XV

CHARLES DARWIN

To this focus of close friendships Charles Darwin would assuredly have been invited to belong had he been other than an invalid living away from London; for he was the warm and revered friend not only of Huxley, but still more of Hooker, who in age stood midway between the two—­eight years younger than the one and eight years older than the other—­and who, for some fifteen years before the publication of the Origin of Species, had been Darwin’s most intimate friend and aid in his work.

Huxley had made Darwin’s acquaintance early in the fifties, and soon fell under the spell of his deep thought, his utter sincerity and generous warmth of heart.  Darwin, for his part, was strongly attracted by his new friend’s penetrating knowledge, incisive criticism, and brilliant conversation.  When, in 1858, he began to write out the Origin, Huxley was one of the three men he fixed upon by whose judgment of the book he meant to abide.  Lyell, who had read the book before it came out, was the first; Hooker, his long-time aid and critic and finally convert, the second.  On the eve of publication, secure of these, he adds:  “If I can convert Huxley I shall be content.”

On all three the effect of the completed book, with its array of detailed argument and evidence, was far greater than that of previous discussions.  With one or two reservations as to the logical completeness of the theory, Huxley accepted it as a well-founded working hypothesis, calculated to explain problems otherwise inexplicable.  There were evolutionists before Darwin, from Lamarck and the author of the Vestiges of Creation to Herbert Spencer; but as there was no evidence to bear out the orthodox creational view of the Book of Genesis, enlarged upon in detail by Milton, so before Darwin the evidence in favour of the transmutation of species was wholly insufficient, and no suggestion which had been made to the causes of the assumed transmutation was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena.  Under such conditions only an agnostic attitude was possible.  “So,” writes Huxley—­

I took refuge in that “thaetige Skepsis,” which Goethe has so well defined, and, reversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I usually defended the tenability of the received doctrines when I had to do with the transmutationists, and stood up for the possibility of transmutation among the orthodox, thereby, no doubt, increasing an already current, but quite undeserved, reputation for needless combativeness.

Then came the publication of the Darwin-Wallace paper in 1858, and of the Origin in 1859, the effect of which he compares to—­