The Act of Creation (99 page)

It was the time when Berthelot proclaimed: 'The world today has
no longer any mystery for us'; when Haeckel had solved all his
Welträtsel
and A. R. Wallace, in his book on
The
Wonderful Century
, declared that the nineteenth century had produced
'twenty-four fundamental advances, as against only fifteen for all
the rest of recorded history'. The Philistines everywhere were 'dizzy
with success' -- to quote once more Stalin's famous phrase of 1932,
when factories and power dams were going up at great speed while some
seven million peasants were dying of starvation. It had indeed been a
wonderful century for natural philosophy, but at its end moral philosophy
had reached one of its lowest ebbs in history -- and Maxwell was well
aware of this. He was aware of the limitations of a rigidly deterministic
outlook; it was he who, in his revolutionary treatment of the dynamics
of gases, replaced mechanical causation by a statistical approach based
on the theory of probability -- a decisive step towards quantum physics
and the principle of indeterminism. Moreover, he was fully aware of
the far-reaching implications of this approach, not only for physics
but also for philosophy: 'It is probable that important results will
be obtained by the application of this the statistical method, which
is as yet little known and is not familiar to our minds. If the actual
history of Science had been different, and if the scientific doctrines
most familiar to us had been those which must be expressed in this way,
it is possible that we might have considered the existence of a certain
kind of contingency a self-evident truth, and treated the doctrine of
philosophical necessity as a mere sophism.' [15]
Already at the age of twenty-four he had realized the limitations of
materialist philosophy: 'The only laws of matter are those which our
minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by
matter.' [16] Twenty years later, at the height of his fame, he gave full
rein to his hobby, satirical verse, to ridicule the shallow materialism
of the Philistines. The occasion was the famous presidential address by
John Tyndall to the British Association meeting in Belfast. Tyndall, a
generous soul but a narrow-minded philosopher, attacked the 'theologians'
and extolled the virtues of the brave new materialist creed. Maxwell's
satire is still valid today:

In the very beginning of science,
the parsons, who managed things then,
Being handy with hammer and chisel,
made gods in the likeness of men;
Till Commerce arose, and at length
some men of exceptional power
Supplanted both demons and gods by
the atoms, which last to this hour.
From nothing comes nothing, they told us,
nought happens by chance but by fate;
There is nothing but atoms and void,
all else is mere whims out of date!
Then why should a man curry favour
with beings who cannot exist,
To compass some petty promotion
in nebulous kingdoms of mist? . . .
First, then, let us honour the atom,
so lively, so wise, and so small;
The atomists next let us praise, Epicurus,
Lucretius, and all;
Let us danm with faint praise Bishop Butler,
in whom many atoms combined
To form that remarkable structure,
it pleased him to call -- his mind.

In another poem he wrote:

. . . While down the stream of Evolution
We drift, expecting no solution
But that of the survival of the fittest.
Till, in the twilight of the gods,
When earth and sun are frozen clods,
When, all its energy degraded,
Matter to aether shall have faded;
We, that is, all the work we've done,
As waves in aether, shall for ever run
In ever-widening spheres through heavens beyond the sun.

And thus in the nineteenth century's most advanced scientific mind we
meet once again, in a sublimated and rarified form, the ancient belief
in the indestructibility of the numinous.
The Atheism of Darwin
Dr. Robert Darwin was an atheist who chose for his son Charles the
career of a country clergyman -- simply because this seemed to be the
most gentlemanly occupation for a youth so obviously devoid of any
particular ambition and intellectual excellence. Charles himself
fully agreed with this choice. As a student at Cambridge he had read
Pearson on the Creeds
, and had come to the conclusion that he
did not 'in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word
in the Bible'. [17] Even during the voyage of the Beagle he amused the
officers by his naïve orthodoxy, and he was deeply shocked when one
of his shipmates expressed doubts concerning the biblical account of the
Flood. Such a rigid fundamentalist belief could not be reconciled with
speculations about the origin of species; his loss of faith coincided
with his conversion to the evolutionary theory. For a while he fought a
rearguard action against his doubts by day-dreaming about the discovery
of old manuscript texts which would confirm the historical truth of
the Gospels; but this did not help much. In the months following his
return from the voyage the new theory was born and his faith in religion
was dead.
Darwin's arguments against religion were as crude and literal-minded
as his belief had been: 'the miracles were not credible to any sane
man'; the Old Testament gave a 'manifestly false history of the world,
with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. [18] He
took strong exception to the 'damnable doctrine' that non-believers,
'and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best
friends', will be everlastingly punished. As for Hinduism or Buddhism,
and the persistence of religious aspirations throughout human history,
he explained them -- in an oddly Lamarckian argument -- as the result of
'inherited experience'.

Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation of
a belief in God on the minds of children by producing so strong and
perhaps an inherited effect on their brains, not as yet fully developed,
that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God,
as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.

Before the great turning point in his life, 'the nuclear discovery' of
his theory, he had not only been an orthodox believer, but at least on one
occasion, in the grandeur of the Brazilian forest, he had also felt that
quasi-mystical, 'deep inward experience' that there must be more in man
than 'the mere breath of his body.' [19] But after the turning point such
experiences did not recur -- and he himself wondered sometimes whether
he was not like a man who had become colour-blind. At the same decisive
period, when he was about thirty, Darwin suffered, in his own words, a
'curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes'. An attempt
to re-read Shakespeare bored him 'to the point of physical nausea'. [20]
He preferred popular novels of the sentimental kind -- so long as they
had a happy ending. In his autobiography he complained:

But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. My
mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws
out of a large collection of facts, but why this should have caused the
atrophy of that part of the brain on which the higher tastes depend,
I cannot conceive. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness,
and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to
the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Darwin's 'religious tastes', if the expression may be permitted,
had been of an equally unsubtle nature. 'His sensibility was of
that inverted order that is unable to extend to human beings the
same sympathy and respect it has for animals. As a zoologist Darwin
was naturally more at home in the realm of animal behaviour than of
philosophy. This may be why so much of his discussion of religion,
morality and aesthetics seems painfully naive.' [21] The concept of
'religious experience' did not mean to Darwin what it did to Maxwell --
the intuition of an 'unknown reality which held the secret of infinite
space and enterhal time'; it meant to him believing the story told in
Genesis, and also in eternal hellfire. In "The Descent of Man", he had
denied that language was a unique attribute of man because animals too
use sounds and gestures to communicate emotions. This confusion of sign
and symbol equally pervades his discussions of religion. In his youth
he had believed in the 'strict and literal truth of every word in the
Bible'; later on he considered himself an atheist because he did not
believe in the Tower of Babel. Neither attitude has much relevance to
the unconscious, inner motivation of his work. More relevant is the
fact that the kind of undefinable intuition which he had experienced
in the Brazilian forest went out of his life at the same time as the
'atrophy of the higher tastes' set in. This was at the time when he
made his basic discovery. The remaining forty odd years were spent on
the heroic labours of its elaboration.
Darwin, as we have seen, was like Copernicus, essentially a one-idea
man. Each had his 'nuclear inspiration' early in life, and spent the rest
of his life working it out -- the ratio of inspiration to perspiration
being heavily in favour of the second. Both lacked the many-sidedness,
that universality of interest and amazing multitude of achievement
in unrelated fields of research which characterized Kepler, Newton,
Descartes, Franklin, Faraday, Maxwell, and hundreds of lesser but equally
versatile geniuses. It is perhaps no coincidence that both Darwin and
Copernicus, after the decisive turning point when their course was
set, led a life of duty, devotion to task, rigorous self-discipline,
and spiritual desiccation. It looks as if the artesian wells of their
inspiration had been replaced by a mechanical water supply kept under
pressure by sheer power of will.
In Darwin's case, the magnitude of this power must be measured against
the handicap of forty years of chronic ill health, which also afflicted
his large family. The sense of duty which kept him going became his
true religion. After the publication of the
Origin
and the
Descent
, he became one of the most celebrated personalities in
Europe, but he continued to lead the same rigorously scheduled life,
without allowing himself to bask in the sun, without getting spoilt or
distracted from his work. 'While others used the prestige of Darwinism to
promote their social or political views, Darwin himself forebore doing so;
[21a]' and when Marx proposed to dedicate to him the English translation
of
Das Kapital
Darwin refused the honour.
His last years were spent in churning out a number of technical books
and papers; his very first book was called
The Formation of Vegetable
Mould through the Action of Worms
. He had started this research
on earthworms at twenty-eight, after his return from the voyage of
the Beagle; now, after this momentous detour, he finished it at the
age of seventy-two, one year before his death. It is a measure of the
enormous vogue which Darwin enjoyed that the worm book, in spite of its
unprepossessing title, sold eight thousand five hundred copies in the
first three years after publication -- which would be quite a respectable
success for a novel in our own days.
On one occasion in his late years Darwin was asked to state his opinion
on religion. He answered that while the subject of God was 'beyond the
scope of man's intellect', his moral obligations were nevertheless
clear: 'Man can do his duty.' On another occasion -- in an addendum
to his autobiography -- he explained that, even without a belief in
God, a man 'can have for his rule of life . . . only to follow those
impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him
the best ones. . . . By degrees it will be more intolerable to him
to obey his sensuous passions rather than his highest impulses, which
when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may
occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others,
whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the
solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost judge
or conscience.' He never realized that statements of this kind destroyed
the very foundations of any strictly materialistic and deterministic
philosophy, including his own -- according to which human morality was
derived from innate 'social instincts'. 'It can hardly be disputed',
he wrote in his disastrous controversy against Mill, 'that the social
feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals: and why should
they not be so in men?' But from what source, then, would man derive the
power to follow those instincts 'which seemed to him the best ones',
to obey his 'highest impulses' as opposed to his 'sensuous passions';
and even 'to act in opposition to the opinion of others'? The source
of that power must evidently be the 'innermost judge, or conscience' --
concepts of a transcendental nature and quite heretical from the point
of view of a purely materialist world-view.
It has been said that Darwin's philosophizing was 'painfully
naïve'. Yet his life bore witness, not to his philosophical
rationalizations, but to his transcendental beliefs -- he was a
croyant
malgré lui
. The proof is in the closing passages of his two
great books:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many
plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various
insects 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 upon 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 by the creator
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. [22]
Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not
through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and
the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally
placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the
distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears,
only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it; and
I have given the evidence to the best of my ability. We must, however,
acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities,
with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which
extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature,
with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and
constitution of the solar system -- with all these exalted powers --
Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly
origin. [23]