one sense it was selfishness and ex-
pectedly biology promotes just that. His actions were explicable, as long as one
could assume (as did his wife) that Logan was out there with an illicit girlfriend
and by hanging on he was trying to impress a much younger woman. When he
did it because it was right, that took more explaining. But one can explain it—​as
Joe at the end explains it to the wife—​in terms of some people simply being
better than others. Evolutionary psychology can accommodate this, if only to
inspire others. “The kind of courage the rest of us can only dream about.” And
note it seems to have been this kind of healing scenario that opened the path
for Joe and Clarissa to reconnect. How could one let something like this go
unanswered?
The case of Jed is somewhat more complex and ambiguous. It is made
clear in an appendix that his condition was probably triggered by incidental
social factors, which could range from a missing father through inheritance
of wealth that made possible a psychologically isolating situation to the very
excitement of the balloon incident. How far biology in the form of genetics
was responsible is left unanswered. The main thing is that we are not dealing
with a rational person and in this case religion was intimately involved. It
is interesting to note that it is admitted that religion does not normally get
so involved, suggesting that the author did this deliberately to contrast with
Joe’s atheistic rationality. Be this as it may, the overall theme is that we are
what we are because of our evolved past as much as because of individual
happenstance.

We do not arrive in this world as blank sheets, or as all-​purpose learning

devices. Nor are we the ‘products’ of our environment. If we want to
know what we are, we have to know where we came from. We evolved,
like every other creature on earth. We come into this world with limi-
tations and capacities, all of them genetically prescribed. Many of our
features, our foot shape, eye color, are fixed, and others, like our social
and sexual behavior, and our language learning, await the life we live
to take their course. But the course is not infinitely variable. We have a
nature. (69–​70)

Much is made of Darwin’s claim that human expressions are the same from cul-
ture to culture. At Heathrow airport: “I saw the same joy, the same uncontrol-
lable smile, in the faces of a Nigerian earth mama, a thin-​lipped Scottish granny
and a pale, correct Japanese businessman as they wheeled their trolleys in and
recognized a figure in the expectant crowd” (4). One is not surprised that at
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272 Darwinism as Religion

the end of the book McEwan acknowledges his debt to Edward O. Wilson’s On
Human Nature. It shows.
The dreadful events of 9/​11 hardened McEwan’s stance:

Few of us, I think, in the mid-​1970s, when The Selfish Gene was pub-
lished, would have thought we would be dedicating so much mental
space to discussing religious faith in this new century. We thought that
since it has nothing useful at all to say about cosmology, the age of the
earth, the origin of species, the curing of disease or any other aspect of
the physical world, it had retreated finally to where it belongs, to the
privacy of individual conscience. We were wrong. A variety of sky-​god
worshippers with their numerous, mutually exclusive certainties (all of
which we must “respect”) appears to be occupying more and more of
the space of public discourse. (McEwan 2006)

Saturday, a novel that appeared four years after the Twin Towers inferno—​
“Now we breathe a different air” (McEwan [2005] 2006, 37)—​shows a yet-​
deeper commitment to science, to Darwinian-​type thinking, and a like distrust
of faith and emotion-​based systems. In respects, this and the earlier novel share
plot elements. Both involve a decent human—​this time, the neurosurgeon
Henry Perowne—​in contact with a crazed human being—​this time Baxter, a
thug who suffers from Huntington’s chorea. Taking place in London all within
one day, the story is of Perowne going out to play squash, diverted down a
street because of a major rally against the proposed invasion of Iraq, where he
bashes his car against that of Baxter. Able to talk his way out of a potentially
violent situation (by noting and remarking on Baxter’s illness which has not
yet taken over his body), Perowne and his family are later (at home) terrorized
by Baxter who has discovered his address. In the end, Perowne knocks Baxter
down the stairs, and then spends the rest of the evening operating on Baxter
who has sustained a bad head injury. It is left hanging whether Perowne does
this out of altruism, simply because that is what he does for a living, or because
he knows that he is simply guaranteeing Baxter a year or two of dreadful exis-
tence as the chorea takes over.
Again, it is the life of science (or its technological implications as in neuro-
surgery) that is the underlying theme of the novel, combined with a view that
religion and all kinds of irrationality are what science combats and conquers—​
although there is an edge to things missing earlier. The operation on Baxter is a
success. None of this is Darwinian as such, but to make sure the reader knows that
it is the Darwinian metaphysics that underlies this attitude, not only is Perowne
given a Darwinian biography to read—​given the date, one speculates:  Was it
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Con flic ting Vis ions 273

the first volume of Janet Browne’s (1995) magisterial biography that had just
appeared?—​but the implications are spelled out. Like a tune that one cannot
get out of one’s head, Perowne thinks again and again of that most famous line
toward the end of the Origin: “There is a grandeur in this view of life.”

Kindly, driven, infirm Charles in all his humility, bringing on the earth-
worms and planetary cycles to assist him with a farewell bow. To soften
the message, he also summoned up a creator in later editions, but his
heart was never really in it. Those five hundred pages deserved only
one conclusion:  endless and beautiful forms of life, such as you see
in a common hedgerow, including exalted beings like ourselves, arose
from physical laws, from war of nature, famine and death. This is the
grandeur. And a bracing kind of consolation in the brief privilege of
consciousness.  (56)4

Unlike the earlier novel, the crazy one is not a religious maniac, but there is
enough to make one wary of religion, and indeed of the whole Arab/​Islamic way
of life. Perowne is strongly in favor of Progress. “Life in it [London] has steadily
improved over the centuries. For most people, despite the junkies and beggars
now. The air is better, and salmon leaping in the Thames, and otters are return-
ing. At every level, material, medical, intellectual, sensual, for most people it has
improved.” Continuing:  “He remembers some lines by Medawar, a man he ad-
mires: ‘to deride the hopes of progress is the ultimate fatuity, a last word in poverty
of spirit and meanness of mind’ ” (77). Think of Islam—​“ Waiting at red lights he
watches three figures in black burkhas emerge from a taxi on Devonshire Place”
(123–​124)—​where the males alone are allowed to enter the twentieth century—​
“But the men, the husbands—​Perowne has had dealings with various Saudis in his
office—​wear suits, or trainers and track suits, or baggy shorts and Rolexes, and are
entirely charming and worldly and thoroughly educated in both traditions. Would
they care to carry the folkloric torch, and stumble about in the dark at midday?”
(124).5
Perowne sees a plane in flames. As it happens, it turns out not to be that tragic,
but at the time of viewing he did not know this. Why was it happening? “A man
of sound faith with a bomb in the heel of his shoe. Among the terrified pas-
sengers many might be praying—​another problem of reference—​to their own
God for intercession. And if there are to be deaths, the very God who ordained
them will soon be funereally petitioned for comfort” (17–​18). You cannot

  As you know, this is not my take on the Origin, although I think it is closer to the Descent.
4

  Obviously now evolution is being opposed not just to Christianity but to all religions.
5
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274 Darwinism as Religion

win an argument against something so irrational. “Even the denial of God, he

was once amazed and indignant to hear a priest argue, is a spiritual exercise, a
form of prayer: it’s not easy to escape from the clutches of the believers” (18).
Interestingly, although Perowne’s adult daughter is portrayed as much against
the prospect of the Iraq war, Perowne himself—╉having met one of Saddam’s
victims—╉is a lot more ambivalent. (Among the New Atheists, Hitchens notori-
ously was for the war.) The only real change from Enduring Love is that McEwan
is now self-╉consciously aware that it is one thing to write against religion and
irrationality, but it would be another to include all nonscientific activity in this
category.6 Poetry is given a favorable treatment—╉both Perowne’s daughter
and father-╉in-╉law are poets, and at a crucial moment Baxter is distracted by the
beauty of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Dare one suggest that the choice of
this particular poem—╉which is printed at the end of the novel—╉is not random,
but chosen precisely because it tells of the loss of faith? It is not very psycho-
logically convincing that the poem would have had the supposed calming effect
on Baxter, but it is a crucial support of McEwan’s metaphysical world picture
that with the death of God we are on our own and our only hope comes from
humankind.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Marilynne Robinson (b. 1943)

Cross the Atlantic and turn to the novels of a woman, a Christian, who garners
the same praise as McEwan. Somewhat ironically, given themes in her fiction,
one of her greatest admirers is Barack Obama, the first black president of the
United States (Obama and Robinson 2015). Although I do not take her to

6
╛╛To be fair, it is not so much “change” as “development,” for as Clark and Gordon (2003) point
out McEwan does wrestle somewhat in Enduring Love with the limits of science and the need of
a broader humanistic perspective. McEwan speaks of “continuing a conversation” on this topic
and Clark and Gordon remark perceptively that “it’s a conversation that has clearly not come to an
end” (81).
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Con flic ting Vis ions 275

be a crude Creationist—​the first chapter of Genesis “is startlingly compatible

with the idea of evolution”—​Marilynne Robinson is as wary of Darwinism as
McEwan is enthusiastic. Her essay on the topic (that dates from 1997) contains
just about all of the standard criticisms. It promotes and cherishes selfishness.
It is anti-​Christian. “Darwinism was the appropriation of certain canards about
animal breeding for the purpose of social criticism, together with a weariness in
European civilization with Christianity, which did cavil, if anything did, at the
extraordinary cruelty of industrial and colonial civilization” (Robinson [1998]
2005, 32–​33). It is materialistic (35). It is (or at least taken to be) antimorality.
“Whether Darwin himself intended to debunk religion is not a matter of impor-
tance, since he was perceived to have done so by those who embraced his views.
His theory, a science, is irrelevant to the question of truth of religion. It is only as
an inversion of Christian ethicalism that he truly engages religion” (36–​37). It is
anti-​religion generally (38). It is itself a religion. “Faith is called faith for a reason.
Darwinism is another faith—​a loyalty to a vision of the nature of things, despite
its inaccessibility to demonstration” (39). It is so back to back with Creationism,
they are peas in a pod. It claims not to be progressivist, but it is. “I am aware that
many Darwinists do not argue that the complexity of organisms is a mark of
progress in evolution, yet the idea is implicit in their model of adaptation” (45).
After all this, the reader will not be surprised to learn that natural selection is a
tautology and that Darwinism led to both Freud and Hitler.
Turn now to Robinson’s trilogy, Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014)
for the alternative picture. The central figure is an aged Congregationalist min-
ister, the Reverend John Ames, in a small town, Gilead, in Iowa. When we meet
him in the first novel—​the time is the mid-​1950s, Eisenhower is running again
for president—​Ames is married to a much younger woman, Lila, and has a near-​
seven-​year-​old son. Ames’s grandfather was also a minister and an abolitionist,
not afraid to take up weapons for the cause. His father, a minister, had been a paci-
fist. Ames himself has had a long and sad life. His first wife, a childhood friend,
died in childbirth and the child (a girl) did not survive either. For forty years,
Ames remained a lonely widower. Then, about eight years earlier than the tell-
ing of the story, Lila had appeared from nowhere, poor and friendless—​a pas-
sion sprang up between them, they married, and the son (Robert) was conceived
and born. Connecting with Home (taking place at the same time) is one of the
adult sons of Ames’s best friend, the Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Robert
Boughton. John Ames ( Jack) Boughton is a ne’er-​do-​well, an alcoholic, who im-
pregnated a young girl (very much from the wrong side of the tracks) and ignored
both mother and child, the latter (a girl) dying at a very young age. With more
than echoes of the Prodigal Son, Jack is loved above all others by his father, but
Ames cannot stand him—​he thinks with reason that this son is downright mean.
Inasmuch as these are stories with a plot—​and it is no criticism to say that in
many respects they are more philosophical/​theological reflections exploring the
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276 Darwinism as Religion

psychology of human beings—​Gilead and Home center on the discovery (made

clear in Gilead but not introduced into Home until the end) that Jack has for ten
years been living in a common-​law relationship with a black woman and that
they have a child (a boy also called Robert). This discovery brings Ames to a love
of Jack. Speaking in his mind to his friend Boughton: “I blessed that boy of yours
for you. I still feel the weight of his brow on my hand. I said, I love him as much
as you meant me to. So certain of your prayers are finally answered, old fellow.
And mine too, mine too. We had to wait a long time, didn’t we?” (Robinson
[2004] 2005, 279).
Lila takes us back about eight years to the appearance of Ames’s future wife
in Gilead. Abused by her family as a very small child, she was stolen away by a
woman called Doll. A life of trial follows, living vagabond-​like on the road—​
this was the time of the Depression—​and then when Doll gets arrested (and
subsequently escapes and vanishes) for killing the man who was probably Lila’s
father, Lila spends time first in a brothel in St. Louis and then cleaning hotel
rooms, until she runs off to Iowa and ends (without design) in Gilead. Living in
a shack on the edge of town she starts coming to church, suddenly she proposes
to Ames—​“ You ought to marry me”—​and marriage and parenthood follow.
We are in the world of John Calvin—​​it is stressed that both Presbyterians
and Congregationalists are in the tradition of Calvin—​with a strong flavor of
New England transcendentalism. “The moon looks wonderful in this warm eve-
ning light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light
within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. So much does. Ralph Waldo
Emerson is excellent on this point” (Robinson [2004] 2005, 136). Let me isolate
three themes, one from each book.7 First let us look at the Calvinist notion of pre-
destination. This is in complete contrast to the blind randomness Thomas Hardy
extracted from Darwinism. For Calvin, God’s sovereignty is everything, meaning
that ultimately He knows all things and He decides all things. In Gilead particu-
larly, this is the underlying foundation. Ames’s first wife and child die, unexpect-
edly, when basically they should not have done. This was part of God’s plan. Ames
could have remarried but did not—​whether as part of his God-​given nature or
part of his reaction to the deaths, from which he never recovered. Lila appearing
on the scene and their subsequent marriage and the birth of a healthy child are
again part of God’s plan. And the subsequent reconciliation with Jack—​a man
born with a flawed nature—​also falls into place. None of this is chance. All of it
is the will and scheme of the Almighty. And if you are in any doubt about this, in
both Gilead and Home there are explicit discussions of predestination. Jack chal-
lenges Ames about this doctrine. It is accepted totally, although—​in a passage
identical in both novels—​Ames admits its full meaning is beyond his ken. “I tell

7
  Although from any perspective, these are major themes, I stress that I am not doing a general
analysis of the trilogy but focusing on aspects pertinent to our story.
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Con flic ting Vis ions 277

them there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God: omniscience, omnipo-
tence, justice, and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with
power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity to
grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot
hope to penetrate” (Robinson [2004] 2005, 171, 2008, 220).
The problematic issue with all systems that make God so all-​powerful is how
then one makes room for the equally important matter of human freedom.
A major intent of Robinson is to show precisely that her characters are free and
merit judgment. Ames had psychological as well as (in his mind) contractual
reasons not to remarry—​he had made a commitment to the first wife—​but
nevertheless it was in some sense his choice to lead an adult life of such loneli-
ness. Then when Lila appears, they too have a choice about marriage. Jack clearly
merits forgiveness given the concern he has for his black wife and child. It may be
that God gave him his original nature and that God was involved in the change.
But there is more. Although it is stressed that Lila has great native intelligence,
she is presented as a bit of a holy innocent or fool. Yet it is she who makes clear
that there is change and humans deserve merit for their efforts. “A person can
change. Everything can change” (Robinson 2008, 227). And Jack thanks her for
bringing comfort to his troubled soul.
Finally, think about Ames and Jack. The older man hates Jack for personal
reasons. He himself lost wife and child. Then Jack has a girlfriend and ignores
her and his child, even to the point where the latter dies and it is his own family
who take her and bury her. Finally, Ames is given the comfort of his own wife
and child. And it turns out that Jack has wife and son, and cares deeply about
them. Obviously there are all sorts of psychological causal factors at work here,
but overall and in the end it is Jack who changes and Ames who responds and
forgives and loves. No more than with the discussions of freedom in the earlier
chapters am I saying that this is all entirely satisfactory. What I am saying is that
Robinson is acknowledging the challenges and taking them on and offering an
alternative to a position that many think has been dictated by Darwinism.
Home in respects is a darker work. Although the true nature of Jack’s wife and
child—​that they are black—​is not revealed until the end, it hangs over every-
thing and we the readers know from the earlier novel what is at stake. Jack essen-
tially is looking to see if Gilead is a place that he can bring his family and settle
into. Remember, this is the town where Ames’s grandfather was a minister—​that
grandfather so deep in the movement to free the slaves that he even went to
war and lost an eye—​and who was much involved in the passage of slaves up to
free territories. Now 100 years later, blacks cannot comfortably live in Gilead.
There were once black families but they have all left and the black church was
set afire—​or an attempt was made to do so. Moreover, the ministers—​the men
of God—​are doing little about this and showing complacency. This is the time
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278 Darwinism as Religion

of civil rights demonstrations in the South, events that are being shown on the
newly acquired televisions. “ ‘The colored people,’ his father said, ‘appear to me
to be creating problems and obstacles for themselves with all this—​commotion.
There’s no reason for all this trouble. They bring it on themselves.’ ” Jack protests
and the conversation continues.

“So you know some colored people, there in St. Louis.”

“Yes. They’ve been kind to me.”
His father regarded him. “Your mother and I brought you children
up to be at ease in any company. Any respectable company. So you
could have the benefit of good friends. Because people judge you by
your associations. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s the truth.”
Jack smiled. “Yes, sir, believe me, I know what it is to be judged by
my associations.”
“You could help yourself by finding a better class of friends.”
(Robinson 2008, 156–​157)

Even the best of us are tainted. We are all marked by original sin. No better dem-
onstration could be given of the futility of hopes or claims of Progress. Without
the grace of God we are as nothing.
Lila brings up this matter of grace precisely. A major theme is that of trying to
make sense of suffering and pain. In some respects, the solution offered is that
of the poet Keats, that this world is a vale of soul making. It is through suffering
that things are made better. The authority of Calvin is invoked—​“people have to
suffer to really know grace” (Robinson 2014, 131). Lila has a taste for the more
difficult books of the Old Testament and her husband responds. “I guess I’ve had
my time of suffering. Not so much by Ezekiel’s standards. And there might be
more to come. At my age, I’m sure there is. But at least I’ve had enough of it by
now to know that this is grace” (132). As with our other Christian writers, Job is
also invoked. Ames worries that he is so happy now. Could it possibly have been
part of God’s plan that his first wife and child had to die to make possible his joy
now? And what of his own old age? He is soon going to leave a rather defenseless
wife and young child. He has no real savings or anything else. The story of Hagar
and Ishmael is raised, another mother and son without help or hope whom the
Lord comforted and succored. But ultimately it is all a mystery. Effects of the
thoughts and actions of a sovereign God.

Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult
and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t
add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it
is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense
  279

Con flic ting Vis ions 279

until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money,

or memory, or light years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a
God who is not under any obligation to the past, except in his eternal,
freely given constancy.  (223)

Robinson does not bring Darwin or Dawkins or sociobiology into her novels.
But they are there in the shadows. She is writing from within the other para-
digm, the other world picture, the other religion. “I am content to place human-
kind at the center of Creation” (Robinson 2015, 9). You may or may not accept
it. But you should see that she is very self-​conscious about what she is doing.
Presenting the case that makes Darwinism not just false in important respects
but deeply irrelevant to the human condition and to our understanding of it. “If
there is a scientific mode of thought that is crowding out and demoralizing the
humanities, it is not research in the biology of the cell or the quest for life on
other planets. It is this neo-​Darwinism, which claims to cut through the dense
miasmas of delusion to what is mere, simple, and real” (12). For her, Joe’s disqui-
sition on selfishness and altruism—​inspired by the rising balloon and that only
one hung on—​is so beside the point as to be farcical. They all had a choice, and
Logan alone showed himself a moral giant. The others were pigmies. No amount
of Darwinian theorizing is going to take credit from Logan or excuse Joe and the
others. No amount of Darwinian theorizing is needed to give meaning to the life
of John Ames, his little family, and his friends and others in his community. For
Ian McEwan, Progress is everything. Providence is a dated superstition, one that
retards the forward course of modern life. For Marilynne Robinson, Progress
is a false hope. People were no better in the middle of the twentieth century
than they had been in the middle of the nineteenth. Worse perhaps. Without
Providence, without God’s grace, we have nothing. No hope, no joy, no genuine
relationships with our Maker and with ourselves. We have come a full circle and
are back where we started.
280
  281

EPILOGUE

At the end of A Portrait of a Lady the reader is left hanging.1 Isabel has returned
to her vile husband, Gilbert Osmond. Is this going to be permanent or will she
leave once and for all, perhaps to divorce and marry Caspar Goodwood? The
last line has Henrietta, Isabel’s friend, saying to Caspar: “Just you wait.” Wait for
what? Wait for Isabel to turn up on his doorstep? Or wait until he has grown up
and forgotten her? Real life is a bit like that. Rarely do we get a happy ending.
Rarely do we get an ending. And that is our story. In the past 300 years, some-
thing really important has happened. People have come to see that there were
no miracles, no Creator God pleased with the job He had done, no promise or
guarantee that we humans are special. Like all other organisms, we have been
produced by a long, slow, natural process of change, of blind evolution and that
is it. Charles Darwin was not the only figure in this story, but he was way and afar
the most important. Whether one accepted it in whole, in part, or little at all, nat-
ural selection brought on by the struggle for existence struck a chill in people’s
hearts. We miss the import of what happened if we think of the “revolution”—​
and it is fully appropriate to use this term and to credit it to Darwin—​simply as a
matter of fact, of disinterested science. Making the crucial distinctions between
pseudoscience and popular science, and popular science and professional sci-
ence, it was at the popular science level that Darwinism struck hardest and had
the greatest effect. And seen in this light, there was something we can properly
speak of not just as a revolution in science but as a religious revolution, whether
you want to speak without qualification of Darwinism as a religion or more cau-
tiously of Darwinism as offering a new, secular religious perspective.

1
  I refer now to the original 1881 edition. In the revised 1908 edition, I read James as saying (what
he had always intended) that the return to Osmond is final. Bender (1996, 138) suggests that James is
reflecting a Spencerian observation that women are attracted to men who treat them badly.

281
282

282 E p i l o gue

It has clearly not vanquished all existing religions, Christianity in particular,

the religion against which Darwinism was formed and fought and grew and ma-
tured. Even for believers, however, the world has changed and is less obvious. It
isn’t really true that for Marilynne Robinson we are back where we started. The
great Congregationalist hymn-​writer Isaac Watts wrote not only of the sacrifice
on the Cross but also in a natural theological vein of the way in which the world
testifies to the Creator.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room
And heaven and nature sing.
Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ,
While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding joy.2

In the post-​Darwinian world, not only does nature not sing, it is hard to hear
the tunes of Heaven either. Witness the way in which John Ames turned to Job
for solace. He is part of a movement that reaches back into the nineteenth cen-
tury for both believers and nonbelievers as they tried to make sense of a world
without Archdeacon Paley’s friendly God. Confidence in Divine Providence has
been replaced by fear of those Purblind Doomsters. After Darwin, meaning has
been drained from the world and all is laid on faith. “Where wast thou when
I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.”
This is no obviously happy ending. Is it an ending at all? For some, there is
nothing. For others, there is still hope, whether from outside or from within.
Perhaps we can find value still in the world or perhaps we can find value in our
hearts. Appropriately, let us give the last word to Thomas Hardy in his 1899
poem “The Darkling Thrush,” a melancholic reflection on the existentially barren
nature of our world, acknowledging that even now for some there is something
true and beautiful to be seen and grasped. But not all of us can readily share in
the optimism. It is all so ambiguous in the Darwinian world.

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-​grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate

2
  Emily Dickinson’s style owes a huge amount to Isaac Watts, whose hymns were a major part of
her Christian childhood. Obviously she turns his message the other way (Wolosky 1988).
  283

Epilogue 283

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-​stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-​lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-​hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-​beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-​night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
(Hardy 1994, 134)
284
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  299

INDEX

Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 224–​27 “Ascent of Man, The” (Blind), 120–​21

Achebe, Chinua, and Conrad, 136n6 atheism, 100–​1, 152
Adam Bede (Eliot), 74n14 Atlantis, 235
Adams, Henry, 88n4 Atonement (McEwan), 269
Adams, J. E., 186n18 Aunt Judy’s Magazine, 52
adaptations (Darwin), 46–​47, 53, 56–​57, 60–​61, Austen, Jane, 20
91–​92, 250 Australopithecine, 222
Huxley and, 135 Autobiography (Darwin), xv
James and, 97 Awakening (Chopin), 174n6
Robinson and, 275
Weldon and, 54–​55 Bacon, Francis, 1
“Against the Ethereal” (Rogers), 264n6 “ballad of the Ichthyosaurus, The” (Kendall), 176
Agassiz, Louis, 52 barnacles, and Darwin, 55, 59, 60n2, 112, 195n3
agnosticism (Huxley), 83 Bates, Henry Walter (1825–​1892), 53, 54n4,
Darwin and, 89 55n6, 131
Swinburne and, 110 Darwin and, 53n2
Alexander, Cecil F., 24n4 Bateson, William, 71
Alice through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 108 Beach, J. W., 39n10
All the Year Round, xii, 61, 61n3, 61n4, “Because I could not stop for death”
62n5, 79n20 (Dickinson), 216–​17
Allee, Clyde Warder, 228 behavior
Allosaurus, 108 moral, 151, 164 (see also morality)
Alton Locke (Kingsley), 24–​26, 32, 36 sexual, 149, 271
anatomy, 222 social, 222, 237, 271
comparative (Cuvier), 27 Bender, B., 281n1
Huxley and, 57 Bennett, Arnold, 153n5
Anglo-​Saxon Attitudes (Wilson), 222n1 Bergson, Henri, 164n12, 187, 187n19, 189
Ansted, David Thomas (1814–​1880), 61 Bible-​Society, Carlyle on the, 37n9
Darwin and, 61n4 biogenic law (Haeckel). See ontogeny recapitulates
anthroposophy (Steiner), 234 phylogeny (Haeckel)
Anti-​Jacobin, The, 12 biogeography, 222
Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Newman), 203n13 biology, 47
Appleman, Philip (b. 1926), 253–​58 popular evolutionary, 222–​23, 238
Darwin and, 253–​58 professional evolutionary, 222–​23, 237, 270
archetypal theory (Owen), 30, 40, 40n11 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 63n6
Armageddon, 260n4 Blake, William, 18–​19
Arnold, Matthew, 84–​85, 87n3, 243 Bleak House (Dickens), 24, 28, 37n9, 72n13, 143,
Arnold, Thomas, 85 166n16, 173n4
artificial selection, 45 Blind, Mathilde, 110, 120–​21

299
300

300 I n d e x

blood, 198n7, 246n8 Chartism, 24–​26

of Christ, 197 Chopin, Kate, 174n6
degenerate (Hardy), 161, 201, 225 Christianity, 77–​80
Faulkner and, 225–​27 Cold War and, 252
Greene and, 245 Darwinism and, ix, 82–​101, 103n1, 265
Hughes and, 245 Dickens and, 36–​37
of the Lamb, 18, 203 evil and, 192
Lawrence and, 189 evolution and, 1
-​lust, 12 Hardy and, 146, 162
Stoker and, 196n5, 197–​98, 246n8 as Hebrew old clothes (Carlyle), 1
Blunt, Wilfried Scawen, 157–​58 higher criticism and, 40, 84, 94n12
blushing, 172n4, 174n7 Huxley and, 83–​84
Book of Job, Eliot and, 166n16 Kingsley and, 90
Boulton, Matthew, 10 Providential, 82n1
Bradley, I. C., 269n2 race and, 128–​29
Brave New World (A. Huxley), 224n3 race and class and, 128–​29
Breaking the Spell (Dennett), 268 sex and, 167–​68
Bridges, Robert, 155–​56 Shelley and, 37–​38
Briffault, Robert, 230n6 Steinbeck and, 231–​32
Brighton Rock (Greene), and the Book of as a story of origins, 102–​13
Job, 244n5 “Christmas 1924” (Hardy), 162
Brooke, Rupert, 208–​9 Christmas Carol (Dickens), 36, 107
Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky), 163 Clampitt, Amy (1920–​1994), 266–​68
Browne, Janet, 273 Darwin and, 266
Browning, Robert (1812–​1889), 30–​31, 99 Clark, R., 274n6
Buchan, John, 132n2, 138n8, 162n10 class
Buckland, William, 18 Christianity and, 128–​29
Buddhism, 103n1 Darwinism and, 129–​32, 143–​47
Buffon, Georges, 7, 9 Dickens and, 143–​144
Bunyon, John, 90 Eliot and, 143
“Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” Hardy and, 144–​47
(Eliot), 139n11 Origin of Species and, 144
Burnet, James, Lord Mondboddo, 9 Cleto, F., 67n10
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 170 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 31–​32
Darwin and, 170n2 compatibilism, 160–​61, 242
Burton, Richard, 51 Comte, Auguste, 23n2
Butler, Samuel (1835–​1902), 41n12, 70–​72, Conan Doyle, Arthur, 108–​9
76n18, 82n1, 205 Darwin and, 173n5
Darwin and, 70–​71 conditions of existence (Cuvier), 28
butterfly coloration, 55n5 Condorcet, Marquis de, 2
Byatt, A. S., 243n4 Conrad, Joseph (1857–​1924), 134–​38,
Byron, Cuvier and, 27 136n6, 184n17
Huxley and, 135
Caleb Williams (Godwin), 239 “consilience of inductions” (Whewell), 45
“Caliban on Setebos” (Browning), 99 Cornhill Magazine, 62
Call of the Wild (London), 66 Council of Chalcedon (A. D. 451), 68
Cambridge University, 16, 43, 53 Council of Nicaea (A. D. 325), 68
Candide (Voltaire), 14 creation, 11. See also God: as Creator
Canton, William, 122–​23 Browning and, 31
Carey, John, 234 Descent and, 89n7
Carlyle, Thomas (1795–​1881), 1, 22–​24, 37n9, Dickinson and, 115
39, 41n12, 80n21 Genesis and, 1, 32, 102, 110, 275
Carroll, Lewis, 108–​9 of God, 163
catastrophism, 27–​28 Hughes and, 246
Lyell and, 28 Kingsley and, 33
chain of being, 8 Lawrence and, 191
Chambers, Robert, 28–​29, 39n10 natural selection and, 61, 97
  301

Index 301

organic, 29 Day of Judgment, 260n4

Origin of Species and, 89n7 Debrabant, M., 60n1
Rogers and, 264–​64 “deep time” and modern science, 103–​7
Teilhard de Chardin and, 265 deism
Creationism, 7 Darwin and, 43, 88–​89
Creative Evolution (Bergson), 164n12, 187n19 defined, 14
Crick, Francis, 222 Dennett, Daniel, 268
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 89n7 Deresiewicz, W., 75n15
“Crow Blacker Than Ever” (Hughes), 246n7 Descent of Man (Darwin, 1871), ix, 44, 48–​56, 58,
Curwen, Henry, 116 78, 89n7, 97, 112, 130, 149, 273n4
Cuvier, Georges, 27–​30 Borroughs and, 170n2
Byron and, 27–​28 Eliot and, 141, 164, 171n3
Darwin and, 46 Faulkner and, 225–​26
Hardy and, 173
Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 72n12, 139–​43, 164–​66, James and, 180
171–​72, 205 Kingsley and, 203n13
Moses and, 142n12 Kipling and, 69, 133–​34
Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–​1882), xv, 43–​44, Twain and, 135
53. See also specific concepts and persons “Descent of Man” (Wharton), 66n9
Darwin, Dr. Robert, 43 design, 96–​97, 123, 253
Darwin, Emma, 56n7 argument from, 14, 16, 89, 152
Darwin, Erasmus (1731–​1802), 10–​11, 43, 63n6 Desmond, Adrian, 270n3
Darwin and Design: Does Nature Have a Purpose? determinism, 160
(Ruse), x Dickens, Charles (1812–​1870), 36–​37,
Darwinian Revolution, myth of, 56 60n2, 78–​79
Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Carlyle and, 22–​24, 37n9, 78n19
Claw, The (Ruse), x Chambers and, 61n3
Darwinian theory (defined), 87–​88 Darwin and, 60–​61, 60n2, 79n20
Darwinism Dickinson, Emily (1830–​1886), 92–​93, 95,
acceptance of, 80–​81 98–​99, 216–​18
as background, 222–​36 Darwin and, 92n10, 93n11–​94n11, 216
Canton and, 122–​23 Watts and, 282n2
coming of age, 237–​51 Diderot, Denis (1713–​1784), 3, 9–​10, 15
compatibilism and, 160–​61 dinosaurs, 107–​9
Dickens and, 78–​79 Diplodocus carnegie, 108
Eliot and, 76n18, 180n10 Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy
embracing, 122–​26 (Herschel), Darwin and, 44–​45
female sexuality and, 175–​79 Disraeli, Benjamin, 29–​30, 140, 151–​52
Haggard and, 132 Dixon, Edmund Saul, 62–​63, 186n18
Hardy and, 59, 146 Darwin and, 62n6
Hopkins and, 79–​80 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 223, 247, 251
Huxley and, 83–​84 Doppelgänger, 235
Kingsley and, 68 Dostoevsky, 163
neo-​(“synthetic” theory of evolution), 223 “Dover Beach” (Arnold), 84, 87, 274
as popular science, 56–​58, 82 Dracula (Stoker), 196–​98, 246n8
Progressionist, 82n1 drama, theory of epic, 100n16
race and class and, 129–​32 Dreiser, Theodore, 183n15
reactions to, 51–​56 “Drummer Hodge” (Hardy), 144n13
as a secular religion, 82 dynamic equilibrium (Spencer), 76
sex and, 169–​70 Dynasts, The (Hardy), 100n16,
Social Darwinism versus, 150n2 211–​12, 213n3
Darwinism and Its Discontents (Ruse), x Dyster, W., 83
Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution
Controversies (Ruse), x Eagleton, T., 146n15
Dawkins, Richard, 160, 253, 268 earth
Dawkins Delusion, The (McGrath and age of, 7–​9, 103
McGrath), 268 Byron and, 27–​28
302

302 I n d e x

earth (Cont.) E. Darwin and, 10–​11

developmental deluges of (Cuvier) genuine, 30–​32
(see catastrophism) Hardy and, 123–​27
history of, 260n4 Hodge and, 52
Eberwein, J. D., 94n11 human over-​, 123–24, 249
Egoist, The (Meredith), 170–​71 implications of, 64–​67
eighteenth century, 1–​17 by jumps (Huxley), 55
Einstein, Albert, 106 Lamarck and, 27–​29, 31
Eliot, George (1819–​1880), 23n2, 26n6, 40, Lawrence and, 187
72n12, 164–​66, 192n1, 205–​7, 219 Lyell and, 28
Darwin and, 72–​76, 164, 164n13 Mivart and, 79
Huxley and, 164n13 Plato and, 1
Silas Marner and, 172n4 “professional,” 222–​24
Spencer and, 75–​76, 141, 164 proto-​ (Empedocles), 1
Strauss and, 164n14 religion and, 36–​38
Eliot, T. S., 139, 139n11 as a secular religious perspective, ix
Ellegård, A., 62n5 Smuts and, 228–​29
embryology, 57, 222 “synthetic” theory of (see Darwinism: neo-​)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 39, 91 Tennyson and, 77–​78
Whitman and, 39n10 vital force (élan vital) and, 187
Empedocles (c490–​c430 B.C.), 1 Wallace and, 44
Encyclopédie (1751–​1772), 3 Évolution créatrice, L’ (Bergson), 187
End of Faith, The (Harris), 268 “Evolutionary Erotics” (Naden), 178
Enduring Love (McEwan), 268–​72, 274n6 evolutionary progressivism, and Teilhard de
Enlightenment, 2 Chardin, 247
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Evolution-​Creation Struggle (Ruse), x, 82n1
Influence on General Virtue and Happiness evolutionism. See Darwinism
(Godwin), 4, 7 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
“entangled bank” (Darwin), 47 (Darwin, 1872), 44, 172n4
entelechy (Aristotle), 93 Eliot and, 141
Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation, 58n9
Erewhon (Butler), 70, 76n18 Facts and Arguments for Darwin (Müller), 53n2
Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus), 17 Far from the Madding Crowd (Hardy), 62
Darwin and, 44 Farn, A. B., 54n3, 55n6
Essays and Reviews (Anon.), 84–​85 Faulkner, William (1897–​1962), 224–​27
Essence of Christianity (Feuerbach), 210n3 Darwin and, 225–​26
ethics final cause (Aristotle), 1
Huxley and, 151 first cause, and E. Darwin, 11
Spencer and, 150 First Principles (Spencer), 66n8
Eustace Diamonds, The (Trollope), 140 First Reform Act (1832), 20, 22
Evans, Marion. See Eliot, George Fontana, E., 79n20
Evelyn Innes (Moore), 152–​53 Ford, E. B., 223
Evidences of Christianity (Paley), 16 Form of the Good, 244
evil, 192–​94 Fourth Dimension (Wells), 107
free will and, 192 Fowles, John (1926–​2005), 238–​43
God and, 265 Darwin and, 240–​42
Greene and, 265 Framley Parsonage (Trollope), 62
moral, 192–​93 Frankenstein (M. Shelley), 5n3
natural, 192 free choice, and Eliot, 75n15
Steinbeck and, 265 free will. See also compatibilism; libertarianism
evolution, 7–​12. See also Progress Calvinistic, 26n5
Agassiz and, 52 Darwin and, 161
anti-​Jacobean attacks on, 12–​13 Hardy and, 160–​61
Aristotle and, 1 moral evil and, 192
Browning and, 31 freedom. See also compatibilism;
Chambers and, 28–​29 libertarianism
defined, xv Bergson and, 189
  303

Index 303

Carlyle and, 23 as a retired engineer, 90

Darwinian, 161, 240 Rogers and, 262–​65
Fowles and, 240, 242 science and, 265
Hardy and, 160 Teilhard de Chardin and, 246–​47
Hume and, 160 Tennyson and, 35
Lawrence and, 188–​91 as an unmoved mover, xvi, 14
Robinson and, 277 God and the New Atheism (Haught), 268
French Lieutenant’s Woman, The (Fowles), 238–​43 God Delusion, The (Dawkins), 268
Freudian psychology, and Darwinism, 223n3 God is Not Great (Hitchens), 268
Frost, Robert (1874–​1963), 96–​97, 192n1 “God’s Funeral” (Hardy), 210–​11
Froude, James Anthony, 40–​42 God’s Undertaker (Lennox), 268
Carlyle and, 41 Godwin, William (1756–​1836), 4–​7, 14
Froude, Richard Hurrell, 40 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 3
Für Darwin (Müller), 53n2 Golding, William (1911–​1993), 232–​36
Darwin and, 234
Galapagos (Vonnegut), 248–​51 Steiner and, 234–​35
Galton, Francis, 144 “Good Friday” (Clampitt), 267
gas cloud nebulae, 8 Gordon, A., 274n6
Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth (1810–​1865), 25–​26, Gould, Stephen Jay, 238, 247
26n7, 149n1 Grant, Robert, 28, 43
Darwin and, 60 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 227–​32
Malthus and, 25–​26 Graver, S., 76n17
Gatty, Mrs. Alfred, 52, 68 Gray, Asa, 48, 68, 88–​89, 93n10
“Genesis” (Swinburne), 110–​11 Great Expectations (Dickens), 5, 60, 135n4, 239
Genesis of Species (Mivart), 203n13 Great Tradition (Leavis), 124n1
genetics Great Tribulation, 260n4
Darwin and, 48n1 Greene, Graham (1904–​1991), 244–​48, 244n5
population, 222 Bergson and, 244
Geoffroy St. Hilaire, 60 Teilhard de Chardin and, 244
Geological Gossip (Ansted), 61, 61n4 Greenmantle (Buchan), 138n8, 162n10
geology, 28 Greif, Mark, 224n3
Gilbert, W. S., 175
Gilead (Robinson), 275–​77 Haeckel, Ernst, 55
Gissing, George (1857–​1903), 26n7, 65–​67, Haggard, H. Rider (1856–​1925), 132,
67n10, 149n1, 181 184–​86, 186n18
Darwin and, 183 Hallam, Arthur, 34–​35
Spencer and, 183 Hamilton, William, 237
Gladstone, William Ewart, 87n3, 140 “Hap” (Hardy), 99–​100
Glaucus (Kingsley), 32–​33 Hard Times (Dickens), 37
Gnophos obscurata, 54n3 Carlyle and, 23–​24
God, 82–​101 Hardy, Thomas, 59, 104–​6, 123–​27, 160–​64,
actions of unbroken law and, 91 192n1, 200–​1, 204–​5, 209–​14
Appleman and, 267 Bergson and, 164n12
C. Rossetti and, 88 Darwin and, 99, 99n16, 173, 174n7
Clampitt and, 267 Mantell and, 113n6
as Creator, xvi, 8, 29–​30, 38, 41, 68, 88–​91, 114, Schopenhauer and, 100n16
168, 244–​45, 263–​65, 267, 281–​82 Harris, Sam, 268
Dostoevsky and, 163 Haught, John, 268
Form of the Good and, 244 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 134–​38, 184n17
Greene and, 246 as a Darwinian religious novel, 138
Hughes and, 245–​46 Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 202
as a human invention (Feuerbach), 210n3 Henson, L., 60n1
Leibniz and, 267 heredity
MacLeish and, 263 Darwin and, 48n1
in nature, 91–​93 selection and, 58n8
Old Testament and, 268 Herschel, John F. W., xvi, 44–​45
“question,” 87–​101 Herschel, William, 8
304

304 I n d e x

higher criticism, 40, 84 Bergson and, 187n19

Dickinson and, 94n11 Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825–​1895), 55n4, 56–​
“Higher Pantheism” (Tennyson), 90–​91 58, 60n1, 85, 87n3
hippocampus minor, 51–​52 Carlyle and, 23
History of the Inductive Sciences (Whewell), and critical assessment of, ix
Darwin, 45 Owen and, 51
Hitchens, Christopher, 268, 274 “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce and, 51
HMS Beagle, and Darwin, xv–​xvi, 43 Spencer and, 151n3
Hodge, Charles, 52 “Hylo-​Idealism” (Naden), 178n8
Hofstadter, Richard, 150n2
Holland, Elizabeth, 216 idealism, German, and transcendentalism, 23
Holmes, J. R., xi–​xii, 56n7, 99n15 Iguanodon, 108
Book of Job and, 262n5 Immanent Will, 160, 163
Home (Robinson), 275–​278 Hardy and, 100n16, 147n16, 211–​12,
“Home burial” (Frost), 192n1 214, 218n6
homology, 46–​47 immortality
Darwin and, 55 Dickinson and, 216–​18
Haeckel and, 55 Hardy and, 209–​14
Huxley and, 55 transcendentalism and, 215–​18
Owen and, 55 Wells and, 213–​15
homophobia, 190n20 Whitman and, 215–​16
homosexuality, 194n3 Impressions of Theophrastus Such (Eliot), 76n18
Freud and, 195n3 Individual in the Animal Kingdom, The ( J. Huxley),
Lawrence and, 190n20 187n19, 250
Honorary Consul, The (Greene), 244–​48 industralism, 24–​26
Hooker, Joseph, 108 inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarck),
Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–​1889), 79–​80, 55, 68n11
80n21, 192n1 Butler and, 70–​71
Hot-​Blooded Dinosaurs: A Revolution in Inheritors, The (Golding), 232–​36
Palaeontology (Desmond), 270n3 In Memoriam (Tennyson), 33–​36, 186n18, 218
House of Mirth, The (Wharton), 181, 183n14 “In the Neolithic Age” (Kipling), 133
Household Words, 63n6 irrationality, 269–​70, 272, 274
Housman, A. E., 160
Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 120, 135 J. B. (MacLeish), 263
Hughes, Ted, 245, 246n7 “Jabberwocky,” 108
human nature, and Le Conte, 200n10 James, Henry (1843–​1916), 72, 72n13, 79n20,
humans, 114–​27 179–​80, 180n11, 281n1
Blind and, 120–​21 Darwin and, 180
Darwin and, 114 Eliot and, 180
Dickinson and, 115 Hardy and, 124n1
fight for survival and, 116–​17 Lewes and, 180
God and, 114 Spencer and, 180
Hardy and, 115 James, William, and Darwin, 97
Huxley and, 121 James the Second, King, 2
Naden and, 118–​20 Java Man (Homo erectus), 222
progress to, 118–​22 Jenkins, Jerry B., 259
proto-​ (Curwen), 116 “Jerusalem” (Blake), 18–​19
Reade and, 118 Jewish question, 139–​43
special status of, 114, 126 Dickens and, 140
Twain and, 115 Eliot and, 140–​43
Hume, David (1711–​1776), 3, Origin of Species and, 140
13–​14, 16, 160 T. S. Eliot and, 139
Darwin and, 49 Trollope and, 140
Hunter, A., 184n17 Job, Book of, 80n21, 88n4, 98n14, 192n1
Hutton, James, 7–​8, 28 Bleak House and, 166n16
Huxley, Aldous, 85, 224n3 Brighton Rock and, 244n5
Bergson and, 187n19 Holmes and, 262n5
Huxley, Julian, 85, 187n19, 247, 247n9 Jude the Obscure and, 147n16
  305

Index 305

Silas Marner and, 166n16 Lightman, B., 56n7

Tennyson and, 81n21 Lila (Robinson), 275–​78
Johnson, Thomas H., 92n9 Linnaeus, Carl, 8–​9
Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 145–​47, 204–​5 Literature and Dogma (Arnold), 87n3
Jungle, The (Sinclair), 158–​59 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 72n13
Darwin and, 60n2
Kant, Immanuel, 3, 8, 89n7, 160 “Locksley Hall” (Tennyson), 34, 77
Keane, P. J., 93n11 “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” (Tennyson), 77
Keble, John, 16n4 London, Jack (1876–​1916), 66, 139n9,
Kendall, May, 176, 178–​79, 219 149n1, 156n7
kenosis, 263–​64 Darwin and, 66n8, 156
Kim (Kipling), 133–​34, 134n3 Gaskell and, 156n7
kin selection (Hamilton), 237 Gissing and, 156n7
King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 132 Huxley and, 156
Kingsley, Charles (1819–​1875), 24–​25, 32–​33, 36, Spencer and, 156
51–​52, 68n11, 203n13 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 93n11
Darwin and, 68 Lord of the Flies, The (Golding), 232, 235
Kipling, Rudyard (1865–​1936), 69, 134n3 Lost World, The (Conan Doyle), 108–​9,
Spencer and, 133–​34 117, 154
Kuhn, Thomas, 36, 36n8, 219 Lothair (Disraeli), 151–​52
Lunar Society, 10
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 190n20 Lundin, R., 93n11
LaHay, Tim, 259 Lyell, Charles (1797–​1875), 27
Lamarck, Chevalier (later Citoyen) Jean-​Baptiste Lytton, Edward Bulwer, and Darwin, 59–​60
de, 27–​29
Lamarckism, 48n1 MacLeish, Archibald, 263
reception of, 67–​72 “Making of Man, The” (Tennyson), 219
Spencer and, 76 Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766–​1834), 17
Lankester, E. Ray, 193–​94, 214 Malthusianism, 26n7
Laplace, Pierre, 8 “Man the Philosophizer”
Last and First Men (Stapeldon), 235 ( J. Huxley), 247n9
Lawrence, D. H. (1885–​1930), 187–​91, 220 Mansfield Park (Austen), 20
Bergson and, 187, 187n19 Mantell, Gideon, 113n6
Darwin and, 187, 191 Martyrdom of Man, The (Reade), 97
Haeckel and, 187 Marxism, and Darwinism, 223n3
Huxley and, 187 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 60n1
Spencer and, 187 Maud (Tennyson), 36
“Lay Sermons” (Huxley), ix, 86 McEwan, Ian (b. 1948), 268–​74,
“Leaves of Grass” (Whitman), 39n10, 103 269n2, 274n6
Leavis, F. R., 124n1 Darwin and, 270–​74
Le Conte, Joseph, 199n9, 200n10 Wilson and, 272
Left Behind series (LaHay and Jenkins), 259 McGrath, Alister and Joanna, 268
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 14, 192 McIntosh, J., 93n10
Lennox, John, 268 McTeague (Norris), 140, 198–​200, 199n9
Lewes, George Henry, 23n2, 76n16 meaning (lack of), 99–​100
Darwin and, 72, 164 Mechanism, and Carlyle, 22
Lewis, C. S., 258–​59, 259n3 Medawar, Peter, 252
Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 15–​16 Megalosaurus, 108
libertarianism, 160, 242 melanism, industrial, 54
Kant and, 242 Meldola, Raphael, 55n6, 58n9
life, origin of, 108–​11 Melincourt (Peacock), 21–​22
Chambers and, 109 meliorism, evolutionary, and Hardy, 100n16,
Darwin and, 108, 110n5 164n12, 212, 213, 214n4
E. Darwin and, 108 Mendel, Gregor, 222
Huxley and, 110, 110n5 Meredith, George (1828–​1909),
Pasteur and, 109 170–​71, 220–​21
Swinburne and, 110–​11 metafiction, 238–​39
Life of Jesus (Strauss), 40 Metaphysical Society, 91
306

306 I n d e x

Middlemarch (Eliot), 72n12, 135n4, 164n14, “Natura Naturans” (Clough), 31–​32

206–​7, 219 Natural History of Religion (Hume), 49
Darwin and, 72–​74 Natural History of the British Lepidoptera. A Text-​book
Huxley and, 72 for Students and Collectors (Tutt), 54, 58n9
Millay, Edna St. Vincent (1892–​1950), 186–​87 natural selection, xv, 45–​47
millennialism, 82n1 Adams and, 88n4
Milton, John, xv–​xvi applied, in Origin of Species, 46–​47
mimicry, 53 Bates and, 53
miracles as a comparative process (Darwin), 64–​65
Carlyle and, 39 Darwinism and, 44, 88n4
Darwin and, 43 Dickens and, 60–​61
Hume and, 13 Gissing and, 65–​67
Lawrence and, 220 hobbyists and, 55n6
Mrs. Ward and, 86 Huxley and, 54–​55, 57–​58
nature and, 39 Lytton and, 59–​60
Paley and, 16, 43 Mrs. Gaskell and, 60
Strauss and, 40 Müller and, 53
Mivart, St. George, 79, 82n1, 203n13 Poulton and, 53–​54
Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in reception of, 59–​64
Evolutionary Biology (Ruse), x Shaw and, 72
Monk, The: A Romance (Lewis), 15–​16 “Natural Selection” (Naden), 177–​78
Moore, Aubrey, 265 Natural Theology (Paley), 16
Moore, George, 150–​53, 204n14 Darwin and, 46
Darwin and, 152 natural theology, and Origin of Species, 89n7
Huxley and, 152 naturalistic fallacy (Moore), 151
Spencer and, 152–​53 nature, 186n18
morality defined (Hegel), 3
Blunt and, 157–​58 “Nature’s Questioning” (Hardy), 209–​10
Christianity and, 148–​49, 151–​53 Naturphilosophie, 235
Darwin and, 49–​50, 149–​50, 193 Neanderthal Man, 222, 233–​36
Disraeli and, 151–​52 Nemesis of Faith (Froude), 40–​42, 148, 166n15
Dreiser and, 157 Neptunism, 7
Eliot and, 148 New Atheism, 268, 269n2
evolutionism and, 153–​56 New Grub Street (Gissing), 76, 183
Gissing and, 154 “New Orthodoxy, The” (Naden), 178
God and, 148 Newcomb, Simon, 107
Hardy and, 149, 160–​64 Newcomen engine, 7–​8
Huxley and, 149, 193 Newman, John Henry, 40–​41, 79, 203n13
Kingsley and, 153–​54 Noah’s Flood, 260n4
Moore and, 152–​53 Norris, Frank (1870–​1902), 140, 198–​200
problem of, 148–​51 Zola and, 181n12
secular, and George Eliot, 164–​66 North and South (Mrs. Gaskell), 25–​26, 60n1
Spencer and, 150, 193 Nun, The (Diderot), 15
truth and, 7
Wharton and, 182–​83 Occult Science: An Outline (Steiner), 235
Morpho Eugenia (Byatt), 243n4 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 23–​24, 140
mulattoes, 131 On Human Nature (Wilson), 252–​53, 272
Müller, Fritz, 53 ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (Haeckel), 55
Murray, John, 53n2 Lankester and, 193
Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social optimism, 218–​21
Construction? (Ruse), x Meredith and, 220–​21
Tennyson and, 218–​19
Naden, Constance (1858–​1889), 118–​21, “Opus from Space” (Rogers), 65–​67, 260, 264n6
176–​79, 178n8 organicism, 76n16, 230
Spencer and, 178–​79 Spencer and, 155n6
Nagel, Thomas, 56n7 Origin of Species (Darwin, 1859), xv, 44–​48, 58,
Narnia chronicles (Lewis), 259 107–​8, 186n18
  307

Index 307

Sedgwick and, 52 Pragmatism, American, and Darwinian

Whewell and, 52 evolution, 180n9
original sin, 192 Prester John (Buchan), 132n2
Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), xii–​xiii, 72n13, Priestly, Joseph, 10
78–79, 79n20, 140, 143–​44 Prime Minister, The (Trollope), 140
Outcast, The (Reade), 97 Princess, The (Tennyson), 36, 175–​76, 186n18
“Over-​Soul” (Emerson), 91 Princess Ida (Gilbert and Sullivan), 175
Owen, Richard (1804–​1892), 30, 40, principle of divergence (Darwin), 46
40n11, 112 Principles of Geology (Lyell), 27
Carlyle and, 23 Darwin and, 43
Dickens and, 61n3 Tennyson and, 34–​35
Huxley and, 51 process philosophy/​theology (Whitehead), 263
Oxford Movement, 40 Progress, 2n1, 18–​20
Oxford University, 16 British notion of, 3
Canning and, 12
Pair of Blue Eyes, A (Hardy), 112–​13, 174n7 Chambers and, 29
“Palace of Art, The” (Tennyson), 33 Cuvier and, 27
paleoanthropology, 232 Darwin and, 47–​48
paleobiology, 237 defined, 1–​2
paleontology, 222, 237 E. Darwin and, 11–​12
Paley, William, Archdeacon of Carlisle, 16 Eliot and, 74–​75, 219
pangenesis, provisional theory of (Darwin), and evolution and, 15, 58
Lamarckism, 48n1 forms/​interpretations of, 2
“Paracelsus” (Browning), 30–​31 French philosophes’ notion of, 2
Paradise Lost (Milton), xv German-​based notion of, 3
Park, Mungo, 51 Godwin and, 4–​7, 12
Parry, Hubert, 19 Golding and, 235
Pasteur, Louis, 109 Lamarck and, 27
Peacock, Thomas Love, 21 Lawrence and, 187–​88
Pearson, Karl, 54 London and, 156
Peel, Robert, 93n11 Malthus and, 26
Phenomenon of Man, The (Teilhard de Chardin), McEwan and, 273
248, 252 Mrs. Gaskell and, 26
Philosophie Zoologique (Lamarck), 27 Naturphilosophen and, 3
Philosophy After Darwin (Ruse), x versus progress, 2n1
Phineas Redux (Trollope), 140 Providence and, 26n5, 36n8
phylogeny, 55 religion and, 18
Darwin and, 112 Sinclair and, 159
Pickwick Papers (Dickens), 37 Steinbeck and, 229–​30
Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyon), 90 Tennyson and, 34
Piltdown Man, 222n1 progress
Pincher Martin (Golding), 235 biological (Darwin), 47–​48
“Pity of It, The” (Hardy), 161–​62 Darwin and, 214n5
“Plaint to Man, A” (Hardy), 163 J. Huxley and, 247n9
Poems of Emily Dickinson, 92n9 “Progress of Man” (Canning), 12–​13
Pope, Alexander, 8 Pterodactyl, 108
Popper, Karl, 71 Punch, 62
population, and industralization, 17
Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth), 238n2 “Queen Mab” (Shelley), 19–​20
Portrait of a Lady ( James), 179–​80
Positivism, 23n2 race
Lewes and, 76n16 Conrad and, 134–​38
“Possible Suffering of a God during Creation, The” Darwinism and, 129–​32
(Rogers), 264, 264n6 Haggard and, 132
“Potsherd,” and the Book of Job, 80n21 Kipling and, 133
Poulton, Edward B., 53–​54 radioactive decay, 103
Powell, Rev. Baden, 84 Rainbow, The (Lawrence), 187–​91
308

308 I n d e x

random variation (Darwin), 48 Meredith and, 170–​71

Reade, Winwood, 51, 97 modern, 106–​7
recapitulation, 195n3 Mrs. Gaskell and, 60
reciprocal altruism, 149 Naden and, 177
Reform Bill, 73 physical, and evolution, 8
regression, Freudian, 195n3 popular, 58, 81, 223, 281
religion pre-​Darwinian, 55
Appleman and, 258 professional, 58, 223
Darwinism and, ix–​x Progress and, 12
Eighteenth-​century critics of, 13–​17 pseudo-​, 13, 36, 48, 58, 82, 110n5, 223, 281
evolution and, 36–​38 Robinson and, 275
polythetic, 82n1 Stoker and, 197
salient features of, 82n1 Tennyson and, 34, 77
science and, 232, 237–​38, 252, 258–​59 Wells and, 202, 214
Sinclair and, 159 Wharton and, 181
Return of the Native, The (Hardy), 104–​5, 144–​45, Whewell and, 89n7
146n15, 211 Scientific Revolution, 1
Richards, Robert J., 76n16 Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, 223, 225
Ricketts, Ed, 228 Second Jungle Book (Kipling), 69
Robert Elsmere (Ward), 84–​87, 87n3, 166n15 self-​interest (Smith), 3, 24
Darwin and, 85 Carlyle and, 22
Robinson, Marilynne (b. 1943), 274–​79, 281 sensus divinitatis, 268
Darwin and, 275 sex
Emerson and, 276 anal, 189–​90, 230
Rocks of Ages (Gould), 238 Christianity and, 167–​68
Rogers, Pattiann (b. 1940), 259, 264n6, 265n7 Darwinism and, 169–​70, 179–​83
Whitman and, 260 sexual selection (Darwin), 48–​51, 114
Romola (Eliot), 62 female choice, 49, 51, 169
Rossetti, Christina (1830–​1894), 88, 102 in fiction, 170–​74
Roth, Philip, 238n2 Haggard and, 184–​86
male combat, 49, 51, 169
Sacred and Profane Love (Bennett), 153n5 Portrait of a Lady and, 180
saltationism. See evolution: by jumps (Huxley) Shaw, George Bernard, 71
salvation, 94, 114, 154, 162, 196, 203–​7 She (Rider), 184–​86, 196n4
Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 22–​23, 39 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 19–​20
Sartre, Jean Paul, 163–​64 E. Darwin and, 30
Saturday (McEwan), 272 Sidgwick, Henry, 150–​51
sauropod, 108 “Signs of the Times” (Carlyle), 22, 23
Scarlet Plague, The (London), 156 Sinclair, Upton (1878–​1968), 158–​59
Schelling, Friedrich, 3, 106n4 Nietzsche and, 159
Scholomance, 197n6 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 157, 183n15
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 100n16, 106n4 Spencer and, 157
science. See also religion; specific branch of Sister Teresa (Moore), 204n14
A. Moore and, 265 Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut), 248
Appleman and, 255 slavery, 129–​30
Blunt and, 157 Austen and West Indian, 20
British, 3, 16 Darwin and, 226
Darwin and, 44, 83 Darwin-​Wedgwood family and, 130, 132
Darwinism and, x Faulkner and, 226
Dickinson and, 93n11 science and, 235
Fowles and, 240 Smith, Adam (1723–​1790), 3
Haggard and, 132 Darwin and, 46–​47
Huxley and, 110 Smuts, Jan, 228–​29
hypothetico-​deductive (a body of laws), 45 Social Darwinism, 150–​51
Kuhn and, 36 Bridges and, 155–​56
Lawrence and, 189 London and, 154–​55
McEwan and, 269, 272 social injustice, and Godwin, 5–​7
  309

Index 309

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Wilson), 237 theology

“Solomon Redivivus” (Naden), 118–​20 apophatic, 267
Space Trilogy (Lewis), 258 argument from design and, 16
Spencer, Herbert (1820–​1903), 27, 66n8, 75–​76, Dispensationalist, 260n4
150n2, 151n3, 156n7 Huxley and, 83
Lewes and, 76n16 natural, and Dickinson, 217–​18
Spencerianism, 72–​76 Wilson and, 253
spiders, 94–​97 Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb
spontaneous generation, 108 Williams (Godwin), 4–​5, 7
Sputnik, 252, 252n1 “This View of Life” (Gould), 238
Stapeldon, Olaf, 235 Thompson, James (Bysshe Vanolis), 100–​1
Stegosaurus, 108 Thompson, William (Lord Kelvin), 103
Steinbeck, Carol, 230n6 Thoreau, Henry, 39
Steinbeck, John (1902–​1968), 227–​32, 229n5 “Through the Ages: A Legend of a Stone Axe”
Bergson, Henri, 228, 230 (Canton), 122–​23
Briffault and, 230n6 Tierra del Fuego, and Darwin, 130
Darwin and, 228–​30 time, and Hardy, 112–​13
Steiner, Rudolf, 234–​35 Time Machine, The (Wells), 107, 202–​3, 214
Haeckel and, 235 “To a socialist in London” (Bridges), 155–​56
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–​1894), Tolkien, J. R. R., 258
124n1, 194–​95 transcendentalism, 38–​40
Stoker, Bram (1847–​1912), 196–​98 transubstantiation, 197
Story of the Stone Age, A (Wells), 117 tree of life (Darwin), 46, 112
Strachey, Lytton, 71 Trollope, Anthony, 140
Straley, J., 90n8 Tutt, James W., 58n9
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Twain, Mark, 115
(Stevenson), 194–​95
Strauss, David, 40, 164n14 unconscious, and Hartmann, 100n16
struggle for existence (Darwin), 44–​4 6, 57, “uncrucifixion,” 241, 244
62, 66, 121, 149, 151, 159, 169–​7 0, understanding, as a function of mind-​imposed
261, 281 restraints (Kant), 3
Malthus and, 17 uniformitarianism, 35
Study in Scarlet (Doyle), 173n5 Ussher, Archbishop, 7
suffering, 97–​98
Appleman and, 267 Vanolis, Bysshe. See Thompson, James
suffrage, 20–​21, 24 vera causa (“true cause”), 45
Sullivan, Arthur, 175 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Sumner, William Graham, 150 (Chambers), 28–​30, 61n3
supernaturalism, and Carlyle, 39 Kingsley and, 32
Swinburne, Augustus Charles, 110–​11 Tennyson and, 34–​36
Vision of Animal Existences, A (Dixon), 62–​63
Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to vitalism, and Lewis, 259n3
Philosophy (Ruse), x vitality, 26n7, 67n10, 156n8, 182
Tarzan of the Apes (Burroughs), 170, 170n2 effects of mixed breeding on (Darwin), 199n9
taxonomy, 222 Hardy’s opposing view, 149n1
Taylor, Edward (1642–​1729), 94–​95 Voltaire (François-​Marie Arouet), 2, 14, 192
Teilhard de Chardin, 244–​48 von Hartmann, Eduard, 100n16, 106n4
Tenniel, John, 108 Vonnegut, Kurt (1922–​2007), 248–​51
Tennyson, Alfred Lord (1809–​1892), 33–​36, Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin), 59
36n8, 77–​78, 219n7 Vulcanism, 7
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy), 123–​27, 124n1,
144, 161, 173–​74, 200–​1, 212 Wallace, Alfred Russel (1823–​1913), 44, 55n6,
Faulkner and, 225, 227 68n11, 234
Thackeray, William, 62 Darwin and, 49
That Hideous Strength (Lewis), 258 Owen and, 47
“That nature is a Heraclitean fire and the comfort Ward, Mrs. Humphrey (Mary Augusta Arnold)
of the Resurrection” (Hopkins), 79–​80 (1851–​1920), x, 85–​87
310

310 I n d e x

Water Babies, The (Kingsley), 51–​52, 68–​69, 90, 90n8 Whewell, William, 45, 89n7
Watson, James, 222 Whitehead, Alfred North, 244, 263
Watt, James, 10 Whitman, Walt (1819–​1892), 39–​40, 215–​16
Watts, Isaac, 18n1, 282n2 Emerson and, 39n10
Way of All Flesh, The (Butler), 70–​71, 144, 205 Wilberforce, “Soapy Sam,” 51
Way We Live Now, The (Trollope), 140 Wilberforce, William, 85
Wedgwood, Emma, 43 Wilde, Oscar, 87n3
Wedgwood, Josiah, 10, 43 Wilson, Angus, 222n1
Weismann, August, 55n6 Wilson, Edward O., 237, 252–​53
Darwin and, 53 Wives and Daughters (Mrs. Gaskell), 60, 62
Weldon, W. F. R., 54, 58n8 Women in Love (Lawrence), 187–​91, 187n19
Wells, H. G. (1886–​1946), 107, 201–​3, Wonders of Geology (Mantell), 113n6
213–​15, 234 Wordsworth, William, 38
Wharton, Edith (1862–​1937), 26n7, 66n9, 149n1, “Wreck of the Deutschland”
156n7, 181–​83 (Hopkins), 80n21
Darwin and, 181
Haeckel and, 181 Yeats, William Butler, 98
Huxley and, 183
Spencer and, 181, 183 Zit and Xoe (Curwen), 116
Zola and, 181n12 Zola, Émile, 181n12
What Will He Do with It? (Lytton), 59–​60 Zoonomia (E. Darwin), 10, 43
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