Chapter XV. Darwinism (1867-1868)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

POLITICS, diplomacy, law, art, and history had opened no outlet
for future energy or effort, but a man must do something, even in
Portland Place, when winter is dark and winter evenings are
exceedingly long. At that moment Darwin was convulsing society. The
geological champion of Darwin was Sir Charles Lyell, and the Lyells
were intimate at the Legation. Sir Charles constantly said of Darwin,
what Palgrave said of Tennyson, that the first time he came to town,
Adams should be asked to meet him, but neither of them ever came to
town, or ever cared to meet a young American, and one could not go to
them because they were known to dislike intrusion. The only Americans
who were not allowed to intrude were the half-dozen in the Legation.
Adams was content to read Darwin, especially his "Origin of Species"
and his "Voyage of the Beagle." He was a Darwinist before the letter;
a predestined follower of the tide; but he was hardly trained to
follow Darwin's evidences. Fragmentary the British mind might be, but
in those days it was doing a great deal of work in a very un-English
way, building up so many and such vast theories on such narrow
foundations as to shock the conservative, and delight the frivolous.
The atomic theory; the correlation and conservation of energy; the
mechanical theory of the universe; the kinetic theory of gases, and
Darwin's Law of Natural Selection, were examples of what a young man
had to take on trust. Neither he nor any one else knew enough to
verify them; in his ignorance of mathematics, he was particularly
helpless; but this never stood in his way. The ideas were new and
seemed to lead somewhere -- to some great generalization which would
finish one's clamor to be educated. That a beginner should understand
them all, or believe them all, no one could expect, still less exact.
Henry Adams was Darwinist because it was easier than not, for his
ignorance exceeded belief, and one must know something in order to
contradict even such triflers as Tyndall and Huxley.

By rights, he should have been also a Marxist but some narrow
trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and he
tried in vain to make himself a convert. He did the next best thing;
he became a Comteist, within the limits of evolution. He was ready to
become anything but quiet. As though the world had not been enough
upset in his time, he was eager to see it upset more. He had his
wish, but he lost his hold on the results by trying to understand
them.

He never tried to understand Darwin; but he still fancied he
might get the best part of Darwinism from the easier study of
geology; a science which suited idle minds as well as though it were
history. Every curate in England dabbled in geology and hunted for
vestiges of Creation. Darwin hunted only for vestiges of Natural
Selection, and Adams followed him, although he cared nothing about
Selection, unless perhaps for the indirect amusement of upsetting
curates. He felt, like nine men in ten, an instinctive belief in
Evolution, but he felt no more concern in Natural than in unnatural
Selection, though he seized with greediness the new volume on the
"Antiquity of Man" which Sir Charles Lyell published in 1863 in order
to support Darwin by wrecking the Garden of Eden. Sir Charles next
brought out, in 1866, a new edition of his "Principles," then the
highest text-book of geology; but here the Darwinian doctrine grew in
stature. Natural Selection led back to Natural Evolution, and at last
to Natural Uniformity. This was a vast stride. Unbroken Evolution
under uniform conditions pleased every one -- 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. Unity and Uniformity were the whole motive of
philosophy, and if Darwin, like a true Englishman, preferred to back
into it -- to reach God a posteriori -- rather than start from it,
like Spinoza, the difference of method taught only the moral that the
best way of reaching unity was to unite. Any road was good that
arrived. Life depended on it. One had been, from the first, dragged
hither and thither like a French poodle on a string, following always
the strongest pull, between one form of unity or centralization and
another. The proof that one had acted wisely because of obeying the
primordial habit of nature flattered one's self-esteem. Steady,
uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to higher seemed easy. So, one
day when Sir Charles came to the Legation to inquire about getting
his "Principles" properly noticed in America, young Adams found
nothing simpler than to suggest that he could do it himself if Sir
Charles would tell him what to say. Youth risks such encounters with
the universe before one succumbs to it, yet even he was surprised at
Sir Charles's ready assent, and still more so at finding himself,
after half an hour's conversation, sitting down to clear the minds of
American geologists about the principles of their profession. This
was getting on fast; Arthur Pendennis had never gone so far.

The geologists were a hardy class, not likely to be much hurt by
Adams's learning, nor did he throw away much concern on their
account. He undertook the task chiefly to educate, not them, but
himself, and if Sir Isaac Newton had, like Sir Charles Lyell, asked
him to explain for Americans his last edition of the "Principia,"
Adams would have jumped at the chance. Unfortunately the mere reading
such works for amusement is quite a different matter from studying
them for criticism. Ignorance must always begin at the beginning.
Adams must inevitably have begun by asking Sir Isaac for an
intelligible reason why the apple fell to the ground. He did not know
enough to be satisfied with the fact. The Law of Gravitation was
so-and-so, but what was Gravitation? and he would have been thrown
quite off his base if Sir Isaac had answered that he did not know.

At the very outset Adams struck on Sir Charles's Glacial Theory
or theories. He was ignorant enough to think that the glacial epoch
looked like a chasm between him and a uniformitarian world. If the
glacial period were uniformity, what was catastrophe? To him the two
or three labored guesses that Sir Charles suggested or borrowed to
explain glaciation were proof of nothing, and were quite unsolid as
support for so immense a superstructure as geological uniformity. If
one were at liberty to be as lax in science as in theology, and to
assume unity from the start, one might better say so, as the Church
did, and not invite attack by appearing weak in evidence. Naturally a
young man, altogether ignorant, could not say this to Sir Charles
Lyell or Sir Isaac Newton; but he was forced to state Sir Charles's
views, which he thought weak as hypotheses and worthless as proofs.
Sir Charles himself seemed shy of them. Adams hinted his heresies in
vain. At last he resorted to what he thought the bold experiment of
inserting a sentence in the text, intended to provoke correction.
"The introduction [by Louis Agassiz] of this new geological agent
seemed at first sight inconsistent with Sir Charles's argument,
obliging him to allow that causes had in fact existed on the earth
capable of producing more violent geological changes than would be
possible in our own day." The hint produced no effect. Sir Charles
said not a word; he let the paragraph stand; and Adams never knew
whether the great Uniformitarian was strict or lax in his
uniformitarian creed; but he doubted.

Objections fatal to one mind are futile to another, and as far
as concerned the article, the matter ended there, although the
glacial epoch remained a misty region in the young man's Darwinism.
Had it been the only one, he would not have fretted about it; but
uniformity often worked queerly and sometimes did not work as Natural
Selection at all. Finding himself at a loss for some single figure to
illustrate the Law of Natural Selection, Adams asked Sir Charles for
the simplest case of uniformity on record. Much to his surprise Sir
Charles told him that certain forms, like Terebratula, appeared to
be identical from the beginning to the end of geological time. Since
this was altogether too much uniformity and much too little
selection, Adams gave up the attempt to begin at the beginning, and
tried starting at the end -- himself. Taking for granted that the
vertebrates would serve his purpose, he asked Sir Charles to
introduce him to the first vertebrate. Infinitely to his
bewilderment, Sir Charles informed him that the first vertebrate was
a very respectable fish, among the earliest of all fossils, which had
lived, and whose bones were still reposing, under Adams's own
favorite Abbey on Wenlock Edge.

By this time, in 1867 Adams had learned to know Shropshire
familiarly, and it was the part of his diplomatic education which he
loved best. Like Catherine Olney in "Northanger Abbey," he yearned
for nothing so keenly as to feel at home in a thirteenth-century
Abbey, unless it were to haunt a fifteenth-century Prior's House, and
both these joys were his at Wenlock. With companions or without, he
never tired of it. Whether he rode about the Wrekin, or visited all
the historical haunts from Ludlow Castle and Stokesay to Boscobel and
Uriconium; or followed the Roman road or scratched in the Abbey
ruins, all was amusing and carried a flavor of its own like that of
the Roman Campagna; but perhaps he liked best to ramble over the Edge
on a summer afternoon and look across the Marches to the mountains of
Wales. The peculiar flavor of the scenery has something to do with
absence of evolution; it was better marked in Egypt: it was felt
wherever time-sequences became interchangeable. One's instinct abhors
time. As one lay on the slope of the Edge, looking sleepily through
the summer haze towards Shrewsbury or Cader Idris or Caer Caradoc or
Uriconium, nothing suggested sequence. The Roman road was twin to the
railroad; Uriconium was well worth Shrewsbury; Wenlock and Buildwas
were far superior to Bridgnorth. The shepherds of Caractacus or Offa,
or the monks of Buildwas, had they approached where he lay in the
grass, would have taken him only for another and tamer variety of
Welsh thief. They would have seen little to surprise them in the
modern landscape unless it were the steam of a distant railway. One
might mix up the terms of time as one liked, or stuff the present
anywhere into the past, measuring time by Falstaff's Shrewsbury
clock, without violent sense of wrong, as one could do it on the
Pacific Ocean; but the triumph of all was to look south along the
Edge to the abode of one's earliest ancestor and nearest relative,
the ganoid fish, whose name, according to Professor Huxley, was
Pteraspis, a cousin of the sturgeon, and whose kingdom, according to
Sir Roderick Murchison, was called Siluria. Life began and ended
there. Behind that horizon lay only the Cambrian, without vertebrates
or any other organism except a few shell-fish. On the further verge
of the Cambrian rose the crystalline rocks from which every trace of
organic existence had been erased.

That here, on the Wenlock Edge of time, a young American,
seeking only frivolous amusement, should find a legitimate parentage
as modern as though just caught in the Severn below, astonished him
as much as though he had found Darwin himself. In the scale of
evolution, one vertebrate was as good as another. For anything he, or
any one else, knew, nine hundred and ninety nine parts of evolution
out of a thousand lay behind or below the Pteraspis . To an American
in search of a father, it mattered nothing whether the father
breathed through lungs, or walked on fins, or on feet. Evolution of
mind was altogether another matter and belonged to another science,
but whether one traced descent from the shark or the wolf was
immaterial even in morals. This matter had been discussed for ages
without scientific result. La Fontaine and other fabulists maintained
that the wolf, even in morals, stood higher than man; and in view of
the late civil war, Adams had doubts of his own on the facts of moral
evolution:--

"Tout bien considere, je te soutiens en somme, Que
scelerat pour scelerat, Il vaut mieux etre un loup qu'un homme."
It might well be! At all events, it did not enter into the problem of
Pteraspis, for it was quite certain that no complete proof of
Natural Selection had occurred back to the time of Pteraspis, and
that before Pteraspis was eternal void. No trace of any vertebrate
had been found there; only starfish, shell-fish, polyps, or
trilobites whose kindly descendants he had often bathed with, as a
child on the shores of Quincy Bay.

That Pteraspis and shark were his cousins, great-uncles, or
grandfathers, in no way troubled him, but that either or both of them
should be older than evolution itself seemed to him perplexing; nor
could he at all simplify the problem by taking the sudden
back-somersault into Quincy Bay in search of the fascinating creature
he had called a horseshoe, whose huge dome of shell and sharp spur of
tail had so alarmed him as a child. In Siluria, he understood, Sir
Roderick Murchison called the horseshoe a Limulus , which helped
nothing. Neither in the Limulus nor in the Terebratula , nor in the
Cestracion Philippi ,any more than in the Pteraspis, could one
conceive an ancestor, but, if one must, the choice mattered little.
Cousinship had limits but no one knew enough to fix them. When the
vertebrate vanished in Siluria, it disappeared instantly and forever.
Neither vertebra nor scale nor print reappeared, nor any trace of
ascent or descent to a lower type. The vertebrate began in the Ludlow
shale, as complete as Adams himself -- in some respects more so -- at
the top of the column of organic evolution: and geology offered no
sort of proof that he had ever been anything else. Ponder over it as
he might, Adams could see nothing in the theory of Sir Charles but
pure inference, precisely like the inference of Paley, that, if one
found a watch, one inferred a maker. He could detect no more
evolution in life since the Pteraspis than he could detect it in
architecture since the Abbey. All he could prove was change.
Coal-power alone asserted evolution -- of power -- and only by
violence could be forced to assert selection of type.

All this seemed trivial to the true Darwinian, and to Sir
Charles it was mere defect in the geological record. Sir Charles
labored only to heap up the evidences of evolution; to cumulate them
till the mass became irresistible. With that purpose, Adams gladly
studied and tried to help Sir Charles, but, behind the lesson of the
day, he was conscious that, in geology as in theology, he could prove
only Evolution that did not evolve; Uniformity that was not uniform;
and Selection that did not select. To other Darwinians -- except
Darwin -- Natural Selection seemed a dogma to be put in the place of
the Athanasian creed; it was a form of religious hope; a promise of
ultimate perfection. Adams wished no better; he warmly sympathized in
the object; but when he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he
felt that he had no Faith; that whenever the next new hobby should be
brought out, he should surely drop off from Darwinism like a monkey
from a perch; that the idea of one Form, Law, Order, or Sequence had
no more value for him than the idea of none; that what he valued most
was Motion, and that what attracted his mind was Change.

Psychology was to him a new study, and a dark corner of
education. As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the
grass close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the grass
-- or whatever there was to nibble -- in the Silurian kingdom of
Pteraspis, he seemed to have fallen on an evolution far more
wonderful than that of fishes. He did not like it; he could not
account for it; and he determined to stop it. Never since the days of
his Limulus ancestry had any of his ascendants thought thus. Their
modes of thought might be many, but their thought was one. Out of his
millions of millions of ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks,
every one had probably lived and died in the illusion of Truths which
did not amuse him, and which had never changed. Henry Adams was the
first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he
really did not care whether truth was, or was not, true. He did not
even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new
and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.

From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded as
criminal -- worse than crime -- sacrilege! Society punished it
ferociously and justly, in self-defence. Mr. Adams, the father,
looked on it as moral weakness; it annoyed him; but it did not annoy
him nearly so much as it annoyed his son, who had no need to learn
from Hamlet the fatal effect of the pale cast of thought on
enterprises great or small. He had no notion of letting the currents
of his action be turned awry by this form of conscience. To him, the
current of his time was to be his current, lead where it might. He
put psychology under lock and key; he insisted on maintaining his
absolute standards; on aiming at ultimate Unity. The mania for
handling all the sides of every question, looking into every window,
and opening every door, was, as Bluebeard judiciously pointed out to
his wives, fatal to their practical usefulness in society. One could
not stop to chase doubts as though they were rabbits. One had no time
to paint and putty the surface of Law, even though it were cracked
and rotten. For the young men whose lives were cast in the generation
between 1867 and 1900, Law should be Evolution from lower to higher,
aggregation of the atom in the mass, concentration of multiplicity in
unity, compulsion of anarchy in order; and he would force himself to
follow wherever it led, though he should sacrifice five thousand
millions more in money, and a million more lives.

As the path ultimately led, it sacrificed much more than this;
but at the time, he thought the price he named a high one, and he
could not foresee that science and society would desert him in paying
it. He, at least, took his education as a Darwinian in good faith.
The Church was gone, and Duty was dim, but Will should take its
place, founded deeply in interest and law. This was the result of
five or six years in England; a result so British as to be almost the
equivalent of an Oxford degree.

Quite serious about it, he set to work at once. While confusing
his ideas about geology to the apparent satisfaction of Sir Charles
who left him his field-compass in token of it, Adams turned
resolutely to business, and attacked the burning question of specie
payments. His principles assured him that the honest way to resume
payments was to restrict currency. He thought he might win a name
among financiers and statesmen at home by showing how this task had
been done by England, after the classical suspension of 1797-1821.
Setting himself to the study of this perplexed period, he waded as
well as he could through a morass of volumes, pamphlets, and debates,
until he learned to his confusion that the Bank of England itself and
all the best British financial writers held that restriction was a
fatal mistake, and that the best treatment of a debased currency was
to let it alone, as the Bank had in fact done. Time and patience were
the remedies.

The shock of this discovery to his financial principles was
serious; much more serious than the shock of the Terebratula and
Pteraspis to his principles of geology. A mistake about Evolution
was not fatal; a mistake about specie payments would destroy forever
the last hope of employment in State Street. Six months of patient
labor would be thrown away if he did not publish, and with it his
whole scheme of making himself a position as a practical
man-of-business. If he did publish, how could he tell virtuous
bankers in State Street that moral and absolute principles of
abstract truth, such as theirs, had nothing to do with the matter,
and that they had better let it alone? Geologists, naturally a humble
and helpless class, might not revenge impertinences offered to their
science; but capitalists never forgot or forgave.

With labor and caution he made one long article on British
Finance in 1816, and another on the Bank Restriction of 1797-1821,
and, doing both up in one package, he sent it to the North American
for choice. He knew that two heavy, technical, financial studies thus
thrown at an editor's head, would probably return to crush the
author; but the audacity of youth is more sympathetic -- when
successful -- than his ignorance. The editor accepted both.

When the post brought his letter, Adams looked at it as though
he were a debtor who had begged for an extension. He read it with as
much relief as the debtor, if it had brought him the loan. The letter
gave the new writer literary rank. Henceforward he had the freedom of
the press. These articles, following those on Pocahontas and Lyell,
enrolled him on the permanent staff of the North American Review .
Precisely what this rank was worth, no one could say; but, for fifty
years the North American Review had been the stage coach which
carried literary Bostonians to such distinction as they had achieved.
Few writers had ideas which warranted thirty pages of development,
but for such as thought they had, the Review alone offered space. An
article was a small volume which required at least three months'
work, and was paid, at best, five dollars a page. Not many men even
in England or France could write a good thirty-page article, and
practically no one in America read them; but a few score of people,
mostly in search of items to steal, ran over the pages to extract an
idea or a fact, which was a sort of wild game -- a bluefish or a teal
-- worth anywhere from fifty cents to five dollars. Newspaper writers
had their eye on quarterly pickings. The circulation of the Review
had never exceeded three or four hundred copies, and the Review had
never paid its reasonable expenses. Yet it stood at the head of
American literary periodicals; it was a source of suggestion to
cheaper workers; it reached far into societies that never knew its
existence; it was an organ worth playing on; and, in the fancy of
Henry Adams, it led, in some indistinct future, to playing on a New
York daily newspaper.

With the editor's letter under his eyes, Adams asked himself
what better he could have done. On the whole, considering his
helplessness, he thought he had done as well as his neighbors. No one
could yet guess which of his contemporaries was most likely to play a
part in the great world. A shrewd prophet in Wall Street might
perhaps have set a mark on Pierpont Morgan, but hardly on the
Rockefellers or William C. Whitney or Whitelaw Reid. No one would
have picked out William McKinley or John Hay or Mark Hanna for great
statesmen. Boston was ignorant of the careers in store for Alexander
Agassiz and Henry Higginson. Phillips Brooks was unknown; Henry James
was unheard; Howells was new; Richardson and LaFarge were struggling
for a start. Out of any score of names and reputations that should
reach beyond the century, the thirty-years-old who were starting in
the year 1867 could show none that was so far in advance as to
warrant odds in its favor. The army men had for the most part fallen
to the ranks. Had Adams foreseen the future exactly as it came, he
would have been no wiser, and could have chosen no better path.

Thus it turned out that the last year in England was the
pleasantest. He was already old in society, and belonged to the
Silurian horizon. The Prince of Wales had come. Mr. Disraeli, Lord
Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury had thrown into the background
the memories of Palmerston and Russell. Europe was moving rapidly,
and the conduct of England during the American Civil War was the last
thing that London liked to recall. The revolution since 1861 was
nearly complete, and, for the first time in history, the American
felt himself almost as strong as an Englishman. He had thirty years
to wait before he should feel himself stronger. Meanwhile even a
private secretary could afford to be happy. His old education was
finished; his new one was not begun; he still loitered a year,
feeling himself near the end of a very long, anxious, tempestuous,
successful voyage, with another to follow, and a summer sea
between.

He made what use he could of it. In February, 1868, he was back
in Rome with his friend Milnes Gaskell. For another season he
wandered on horseback over the campagna or on foot through the Rome
of the middle ages, and sat once more on the steps of Ara Coeli, as
had become with him almost a superstition, like the waters of the
fountain of Trevi. Rome was still tragic and solemn as ever, with its
mediaeval society, artistic, literary, and clerical, taking itself as
seriously as in the days of Byron and Shelley. The long ten years of
accidental education had changed nothing for him there. He knew no
more in 1868 than in 1858. He had learned nothing whatever that made
Rome more intelligible to him, or made life easier to handle. The
case was no better when he got back to London and went through his
last season. London had become his vice. He loved his haunts, his
houses, his habits, and even his hansom cabs. He loved growling like
an Englishman, and going into society where he knew not a face, and
cared not a straw. He lived deep into the lives and loves and
disappointments of his friends. When at last he found himself back
again at Liverpool, his heart wrenched by the act of parting, he
moved mechanically, unstrung, but he had no more acquired education
than when he first trod the steps of the Adelphi Hotel in November,
1858. He could see only one great change, and this was wholly in
years. Eaton Hall no longer impressed his imagination; even the
architecture of Chester roused but a sleepy interest; he felt no
sensation whatever in the atmosphere of the British peerage, but
mainly an habitual dislike to most of the people who frequented their
country houses; he had become English to the point of sharing their
petty social divisions, their dislikes and prejudices against each
other; he took England no longer with the awe of American youth, but
with the habit of an old and rather worn suit of clothes. As far as
he knew, this was all that Englishmen meant by social education, but
in any case it was all the education he had gained from seven years
in London.