Flesh in the Age of Reason (58 page)

As a radical alternative to Genesis, evolution was thus first established as a biomedical theory and creation myth in Darwin’s
Zoonomia
. Its implications specifically for man and society were further spelt out in
The Temple of Nature
, posthumously published in 1803. A sublime panorama of change was unfolded in that didactic poem, from the coagulation of nebulae up to the steam engine, from mushrooms to machines. Irritation was the initial trigger of the life forces, unlocking the potentialities of animated powers, leading to the awakening of feelings:

Next the long nerves unite their silver train,
And young Sensation permeates the brain;
Through each new sense the keen emotions dart,
Flush the young cheek, and swell the throbbing heart.

Sensation in turn quickened the perceptions of pleasure and pain and triggered volition:

From pain and pleasure quick Volitions rise,
Lift the strong arm, or point the inquiring eyes…

These then produced the awakening of mind:

Last in thick swarms Associations spring,
Thoughts join to thoughts, to motions motions cling;
Whence in long trains of catenation flow
Imagined joy, and voluntary woe.

And, thanks to the association of ideas, there followed habit, imitation, imagination and the higher mental powers, generating language, the arts and sciences, the love of beauty, and the moral and social powers engendered by sympathy. Through such evolutionary processes man had become the lord of creation – a pre-eminence stemming not from a divine mission or from any innate Cartesian endowments, but because of basic physical advantages: highly sensitive hands, for instance, had permitted the development of superior powers of volition and understanding.

‘All nature’, he proclaimed, ‘exists in a state of perpetual improvement.’ Doubtless, endless competition of organic forms also resulted in death, destruction and even extinction:

From Hunger’s arm the shafts of Death are hurl’d,
And one great Slaughter-house the warring world!

Nevertheless, rather as for Adam Smith, competition spelt improvement, and population rise brought not Malthusian misery but Darwinian delight:

Shout round the globe, how Reproduction strives
With vanquish’d Death, – and Happiness survives;
How Life increasing peoples every clime,
And young renascent Nature conquers Time.

Contrast Darwin’s epic of progress with such earlier visions as
Paradise Lost
and the
Essay on Man
. For Milton, what was fundamental was the spoilt relationship between man and God: endowed with reason and free will, Adam’s offence lay in violation of God’s command; man’s destiny was couched in divine revelation. Pope for his part presented the human condition as a divided self, fixed on a divinely ordained scale:

Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great;
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride; He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer…

The static Chain of Being in mind, Pope viewed humans suspended between angels and animals, a predicament at once laughable and lamentable,

Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all.

Man was thus ‘the glory, jest and riddle of the world’.

Darwin, by contrast, painted a more naturalistic, this-worldly and optimistic picture, grounded on evolution. Human capacities were products of biological and physiological developments which guaranteed ‘the progress of the Mind’. There was no Lucifer, and no Fall. Neither was there any fundamental Popean mind–body dichotomy. Evolutionary tendencies bridged the gap. What in Hartley had been a monism of individual development became in Darwin a monism of evolutionary improvement.

Viewing humanity from Nature’s perspective not God’s, Darwin granted mankind a more elevated position: man alone had consciousness of the natural order. The human animal which Pope satirized, Darwin celebrated – though he couldn’t resist tagging on a warning against hubris, in respect of the pride engendered by Christianity:

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!

While
Paradise Lost
related mankind’s fate in terms of disobedience, sin and punishment – and perhaps redemption – to justify the ways of God to man, and the
Essay on Man
offered man as a riddle, even if, in principle at least, he was capable of self-knowledge, Darwin presented a materialist view of man making himself, a Promethean vision of infinite possibilities. God was now nothing more than a distant cause of causes; what mattered was matter, and man acting in nature. The theodicy, the master-narrative, had become secularized.

It is illuminating to differentiate Erasmus Darwin’s materialism from that of his contemporary William Godwin. The latter (see
Chapter 23
) held that progress lay in mind controlling, and (he hoped) ultimately superseding, the biological: the triumph of reason would render physical bodies redundant. No such vision was entertained by Erasmus Darwin, who would doubtless have chortled at Godwin’s view for being vain, pretentious and impractical – on a par with theological nonsense! Darwin had no faith in pure reason – as a physician he saw disease, decay and death all too often destroying human hopes. When his own son died after a dissecting accident as a medical student, Darwin warned that too much trust should not be placed in rationality: ‘Reason but skins the wound, which is perpetually liable to fester again.’ The frailties of the flesh could be rationalized, not transcended.

Neither was the Godwinian triumph of reason over the flesh something that Darwin would remotely have
wanted
. The utilitarian physician had huge faith in physical, material happiness – it was that which drove evolution. Happiness ultimately came from bodily energies. Darwin’s vision was the triumph of Eros over Thanatos. Industrial development was an extension of such life-enhancing
powers; agricultural and industrial improvement would provide the food and wealth which would support the increased number of mouths the sexual drive would bring about. He was thus a fan of the flesh, by contrast to Godwin’s zeal for disembodied reason and Malthus’s pessimism about baser instincts.
Nosce teipsum
still applied, but it was essentially human biology which was to be known, as human kind emancipated itself from ignorance:

Ignorance and credulity have ever been companions, and have misled and enslaved mankind; philosophy has in all ages endeavoured to oppose their progress, and to loosen the shackles they had imposed; philosophers have on this account been called unbelievers; unbelievers of what? of the fictions of fancy, of witchcraft, hobgoblins, apparitions, vampires, fairies; of the influence of stars on human actions, miracles wrought by the bones of saints, the flights of ominous birds, the predictions from the bowels of dying animals, expounders of dreams, fortune-tellers, conjurors, modern prophets, necromancy, cheiromancy, animal magnetism, metallic tractors, with endless variety of folly? These they have disbelieved and despised, but have ever bowed their hoary heads to Truth and Nature.…

In regard to religious matters, there is an intellectual cowardice instilled into the minds of the people from their infancy; which prevents their inquiry: credulity is made an indispensable virtue; to inquire or exert their reason in religious matters is denounced as sinful; and in the catholic church is punished with more severe penances than moral crimes.

*

Carlyle’s pessimism notwithstanding, Erasmus Darwin should not be seen as offering a crude model of man for his times. In the light of Wedgwood’s desire to turn his workforce into such machines ‘as do not err’, it might be anticipated that the poet-doctor’s vision would be of
l’homme machine
, in which man was reduced to a robot, responding mechanically to external sticks and carrots.

There is, it must be admitted, something curious about the view of human agency in industrial society conveyed by Darwin’s writings: the poetic tropes of
The Temple of Nature
are mystifying, for all the actual work is depicted as being done either by heroic machines or by even more heroic inventors:

So A
rkwright
taught from Cotton-pods to cull,
And stretch in lines the vegetable wool…

The actual workforce in Arkwright’s factories is conspicuously absent. Darwin certainly never advocated a model of industrial man as an automaton, to be drilled into discipline. In many ways he was concerned to
rescue
man from the aspersions of being just a machine. He constantly stressed inner energy and drives – both the capacity and the need to learn, the inventiveness and adaptiveness of
homo faber
, the man who makes himself. His was a prophecy of Promethean man for the machine age, but it was not a vision of man the machine.

For something approaching that one must look forward to Robert Owen, the most remarkable entrepreneur-philosopher of the industrial era (at least until Friedrich Engels), a truly astonishing instance of the self-made man. His was a rags-to-riches story of the kind soon to be celebrated by Samuel Smiles. The experience of being a self-made individual, however, led Owen to recognize that nothing whatever was
given
, nothing had been
created
just-so, for all time, in a fixed place, by a Creator. All was made – be it self-made or made by others. God therefore dropped out of the picture, and the entrepreneur-philosopher stepped into his shoes, the classic self-made man who worshipped his maker.

Born in 1771 in Newtown, Montgomeryshire, the son of a saddler, Owen had only a bare elementary education before becoming a draper’s assistant first in Stamford and then London. Little is known of his early years, but he tells us that, as early as the age of 10, it had dawned on him that there was something wrong with religions, because of the contradictions between them. One day, at the counter, he realized that these different faiths ‘emanated… from the same false imaginations of our early ancestors’: contemporary faiths were thus relics of primitive errors. Man, he concluded, was not responsible to God for his behaviour, for he was entirely ‘the child of Nature and Society’.

In 1788, at the age of 17, this precocious lad went to seek his fortune in Manchester, and a few years later he moved north to Scotland,
where he built up the Lanark textile mills at Paisley, just outside Glasgow. There he became not just a highly successful entrepreneur, but a passionate advocate of the crucial role of industry – understood both as a mode of production and as disciplined hard work – in generating progress. Industry was the principle of improvement; it would turn wastelands into wealth. ‘Those who were engaged in the trade, manufactures, and commerce of this country thirty or forty years ago formed but a very insignificant portion of the knowledge, wealth, influence or population of the Empire,’ he reflected. Since then things had been quite transformed, mainly thanks to the ‘mechanical inventions which introduced the cotton trade into this country’. But their effect had been deeply equivocal. They brought riches – but they also created poverty and all its problems:

The general diffusion of manufactures throughout a country generates a new character in its inhabitants; and as this character is formed upon a principle quite unfavourable to individual or general happiness, it will produce the most lamentable and permanent evils, unless its tendency be counteracted by legislative interference and direction.

Mechanical efficiency had the capacity, however, to create the blessings of order and satisfaction, without which it could not itself thrive. Optimal human functioning would, obviously, service the factory to best effect, but, more broadly, it would make happiness prevail. The creation of such ideal workplace conditions was the responsibility of the paternalistic factory-owner. He must develop model factory villages equipped with schools, good housing, libraries, meeting halls and so forth, so as to produce a healthy, well-balanced workforce. ‘After breakfast we walked to New Lanark…,’ wrote Robert Southey, no great friend to the industrial system, either in his early incarnation as a Jacobin radical or later, as here, as a pillar of Toryism:

In the course of going thro’ these buildings, [Owen] took us into an apartment where one of his plans… was spread upon the floor. And with a long wand in his hand he explained the plan.… Meantime the word had
been given: we were conducted into one of the dancing rooms; half a dozen fine boys, about nine or ten years old, led the way, playing of fifes, and some 200 children, from four years of age till ten, entered the room and arranged themselves on three sides of it.

Southey was rather impressed by the appearance of successful, caring paternalism, but insistent that Owen himself was a phoney:

He is part-owner and sole Director of a large establishment, differing more in accidents than in essence from a plantation: the persons under him happen to be white, and are at liberty by law to quit his service, but while they remain in it they are as much under his absolute management as so many negro-slaves. His humour, his vanity, his kindliness of nature (all these have their share) lead him to make these
human machines
as he calls them (and literally believes them to be) as happy as he can, and to make a display of their happiness.