Note 245 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

5. Still more rousing, finally, was the effect of the science of zoology, as placed upon a broad scientific foundation by Charles Darwin. Here again steps had been taken in previous generations on the right path, without any general movement on the part of scientific and educated men. Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had in his Zoonomia (1794) anticipated many of the positions of the French Lamarck, who in 1801 began developing the views he fully elaborated in 1815, as to the descendance of all existing species from earlier forms.245 As early as 1795 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had begun to suspect that all species are variants on a primordial form of life; and at the same time (1794–95) Goethe in Germany had reached similar convictions.246 That views thus reached almost simultaneously in Germany, England, and France, at the time of the French Revolution, should have to wait for two generations before even meeting the full stress of battle, must be put down as one of the results of the general reaction. Saint-Hilaire, publishing his views in 1828, was officially overborne by the Cuvier school in France. In England, indeed, so late as 1855, we find Sir David Brewster denouncing the Nebular Hypothesis: “that dull and dangerous heresy of the age.... An omnipotent arm was required to give the planets their position and motion in space, and a presiding intelligence to assign to them the different functions they had to perform.”247 And Murchison the geologist was no less emphatic against Darwinism, which he rejected till his dying day (1871).