CHAPTER I.

THE SECRET OF DARWIN’S GREATNESS.

Charles Robert Darwin was born at Shrewsbury on February 12th, 1809, the year which witnessed the birth of Alfred Tennyson, W. E. Gladstone, and Abraham Lincoln.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, born in the same year, delighted to speak of the good company in which he came into the world. On January 27th, 1894, I had the great pleasure of sitting next to him at a dinner of the Saturday Club in Boston, and he then spoke of the subject with the same enthusiasm with which he deals with it in his writings; mentioning the four distinguished names, and giving a brief epigrammatic description of each with characteristic felicity. Dr. Holmes further said that he remembered with much satisfaction an occasion on which he was able to correct Darwin on a matter of scientific fact. He could not remember the details, but we may hope for their ultimate recovery, for he said that Darwin had written a courteous reply accepting the correction.

[Sidenote: HIS FAMILY.]

Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), was a man of great genius. He speculated upon the origin of species, and arrived at views which were afterwards independently enunciated by Lamarck. He resembled this great zoologist in fertility of imagination, and also in the boldness with which he put forward suggestions, many of which were crude and entirely untested by an appeal to facts. The poetical form in which a part of his work was written was, doubtless, largely due to the traditions and customs of the age in which he lived.

Robert Waring (1766–1848), the father of Charles Darwin, was the second son of Erasmus. He married a daughter of the great Josiah Wedgwood. Although his mother died when he was only eight years old, and Darwin remembered very little of her, there is evidence that she directed his attention to Nature (“Autobiography,” p. 28, footnote). Dr. Darwin followed his father’s profession, commencing a very successful medical practice at Shrewsbury before he was twenty-one. He was a man of great penetration, especially in the discernment of character--a power which was of the utmost value to him in his profession. Dr. Darwin had two sons and four daughters: Charles was the younger son and fourth child, his brother Erasmus being the third.

Even in this mere outline there is evidence of hereditary genius in the Darwin family--evidence which becomes irresistible when all available details of every member of the family are brought together, as they are in the great “Life and Letters.” When it is further remembered that two of Charles Darwin’s sons have achieved distinction as scientific investigators, it will be admitted that the history of the family affords a most striking example of hereditary intellectual power.

There is nothing in this history to warrant the belief that the nature and direction of hereditary genius receive any bias from the line of intellectual effort pursued by a parent. We recognise the strongest evidence for hereditary capacity, but none at all for the transmission of results which follow the employment of capacity. Thus Erasmus inherited high intellectual power, with a bias entirely different from that of his younger brother Charles--his interests being literary and artistic rather than scientific. The wide difference between the brothers seems to have made a great impression upon Charles, for he wrote:--

“Our minds and tastes were, however, so different, that I do not think I owe much to him intellectually. I am inclined to agree with Francis Galton in believing that education and environment produce only a small effect on the mind of anyone, and that most of our qualities are innate” (“Life and Letters,” 1887, p. 22).

Equally significant is the fact that Professor George Darwin’s important researches in mathematics have been applied to astronomy--subjects which were not pursued by his father.

[Sidenote: CHARACTER AND POWERS.]

It appears probable that Charles Darwin’s unique power was largely due to the inheritance of the imagination of his grandfather combined with the acute observation of his father. Although he possessed an even larger share of both these qualities than his predecessors, it is probable that he owed more to their co-operation than to the high degree of their development.

It is a common error to suppose that the intellectual powers which make the poet or the historian are essentially different from those which make the man of science. Powers of observation, however acute, could never make a scientific discoverer; for discovery requires the creative effort of the imagination. The scientific man does not stumble upon new facts or conclusions by accident; he finds what he looks for. The problem before him is essentially similar to that of the historian who tries to create an accurate and complete picture of an epoch out of scattered records of contemporary impressions more or less true, and none wholly true. Fertility of imagination is absolutely essential for that step from the less to the more perfectly known which we call discovery.

But fertility of imagination alone is insufficient for the highest achievement in poetry, history, or science; for in all these subjects the strictest self-criticism and the soundest judgment are necessary in order to ensure that the results are an advance in the direction of the truth. A delicately-adjusted balance between the powers of imagination and the powers which hold imagination in check, is essential in the historian who is to provide us with a picture of a past age, which explains the mistaken impression gained by a more or less prejudiced observer who saw but a small part of it from a limited standpoint, and has handed down his impression to us. A poem which sheds new light upon the relation between mind and mind, requires to be tested and controlled by constant and correct observation, like a hypothesis in the domain of the natural sciences.

It is probable, then, that the secret of Darwin’s strength lay in the perfect balance between his powers of imagination and those of accurate observation, the creative efforts of the one being ever subjected to the most relentless criticism by the employment of the other. We shall never know, I have heard Professor Michael Foster say, the countless hypotheses which passed through the mind of Darwin, and which, however wild and improbable, were tested by an appeal to Nature, and were then dismissed for ever.

Darwin’s estimate of his own powers is given with characteristic candour and modesty in the concluding paragraph of his “Autobiography” (“Life and Letters,” 1887, p. 107):--

“Therefore my success as a man of science, whatever this may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. Of these, the most important have been--the love of science--unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject--industry in observing and collecting facts--and a fair share of invention as well as of common sense. With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that I should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points.”

We also know from other sources that Darwin looked upon the creative powers as essential to scientific progress. Thus he wrote to Wallace in 1857: “I am a firm believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation.” He also says in the “Autobiography”: “I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.”

[Sidenote: VALUE OF HYPOTHESIS.]

I have thought it worth while to insist thus strongly on the high value attached by Darwin to hypothesis, controlled by observation, in view of certain recent attacks upon this necessary weapon for scientific advance. Thus Bateson, in his “Materials for the Study of Variation” (London, 1894), p. 7, says: “In the old time the facts of Nature were beautiful in themselves and needed not the rouge of speculation to quicken their charm, but that was long ago before Modern Science was born.” The author does not specify the period in the history of science when discovery proceeded without hypothesis. A study of the earlier volumes of the _Philosophical Transactions_ reveals a far greater interest in speculation than in the facts of Nature. We can hardly call those ages anything but speculative which received with approval the suggestions that geese were developed from barnacles which grew upon trees; that swallows hibernated at the bottom of lakes; that the Trade-winds were due to the breath of a sea-weed. Bateson’s statement requires to be reversed in order to become correct. Modern science differs from the science of long ago in its greater attention to the facts of Nature and its more rigid control over the tendency to hypothesis; although hypothesis remains, and must ever remain, as the guide and inspirer of observation and the discovery of fact.[A] Although Darwin has kindled the imagination of hundreds of workers, and has thus been the cause of an immense amount of speculation, science owes him an even larger debt for the innumerable facts discovered under the guidance of this faculty.