The Infidel Half Century

THE DAWN OF DARWINISM

One day early in the eighteen hundred and sixties, I, being then a small boy, was with my nurse, buying something in the shop of a petty newsagent, bookseller, and stationer in Camden Street, Dublin, when there entered an elderly man, weighty and solemn, who advanced to the counter, and said pompously, ’Have you the works of the celebrated Buffoon?’

My own works were at that time unwritten, or it is possible that the shop assistant might have misunderstood me so far as to produce a copy of Man and Superman.  As it was, she knew quite well what he wanted; for this was before the Education Act of 1870 had produced shop assistants who know how to read and know nothing else.  The celebrated Buffoon was not a humorist, but the famous naturalist Buffon.  Every literate child at that time knew Buffon’s Natural History as well as Esop’s Fables.  And no living child had heard the name that has since obliterated Buffon’s in the popular consciousness:  the name of Darwin.

Ten years elapsed.  The celebrated Buffoon was forgotten; I had doubled my years and my length; and I had discarded the religion of my forefathers.  One day the richest and consequently most dogmatic of my uncles came into a restaurant where I was dining, and found himself, much against his will, in conversation with the most questionable of his nephews.  By way of making myself agreeable, I spoke of modern thought and Darwin.  He said, ’Oh, thats the fellow who wants to make out that we all have tails like monkeys.’  I tried to explain that what Darwin had insisted on in this connection was that some monkeys have no tails.  But my uncle was as impervious to what Darwin really said as any Neo-Darwinian nowadays.  He died impenitent, and did not mention me in his will.

Twenty years elapsed.  If my uncle had been alive, he would have known all about Darwin, and known it all wrong.  In spite of the efforts of Grant Allen to set him right, he would have accepted Darwin as the discoverer of Evolution, of Heredity, and of modification of species by Selection.  For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo’s demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci’s simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Newton’s theory of gravitation, Sir Humphry Davy’s invention of the safety-lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post.  It was just the same in other subjects.  Thus Nietzsche, by the two or three who had come across his writings, was supposed to have been the first man to whom it occurred that mere morality and legality and urbanity lead nowhere, as if Bunyan had never written Badman.  Schopenhauer was credited with inventing the distinction