Etapa de revisores externos

Nature and Man: Essays Scientific and Philosophical (London, 1888), p. 4. Carpenter, Mental Physiology, pp. 503, 702.

William Benjamin Carpenter, ‘The force behind nature’. The Modern Review (January 1880); reprinted in Carpenter, Nature and Man, 350-364: p. 364.

For a discussion o f those scientists who felt a broader philosophy needed to be negotiated to account for all phenomena, see Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven, 1974), p. 2, and pp. 68-103 on Wallace.

what made humans unique within the organic world was their progression to a state where natural selection stopped operating on mankind’s physical state, and thereafter acted only on humanity’s mental and moral constitution/^^ At the Exeter meeting of the British Association in 1869, Wallace declared his belief that natural selection was inadequate to account for the origin of mankind, a position he developed further in the Quarterly R e v i e w and in 1870 in his Contributions to the Theory o f Natural Selection. Remarking on Lyell’s opinions on the origin of man as they appeared in the tenth edition of his Principles o f Geology (1868), Wallace remained unconvinced. In this edition, Lyell came out in more fulsome support of Darwin’s theory of natural selection: despite maintaining that Darwin had not ‘absolutely’ proved it, nevertheless he believed Darwin had ‘made it appear in the highest degree probable’ that species had developed in such a way.^*^ However, Wallace insisted that, ‘Neither natural selection nor the more general theory of evolution can give any account whatever of the origin of sensational or conscious life.’ While allowing that chemical and natural laws could account for the way in which man’s body was organised, still ‘the moral and higher intellectual nature of man is as unique a phenomenon as was conscious life on its first appearance in the world’, the mind of man being ‘itself the living proof of a supreme mind’.^^^ He argued that at a certain stage of human evolution, mental and moral qualities had become so important that natural selection acting on the physical condition was no longer the key mechanism, ‘because the development of his mental faculties would render important modifications of its form and structure unnecessary.’ Indeed, in 1870 Wallace stated that, ‘I do not consider that all nature can be explained on the principles of which I am so ardent an advocate’, a s s e r t i n g that certain mental qualities, among them musical appreciation and mathematical ability, were beyond the

Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘The origin of human races and the antiquity o f man deduced from the theory o f “natural selection’” , Journal o f the Anthropological Society, 2 (1864), clviii-clxx, especially pp. clxiii- clxiv.

Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader, p. 84.

Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘Geological climates and the origin of species’. The Quarterly Review, 126 (April 1869), 359-394.

Charles Lyell, The Principles o f Geology (London, 1868, tenth edition), 2 vols., II, p. 492. Wallace, ‘Geological climates’, pp. 391, 394.

Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘The limits of natural selection as applied to man’, in Alfred Russel Wallace,

Contributions to the Theory o f Natural Selection. A Series o f Essays (London, 1870), pp. 332-371: 332. Wallace, ‘The limits o f natural selection as applied to man’, p. 333.

explanatory powers of the doctrine of natural s e l e c t i o n / H e thus retained a place for the action of supematural agents.

As Wallace became increasingly interested in spiritualism through the course of the second half of the nineteenth c e n t u r y / s o he became gradually more insistent on attention being paid to the spiritual nature of man. He reiterated this in his Darwinism

(1889). Summarising the conclusion of Darwin’s theory as being that ‘m an’s entire nature and all his faculties, whether moral, intellectual, or spiritual, have been derived from their rudiments in the lower animals’, Wallace judged this ‘not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts’. Thus Wallace attributed the higher intellectual ‘special’ faculties of man to ‘the existence of something which he has not derived from his animal progenitors— something which we may best refer to as being of a spiritual essence or nature, capable of progressive development under favourable conditions.’ These faculties, Wallace believed, pointed to ‘a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is altogether subordinate

However, to those scientists who were interested in the consequences of Darwinian interpretations of n a t u r e , g e n i u s was a peripheral concern. W ithin these debates, only one man, the scientist, statistician, anthropologist, eugenist and half-cousin of Darwin, Francis Galton (1822-1911), attempted an extended study in order to try to resolve what constituted genius, and how it came about. In his book. Hereditary Genius (1869), founded on wholly natural, Darwinian principles gleaned from both the Origin, (which Galton later explained ‘made a marked epoch in my own mental development’^^^), and Darwin’s The Variation o f Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), Galton advanced the idea of genius as an inherited characteristic, transmitted from parent to offspring.

Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwinism: An Exposition o f the Theory o f Natural Selection with some o f its Applications (London, 1889), pp. 464-472.

See, for example, Alfred Russel Wallace, On Miracles and M odem Spiritualism. Three Essays

(London, 1875).

Wallace, Darwinism, pp. 4 6 1 ,4 7 4 ,4 7 6 .

For a discussion o f the different shades o f thought represented by the term ‘Darwinian’ in this period, see James Moore, ‘Deconstructing Darwinism; the politics o f evolution in the 1860s’, Journal o f the History o f Biology, 24, no. 3 (Fall, 1991), 353-408; also James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study o f the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 7570-7900 (Cambridge, 1979), especially pp. 125-351.

Galton, Memories, p. 287; and see copy o f letter, Francis Galton to Charles Darwin (24 December 1869), Galton Papers, University College London, Folder 245/5.

A variety of reasons help to explain why Galton became interested in mental heredity at this juncture. It is possible that Galton felt he was a marginal force in English science during the 1850s and 60s, and thus determined to gain entry to the inner Darwinian circle, from which he was largely excluded, by identifying an area of scientific enterprise, that he could make his own. In 1864, whilst studying heredity within races, Galton was drawn to the investigation of heredity within populations, and he began to investigate the inheritance of mental ability along patriarchal lines, which he believed was revealed by success in competitive careers. Besides the emphasis placed on the importance of intellectual accomplishment and good marriages by the élite professionals of Gallon’s own social group, hereditary intelligence itself was a subject that would appeal to fellow advocates of Darwin’s theory. If Galton did manage to establish a biological and hence hereditary link in explaining the appearance of talent within families, some of the misgivings aired by Lyell in the Antiquity concerning the origin and cause of genius would be a d d r e s s e d . T h e next section explores the hereditarian element that was attached to the idea of genius within Britain from the 1860s.