Bronson Alcott was disappointed to learn of Emerson’s high opinion of On the Origin of Species. That spring at the Saturday Club, Louis Agassiz broached the topic of Darwin’s book with Emerson, who apparently had already read portions of the Origin sometime after returning from his winter lecture tour. Most likely he obtained a copy at Thoreau’s urging, dipping into the book, as was his custom, like a bee collecting pollen, flipping pages back and forth, seeking inspiration for his own essays. He almost never read a book from start to finish, but he had skimmed enough of the Origin to see that its premises could be absorbed into his own progressive notion of history and human aspiration and that it confirmed some of his own deeply held convictions about the universe.
Indeed, while Emerson would always think of Nature as a reflection of God’s thought, he shared with Darwin a sense that the material world was best understood as fluid and ever changing. “There are no fixtures in nature,” Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay “Circles.” “The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.” There was an endpoint to this motion, however: the creation of divinely inspired humans. “The continual effort to raise himself above himself,” he continued in the same essay, “to work a pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man’s relations.” One of Emerson’s young followers, Moncure Daniel Conway, went so far as to say, “We who studied [Emerson] were building our faith on evolution before Darwin came to prove our foundations strictly scientific.” Conway exaggerated, but not by much, when he noted that it had long been clear to Emerson that “the method of nature is evolution, and it organized the basis of his every statement.”
Agassiz, on the other hand, had continued his very public campaign to discredit evolutionary theory. On February 15 he attended another meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History, where he listened impatiently as members reported on new bird species and read correspondence from far-flung collectors. Then he stood up and expressed his profound distaste for the new book. Darwin was a “successful writer and natural historian,” he allowed, but his new theory, while admittedly “ingenious,” was also “fanciful.” Fanciful was one of Agassiz’s favorite epithets: a quality insufficiently respectful of the careful thinking demanded by science. The possibility that species migrated from place to place instead of remaining in their allocated zone, in Agassiz’s opinion, was fanciful. The notion that plants or animals changed over time was fanciful. The belief that whites and blacks shared the same ancestor was also most deplorably fanciful. Agassiz told the assembled society that Darwin actually seemed to have convinced himself that creation began “with a primary cell.” From this improbable beginning, organic life had developed “by a process of differentiation and gradual improvement.”
The great Swiss scientist then launched into a rambling exposition. He expressed his belief that animals presently inhabiting the Earth were wholly unrelated to similar species from the past. Previous creatures had been wiped out during cataclysms such as the Ice Age and had then been recreated by God. Moreover, no credible evidence existed to prove that animals had grown more complex over time, as Darwin insisted. “Animal representatives were as numerous and diversified in early geological periods as now,” Agassiz said.
In subsequent meetings of the society, the geologist William Barton Rogers would skillfully dismantle most of these arguments. Rogers was the soon-to-be-president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his debates with Agassiz he employed an encyclopedic knowledge of North American geology to show that most of his opponent’s claims were either false or partially true at best. But Agassiz cared little for debating the topic; he was not interested in debating a subject about which he was already certain. As far as he was concerned, his own theory of special creation rendered Darwin’s null and void. This was one of the reasons he preferred discussing the topic with members of the Saturday Club, who were far more sympathetic to his ideas and who were also more likely to shape public opinion about Darwinian theory than a handful of scientific specialists.
During a spring meeting of the club, Agassiz waited until the dinner plates were removed and then, according to a visitor, “made some little fling at the new theory.” Conversation around the table died off.
Emerson, who was sitting next to Agassiz, smiled. He looked directly at his friend and admitted that while reading Darwin’s book, “he had at once expressed satisfaction and confirmation of what [Agassiz] has long been telling us.” For the Origin of Species, in his opinion, seemed to authenticate all of “those beautiful harmonies of form with form throughout nature which [Agassiz] had so finely divined.”
Agassiz was pleasantly surprised by this compliment. “Yes,” he said, warming to the topic. He said something about nature’s “ideal relationships,” which were nothing less than the “connected thoughts of a Being acting with an intellectual purpose.”
But Emerson didn’t mean that exactly. At age fifty-seven, he had become too great a respecter of the material world, its obdurate presence in human affairs. For some years now his thinking had been consumed with the poignant limitations of experience. While he continued to believe that “the visible universe was all a manifestation of things ideal,” he nevertheless acknowledged that the “visible universe” impinged with some frequency upon his own day-to-day life and in ways that were difficult to explain away. Might one not consider Darwin’s new theory “a counterpart of the ideal development”?
Agassiz shook his head. “There I cannot agree with you,” he replied, and quickly changed the subject.
• • •
Bronson Alcott attended this meeting of the Saturday Club, and although he remained mute on the topic in his journal, he instinctively sided with Agassiz. Interested in new ideas, Alcott was not deaf to the melody of Darwin’s thinking; he just didn’t care for its particular tune. The theory banished Mind from the universe, evacuated meaning from the cosmos. All his life Alcott had trusted that a wise and benevolent Soul animated creation, guiding it toward perfection. But about Darwin’s theories he would later complain, “Any faith declaring a divorce from the supernatural, and seeking to prop itself upon Nature alone falls short of satisfying the deepest needs of humanity.”
At the next meeting of the Saturday Club, he brought up the topic himself. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes were in attendance, and the two poets sat flushed and buoyant as they enjoyed their wine and traded bons mots. At one end of the long table Bronson Alcott and Louis Agassiz sat huddled together, wrapped in conversation. The two men could not have been more dissimilar: Agassiz burnished with good food and wine, his manners expansively European, Alcott committed to his vegetables and water, his attention wavering now and then as he communed with some ineffable spirit.
Leaning forward, he told Agassiz that he was distressed by the theory of natural selection—by the way it pretended to explain how humans could have originated from lesser creatures. Alcott had been mulling over this aspect of Darwin’s hypothesis. Emerson, in his famous essay “The American Scholar,” had described humans as existing in a “grub state.” Too many Americans were sleepy drones refusing to awaken, unaware of their innate capacity to transform themselves into spiritual butterflies. From Alcott’s vantage, Darwin emphasized the animal nature—the grub state—of creation far too much. The English naturalist seemed morbidly attached to an amoral struggle of existence, which robbed humans of free will and ignored the promptings of the soul. Alcott had developed his own hypothesis about transmutation, which he wanted to share with Agassiz.
“I have long desired,” he said, “to bring my views of creation to the severest scientific test. To me the idea that man is the development from lower orders of beings is a subversion of the truth.”
Agassiz grew attentive. According to a visitor that evening, he looked about the table “with a somewhat pleased glance at the rest of the company, whom he knew to be inclined to the hypothesis of Darwin.”
“Yes, sir,” Alcott continued, “an exact subversion of the truth. Man, I take it, was the first being; was he not?”
Agassiz looked confused.
Was it not obvious, Alcott continued, that “God could never have created a miserable, poisonous snake, and filthy vermin, and malignant tigers”?
Still puzzled, Agassiz asked who else might have created them.
“Must we not conclude,” Alcott replied, “that these evil beasts which fill the world are the various forms of human sins? That when man was created they did not exist, but were originated by his lusts and animalisms?”
Alcott had inverted Darwin’s evolutionary ideas. God had begun not with some lowly single-celled organism, he suggested, but instead with the highest form in nature—with humans. From there He had worked His way downward. Alcott told Agassiz he believed that all creatures had begun as humans, as part of a Universal Spirit, with some descending further into nature than others. The lower the animal in the chain of being, the further that particular animal had fallen from its true spiritual state.
At this point Agassiz thought it helpful to interject with some science. “But geology shows that these beasts existed many ages before man,” he said.
“But may man not have created these things before he appeared in his present form?” Alcott earnestly asked.
Many years later Franklin Sanborn would speak of “that time when Alcott’s ideas had become worn out.” He was speaking of the years after the Civil War, when philosophical idealism was no longer in fashion and seemed increasingly a quaint relic from the past. In truth, that process had begun much earlier. Alcott’s daughter Louisa revered his commitment to ideals, but she was also too honest to ignore her father’s harebrained theorizing. She viewed her father with a combination of affection, resentment, and ridicule, much like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who moved next door that summer and satirized Bronson’s obsession with diet. “He is now convinced,” Hawthorne wrote, “. . . that pears exercise a more direct and ennobling influence on us than any other vegetable or fruit.”
In 1860 Alcott’s ideas were already becoming obsolete. Darwin’s theory didn’t make them that way, but it did hasten the process. The scientist’s solid, unflappable language, his voluminous use of example and illustration—all these things exposed Alcott’s abstractions as guesswork and conjectures, the unverifiable suppositions of someone who needed to believe in them.
Alcott’s response to the theory of natural selection was to reject its materialism out of hand. At the same time, he borrowed its outlines so as to imagine a world filled with creatures that had descended from original perfection. In essence he applied Platonic ideals to evolutionary theory. Even Agassiz, the most idealistic scientist in America, understood that this approach was nonsense. He listened as long as he was able, and then he did what many people do when cornered by a monologist sharing a pet idea. He smiled politely and glanced at his watch.
• • •
Alcott failed to recognize the Darwinian references sprinkled throughout Thoreau’s latest lecture. He thought “Wild Apples” “a celebration of the principles of Nature, exemplified with much learning and original observation: beginning with the Apple in Eden and down to the wildings in Concord.” Alcott sat in the Town Hall and “listened with uninterrupted interest and delight” while Thoreau punned on Adam and Eve, on crab apples, on Johnny Appleseed. The lecture was a perfect example of Thoreau’s ability to spin literary gold from the simplest materials.
By focusing on wild apples, Thoreau was making his standard argument for the uncultivated and untamable aspects of life. He traced the history of apple cultivation, sprinkling his talk with a decade’s worth of facts and observations he culled from his notebooks and journals. Concord residents must have delighted to hear the village eccentric expound on the apple’s place in Greek mythology and Homeric epic, to learn of the numerous binomial Latin names for apple varieties used by science, to hear pungent descriptions of the taste of different apples, including the acrid crabapple. They must have recognized with delight the “old farmer” Thoreau quoted as saying that apples in November “‘have a kind of bow-arrow tang.’”
What they most likely did not notice was the influence of Darwin, which courses like a subterranean stream through the loamy prose of Thoreau’s lecture. He traced the geographical distribution of apple trees “throughout Western Asia, China, & Japan.” He described how animals helped disperse apple seeds, and he portrayed the fruit tree as an example of artificial selection, having been transmuted from an indigenous shrub to “the most civilized of all trees” by careful breeding over many generations. Referring to Darwin’s discussion of dog breeders, he asked, “Who knows but like the dog, [the apple] will at length be no longer traceable to its wild original (No tree is more perfectly domesticated). It migrates.”
By the time he delivered his lecture on “Wild Apples” in late February, Thoreau had long since finished reading Darwin’s groundbreaking book. He continued to dwell on it, however, focusing especially on the book’s third chapter, “The Struggle for Existence.” Darwin’s portrait of the “war between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey” captured a dynamic he had observed on his countless walks into the woods. But he was becoming more interested in the way this war also linked creatures together—something Darwin described as the way “plants and animals most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations.” In Darwin’s vision of nature, species and individuals honed themselves in strife. They came into being through continual friction with one another. “Many cases are on record showing how complex and unexpected are the checks and relations between organic beings,” Darwin wrote, “which have to struggle together in the same country.” Thoreau didn’t express it in quite the same way, but he seems to have begun envisioning a natural world that resembled a democracy more than a kingdom, its citizens connected and yet perennially jostling for advantage. As winter came to a close, this fascination increasingly expressed itself in Thoreau’s research into trees.
One of Darwin’s examples stood out in particular—a passage in the Origin describing a Staffordshire estate. The land, which probably belonged to Darwin’s father, was a large, barren heath. A generation earlier several hundred acres had been fenced off and planted with Scotch fir, the only pine variety native to Europe. Twenty years later the difference between the two areas was astonishing—“more than is generally seen in passing from one quite different soil to another,” Darwin wrote. Twelve plants that did not exist on the heath flourished among the pines. Six insectivorous bird species, also wholly absent on the heath, lived there—implying a significant alteration in the insect population, as well. “Here we see how potent has been the effect of the introduction of a single tree, nothing whatever else having been done, with the exception that the land had been enclosed, so that cattle could not enter.”
It was a simple but brilliant insight. By amassing details about plants and animals, Darwin had grasped how new environments might come into being. He could not trace every step that had created this new ecosystem—he had not observed it for the twenty years it took to develop—but he had a plausible theory to explain why the transformation had occurred. By introducing a new species to an established environment, humans had completely thrown off-kilter the dynamics of competition and coexistence, creating opportunities and disasters in its wake. An alteration in nature’s equilibrium had introduced a chain of advantages and disadvantages to countless species, radically transforming the landscape.
Thoreau latched onto this particular moment in the Origin for several reasons. For one, it implied that the history of an environment was recoverable. If one accepted the premise that perpetual struggle between species led to the creation of place, then one could uncover its history and thereby determine why “precisely these objects which we behold make a world,” as he had written in Walden. The passage in the Origin also reinforced the idea that such histories were provisional and unpredictable. Each living thing contained the potential for countless actions and reactions, and these in turn contained innumerable paths of development that were impossible to manage. Nature was alive, in other words, not static. And one other aspect of Darwin’s story about the Staffordshire estate intrigued Thoreau: its human element. A completely new landscape had sprung into existence when a sentient being decided to introduce pine trees. This simple act had helped create a complicated environment, a new fact in the world. Thoreau had long suspected that people were an intrinsic part of nature—neither separate nor entirely alienated from it. Darwin enabled him to see how people and the environment worked together to fashion the world. Put another way, the Origin provided a scientific foundation for Thoreau’s belief that humans and nature were part of the same continuum.
• • •
As winter waned, Thoreau walked with new purpose, looking for evidence of struggle and development in the woodlots just beyond the village. He spent time examining the margins between pine and oak forests, suddenly aware that these were the battle lines between two species that competed for the same soil and the same sunlight. He was more alert to the consequences of human activity. One day toward the end of March he left his mother’s yellow house on Main Street and walked several miles to the nearby town of Acton, where a forest fire had recently consumed a thousand acres of timber. Here was an opportunity to observe a landscape wiped clean, an area that would have to start over from scratch—a laboratory of creation.
The air still smelled of smoke. The horizon was blurred with a thick, bluish haze. Thoreau stood before the smoldering waste, rapt and yet uncomfortable. Sixteen years earlier, in April 1844, in one of the most shameful acts of his life, he had accidentally burned down a large swath of the Concord woods. His campfire, built too large, had quickly spread beyond its pit. Thoreau jumped up to extinguish the blaze, first using his hands and feet, then grabbing a board from his canoe, “but in a few minutes it was beyond . . . reach; being on the side of a hill, it spread rapidly upward through the long, dry, wiry grass interspersed with bushes.”
For years he could not bring himself to write about the event or the helplessness that had swallowed him as thick hot smoke spread through the woods and blackened the sky. There was something dreamlike and unreal about the experience. He watched as his beloved woods were consumed in a roaring red glow he had created. It was a lesson in hubris, in unintended consequences—a lesson in the way incendiary events engulf us and spread beyond our control. Thoreau could describe the incident only in a numb and distant voice. “The earth was uncommonly dry,” he wrote, and the “fire, kindled far from the woods in a sunny recess in the hillside on the east of the pond, suddenly caught the dry grass of the previous year which grew about the stump on which it was kindled.” He wrote nothing about the danger he had found himself in as the flames devoured every combustible material around him. Nor did he mention the strange, exciting beauty of the conflagration.
Now, sixteen years later, he stood outside Acton, before a blackened world. Charred trees lay amid embers, and the ashen hillside was silent and lifeless. It was cold—unseasonably cold, with the temperature reading thirty-one degrees, according to Thoreau’s notes—and he saw traces of snow on gooseberry and lilac shrubs that were just beginning to bud some forty feet from the forest fire. It was “the dangerous time,” he wrote that evening, a period of the year “between the drying of the earth, or say when the dust begins to fly, and the general leafing of the trees, when it is shaded again.”
That night he wrote nothing about the world beyond Concord’s woods—a world that seemed increasingly on the edge of combustion, too. A few months earlier he had been utterly consumed by the John Brown affair, unable to sleep, angry, and aflame with indignation. During the winter he had willed himself to quit thinking about the nation’s baleful state of affairs, its compromises and hypocrisies, its unacceptable complicity with slavery. With little faith in the political process, which he believed favored the wealthy and self-interested, Thoreau read about the upcoming Republican and Democratic conventions with derision.
Darwin’s book had helped him take his mind off these things. The Origin had redirected his thinking. It shifted his focus from a corrupt society that seemed incapable of reform to a natural world defined entirely by change and exuberant dynamism. In his journals and conversations, Thoreau still sometimes erupted in anger at Brown’s unjust execution. But Darwin’s theory soothed him during this period.
Which isn’t to say he adopted the book unequivocally. That spring he continued to grapple with its unrelenting empiricism and with the inductive method of science more broadly. “Science in many departments of natural history does not pretend to go beyond the shell,” he observed a few days before visiting the forest fire in Acton, “i.e., it does not get to animated nature at all.” For Thoreau, merely measuring and describing nature failed to capture its essence. Take the dog, for example. What was most interesting about the animal was “his attachment to his master, his intelligence, courage, and the like, and not his anatomical structure or even many habits which affect us less.” Other aspects of the dog—its relationship to its kind, its fondness for warmth and touch, its interactions with people—conveyed core attributes far better than physical descriptions. Science missed the bigger picture. It failed to grasp what the ancient Romans would have called the animus of nature: its spirit, its mind, its purpose.
At times, Thoreau’s thought bordered on the nostalgic. He longed for the transcendentalist’s confidence in a natural world infused with spirit. He considered his increasing scientism an unwelcome sign of aging, as if the sap and vigor of youth were slowly petrifying. But he continued collecting data, continued filling his journal with notations on the arrival of the robin and bobolink, the budding of the spiraea and the Missouri currant. The third or fourth time he ventured to the wildfire site near Acton, he took notes on the moisture of the ground near the burned-out region. Then he returned to Concord.
On his way home he stopped to speak with a local farmer who was milking his cows. The man sat on his stool, his head pressed against the warm, soft flank of the animal, while Thoreau asked questions in the cold barn. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, an ox standing near the two men “half lay, half fell, down on the hard and filthy floor, extending its legs helplessly to one side in a mechanical manner while its head was uncomfortably held between the stanchions as in a pillory.”
Something about the sight moved Thoreau. It recalled to him the continuous discord over slavery that filled the daily newspapers. As he later wrote that evening, “The man’s fellow-laborer the ox, tired with his day’s work, is compelled to take his rest, like the most wretched slave or culprit.”
The next day he wrote nothing in his journal. A fire of another kind had swept through Concord. That night he never even made it home.