Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T20:26:15.956Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Immediate Reactions to Darwin: The English Catholic Press' First Reviews of the ‘Origin of the Species’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

John Lyon
John Lyon
Affiliation:
Associate professor in the general program of liberal studies in the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

English Roman Catholic reactions to the issues presented by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) were as varied as the elements which made up the English Catholic community itself. Any reading of the Catholic periodical press in England during the years immediately after Darwin's epochal publication will bear this out. These reactions ranged from a simple reaffirmation of childhood formulations of the account of creation in “Genesis,” to rather disingenuous allegorical reinterpretations of the meaning of what “Moses”—and Darwin—had said.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , March 1972 , pp. 78 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1972

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. For Mivart, whose controversy with Huxley over Darwin's hypothesis belongs largely to the 1870s, see Gruber, Jacob, A Conscience in Conflict: The Life of St. George Jackson Mivart (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960).Google Scholar Mivart's On the Genesis of Species appeared in the same year (1871) as Darwin's Descent of Man.

2. Newman's best-known comment on the subject was the following: “There is as much want of simplicity in the idea of creation of distinct species as in that of the creation of trees in full growth, or of rocks with fossils in them. I mean it is as strange that monkeys should be so like men, with no historical connection between them, as that there should be no course of facts by which fossil bones got into rocks.… I will either go whole hog with Darwin, or, dispensing with time and history altogether, hold not only the theory of distinct species but that also of the creation of fossil bearing rocks.” Sundries, unconnected, p. 83 verso. Cited in Culler, A. Dwight, The Imperial Intellect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 267.Google Scholar Newman wrote this in 1863. Concern for the repercussions of Darwin's work was also one of the sources of Newman's preparation of the so-called “Inspiration Papers,” 1861–1863. SeeSeynaeve, Jaak, Cardinal Newman's Doctrine on Holy Scripture (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1953).Google Scholar

3. See his Twelve Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion (London: 1836).Google Scholar Though he made many egregious comments on science in the course of his career, Wiseman was at least aware of what the issues were, and, at the very end of his life, he was trying to come to terms with the issues presented by Lyell, Darwin and Huxley—through the assistance of Richard Owen! See Ward, Wilfrid, The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman (London: Longmans, 1897–1898), 2, p. 495.Google Scholar

4. Manning admitted that he was particularly opposed to the turn which science had taken in his day. It seemed to him to operate on the basis of a “brutal philosophy,” namely, that “there is no God, and the ape is our Adam.” Manning, H. E., “On the Subjects Proper to the Academia,” in Manning, , ed., Essays on Religion and Literature (London: Longmans, 1865–1874), 1, p. 51.Google Scholar

5. For details concerning the establishment, editorial policy, and other matters relevant to the English Catholic press, see Dwyer, J. J., “The Catholic Press, 1850–1950,” in Beck, George Andrew, ed., The English Catholics, 1850–1950 (London: Burns and Oates, 1950), pp. 475–514.Google Scholar The Tablet reviewed the sixth edition of the Origin in its May 25, 1872 issue. There were other Roman Catholic periodicals, such as Wilberforce's Weekly Register. Ellegard, Alvar [Darwin and the General Reader (Goteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1958)]Google Scholar never mentions this periodical in his extensive survey of the literature.

6. Though a biography of Richard Simpson should be forthcoming shortly from the research of McElrath, Fr. Damian, biographical information about him is available in the Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 1917), 18, p. 276Google Scholar; and in the Catholic Encyclopedia, old or new editions. For the identification of Simpson and Morris as the authors of the reviews in question, two sources have been relied on: Altholz, Josef L., The Liberal Catholic Movement in England (London: Burns and Oates, 1962), p. 139Google Scholar (Simpson); and the “General List of Articles, Vols. 1–118 (1836–1896) ”, Dublin Review, 118 (04, 1896), p. 489 (Morris).Google Scholar

7. The positive identification of Canon Morris is hampered by the fact that neither edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia nor the Dictionary of National Biography list a “W. Morris” — other than the well-known author — whose career might approximate that of a Morris who composed the Dublin Review's review. One is left to conclude that the “W. Morris” named as the author of the review in the “General List” is simply a misprint for “John Morris,” (1826–1893), a convert to Roman Catholicism and, after 1852, Canon of Northampton. This John Morris was for a few years Vice-Rector of the English College in Rome. He became a Jesuit in 1867. He was also a frequent contributor to the Dublin Review and other Roman Catholic publications. See DNB, 13, p. 995Google Scholar; and CE (New York: Appleton, 1911), 10, pp. 576–577.Google Scholar Professor Altholz informs me that “about 1860” Morris became Cardinal Wiseman's secretary, and thus it might be concluded that there is a semi-official character to his review. See Ward, Wilfrid, The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman (London: Longman, Green, 1898), 11, pp. 255 ff.Google Scholar, for mention of Morris' association with Wiseman. Though the nature of this association is not explicitly detailed there, Morris' association with the Cardinal seems to date from earlier than 1860.

8. “Religion and Modern Philosophy, No. 1,” Rambler, 6 (09, 1850), pp. 185–86.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., 189.

10. Ibid., 193.

11. Ibid., 199.

12. “Religion and Modern Philosophy, No. IV,” Rambler, 4 (12., 1850), pp. 482.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., 485.

14. Ibid., 488.

15. Ibid., 489. On Sept. 18, 1861, Charles Darwin noted in a letter to Fawcett: “About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colors. How odd it is that any one should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.” (Cited in Bradford, Gamaliel, Darwin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), pp. 44–45.)Google Scholar It seems that Simpson wants to restrict Humboldt and other “rational empiricists” to counting and describing. But what he is really saying is that you can not have it both ways: you can not get from rational empiricism to revealed religion, and only revealed religion can tell you about ultimates such as the creation of the world and the nature of nature. So if you want to issue authoritative statements about abstractions such as “religion”, “science”, and “nature”, you must have recourse to revelation, or at least to metaphysics. It is simply dishonest to pretend to avoid metaphysics, and then sneak it in surreptitiously. And this is what Simpson accuses Humboldt of doing when he undertakes to speak about a “religion of nature,” and what Darwin does when he speaks of “observation” having to be for or against some “view” if it is to be of any “service”.

16. Ibid., 343. Three other articles which Simpson produced which are concerned with the same sort of issues as taken up here might be mentioned: “Galileo and His Condemnation,” Rambler, 9 (01., 1852);Google Scholar“Literary Cookery,” Rambler, N.S. 7, (03, 1857);Google Scholar and a review of Mansell's “Bampton Lectures,” The Limits of Religious Thought Examined, Rambler, N.S. 10 (12, 1858).Google Scholar

17. Rambler, 03, 1860, 362.Google Scholar

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 363.

20. Rambler, 03, 1860, 363.Google Scholar See Aristotle, , “Physics,” ii. e.8, in Mckeon, Richard, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 249–251.Google Scholar

21. Rambler, 03, 1860, 363.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., 365.

23. Rambler, 03, 1860, 365.Google Scholar

24. Ibid., 368.

25. Ibid., 369. This distinction between the truth and the utility of a scientific hypothesis was related to Simpson's critique of positivism.

26. Rambler, 03, 1860, 370.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., 371. But as we have seen, Simpson had suggested in his articles on “Reason and Modern Philosophy” that rational empiricists surreptitiously introduced a form of metaphysics despite their protestations to the contrary.

28. Rambler, 03, 1860, 371.Google Scholar

29. See, for example, Charles Darwin's letter to an unidentified correspondent, March 14, 1861: “I entirely agree with you that there is no more direct proof of variation being unlimited in amount than there is that it is strictly limited.…But I believe in nat. [sic] Selection, not because I can prove in any single case that it has changed one species into another, but because it groups & [sic] explains well (as it seems to me) a host of facts in classification, embryology, morphology, rudimentary organs, geological succession & [sic] distribution.” de Beer, Gavin, ed., “Further unpublished Letters of Charles Darwin,” Annals of Science, 14 (06, 1958), No. 2., pp.112–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. Rambler, 03, 1860, 365–366.Google Scholar

31. Ibid., 372.

32. Ibid., 374.

33. Ibid., 373.

34. Ibid.

35. Gillispie, Charles Coulston, Genesis and Geology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 222.Google Scholar

36. Merz, John Theodore, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Dover, 1965Google Scholar — reprint of original published by Blackwoods, London, 1904–1912), 2, p. 414.

37. Cannon, Walter, “On Uniformity and Progression in Early Victorian Cosmography,” (Unpublished Harvard University Dissertation, 1955), p. 229.Google Scholar

38. Willey, Basil, “Darwin and Clerical Orthodoxy,” in Appleman, Philip, Madden, William A., Wolff, Michael, eds., 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis (Bloomington, Ind., Univ. of Indiana Press, 1959), p. 58.Google Scholar

39. Rambler, 03, 1860, 375.Google Scholar See Aquinas, St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, I,Google Scholar q. 96, art. 1, in Pegis, Anton C., ed.,Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1945), 1, p. 918.Google Scholar

40. Rambler, 03, 1860, 374–375.Google Scholar

41. Rambler, 5 (05, 1861), 166–190Google Scholar; and 5 (Sept., 1861), 326–346.

42. Rambler, 5 (May, 1861), 166–67.

43. Ibid., Sept., 1861, 334.

44. Ibid., 337.

45. Ibid., 338.

46. Ibid., 344.

47. Rambler, Jan., 1852.

48. Rambler, 03, 1860, 375–376.Google Scholar

49. Dublin Review, 05, 1860, 51.Google Scholar (hereafter cited as “DR”).

50. Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species, (London: Murray, 1859), p. 483.Google Scholar See also footnote 73 below.

51. DR, 05, 1860, 52.Google Scholar “Gratuitous” and “repulsive” are Morris' words.

52. Ibid., 58–59.

53. Ibid., 75.

54. Ibid., 80–81.

55. Ibid., 79.

56. Ibid., 76.

57. Favaro, Antonio, La Opere di Galileo Galilei (Florence: 1890–1909, 20 vols.), 12, pp. 171–172.Google Scholar Translated and quoted in Brodrick, James S. J., Galileo (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 93–94.Google Scholar

58. “The whole Darwinian Theory of the struggle for life is simply the transference from society to organic nature of Hobbes' theory of bellum omnium contra omnes, and of the bourgeois economic theory of competition, as well as the Malthusian theory of population.” Engels, Frederick, Dialectics of Nature, trans. Dutt, Clemens (New York: International Publishers, 1963), pp. 208–209.Google Scholar

59. Others have seen the “necessitarian entrapment of man which evolutionary thought in the 1860's and 1870's sketched” as the equivalent “to the predestination of Augustine and Calvin, and derived from the same source.” See Cannon, “Uniformity and Progression,” p. 229. Cannon goes on to say that Darwinism was, perhaps, the “transformation into scientific theory of concepts derived from Protestant Christianity.” See ibid., “Preface,” unpaginated. Simpson was particularly aware of the appeal of Roman Catholicism's less rigorous views on salvation and predestination to those Europeans disenchanted with the Calvinist deity.

60. Duhem, Pierre, Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Wiener, Philip P. (New York: Atheneum, 1962), pp. 123–124.Google Scholar

61. What was unwarranted in “Darwinism” so far as Simpson was concerned was taken as unwarranted in it by the English press generally. As Ellegard has pointed out, Darwin's reviewers felt that induction was the “good, positive ideal which Darwin has deserted for its bad, negative counterpart, variously named hypothesis, theory, speculation, assumption, imagination, fancy, guess, and the like.” See Ellegard, Alvar, Darwin and the General Reader, p. 189.Google Scholar For Simpson's insistence on the logical rather than the inductive nature of Darwin's hypothesis, see Rambler, 03, 1860, p. 370.Google Scholar He cites The Origin of Species, pp. 204 and 458 for proof of Darwin's self-conscious willingness to rely on logic rather than facts for “proof”.

62. Cannon, Walter F., “The Basis of Darwin's Achievement: A Revaluation,” Victorian Studies, 5 (12., 1961), 109.Google Scholar This illustrates the fact that the simplicist division between those for and against uniformitarianism cannot stand. Lyell and Hutton had been advocates of a strict uniformitarianism according to which action in the past differed from that in the present neither in degree nor in kind. Other geologists took a position called “Actualism”. Actualism explained past events by present causes but allowed for variations in tempo and intensity. Such a position seems to be inimical to what Lyell was trying to maintain. See Rudwick's, M.J.S. review of Hooykaas' Natural Law and Divine Miracle, in History of Science, 1 (1962), 83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See Hooykaas, Reijer, Natural Law and Divine Miracle: The Principle of Uniformity in Geology, Biology, and Theology (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill: 1963),Google Scholar esp. pp. 3–14, 31, 43, 113, 140, 143–144.

63. Cannon, “Darwin's Achievement,” 116.

64. Ibid. Cannon's assertion.

65. Cannon, “Darwin's Achievement,” 127–128.

66. Ibid., 130.

67. Ibid., 129.

68. Hooykaas, p. 148. This was so, Hooykaas writes, despite the fact that “any evolutionary theory clashed with the exegetical conceptions of the majority of Christian theologians of the middle of the nineteenth century.”

69. Cannon, Walter F., “The Problem of Miracles in the 1830's,” Victorian Studies, 4 (09. 1960), 31.Google Scholar

70. Cannon, Walter F., “History in Depth: The Early Victorian Period,” History of Science, 3, (1964), 32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

71. For the assertion that Darwin would believe if he could (the impediment being the connection of the God Darwin knew with the suffering of man and his animals), see Fleming, Donald, “Charles Darwin, the Anaesthetic Man,” Victorian Studies, 4 (03, 1961), 219–236.Google Scholar

72. Darwin, Charles, “Sketch of 1842,” in Evolution by Natural Selection, ed. Gavin, de Beer (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 83–84Google Scholar; and T. H. Huxley, “Reception of the Origin,” 1, p. 548. Thus cited in Cannon, “Darwin's Achievement,” 131.

73. Cannon, “Darwin's Achievement,” 131. Simpson was quite aware, for example, of “Mr. Goss's [sic] foolish though well intentioned essay Omphalos.” He also traced the question back to Samuel Butler's Hudibras. See Rambler, 03, 1860, p. 366Google Scholar. Butler, , Hudibras, ed. Wilders, John (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar (Canto 1, line 179). See also Browne, Thomas, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Book 5, Ch.5., in Koynes, Geoffrey, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Browne (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), 3, pp. 97–100Google Scholar, where Browne denies that either Adam or Eve had a navel.

74. Cannon, “Darwin's Achievement,” 132.

75. Ibid.

76. Apparently, however, there were Roman Catholics with whom a form of empiricism found great favor. See Cameron, J. M., “The Night Battle: Newman and Empiricism,” Victorian Studies, 4 (12, 1960), 99–118Google Scholar, esp. 100, wherein Cameron attempts to show the affinities between Newman's method and that of David Hume.

77. Cannon, “Miracles,” 10.

78. Ibid., 11–12. As Cannon points out, it would be interesting to search out the origin of this assumption and the connection between it and the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics.

79. Fleming, Donald, “Charles Darwin, the Anaesthetic Man,” Victorian Studies, 4 (03, 1961), 225.Google Scholar

80. See, for example, SirDarwin, Francis, Charles Darwin's Autobiography (New York: Collier Books, 1961), p. 69.Google Scholar

81. Ibid., p. 70.

82. Fleming, , “Anaesthetic Man,” 232.Google Scholar

83. Charles Kingsley, His Letters and Memories of His Life, ed. by his wife (London: 1880, 7th ed.), 2, p. 155.Google Scholar The passage is also quoted in Hooykaas, p. 216. Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872) was, along with Kingsley, the best known of the “Christian Socialists” in the Church of England. See DNB, 13, pp. 97–105.

84. Hooykaas, p. 216. Hooykaas' paraphrase.

85. Rambler, 03, 1860, 363–365Google Scholar, for example: “Mr. Darwin's theory… is rather mythological than scientific; for it professes to give an account of the origin of man, of animals, and of plants.” (363); and, “Mr. Darwin's book contains two elements, intimately blended. One is the mythological conclusion just enunciated, the other is his accumulation and arrangement of scientific facts.” (365). The word “myth”, when employed in this essay either by the author or by Simpson, is not used in a simply pejorative context. It means a symbolic way of knowing things which is not “scientific”, but is a form of knowing nevertheless. It is not used as a synonym for “unreal”. For myth as a symbolic form of expression, see Cassirer, Ernst, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1946), pp. 8ff.Google Scholar

86. Rambler, 03, 1860, 368.Google Scholar

87. Ibid., 374.