Flesh in the Age of Reason (57 page)

Darwin, too, had enormous faith in stimulants. He advised opium for many complaints: for instance, for sleepwalking, ‘Opium in large doses’. His generous prescriptions may well have been responsible for the addiction of his friend and patient, Josiah Wedgwood’s son, Tom Wedgwood. Treating James Watt’s daughter, wasting away with what was evidently tuberculosis, Darwin energetically tried strong drugs. ‘The principal thing, which can be done in these cases,’ he explained, ‘is by some stimulus a
little
greater than natural, and
uniformly
taken for months or years, to invigorate the digestive power.’

Viewing life through the daily practice of medicine, seeing how illness affected the spirits and the mind and medicines like opium produced counter-effects, Darwin was a materialist through and through. ‘Dr Darwin often used to say’, remembered the pious Quaker Mrs Schimmelpenninck, a close acquaintance who admired his skills yet mistrusted his brisk irreverence:

Man is an eating animal, a drinking animal, and a sleeping animal, and one placed in a material world, which alone furnishes all the human animal can desire. He is gifted besides with knowing faculties, practically to explore and to apply the resources of this world to his use. These are realities. All else is nothing; conscience and sentiment are mere figments of the imagination.

(Surely, in male company, Darwin used a saltier, or less euphemistic, phrase than ‘a sleeping animal’?)

Darwin’s early writings show him an advocate of classic medical moderation. But, as a Brunonian, he came round to recommending the consumption of large quantities of rich and stimulating food. ‘Eat or be eaten!’ he declared, thereby hinting at the biological truth of
the Hobbesian view of mankind. Like his fellow Lichfieldian Samuel Johnson, he was fond of cream and sugar, and so became exceedingly fat. He grew, however, extremely suspicious of alcohol: it brought on his gout, and he feared the ill-effects of drunkenness. In short, man was, for Darwin, not principally
homo rationalis
or
homo rationis capax
, not primarily a thinking creature, still less a disembodied soul: he was flesh and blood.

Darwin probed the interaction of body and mind. Mental disturbances were consequences of physical disease. Following earlier critical Deists, Darwin treated what he considered morbid religious beliefs as illnesses. Sections of
Zoonomia
dealt with such conditions as self-starvation, masochistic tendencies, self-destructiveness, suicide, morbid fears and anxieties, all largely put down to physiological dysfunctions mediated through the distorting lens of religion, as in his analysis of ‘superstitious hope’: ‘In India devotees consign themselves by vows to most painful and unceasing tortures… while in our part of the globe fasting and mortification, as flagellation, has been believed to please a merciful deity!’ Of that he documented an example close to home:

Mr —, a clergyman, formerly of this neighbourhood, began to bruise and wound himself for the sake of religious mortification, and passed much time in prayer, and continued whole nights alone in the church. As he had a wife and family of small children, I believed the case to be incurable; as otherwise the affection and employment in his family connections would have opposed the beginning of this insanity. He was taken to a madhouse without effect, and after he returned home, continued to beat and bruise himself, and by this kind of mortification, and by sometimes long fasting, he at length became emaciated and died.

The influence was not all one way: consciousness in turn affected the body. Stammering – a matter dear to him because he himself had a notorious stammer – was not simply a physical malfunction but a psychological consequence of anxiety. Darwin likewise pointed to the psychological roots of impotence.

A disposition to reduce the lofty to the material, the mysterious to
the intelligible, pervades Darwin’s thought. Discussing the aesthetics of nature he explained, in a manner owing much to Hartley – and, as it were, prefiguring Freud – how our enjoyment of the soft contours of hills derives from the infant’s experience of fingering the breast and sucking the nipple. The idea of beauty arises as a result of associating the ‘female bosom’ with generosity and fertility – an association which in time becomes insensible or subliminal: ‘Hence at our maturer years, when any object of vision is presented to us, which by its waving or spiral lines bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom… we feel a general glow of delight, which seems to influence all our senses.… This animal attraction is love.’ Early tactile experiences thus imprinted themselves on the developing imagination, built up associations, and were rendered permanent in the brain. Darwin thus showed the psycho-physiological basis of Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’.

Like Blake, but for different reasons, Darwin the materialist championed sexual expression. Panegyrizing love as ‘the purest source of human felicity, the cordial drop in the otherwise vapid cup of life’, he sired fourteen children, twelve of them legitimate.
The Temple of Nature
was a paean to the ‘Deities of Sexual Love’, for they it was who propelled evolutionary progress through the superfecundity of the generative powers. The arc of life itself rose from asexual to sexual reproduction, which was ‘the chef d’œuvre, the master-piece of nature’, not only improving and diversifying the stock, but creating more cosmic happiness as well.

In thus hailing these deities, Darwin conscripted pagan mythology to the cause of his scientific botany, invoking a cast of nymphs and sylphs in fables of botanical and zoological processes. The familiar Greek myths, Darwin explained, were anthropomorphic and figurative representations of natural truths: pagan mythology was preoccupied by love precisely because natural man – before the wretched triumph of Christian asceticism! – had an intuitive awareness of how nature was driven by sexual impulses. Like Blake, Darwin offered creation myths of his own, supplanting the Bible.

Numerous contemporary radical doctors adopted materialist
slants upon the human condition, notably Darwin’s friend, Thomas Beddoes, discussed in the following chapter. What makes Darwin unique is that he translated his materialism into a comprehensive theory of biological evolution. In a total reconceptualization of the Chain of Being as upheld by Ralph Cudworth and by Pope’s
Essay on Man
, Darwin reasoned that life had not been created in the Garden of Eden but had arisen naturally and gradually, by stages, from the most elemental microscopic stuff. Everything contained some basic potential or energy. By continual exercise of that life force – which, in the case of higher creatures, eventually burgeoned into conscious will – existence became ever more intricate and full of capabilities. A struggle for survival resulted from the superfecundity of nature: the strong defeated the weak, the sophisticated the simple.

Evolution exhibited an imperceptible rise from mere sensation to irritability, will (volition) and finally consciousness. Consciousness in turn produced complex associations and ideas; by a mechanism we would nowadays tend to call ‘Lamarckian’, such culture could be inherited. This inheritance of acquired characteristics shows that, while Darwin was a committed materialist, he fully valued the (materially based) mind and its role in the transgenerational transmission of culture. Nature, as the Greek atomists had contended, is everywhere in motion, and creatures are ever adapting themselves to their environment – ‘the hares and partridges of the latitudes which are long buried in snow, become white during the winter months’. Domestication, moreover, brings ‘great changes’, transmitted from generation to generation, as in the breeding of pedigree pets and livestock.

The face of nature is thus undergoing ceaseless change. The starting-point for understanding its dynamics lay for Darwin in the inherent motility possessed by organized matter: ‘In every contraction of the fibre there is an expenditure of the sensorial power, or spirit of animation.’ Living beings do not react solely in a mechanical billiard-ball manner to external pressures but possess an inherent responsiveness of their own, a capacity to interact with the environment.

Fibres contract, producing ‘irritation’; irritation leads to ‘sensation’, and in their turn, the tribunals of pleasure and pain generate desire and aversion, giving rise to the superior plane of volition, that is, a creature’s capacity to act in the light of pleasure and pain sensations. Volition, Darwin insisted, drawing on Hartley and Priestley, should not be confused with the discredited theological conception of free will, which was tantamount to an arbitrary whim.

Probing the functions of the mind, Darwin addressed the links between volition and habit. ‘The ingenious Dr Hartley in his work on man,’ he stated, ‘and some other philosophers, have been of the opinion, that our immortal part acquires during this life certain habits of action or of sentiment, which become for ever indissoluble, continuing after death in a future state of existence.’ Darwin naturalized this insight: ‘I would apply this ingenious idea to the generation or production of the embryon, or new animal, which partakes so much of the form and propensities of the parent.’ Frequent repetition of an action, he explained, patterns behaviour; once habits are established, subsequent performance demands less conscious play of mind. At the keyboard the tyro thus has to give all his concentration, whereas the seasoned pianist can, while playing expertly, attend to other things as well. As for Hartley, habit does not supersede volition, it frees it to operate on a higher plateau, forming a better adaptation to the complex demands on creatures needing to do more than one thing at once.

This capacity to advance from isolated acts to behaviour patterns supplied Darwin with a comprehensive model for organic progress. Animals – humans included – are not born inherently endowed with repertoires of know-how and skills – schooled in Locke, Darwin had no truck with ‘innate ideas’ or their Scottish ‘commonsense’ variant. Rather, he noted, with repetition of particular actions, habits form which, undergoing modification over time, tailor behaviour to environmental opportunities and niches. The sanctions of pleasures and pains force organisms to learn and, through learning, to progress. Sense responses translate, via habit, into the volition which gives creatures – some more than others – the capacity to be progressive.
Intelligent materialist thinking resolved the needless mysteries of nature.

What enables such adaptive behaviour to assume truly complex forms, especially in humans, is a further power of the organism: the association of ideas as classically formulated by Locke. Many higher creatures act intelligently, but only humans have the capacity to form complex ideas. Building on Hartley, Darwin held that the expression of emotion – anger, fear, laughter – comprises the learnt product of chains of responses, transmitted from parents to offspring over the generations by the power of imitation.

Association was crucial to Darwin’s concept of evolution and progress. It is through that mechanism that behaviour achieves ever more complex expression, generating, for instance, the sense of beauty and feelings of sympathy which create mutual affection among sociable animals. Through imagination, the brain-based mind becomes the storehouse of experience. And in turn, the imagination plays a crucial role in reproduction, in shaping the future.

Controversy had long raged over the mechanics of generation and heredity. Darwin repudiated the ‘preformationism’ popular with the early mechanical philosophers – for him, foetal growth amounted to far more than the mechanistic enlargement of microscopic parts (like a balloon being blown up) that were ‘given’ from the dawn of time. Offspring did not remain carbon copies down the generations: in all its manifestations innatism was mistaken. Most importantly, he was convinced that mind, as an integral part of the organism, had a part to play in hereditary transmission to the offspring. Such views were not uncommon, for folklore and certain medical theorists alike credited to the mother’s imagination a pathological power to impress its contents upon the embryo at conception – ‘monstrous’ births had long been explained that way. This view was rejected by Darwin, but he did propose an analogous (and equally sexist) doctrine – that it is the
male
imagination which impresses itself upon the conceptus. A mechanism was thus provided whereby ‘improvements’ – products of experience over time – could be passed on to offspring: as with his contemporary Lamarck, Darwin’s evolutionary theory programmed
in the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It might thus be called a secular version of the ‘traducian’ theory of the implantation of the soul.

Darwin held sexual reproduction to be optimal: simpler, pre-sexual modes of reproduction led to deterioration over the generations, as was evident in the case of bulbs. In any case, sexual coupling provided the opportunity for ‘joy’, and it carried a further advantage: by supplying the means whereby ‘ideas’ could be conveyed to the next generation, sexual breeding could be evolutionarily progressive, the adaptations of one generation being passed down to the next.

Analysis of living beings showed that life contained the capacity for repeated, continued, gradual modifications: ‘Would it be too bold to imagine’, he appealed,

that… all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which T
HE
G
REAT
F
IRST
C
AUSE
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 activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?