The Philosophical Breakfast Club (60 page)

What upset Herschel about Darwin’s theory was the fact that, according to it, the variations that crop up from time to time are completely random. Today, with our knowledge of genetics—Gregor Mendel did not publish his famous paper on his pea-plant experiments until 1866, and his work was not widely known until 1900—we would call them “random mutations.” Darwin was arguing that there is no connection between what the individual needs to survive in his environment, and what variations arise. The faster wolf was not born faster
because
there was more competition for edible animals, making it useful to be able to get to the prey faster. Only a “random variation,” as Darwin called it, happened to give this wolf an edge over his slower brothers in getting enough to eat. It was just as likely that the wolf would have been born with an unhelpful variation, such as one shorter leg, in which case it would have been more likely to die before reproducing. Herschel ardently believed that there was some guiding force, some divine intelligence, that was in control of the variations, even if this control had been planned at the start of Creation and built into the laws governing the natural world. It could not be just by chance, Herschel argued, that variations useful to individual organisms arose. It was hard indeed for the prejudice against a chance-driven universe to loosen its grip on the scientists of the day. As Whewell had put it plaintively in his Bridgewater Treatise, “How unlike chance every thing looks!”
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Even strong supporters of Darwin, such as Asa Gray, hoped he would incorporate some kind of guiding force into his theory.
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In contrast to Herschel’s reaction, Whewell’s response pleasantly surprised Darwin—of course, he had had rather low expectations, knowing Whewell’s view of the fixity of species from reading the
History of the Inductive Sciences
. Whewell told Darwin, “Probably you will not be surprised to be told that I cannot, yet at least, become a convert to your doctrines. But there is so much of thought and fact in what you have written that it is not
to be contradicted without a careful selection of the ground and manner of the dissent.”
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Darwin was so pleased that he sent Whewell’s letter to Lyell, showing him that Whewell at least “is not horrified with us.”
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Whewell never became a convert to evolution; on the contrary, he published a new preface for his Bridgewater Treatise in 1864 in which he referred to the recent claim that “the structure of animals has become what it is by the operation of external circumstances and internal appetencies” rather than by the special creation of God. He criticized this view for “assert[ing] the world to be the work of chance.” Rallying the old arsenal of pro-design arguments and examples, Whewell claimed that only an intelligent designer could account for the intricacy and perfect fitness of structures found in nature, such as the human eye.
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Like Herschel, Whewell was concerned about what he considered the gap in Darwin’s argument: random variations, he believed, could not have brought about something as wonderful as the human eye. Even Darwin still worried about this example. He told Asa Gray in 1860 that “the eye to this day gives me a cold shudder!”
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Yet Whewell was impressed with the amount and broad scope of Darwin’s evidence—he saw that Darwin had made some steps toward showing that his theory was consilient. This is why Whewell did not go out of his way to criticize Darwin publicly, as he had the author of the
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
. When that earlier work came out, Whewell published a book in which he compiled all the passages from his earlier writings arguing against transmutation of species. Darwin’s book, by contrast, did not trigger the same kind of reaction.

At the same time, however, Whewell did not believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution was strongly consilient, the way Newton’s law of universal gravitation was. In his 1838 presidential address to the Geological Society, Whewell had laid out the challenge for any purely naturalistic account of man’s origin. “Even if we had no Divine record to guide us,” Whewell argued, “it would be most unphilosophical [that is, unscientific] to attempt to trace back the history of man without taking into account the most remarkable facts in his nature.”
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It was impossible to account adequately for the origin of species, including the origin of man, Whewell believed, without explaining man’s origin as an intellectual and moral being. After all, it was not hard to imagine that our bodies, so like that of the orangutans recently exhibited around London, descended from the primates. But surely our minds—with our conscience, our sympathy for others, our
reasoning skills, and our language—surely these were quite unlike anything else existing in nature, and required a Divine Creator? As Whewell had written in his
Plurality of Worlds
six years earlier, “The introduction of reason and intelligence upon the Earth is no part nor consequence of the series of animal forms. It is a fact of an entirely new kind.” Darwin’s theory of evolution could not be completely consilient until it could explain the most important distinctive fact about the species of mankind.

Darwin knew that Whewell was right about this. Even Charles Lyell and Asa Gray were by then complaining publicly that natural selection could not explain the distinctive features of humans, especially our moral nature. Darwin recognized that he needed to show that just as the physical nature of man could have originated in the physical nature of the higher primates, so too man’s reason and morality could have arisen from other animals. In his
Descent of Man
, published five years after Whewell’s death, Darwin addressed that issue. He explained that his objective in the book was “solely to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.” In the process Darwin showed that each of the faculties thought to be unique to humans—moral reasoning, sympathy, aesthetic enjoyment—can be found as well, to a different degree, of course, in some animal species. As a reviewer of the book in the
Annual Register
put it, Darwin showed that animals shared the emotions of “terror, suspicion, courage, good humor, bad humor, revenge, affection”—something with which any dog lover would agree.
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Darwin hoped to provide evidence that man’s mental nature, no less than his physical nature, could evolve by natural causes.

But what is most remarkable, perhaps, is that neither Herschel nor Whewell strongly and publicly denounced Darwin, as did so many of their friends and acquaintances. As Darwin had expected, evolutionary theory was seen as opposing dearly held religious belief in the special creation of species by God. The issue was not biblical fundamentalism, as it is today in the United States, where 44 percent of people persist in believing that humans were created directly by God, not through any evolutionary process. In Darwin’s day, few believed in the literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, with its six twenty-four-hour days of creation. Rather, men and women worried that without God’s hand in the creation of human kind, life would be amoral, without meaning and purpose; we would be, then, no better than the animals. Darwin had avoided the topic of human origins in his
Origin of Species
, referring to human evolution only
in very oblique terms: if his view is accepted, he blandly noted, “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” But no one was fooled. As Bishop Samuel Wilberforce famously sneered to T. H. Huxley, known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his vociferous defense of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, at the meeting of the British Association in Oxford in June 1860, “Are you related to an ape on your grandfather’s or grandmother’s side?” Huxley spoke for many, even those who opposed evolution, when he replied that “I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather than … a clergyman of the Church of England who introduces ridicule into a grave scientific discussion.”
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The members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club took a different approach. They each believed, as Babbage had proclaimed, “No truth in any department of knowledge can ever be in contradiction to any other truth.”
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Truths of science and truths of religion cannot conflict, even if we do not have full insight into how they coincide. If a scientific theory that is confirmed by the evidence seems to conflict with our interpretation of the Bible, then our biblical interpretation is faulty. As Whewell had put it in his review of Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
, “We do not conceive that those who endeavor to fasten their physical theories on the words of scripture are likely to serve the cause either of religion or science.”
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Neither Herschel nor Whewell believed that Darwin had proven that his theory of evolution by natural selection was true, but they—especially Whewell—saw that there was enough evidence to adopt a “wait and see” attitude. As Whewell admitted, in a private letter to his friend David Forbes, “I cannot see without some regrets the clear definite line, which used to mark the commencement of the human period of the earth’s history, made obscure and doubtful.… It is true that a reconciliation of the scientific with the religious view is still possible, but it is not so clear and striking as it once was. But it is weakness to regret this; and no doubt another generation will find some way of looking at the matter which will satisfy religious men. I should be glad to see my way to this view, and am hoping to do so soon.”
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In his
History of the Inductive Sciences
, first published in 1837, Whewell had asserted point-blank that man’s origin must stand outside science and law; on this question, he believed, geology “says nothing, but she points upwards.”
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In other words, there could be no “scientific view” of the origin of man. By 1864, however, Whewell seemed resigned to accept that there was a scientific view, and that it was an evolutionary one.
Publicly, he continued to reject this position. But in his letter to David Forbes, where he would stoke no flames of controversy, Whewell showed that he took quite seriously the possibility that evolution might turn out to be true, and that it would then have to be reconciled with the religious point of view. Whewell was nearly seventy years old, and strongly committed to his religious views, which had helped sustain him in the loss of his dear friend Jones and his wife, Cordelia; but it was not part of these religious views that well-confirmed scientific theories seeming to conflict with our understanding of scripture must be rejected just for that reason.

That same year, Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell each pointedly declined to sign the infamous “Declaration on Science and Religion,” a petition that claimed to support a “harmonious alliance between Physical Science and Revealed Religion,” but which was seen by many as attempting to put theological restraints on scientific inquiry. (Of their friends and acquaintances, only Sedgwick and David Brewster signed it.) Herschel went so far as to publish several ringing denunciations of the document, causing De Morgan to marvel, “So honey-bees have stings as well as wasps!”
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The reaction of the remaining members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club—especially Whewell and Herschel—to Darwin’s theory laid the foundation for modern-day notions of the relation between Darwinism and religious faith, a way to reconcile the two. As Galileo had put it centuries before, the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.
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Herschel and Whewell, scientific experts of the age, helped to promote the view that the Bible was not meant to be a science textbook, no more a biology text than an astronomy text. A true natural philosopher (and here even Whewell was happy to retain the old-fashioned term, with its broader meaning) should have faith in God, but also, no less, faith in scientific method.

Herschel and Whewell’s view of the relation between science and religion would finally prevail (at least outside of the United States). By the time of Darwin’s death in 1882, he was no longer reviled as a murderer of faith: rather, he was seen as a hero of science, and of England—and was accordingly buried in Westminster Abbey.

O
N
J
ULY
18, 1860, scientists and interested onlookers from Oregon through Canada to Spain and North Africa eagerly awaited the total eclipse
of the sun.
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Whewell traveled to Orduna, south of Bilbao, to view it, in the company of his wife of two years, Lady Everina Frances Affleck. Lady Affleck, the widow of Sir Gilbert Affleck, was the sister of Whewell’s friend Robert Leslie Ellis. In 1857, Ellis and two associates had published a fifteen-volume edition of the collected works of Bacon, which would remain for over a century the standard edition of Bacon’s writings. Whewell wrote a long and laudatory review of the new collection, which gave him the opportunity to praise Bacon again for having “divined in a remarkable manner the characters of the true progress of science.” While writing this review, Whewell spent time with Ellis, a former fellow of Trinity who had been an invalid for some years. During his visits to Ellis’s house in Trumpington, near Cambridge, Whewell came to know Lady Affleck, who had moved into her brother’s home to nurse him after her husband died. Whewell had been a widower for nearly two years by then, and was lonely. As he lamented to his sister-in-law, Susan Myers, soon after Cordelia’s death, “I don’t know whether you are quite aware … how necessary it is for me to have somebody to love me!”
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He and Lady Affleck were wed on July 1, 1858, at St. George’s Church, Hanover Square, London.

The trip to Spain to view the eclipse was a second honeymoon of sorts (during the first one, the couple had visited Whewell’s old in-laws in the Lake District, and spent a week with the Herschels in Kent). They were both excited to see the solar eclipse. Describing the sight afterwards, Whewell admitted that “I had not imagined anything so sudden and luminous.” Although cloud cover made it difficult to see the four planets that would have been visible in clear skies, Whewell and his wife, whom he called Fanny, saw “an extraordinary saffron dawn in the horizon, when all was very dark about us.” He told his friend Forbes that the total eclipse “was quite a thing to see in one’s lifetime, if possible”—it was worth even the discomfort of the Spanish inns.
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