To have lived when this prodigious truth was advanced, debated, established, was a rare privilege in the centuries. The inspiration of seeing the old isolated mists dissolve and reveal the convergence of all branches of knowledge is something that can hardly be known to the men of a later generation, inheritors of what this age has won.
JOHN FISKE
When Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species dawned upon the world it aroused no such immediate furor in the United States as it did in England. A public sensation comparable to that stirred up in England by Huxley’s famous clash with Wilberforce in June 1860 was impossible in America, where a critical election was beginning whose results would disrupt the Union and bring about a terrible Civil War. Although the first American edition of The Origin of Species was widely reviewed in 1860,1 the coming of the war obscured new developments in scientific thought for all but professional scientists and a few hardy intellectuals.
Here and there, however, in quiet studies remote from the glare of politics, the ideas that were in time to transform the intellectual life of the country began to be cultivated. Darwin’s friend Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist, after painstaking study of an advance copy of The Origin of Species sent to him by the author, wrote a careful review for the American Journal of Sciences and Arts, and with admirable foresight prepared a series of articles to defend evolution from the forthcoming charges of atheism. A few men who were already acquainted with the pre-Darwinian evolutionary speculation of Herbert Spencer were laying the foundations for a popular campaign in behalf of evolutionary science. A little-known resident of Salem named Edward Silsbee, trying to arouse American interest in Spencer’s ambitious project for a systematic philosophy, had found an immediate response in two men who would in time take the lead in remolding American thought. The first, John Fiske, a Harvard undergraduate who had already delved deeper than some of his professors into scientific and philosophical literature, went into ecstasies at the sight of Spencer’s grandiose prospectus. The second, Edward Livingston Youmans, a popular lecturer on scientific subjects and author of a widely used textbook in chemistry, secured through his connection with D. Appleton and Company a sympathetic American publisher for Spencer’s works.2 When public attention turned to the problems raised by Darwinism, Fiske and Asa Gray led the movement to make evolution respectable, and Youmans became the self-appointed salesman of the scientific world-outlook.
Interest in the natural sciences grew rapidly. Articles in religious journals and popular magazines show that American readers were fast becoming absorbed in the evolution controversy during the years after the Civil War. To men of culture the idea of evolution, so startling to the popular mind, was hardly new. A man like Whitman, for example, could write of “this old theory, evolution, as broach’d anew, trebled, with indeed all devouring claims by Darwin.” Some Americans were familiar with the historic tradition of speculative evolution, which had reached the point of violent controversy in the days of Cuvier, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Goethe.3 Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1832), which paved the way for the development hypothesis, had been widely read in the United States; and Robert Chambers’ anonymously published Vestiges of Creation (American edition, 1845), a popular religious presentation of evolution, had received much attention.
The rise of biblical criticism and comparative religion, the general relaxation of fundamentalist faith encouraged by the liberal clergy, prepared many Americans for the acceptance of Darwinism. James Freeman Clarke’s Ten Great Religions, a liberal study of world creeds, ran through twenty-two editions in the fifteen years after its first appearance in 1871. A comparable popularization of the new biblical scholarship appeared in 1891, when Washington Gladden published Who Wrote the Bible?4
Many of the influences that brought independent thinkers to accept evolution were manifest in the early work of John Fiske. Although Fiske came from a conventionally religious New England family, his orthodoxy had been undermined by European science. Before entering Harvard he had eagerly read Alexander von Humboldt’s multi-volumed Cosmos, an encyclopedic review of current attainments of science, written in the language of naturalism. For Fiske this book had been a revelation of almost religious intensity, an emotional experience strong enough to force the Civil War into the background. “What’s a war,” he wrote in April 1861, “when a fellow has ‘Kosmos’ on his shelf and ‘Faust’ on his table?”5 It was appropriate for Fiske to couple Humboldt with Goethe. More than any other American of his time, Fiske felt the Faustian urge to devour the entire realm of knowledge. This it was which sent him plowing through the works of the English scientific writers, Mill, Lewes, Buckle, Herschel, Bain, Lyell, and Huxley, impelled him to undertake the most strenuous exercises in philology (he had mastered eight languages and started six others by the time he was twenty), and kept him abreast of recent advances in biblical criticism. When Darwinism appeared, with its imposing answer to the riddle of species, when Spencer promised a profound and authoritative interpretation of the meaning of science, Fiske had long since changed gods.
Darwinism attracted many who lacked Fiske’s ebullient spirit and his freakish appetite for learning. To young Henry Adams, bewildered by his recent experiences in Civil War diplomacy, it at first suggested an intelligible rationale for recent history:
He felt, like nine men in ten, an instinctive belief in Evolution . . . Natural Selection led back to Natural Evolution, and at last to Natural Uniformity. This was a vast stride. Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased everyone—except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative, practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity. Such a working system for the universe suited a young man who had just helped to waste five or ten thousand million dollars and a million lives, more or less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people who objected to it; the idea was only too seductive in its perfection; it had the charm of art.6
For others, more confident of the optimistic implications of evolution, The Origin of Species became an oracle, consulted with the reverence usually reserved for Scripture. Charles Loring Brace, a leading social worker and reformer, read it thirteen times and emerged with the assurance that evolution guaranteed the final fruition of human virtue and the perfectibility of man. “For if the Darwinian theory be true, the law of natural selection applies to all the moral history of mankind, as well as the physical. Evil must die ultimately as the weaker element, in the struggle with good.”7
Before it could secure a grip on the public mind and find a place in accepted patterns of thought, evolution had to prevail within the realm of science itself; and even scientists, especially those among the older generation who were committed to traditional ways of thinking, found adjustment to evolution a painful process. “It is like confessing murder,” Darwin had remarked in 1844, when first he broached to Joseph Dalton Hooker his belief in the mutability of species. And Sir Charles Lyell, whose geology led to the very brink of the development hypothesis, hesitated for almost a decade before making the plunge.8 Before Darwin, however, scientists had been puzzled by the inadequacy of the old notion of the fixity of species, which fitted so badly with the facts of paleontology and geology, with known fossil specimens, the wide variety of species, and the classification of living organisms. They had conventionally assumed that a series of acts of special creation had taken place. While this facile hypothesis may have accorded with their religious beliefs, the new generation of scientists, trained to see their function as a quest for natural causes, suspected that special creation was a poor intellectual makeshift. Among this generation the development hypothesis and the theory of natural selection spread rapidly, and a host of distinguished Darwinian advocates was soon in the field.
Alone among outstanding American naturalists, Louis Agassiz refused to the bitter end to accept Darwinism or evolution in any form.9 Agassiz’s master, Georges L. Cuvier, had been the leading opponent of evolution in the early nineteenth century, and the pupil fought Darwin as his teacher had fought Lamarck. To Agassiz, Darwinism was a crude and insolent challenge to the eternal verities, objectionable as science and abominable for its religious blasphemies. In his last article, published posthumously, Agassiz argued that all the evolution known to man is ontogenetic, the embryological development of the individual. Beyond this it would be impossible to go; evidence of descent of later from earlier species, or of the animal ancestry of man, was totally lacking. The classification of animals, Agassiz said, belied the idea of progression from lower to higher; the history of geological succession showed that the lowest in structure is not necessarily the first in time. A great diversity of animal types probably existed from the very beginning; it is therefore more likely that what men call species arose through separate successive acts of creation of differing individual organisms rather than natural selection or any other mode of purely natural development.10
Convinced that Darwinism was a fad (like Oken’s Naturphilosophie in his younger days), Agassiz brashly asserted that he would “outlive this mania”;11 but when he died in 1873 American science lost its last distinguished opponent of the new theory. Even if Agassiz had lived many years longer it is doubtful that his influence would have retarded the spread of evolution among scientists. Before his death his own students were falling away. Among them, Joseph Le Conte felt that outlines of the development theory were latent in Agassiz’s own classification of animal forms, which need only be interpreted dynamically to yield a convincing picture of the evolutionary past.12 William James, who had been intimate with Agassiz, was his bitterest critic. “The more I think of Darwin’s ideas,” he wrote to his brother Henry in 1868, “the more weighty do they appear to me, though of course my opinion is worth very little—still, I believe that that scoundrel Agassiz is unworthy either intellectually or morally for him to wipe his shoes on, and I find a certain pleasure in yielding to the feeling.”13 Not long after Agassiz’s death, a writer pointed out that eight of Agassiz’s most eminent pupils at Harvard, including the master’s own son, were evolutionists of relatively long standing.14 In 1874, James Dwight Dana, dean of American geologists, published the final edition of his Manual of Geology, in which he too, after a prolonged attempt to resist natural selection, at last granted his endorsement.
Asa Gray soon found himself the acknowledged interpreter of American scientific opinion. Combining the conviction of a crusader with the caution of a scientist, Gray was peculiarly fitted to lead the Darwinian forces. His initial review of The Origin of Species, a brilliant essay upon the entire problem, had given American biologists a favorable but measured summary of Darwin’s case. Conscientiously Gray had set forth what he conceived were the most cogent scientific objections to natural selection, but he praised the theory for its rigidly scientific contribution to biology. Darwin, he wrote guardedly, “has rendered a theory of derivation [of species] much less improbable than before. . . . Such a theory chimes in with the established doctrines of physical science, and is not unlikely to be largely accepted before it can be proved.” With more daring he attacked Agassiz’s theory of species as “theistic to excess” and praised Darwin’s as an antidote. Closing on a note of defiance to possible religious criticisms, he declared that Darwinism is perfectly compatible with theism; and, he conceded, while it is also compatible with atheism, “that is true of physical theories generally.” Natural selection, far from being an attack upon the argument from design in nature, may be considered one of the possible theories of the workings of God’s plan.15
By the early 1870’s the transmutation of species and natural selection dominated the outlook of American naturalists. At the twenty-fifth meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Vice-President Edward S. Morse gave a striking review of contributions of American biologists to evidences of evolution, which showed that their reception of Darwinism had been more than passive.16 Most impressive among these were studies by Professor Othniel C. Marsh of Yale. An acquaintance of Gray, Lyell, and Darwin, one of the most colorful scientific men of the period, Marsh had set out in the early years of the decade in search of fossil specimens to confirm the development hypothesis. By 1874 he had collected a striking set of American fossil horses and published a paper, tracing the development of the horse through geologic ages, which Darwin later acclaimed as the best support of evolution appearing in the two decades following The Origin of Species.17
The conversion of the scientists promised early success in the universities, where the atmosphere was charged with electricity. A reform movement was under way to put greater stress upon science in the curricula, and science schools were being established to meet the country’s growing need for technicians.18 The appalling neglect of scientific specialization (which had brought forth in the smaller colleges such monstrosities as “Professor of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Mineralogy, and Geology and Lecturer of Zoology and Botany”) was now a patent anachronism in a nation that urgently needed science for its industry and agriculture and could well afford to patronize scientific development.
Harvard led the way in university reform with the appointment in 1869 of Charles William Eliot, a chemist, as its president. At Eliot’s inauguration John Fiske privately expressed the hope that this appointment would signify the end of “old fogyism” at Harvard. The realization of this wish came sooner than he expected, and in a more personal way, when Eliot immediately called upon him to offer a series of special lectures at Harvard on the philosophy of science. Eight years before, as an undergraduate, Fiske had been threatened with dismissal from Harvard College if he were caught talking Comtism, which was generally considered atheistic. Now he was asked to hold forth at length under the aegis of the university on the positivist philosophy. Fiske, who had long since dropped Comte in favor of Spencer, undertook the task of defending Spencer against the charge of plagiarizing from Comte, but this hardly diminished the sweetness of his own vindication. The lectures, which were reported in the papers, aroused some criticism, but the audiences were large and enthusiastic.19 Some years later, when William James used Spencer’s Principles of Psychology as a textbook at Harvard, there was not a murmur of excitement. The new philosophy had made its way into the oldest of American universities quickly and almost without controversy.
At Yale it was again Spencer rather than Darwin who created the issue, which did not arise until 1879–80, when William Graham Sumner clashed with President Noah Porter. Porter, a Congregational clergyman, was not an uncompromising opponent of evolutionism in all its forms. Influenced by Professor Marsh’s discoveries and his prestige, and impressed by the fine collection of specimens at Yale’s own Peabody Museum, he had surrendered to evolution by 1877, when he gave an address in which he asserted that he found “no inconsistency between the findings of this museum on the one corner and the teachings of the college chapel on the other.”20 Nonetheless, he believed that American colleges should be kept “distinctively and earnestly Christian.” When Sumner, also converted to evolution by Marsh’s work, tried to use Spencer’s Study of Sociology as a text in one of his courses, Porter objected to the work’s antitheistic and anticlerical tone, and insisted that Sumner abandon it. A widely publicized controversy followed, which ended in a Pyrrhic victory for Porter.21 Sumner, after excoriating Porter, threatened to resign, and was induced with some difficulty to remain. He dropped Spencer’s book, on the ground that the controversy had undermined its value as a textbook, but otherwise continued in his independent ways. Porter himself conducted a course in “First Principles” to refute Spencer’s ideas, in which he used some of the evolutionist’s writings. To his dismay, the appeal of Spencer’s works was irresistible to many students, and they became converts to the doctrines Porter was at such pains to overthrow.22
Less prominent scholars and clerical teachers in some other schools of higher learning were neither as safe nor as successful as Fiske and Sumner. The geologist Alexander Winchell was dismissed from Vanderbilt in 1878, and occasional infringements of academic liberties in other institutions, North and South, caught the attention of the public throughout the 1880’s and 1890’s.23 What is perhaps most noteworthy, however, is not the strength of the resistance but the rapidity with which the new ideas won their way in the better colleges and universities. Evolution penetrated the ranks of faculties and students alike. “Ten or fifteen years ago,” declared Whitelaw Reid in an address at Dartmouth College in 1873, “the staple subject here for reading and talk, outside study hours, was English poetry and fiction. Now it is English science. Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, have usurped the places of Tennyson and Browning, and Matthew Arnold and Dickens.”24
The founding in 1876 of The Johns Hopkins University, an institution devoted to research and free of obligations to any religious denomination, marked a long forward step in higher education. Its first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, struck a symbolic note of defiance to obscurantism at its opening ceremonies by having Thomas Henry Huxley, who was in America on a lecture tour, give an address. Huxley’s address was well received, but his appearance called forth the expected odium theologicum. “It was bad enough to invite Huxley,” wrote one divine. “It were better to have asked God to be present. It would have been absurd to ask them both.”25 Such outcries, however, did not impede the development of the new institution, which was soon among the few leading universities in the advancement of scientific learning. Nor did the cries of alarm obscure or diminish Huxley’s popularity; he found it necessary to refuse countless requests for lectures, and his comings and goings were reported with lavish care by the press.
Popular magazines promptly opened their columns to the evolution controversy. Characteristic progress over a ten-year period from hostility to skepticism to gingerly approval, and finally to full-blown praise, can be seen in the volumes of the North American Review, traditional forum of New England intellectuals. In 1860 an anonymous reviewer of The Origin of Species, arguing that natural selection would take an eternity of time to accomplish its task, rejected Darwin’s theory as “fanciful.”26 Four years later a writer pointed out that the development hypothesis, as a general conception, “has much to recommend it to the speculative mind. It is, as it were, an abstract statement of the order which the intellect expects to find in nature.”27 In 1868, the freethinker Francis Ellingwood Abbot suggested that despite differences of opinion on minor points the development hypothesis would probably take a place among the accepted truths of science.28 In 1870 natural selection was praised by Charles Loring Brace as “one of the great intellectual events of the present century, influencing every department of investigation.” The following year the magazine published an essay by Chauncey Wright defending natural selection; this so impressed Darwin that he had it reprinted in pamphlet form for English readers.29
At the instance of Youmans, who saw the need for a popular magazine emphasizing scientific news, D. Appleton and Company founded Appleton’s Journal in 1867. The journal was the first to run large numbers of articles on Spencer and Darwin and to provide regular publication for the popularizations of Youmans and Fiske. Neither wholly literary nor wholly scientific, Appleton’s Journal pleased few readers.30 More successful was the Popular Science Monthly, founded by Youmans in 1872. The monthly was surprisingly well received, considering the difficulty of some of its subject matter, and soon sold eleven thousand copies a month. There, next to more sensational sketches designed to satisfy common curiosity—“Great Fires and Rainstorms,” “Hypnotism in Animals,” “The Genesis of Superstition,” “Earthquakes and Their Causes”—were learned articles on the philosophy of science, laudatory sketches of leading scientists, discussions of the reconciliation between science and religion, polemics against obscurantism, and reports on the latest progress of research. Edited on a high level and followed faithfully by a substantial body of readers, the monthly was the signal journalistic accomplishment of the scientific revival. To Youmans also must be given credit for organizing on behalf of Appleton’s the famous International Scientific Series, a set of books by outstanding scientific figures of the time planned to cover almost the whole range of natural and social knowledge, which numbered among its contributors Walter Bagehot, John W. Draper, Stanley Jevons. Spencer, and Edward Tylor in the social sciences; Alexander Bain, Joseph Le Conte, Darwin, and Henry Maudsley in psychology and biology; and John Tyndall and others in physical science. Through the International Scientific Series, the Popular Science Monthly, and its control of American editions of Spencer’s writings, Appleton dominated the new intellectual movement and rose to unchallenged leadership in the publishing world on the tidal wave of evolutionism.
The Atlantic Monthly also exploited the controversy by publishing Asa Gray’s early defenses of Darwinism.31 Seeking to maintain a noncommittal tone on Darwinism throughout the 1860’s, the editors balanced the scale by printing one of Agassiz’s counterblasts; but in 1872 an editorial on the rejection of Darwin by the French Academy of Science spoke of natural selection as having
. . . quite won the day in Germany and England, and very nearly won it in America. If the highest type of scientific mind be that which unites the power of originating grand generalizations with endless patience and caution in verifying them, then it is not too much to say that since the death of Newton this type has been in no one more perfectly realized than in Mr. Darwin.32
E. L. Godkin’s Nation gave a favorable if none too conspicuous place to notices of evolutionary writings. Its reviewers were among the first to praise Darwin, Wallace, and Spencer. Gray’s unsigned notices occasionally graced its columns, and some of his most vigorous onslaughts against recalcitrant naturalists and presumptuous clergymen appeared there. At a time when clerical magazines were in an uproar over Darwin’s The Descent of Man, the Nation described it as “the most lucid and impartial exposition of the present state of scientific opinion respecting the origin of man and his relations to the lower animals.”33
There could be no better testimony to an overwhelming interest in scientific developments and the new rationalism than the extensive daily newspaper coverage, in generous detail, of scientific or philosophical lectures. Fiske’s Harvard lectures on “The Cosmic Philosophy” were reported in the New York World at the suggestion of the editor, Manton Marble. Huxley’s lectures in New York were reprinted and discussed in the Tribune, and his visit was treated as ceremoniously as that of royalty.34 It excited no surprise that George Ripley, one of the more vocal journalistic champions of Darwinism,35 should take the dedication of the new Tribune building as an occasion for a muddy discussion of the metaphysical implications of nineteenth-century science.36 The “universal drenching” of belles-lettres and journalism with natural selection amused an editor of the Galaxy. “Journalism is dyed so deep with it,” he remarked, “that the favorite logic of the leading articles is ‘survival of the fittest’ and the favorite jest is ‘sexual selection.’” He noticed that a Washington reporter for the Herald had recently done a sketch of the Senate in which members were portrayed in Darwinian terms as bulls, lions, foxes, and rats. At the latest New Orleans Mardi Gras the Missing Link had been used as a costume motif.37
The last citadels to be stormed were the churches, where evolution won its chief victories among the intellectually alert members of the more liberal Protestant denominations. Of course large numbers of devout persons, Protestant and Catholic, were untouched by Darwinism. Probably the most popular religious leader of the Gilded Age was the evangelist Dwight L. Moody, whose followers must have been blissfully ignorant about all of the troublesome questions raised by the new science. The persistence of fundamentalism into the twentieth century is a token of the incompleteness of the Darwinian conquest. Among the reflective congregations of the late nineteenth-century churches, however, there were vague emotional stirrings and intellectual dissatisfactions which helped to create a receptive frame of mind for a theology liberal enough to embrace the concept of evolution.38
Darwinism seemed to strike from more than one direction at the very heart of traditional theology. For nearly a century the argument from design, as popularized by the English theologian William Paley, had been standard proof of the existence of God. Now it seemed to many that Darwinism, by blasting at this theological foundation stone, must inevitably lead to atheism. The new theory also exploded traditional conceptions of sin, and with them the moral sanctions of the past. At the very least it clearly impaired the authority of Scripture by discrediting the Genesis version of the creation. Such was the initial orthodox reaction.39 The appearance of The Descent of Man (1871) heaped fuel on the fires of clerical wrath,40 for now human dignity itself was openly under attack. Religious readers pointed with horror at Darwin’s too vivid description of man’s ancestor as “a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in habits.”
Darwin’s work and everything connected with it aroused virulent hostility throughout the 1860’s and 1870’s. Not a few of the clerical arguments were on the intellectual plane of the minister who asserted that Darwinism would be established only when scientists could take a monkey from the zoo and by natural selection make him into a man.41 The tone became such that a clergyman, Professor W. N. Rice of Wesleyan University, remonstrated with his fellows against their attitude toward Darwin and suggested that they confine their criticism to the scientific issues.42
The most important clerical objection, of course, was that Darwinism could not be reconciled with theism. Such was the central theme of the most popular exposition of anti-Darwinian views, Charles Hodge’s What Is Darwinism? (1874). An old-school clergyman, author of one of the most imposing theological treatises of the time, and editor of the Princeton Review, Hodge could speak with authority for a large body of churchmen. In his polemical volume, Hodge reminded his readers that “the Bible has little charity for those who reject it. It pronounces them to be either derationalized or demoralized, or both.”43 The perilous paths of atheism threaten all who trifle with evolution, he declared, citing a formidable list of alleged materialists and atheists, including Darwin, Haeckel, Huxley, Büchner, and Vogt. With scant regard for facts,44 Hodge charged that Darwin had carefully excluded any suggestion of design from nature, and closed with the assertion that Darwinism and atheism are synonymous.45
Catholic critics were often equally intransigent. Although mindful that St. George Mivart, an English Catholic and an able critic of natural selection, was an evolutionist, Orestes A. Brownson probably expressed the prevailing Catholic reaction when he urged a policy of no compromise with evolutionary biology. Dissatisfied with the weaker negations of both Protestant and many Catholic opponents of Darwinism, Brownson called for a categorical repudiation of nineteenth-century geology and biology, which he said represented a regression from the science of Aquinas. Lyell, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, even Agassiz, came under his vigorous attack. “The differentia of man,” he wrote, in an Aristotelian analysis of The Descent of Man, “not being in the ape, cannot be obtained from the ape by development. This sufficiently refutes Darwin’s whole theory.” The Genesis version of creation is still in possession, he concluded, and must be maintained until the contrary is fully demonstrated; the burden of proof therefore lies with Darwin.46
The most orthodox struggled with the desperation of men who felt their cause was doomed, but others retired to defensible positions in comparatively good order. The ultimate collapse of uncompromising opposition to evolution was foreshadowed as early as 1871, when James McCosh, the president of Princeton University and the semi-official voice of American Presbyterianism, acknowledged his acceptance of the development hypothesis in his Christianity and Positivism. An outstanding proponent of the current religious philosophy known as Scotch or “common sense” realism, and a man of unquestioned Christian integrity, McCosh had been specially imported from Scotland to give tone to Princeton. It was therefore a matter of considerable moment when, in a volume written to defend theism by the argument from design, he accepted the development hypothesis and conceded that natural selection is at least a portion of the truth:
Darwinism cannot be regarded as settled. . . . I am inclined to think that the theory contains a large body of important truths which we see illustrated in every department of organic nature; but that it does not contain the whole truth, and that it overlooks more than it perceives. . . . That this principle [natural selection] is exhibited in nature and working to the advancement of plants and animals from age to age, I have no doubt. . . . But it has not been proven that there is no other principle at work.47
True, McCosh balked at the application of natural selection to mankind on the ground that a special act of creation explains more plausibly man’s unique spiritual features; but the damage to orthodoxy was now done. Youmans wrote to Spencer in 1871:
Things are going here furiously. I have never known anything like it. Ten thousand Descent of Man have been printed and I guess they are nearly all gone. . . . The progress of liberal thought is remarkable. Everybody is asking for explanations. The clergy are in a flutter. McCosh told them not to worry, as whatever might be discovered he would find design in it and put God behind it. Twenty-five clergymen of Brooklyn sent for me to meet them of a Saturday night and tell them what they should do to be saved. I told them they would find the way of life in the Biology and in the Descent of Man. They said “very good,” and asked me to come again at the next meeting of the clerical dub, to which I went and was again handsomely resoluted.48
The weekly Independent, the most influential religious paper in the country, with over six thousand clergymen on its mailing list, was among the first to give a relatively favorable hearing to evolution. Its initial review of The Origin of Species intimated that the book tended to displace the Creator from “the animated universe,” but acknowledged the wealth of scientific material it contained. Subsequently the book was recommended for “the careful study of theologians and men of science.” The paper was cautious and still under the influence of Agassiz in the late 1860’s, although it had by then receded to the position that Darwinism would not affect theism, an acknowledgment which always served as an opening wedge. About this time, however, attempts at tenuous reconciliation of evolution with Scripture began to appear. “So long as the Bible does not assert that species were created distinct by an authoritative fiat we may be allowed to hear with no fluttering of our theologic nerves, the speculations of zoologists,” wrote one reviewer.49 By 1880 the Independent had completely reversed itself and had begun to publish full-throated polemics on behalf of evolution.50 Other periodicals were slower to modify their views, but two decades after the introduction of Darwinism, some change was noticeable among even the most conservative.51 The New Englander, an important forum of Yankee clergymen which had at first charged Darwin with reviving “an old, exploded theory,” in 1883 published an interesting conciliatory article, in which the hysteria of some Christian apologists was admitted. “A fresh source of conviction,” declared the writer, “is opened to our anticipations of immortality. It is the flattest inconsistency for an evolutionist to deny the probability of a higher future life.”52
In the task of easing the transition to Darwinism for their brethren, liberal clergymen received aid and comfort from men of science. Asa Gray labored tirelessly to show that natural selection had no ultimate bearing on the argument from design, and that Darwin himself was explicitly theistic.53 To those who insisted that the origins of species be left in the realm of the supernatural, Gray replied that they were arbitrarily limiting the field of science without enlarging that of religion. Joseph Le Conte, in his Religion and Science, a collection of Bible-class lectures, followed Gray in maintaining that the argument from design could not be changed by any possible answer to the question whether there had been transmutation of species or what the process of evolution might be. Science, he urged, should be looked upon not as the foe of religion, but rather as a complementary study of the ways in which the First Cause operated in the natural world. Whatever science might learn, the existence of God as First Cause could always be assumed.54 Liberal theologians made good use of the fact that many of the advocates of evolution, like Le Conte, Dana, and McCosh, were men of undeniable Christian piety. They stood as personal symbols of the possibility of reconciling religion and science.55
The most important pulpit in the United States was brought within the evolutionary ranks when Henry Ward Beecher was converted, thanks to the combined impact of Darwin and Spencer. Through Beecher’s Christian Union, which at one time reached a circulation of 100,000, and the Outlook, edited by Lyman Abbott, his successor at Plymouth Church, the liberalizing influence of Beecher’s new theology was widespread. To the reconciliation of religion and science Beecher brought his national reputation, his brilliant, artful rhetoric, and the healthy good cheer of a man newly liberated from the confines of Puritan theology. His chief theoretical contribution was a carefully elaborated distinction between the science of theology and the art of religion: theology would be corrected, enlarged. and liberated by evolution, but religion, as a spiritual fixture in the character of man, would be unmoved.56 Declaring himself “a cordial Christian evolutionist,” Beecher publicly acknowledged Spencer as his intellectual foster father. It was Beecher who trans lated the solution of the design problem into the idioms of a business civilization, with the reminder that “design by wholesale is grander than design by retail.”57 Lyman Abbott agreed; moreover, he forswore the traditional notion of sin, which, he held, degraded God as well as man. He proposed to replace it with an evolutionary view in which every immoral act was to be regarded as a lapse into animality. Sin would then be as abhorrent as ever, but the libel on God implied in the doctrine of original sin would be no more.58
By the 1880’s, the lines of argument that would be taken in the reconciliation of science and religion had become clear. Religion had been forced to share its traditional authority with science, and American thought had been greatly secularized. Evolution had made its way into the churches themselves, and there remained not a single figure of outstanding proportions in Protestant theology who still ventured to dispute it. But evolution had been translated into divine purpose, and in the hands of skillful preachers religion was livened and refreshed by the infusion of an authoritative idea from the field of science. The ranks of the old foes soon could hardly be distinguished as they merged in common hostility to pessimism or skepticism about the promise of American life. The specter of atheism was no longer a menace, and surveys of the colleges where one would most expect to discover infidelity revealed how little there was.59 With little exaggeration a minister could say that American infidelity had not produced “a single champion of cosmopolitan or even of national reputation.”60 “The spirit,” explained Phillips Brooks, “that cries ‘Credo quia impossibile,’ the heroic spirit of faith, is too deep in human nature for any one century to eradicate it.”61 For was it not true, as Beecher told his Plymouth Church congregation, that “the moral structure of the human mind is such that it must have religion”? He continued:
It must have superstition, or it must have intelligent religion. It is just as necessary to men as reason is, as imagination is, as hope and desire are. Religious yearning is part and parcel of the human composition. And when you have taken down any theologic structure—if you should take down the Roman Church and scatter its materials; if then one by one you should dissect all Protestant theologies and scatter them—man would still be a religious animal, would need and be obliged to go about and construct some religious system for himself.62
To these sentiments of its leading divine, the Gilded Age gave unanimous consent.
1 Supernumerals refer to the notes at the end of this book (pages 217–242).