Note 248 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

6. Other anticipations of Darwin’s doctrine in England and elsewhere came practically to nothing,248 as regarded the general opinion, until Robert Chambers in 1844 published anonymously his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a work which found a wide audience, incurring bitter hostility not only from the clergy but from some specialists who, like Huxley, were later to take the evolutionist view on Darwin’s persuasion. Chambers it was that brought the issue within general knowledge; and he improved his position in successive editions. A hostile clerical reader, Whewell, admitted of him, in a letter to a less hostile member of his profession, that, “as to the degree of resemblance between the author and the French physiological atheists, he uses reverent phrases: theirs would not be tolerated in England”; adding: “You would be surprised to hear the contempt and abhorrence with which Owen and Sedgwick speak of the Vestiges.”249 Hugh Miller, himself accused of “infidelity” for his measure of inductive candour, held a similar tone towards men of greater intellectual rectitude, calling the liberalizing religionists of his day “vermin” and “reptiles,”250 and classifying as “degraded and lost”251 all who should accept the new doctrine of evolution, which, as put by Chambers, was then coming forward to evict his own delusions from the field of science. The young Max Müller, with the certitude born of an entire ignorance of physical science, declared in 1856 that the doctrine of a human evolution from lower types “can never be maintained again,” and pronounced it an “unhallowed imputation.”252