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This is a paper in the public domain Originally a lecture in a course of public lectures on "Charles Darwin and His Influence on Science," given at Columbia University in 1909. First appeared in print in Popular Science Monthly for July, 1909, and subsequently reprinted in John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (Henry Holt, 1910). Latin spelling for Greek words, italics retained. Since a web document does not have a standard page format to use for purposes of reference, paragraph numbers are provided instead, if you wish to refer to this version of the document. They are placed within brackets and located at the right margin just before the paragraph to which they refer. If you do wish to quote from or refer to this version of the paper in a scholarly context please use its URL address, which locates it as appearing on this page on the Arisbe website: |
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[1]
That the publication of the "Origin of Species" marked an epoch in
the development of the natural sciences is well known to the
layman. That the combination of the very words origin and
species embodied an intellectual revolt and introduced a new
intellectual temper is easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years, the conceptions that had become
the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of
the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested upon treating change and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the "Origin of Species" introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to
transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of
morals, politics, and religion.
[2]
No wonder, then, that the publication of Darwin's book, a
half century ago, precipitated a crisis. The true nature of the
controversy is easily concealed from us, however, by the theological clamor that attended it. The vivid and popular features of
the anti-Darwinian row tended to leave the impression that the
issue was between science on one side and theology on the other.
Such was not the case -- the issue lay primarily within science
itself, as Darwin himself early recognized. The theological outcry he discounted from the start, hardly noticing it save as it
bore upon the "feelings of his female relatives." But for two
decades before final publication he contemplated the possibility
of being put down by his scientific peers as a fool or as crazy;
and he set, as the measure of his success, the degree in which
he should affect three men of science: Lyell in geology, Hooker
in botany, and Huxley in zoology.
[3]
Religious considerations lent fervor to the controversy,
but they did not provoke it. Intellectually, religious emotions
are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it. They
steep and dye intellectual fabrics in the seething vat of emotions; they do not form their warp and woof. There is not, I
think, an instance of any large idea about the world being independently generated by religion. Although the ideas that rose up
like armed men against Darwinism owed their intensity to religious associations, their origin and meaning are to be sought in
science and philosophy, not in religion.
[4]
Few words in our language foreshorten intellectual history as
much as does the word species. The Greeks, in initiating the
intellectual life of Europe, were impressed by characteristic
traits of the life of plants and animals; so impressed indeed
that they made these traits the key to defining nature and to
explaining mind and society. And truly, life is so wonderful
that a seemingly successful reading of its mystery might well
lead men to believe that the key to the secrets of heaven and
earth was in their hands. The Greek rendering of this mystery,
the Greek formulation of the aim and standard of knowledge, was
in the course of time embodied in the word species, and it controlled philosophy for two thousand years. To understand the
intellectual face-about expressed in the phrase "Origin of Species," we must, then, understand the long dominant idea against
which it is a protest.
[5]
Consider how men were impressed by the facts of life. Their
eyes feel upon certain things slight in bulk, and frail in
structure. To every appearance, these perceived things were
inert and passive. Suddenly, under certain circumstances, these
things--henceforth known as seeds or eggs or germs -- begin to
change, to change rapidly in size, form, and qualities. Rapid
and extensive changes occur, however, in many things -- as when
wood is touched by fire. But the changes in the living things
are orderly; they are cumulative; they tend constantly in one
direction; they do not, like other changes, destroy or consume,
or pass fruitless into wandering flux; they realize and fulfill.
Each successive stage, no matter how unlike its predecessor,
preserves its net effect and so prepares the way for a fuller
activity on the part of its successor. In living beings, changes
do not happen as they seem to happen elsewhere, any which way;
the earlier changes are regulated in view of later results. This
progressive organization does not cease till there is achieved
a true final term, a telos, a completed, perfected end. This
final form exercises in turn a plenitude of functions, no the
least noteworthy of which is the production of germs like those
from which it took its own origin, germs capable of the same
cycle of self-fulfilling activity.
[6]
But the whole miraculous tale is not yet told. The same
drama is enacted to the same destiny in countless myriads of
individuals so sundered in time, so severed in space, that they
have no opportunity for mutual consultation and no means of
interaction. As an old writer quaintly said, "things of the same
kind go through the same formalities"--celebrate, as it were,
the same ceremonial rites.
[7]
This formal activity which operates throughout a series of
changes and holds them to a single course; which subordinates
their aimless flux to its own perfect manifestation; which,
leaping the boundaries of space and time, keeps individuals
distant in space and remote in time to a uniform type of
structure and function: this principle seems to give insight
into the very nature of reality itself. To it Aristotle gave the
names, eidos. This term the scholastics translated as species.
[8]
The force of this term was deepened by its application to
everything in the universe that observes order in flux and
manifests constancy through change. From the casual drift of
daily weather, through the uneven recurrence of seasons and
unequal return of seed time and harvest, up to the majestic
sweep of the heavens -- the image of eternity in time -- and from
this to the unchanging pure and contemplative intelligence beyond nature lies one unbroken fulfillment of ends. Nature as a
whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or
animal.
[9]
The conception of eidos, species, a fixed form and final
cause, was the central principle of knowledge as well as of
nature. Upon it rested the logic of science. Change as change is
merely flux and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to
know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through
changes, holding them thereby within the metes and bounds of
fixed truth. Completely to know is to relate all special forms
to one single end and good: pure contemplative intelligence.
Since, however, the scene of nature which directly confronts us
is in change, nature as directly and practically experienced
does not satisfy the conditions of experience. Human experience
is in flux, and hence the instrumentalities of sense-perception
and of inference based upon observation are condemned in advance. Science is compelled to aim at realities lying behind and
beyond the processes of nature, and to carry on its search for
these realities by means of rational forms transcending ordinary
modes of perception and inference.
[10]
There are, indeed, but two alternative courses. We must
either find the appropriate objects and organs of knowledge in
the mutual interactions of changing things; or else, to escape
the infection of change, we must seek them in some transcendent
and supernal region. The human mind, deliberately as it were,
exhausted the logic of the changeless, the final, and the transcendent, before it essayed adventure on the pathless wastes of
generation and transformation. We dispose all to easily of the
efforts of the schoolmen to interpret nature and mind in terms
of real essences, hidden forms, and occult faculties, forgetful
of the seriousness and dignity of the ideas that lay behind. We
dispose of them by laughing at the famous gentleman who accounted for the fact that opium put people to sleep on the ground it
had a dormitive faculty. But the doctrine, held in our own day,
that knowledge of the plant that yields the poppy consists in
referring the peculiarities of an individual to a type, to a
universal form, a doctrine so firmly established that any other
method of knowing was conceived to be unphilosophical and unscientific, is a survival of precisely the same logic. This
identity of conception in the scholastic and anti-Darwinian
theory may well suggest greater sympathy for what has become
unfamiliar as well as greater humility regarding the further
unfamiliarities that history has in store.
[11]
Darwin was not, of course, the first to question the
classic philosophy of nature and of knowledge. The beginnings of
the revolution are in the physical sciences of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. When Galileo said: "It is my opinion that
the earth is very noble and admirable by reason of so many and
so different alterations and generations which are incessantly
made therein," he expressed the changed temper that was coming
over the world; the transfer of interest from the permanent to
the changing. When Descartes said: "The nature of physical
things is much more easily conceived when they are beheld coming
gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as
produced at once in a finished and perfect state," the modern
world became self-conscious of the logic that was henceforth to
control it, the logic of which Darwin's "Origin of Species" is
the latest scientific achievement. Without the methods of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and their successors in astronomy, physics, and chemistry, Darwin would have been helpless in the organic sciences. But prior to Darwin the impact of the new scientific method upon life, mind, and politics, had been arrested,
because between these ideal or moral interests and the inorganic
world intervened the kingdom of plants and animals. The gates of
the garden of life were barred to the new ideas; and only
through this garden was there access to mind and politics. The
influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition,
and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and
morals and life. When he said of species what Galileo had said
of the earth, e pur se muove, he emancipated, once for all,
genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions
and looking for explanations.
[12]
The exact bearings upon philosophy of the new logical outlook
are, of course, as yet, uncertain and inchoate. We live in the
twilight of intellectual transition. One must add the rashness
of the prophet to the stubbornness of the partisan to venture a
systematic exposition of the influence upon philosophy of the
Darwinian method. At best, we can but inquire as to its general
bearing -- the effect upon mental temper and complexion, upon the
body of half-conscious, half-instinctive intellectual aversions
and preferences which determine, after all, our more deliberate
intellectual enterprises. In this vague inquiry there happens to
exist as a kind of touchstone a problem of long historic currency that has also been discussed in Darwinian literature. I refer
to the old problem of design versus chance, mind versus matter,
as the causal explanation, first or final, of things.
[13]
As we have already seen, the classic notion of species carried with it the idea of purpose. In all living forms, a specific type is present directing the earlier stages of growth to
the realization of its own perfection. Since this purposive
regulative principle is not visible to the senses, it follows
that it must be an ideal or rational force. Since, however, the
perfect form is gradually approximated through the sensible
changes, it also follows that in and through a sensible realm a
rational ideal force is working out its own ultimate manifestation. These inferences were extended to nature: (a) She does
nothing in vain; but all for ulterior purpose. (b) Within natural sensible events there is therefore contained a spiritual causal force, which as spiritual escapes perception, but is apprehended by an enlightened reason. (c) The manifestation of this
principle brings about a subordination of matter and sense to
its own realization, and this ultimate fulfillment is the goal
of nature and of man. The design argument thus operated in two
directions. Purposefulness accounted for the intelligibility of
nature and the possibility of science, while the absolute or
cosmic character of this purposefulness gave sanction and worth
to the moral and religious endeavors of man. Since was underpinned and morals authorized by one and the same principle, and
their mutual agreement was eternally guaranteed.
[14]
This philosophy remained, in spite of sceptical and polemic
outbursts, the official and the regnant philosophy of Europe for
over two thousand years. The expulsion of fixed first and final
causes from astronomy, physics, and chemistry had indeed given
the doctrine something of a shock. But, on the other hand, increased acquaintance with the details of plant and animal life
operated as a counterbalance and perhaps even strengthened the
argument from design. The marvelous adaptations of organisms to
their environment, of organs to the organism, of unlike parts of
a complex organ--like the eye--to the organ itself; the foreshadowing by lower forms of the higher; the preparation in earlier stages of growth for organs that only later had their functioning--these things were increasingly recognized with the
progress of botany, zoology, paleontology, and embryology. Together, they added such prestige to the design argument that by
the late eighteenth century it was, as approved by the sciences
of organic life, the central point of theistic and idealistic
philosophy.
[15]
The Darwinian principle of natural selection cut straight
under this philosophy. If all organic adaptations are due simply
to constant variation and the elimination of those variations
which are harmful in the struggle for existence that is brought
about by excessive reproduction, there is no call for a prior
intelligent causal force to plan and preordain them. Hostile
critics charged Darwin with materialism and with making chance
the cause of the universe.
[16]
Some naturalists, like Asa Gray, favored the Darwinian
principle and attempted to reconcile it with design. Gray held
to what may be called design on the installment plan. If we
conceive the "stream of variations" to be itself intended, we
may suppose that each successive variation was designed from the
first to be selected. In that case, variation, struggle, and
selection simply define the mechanism of "secondary causes"
through which the "first cause" acts; and the doctrine of design
is none the worse off because we know more of its modus
operandi.
[17]
Darwin could not accept this mediating proposal. He admits
or rather he asserts that it is "impossible to conceive this
immense and wonderful universe including man with his capacity
of looking far backwards and far into futurity as the result of
blind chance or necessity."(1) But nevertheless he holds that since
variations are in useless as well as useful directions, and
since the latter are sifted out simply by the stress of the conditions of struggle for existence, the design argument as applied to living beings is unjustifiable; and its lack of support
there deprives it of scientific value as applied to nature in
general. If the variations of the pigeon, which under artificial
selection give the pouter pigeon, are not preordained for the
sake of the breeder, by what logic do we argue that variations
resulting in natural species are pre-designed?(2)
[18]
So much for some of the more obvious facts of the discussion of design versus chance, as casual principle of nature and
of life as a whole. We brought up this discussion, you recall,
as a crucial instance. What does our touchstone indicate as to
the bearing of Darwinian ideas upon philosophy? In the first
place, the new logic outlaws, flanks, dismisses -- what you will -- one type of problems and substitutes for it another type. Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute
finalities in order to explore specific values and the specific
conditions that generate them.
[19]
Darwin concluded that the impossibility of assigning the
world to chance as a whole and to design in its parts indicated
the insolubility of the question. Two radically different
reasons, however, may be given as to why a problem is insoluble.
One reason is that the problem is too high for intelligence; the
other is that the question in its very asking makes assumptions
that render the question meaningless. The latter alternative is
unerringly pointed to in the celebrated case of design versus
chance. Once admit that the sole verifiable or fruitful object
of knowledge is the particular set of changes that generate the
object of study together with the consequences that then flow
from it, and no intelligible question can be asked about what,
by assumption, lies outside. To assert -- as is often asserted -- that specific values of particular truth, social bonds and forms
of beauty, if they can be shown to be generated by concretely
knowable conditions, are meaningless and in vain; to assert that
they are justified only when they and their particular causes
and effects have all at once been gathered up into some inclusive first cause and some exhaustive final goal, is intellectual
atavism. Such argumentation is reversion to the logic that explained the extinction of fire by water through the formal
essence of acqueousness and the quenching of thirst by water
through the final cause of acqueousness. Whether used in the
case of the special event or that of life as a whole, such logic
only abstracts some aspect of the existing course of events in
order to reduplicate it as a petrified eternal principle by
which to explain the very changes of which it is the formalization.
[20]
When Henry Sidgwick casually remarked in a letter that as
he grew older his interest in what or who made the world was
altered into interest in what kind of world it is anyway, his
voicing of a common experience of our day illustrates also the
nature of that intellectual transformation effected by the
Darwinian logic. Interest shifts from the wholesale essence back
of special changes to the question of how special changes serve
and defeat concrete purposes; shifts from an intelligence that
shaped things once for all to the particular intelligences
which things are even now shaping; shifts from an ultimate goal
of good to the direct increments of justice and happiness that
intelligent administration of existent conditions may beget and
that present carelessness or stupidity will destroy or forego.
[21]
In the second place, the classic type of logic inevitably
set philosophy upon proving that life must have certain qualities and values -- no matter how experience presents the matter -- because of some remote cause and eventual goal. The duty of
wholesale justification inevitably accompanies all thinking that
makes the meaning of special occurrences depend on something
that once and for all lies behind them. The habit of derogating
from present meanings and uses prevents our looking the facts of
experience in the face; it prevents serious acknowledgment of
the evils they present and serious concern with the goods they
promise but do not as yet fulfill. It turns thought to the
business of finding a wholesale transcendent remedy for the one
and guarantee for the other. One is reminded of the way many
moralists and theologians greeted Herbert Spencer's recognition
of a unknowable energy from which welled up the phenomenal
physical processes without and the conscious operations within.
Merely because Spencer labeled this unknowable energy "God,"
this faded piece of metaphysical goods was greeted as an important and grateful concession to the reality of the spiritual
realm. Were it not for the deep hold of the habit of seeking
justification for ideal values in the remote and transcendent,
surely this reference of them to an unknowable absolute would be
despised in comparison with the demonstrations of experience
that knowable energies are daily generating about us precious
values.
[22]
The displacing of this wholesale type of philosophy will
doubtless not arrive by sheer logical disproof, but rather by
growing recognition of its futility. Were it a thousand times
true that opium produces sleep because of its dormitive energy,
yet the inducing of sleep in the tired, and the recovery to
waking life of the poisoned, would not be thereby one least step
forwarded. And were it a thousand times dialectically demonstrated that life as a whole is regulated by a transcendent principle to a final inclusive goal, none the less truth and error,
health and disease, good and evil, hope and fear in the concrete, would remain just what and where they now are. To improve
our education, to ameliorate our manners, to advance our politics, we must have recourse to specific conditions of generation.
[23]
Finally, the new logic introduces responsibility into the
intellectual life. To idealize and rationalize the universe at
large is after all a confession of inability to master the
course of things that specially concerns us. As long as mankind
suffered from this impotency, it naturally shifted a burden of
responsibility that it could not carry over to the more competent shoulders of the transcendent cause. But if insight into
specific conditions of value and into specific consequences of
ideas is possible, philosophy must in time become a method of
locating and interpreting the more serious of the conflicts that
occur in life, and a method of projecting ways for dealing with
them: a method of moral and political diagnosis and prognosis.
[24]
The claim to formulate a priori the legislative constitution of the universe is by its nature a claim that may lead to
elaborate dialectic developments. But it is also one that
removes these very conclusions from subjection to experimental
test, for, by definition, these results make no differences in
the detailed course of events. But a philosophy that humbles its
pretensions to the work of projecting hypotheses for the education and conduct of mind, individual and social, is thereby
subjected to test by the way in which the ideas it propounds
work out in practice. In having modesty forced upon it, philosophy also acquires responsibility.
[25]
Doubtless I seem to have violated the implied promise of my
earlier remarks and to have turned both prophet and partisan.
But in anticipating the directions of the transformations in
philosophy to be wrought by the Darwinian genetic and experimental logic. I do not profess to speak for any save those who
yield themselves consciously or unconsciously to this logic. No
one can fairly deny that at present there are two effects of the
Darwinian mode of thinking. On the one hand, there are making
many sincere and vital efforts to revise our traditional philosophic conceptions in accordance with its demands. On the other
hand, there is as definitely a recrudescence of absolutistic
philosophies; an assertion of a type of philosophic knowing distinct from that of the sciences, one which opens to us another
kind of reality from that to which the sciences give access; an
appeal through experience to something that essentially goes
beyond experience. This reaction affects popular creeds and
religious movements as well as technical philosophies. The very
conquest of the biological sciences by the new ideas has led
many to proclaim an explicit and rigid separation of philosophy
from science.
[26]
Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract
logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions,
deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover,
the conviction persists -- though history shows it to be a hallucination -- that all the questions that the human mind has asked
are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives
that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual
progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions
together with both alternatives they assume -- an abandonment that
results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent
interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions
are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions
corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference
take their place. Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new
methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by
the scientific revolution that found its climax in the "Origin
of Species."
(1) "Life and Letters," Vol.I., p. 282; cf. 285.
(2) "Life and Letters," Vol. II. P. 146, 170, 245; Vol. I., pp. 283-84. See also the closing portion of his "Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication."
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