But Lankester’s reforming spirit centered only upon the advance of science—and his social attitudes, insofar as he discussed such issues at all, never transcended the vague argument that increasing scientific knowledge might liberate the human spirit, thus leading to political reform and equality of opportunity. Again, this common attitude of rational scientific skepticism only evoked the disdain of orthodox Marxists, who viewed this position as a bourgeois escape for decent-minded people who lacked the courage to grapple with the true depth of social problems, and the consequent need for political revolution. As Feuer states in his article on Marx and Lankester: “Philosophically, moreover, Lankester stood firmly among the agnostics, the followers of Thomas Henry Huxley, whose standpoint Engels derided as a ‘shamefaced materialism.’”
If Lankester showed so little affinity for Marx’s worldview, perhaps we should try the opposite route and ask if Marx had any intellectual or philosophical reason to seek Lankester’s company. Again, after debunking some persistent mythology, we can find no evident basis for their friendship.
The mythology centers upon a notorious, if understandable, scholarly error that once suggested far more affinity between Marx and Darwin (or at least a one-way hero-worshiping of Darwin by Marx) than corrected evidence can validate. Marx did admire Darwin, and he did send an autographed copy of Das Kapital to the great naturalist. Darwin, in the only recorded contact between the two men, sent a short, polite, and basically contentless letter of thanks. We do know that Darwin (who read German poorly and professed little interest in political science) never spent much time with Marx’s magnum opus. All but the first 105 pages in Darwin’s copy of Marx’s 822-page book remain uncut (as does the table of contents), and Darwin, contrary to his custom when reading books carefully, made no marginal annotations. In fact, we have no evidence that Darwin ever read a word of Das Kapital.
The legend of greater contact began with one of the few errors ever made by one of the finest scholars of this, or any other, century—Isaiah Berlin in his 1939 biography of Marx. Based on a dubious inference from Darwin’s short letter of thanks to Marx, Berlin inferred that Marx had offered to dedicate volume two of Das Kapital to Darwin, and that Darwin had politely refused. This tale of Marx’s proffered dedication then gained credence when a second letter, ostensibly from Darwin to Marx, but addressed only to “Dear Sir,” turned up among Marx’s papers in the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. This letter, written on October 13, 1880, does politely decline a suggested dedication: “I Shd. prefer the Part or Volume not be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honor) as it implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing.” This second document seemed to seal Isaiah Berlin’s case, and the story achieved general currency.
To shorten a long story, two scholars, working independently and simultaneously in the mid-1970s, discovered the almost comical basis of the error—see Margaret A. Fay, “Did Marx offer to dedicate Capital to Darwin” (Journal of the History of Ideas 39 [1978]: 133–46); and Lewis S. Feuer, “Is the ‘Darwin-Marx correspondence’ authentic?” (Annals of Science 32: 1–12). Marx’s daughter Eleanor became the common-law wife of the British socialist Edward Aveling. The couple safeguarded Marx’s papers for several years, and the 1880 letter, evidently sent by Darwin to Aveling himself, must have strayed into the Marxian collection.
Aveling belonged to a group of radical atheists. He sought Darwin’s official approval, and status as dedicatee, for a volume he had edited on Darwin’s work and his (that is Aveling’s, not necessarily Darwin’s) view of its broader social meaning (published in 1881 as The Student’s Darwin, volume two in the International Library of Science and Freethought). Darwin, who understood Aveling’s opportunism and cared little for his antireligious militancy, refused with his customary politeness, but with no lack of firmness. Darwin ended his letter to Aveling (not to Marx, who did not treat religion as a primary subject in Das Kapital) by writing:
It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, and I have confined myself to science.
Nonetheless, despite this correction, Marx might still have regarded himself as a disciple of Darwin, and might have sought the company of a key Darwinian in the younger generation—a position rendered more plausible by Engels’s famous comparison (quoted earlier) in his funerary oration. But this interpretation must also be rejected. Engels maintained far more interest in the natural sciences than did Marx (as best expressed in two books by Engels, Anti-Dühring and The Dialectics of Nature). Marx, as stated above, certainly admired Darwin as a liberator of knowledge from social prejudice, and as a useful ally, at least by analogy. In a famous letter of 1869, Marx wrote to Engels about Darwin’s Origin of Species: “Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”
But Marx also criticized the social biases in Darwin’s formulation, again writing to Engels, and with keen insight:
It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, “invention,” and the Malthusian “struggle for existence.” It is Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes [the war of all against all].
Marx remained a committed evolutionist, of course, but his interest in Darwin clearly diminished through the years. An extensive scholarly literature treats this subject, and I think that Margaret Fay speaks for a consensus when she writes (in her article previously cited):
Marx . . . though he was initially excited by the publication of Darwin’s Origin. . . developed a much more critical stance towards Darwinism, and in his private correspondence of the 1860s poked gentle fun at Darwin’s ideological biases. Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks, compiled circa 1879–1881, in which Darwin is cited only once, provide no evidence that he reverted to his earlier enthusiasm.
To cite one final anecdote, the scholarly literature frequently cites Marx’s great enthusiasm (until the more scientifically savvy Engels set him straight) for a curious book published in 1865 by the now (and deservedly) unknown French explorer and ethnologist P. Trémaux, Origine et transformations de I’homme et des autres êtres (Origin and Transformation of Man and Other Beings). Marx professed ardent admiration for this work, proclaiming it einen Fortschritt über Darwin (an advance over Darwin). The more sober Engels bought the book at Marx’s urging, but then dampened his friend’s ardor by writing: “I have arrived at the conclusion that there is nothing to his theory if for no other reason than because he neither understands geology nor is capable of the most ordinary literary historical criticism.”
I had long been curious about Trémaux and sought a copy of his book for many years. I finally purchased one a while ago—and I must say that I have never read a more absurd or more poorly documented thesis. Basically, Trémaux argues that the nature of the soil determines national characteristics, and that higher civilizations tend to arise on more-complex soils formed in later geological periods. If Marx really believed that such unsupported nonsense could exceed the Origin of Species in importance, then he could not have properly understood or appreciated the power of Darwin’s facts and ideas.
We must therefore conclude that Lankester harbored no secret sympathy for Marxism, and that Marx sought no Darwinian inspiration in courting Lankester’s friendship. Our puzzle only deepens: What brought these disparate men together; what kind of bond could have nurtured their friendship? The first question, at least, can be answered, and may even suggest a route toward resolving the second, and central, conundrum of this essay.
Four short letters from Lankester remain among Marx’s papers. (Marx probably wrote to Lankester as well, bu
t no evidence of such reciprocity has surfaced.) These letters clearly indicate that Marx first approached Lankester for medical advice in the treatment of his wife, who was dying, slowly and painfully, of breast cancer. Lankester suggested that Marx consult his dear friend (and co-conspirator in both the Slade and Charcot incidents), the physician H. B. Donkin. Marx took Lankester’s advice, and proclaimed himself well satisfied with the result, as Donkin, whom Marx described as “a bright and intelligent man,” cared, with great sensitivity, both for Marx’s wife and then for Marx himself in their final illnesses.
We do not know for sure how Marx and Lankester first met, but Feuer develops an eminently plausible hypothesis in his article cited previously—one, moreover, that may finally lead us to understand the basis of this maximally incongruous pairing. The intermediary may well have been Charles Waldstein, born in New York in 1856, the son of a German Jewish immigrant. Waldstein, who later served as professor of classical archaeology at Cambridge, knew Lankester well when they both lived in London during the late 1870s. Waldstein became an intimate friend of Karl Marx, an experience that he remembered warmly in an autobiographical work written in 1917 (when he had attained eminence and respectability under the slightly, but portentously, altered name of Sir Charles Walston):
In my young days, when I was little more than a boy, about 1877, the eminent Russian legal and political writer . . . Professor Kovalevsky, whom I had met at one of G. H. Lewes and George Eliot’s Sunday afternoon parties in London, had introduced me to Karl Marx, then living in Hampstead. I had seen very much of this founder of modern theoretic socialism, as well as of his most refined wife; and, though he had never succeeded in persuading me to adopt socialist views, we often discussed the most varied topics of politics, science, literature, and art. Besides learning much from this great man, who was a mine of deep and accurate knowledge in every sphere, I learnt to hold him in high respect and to love the purity, gentleness, and refinement of his big heart. He seemed to find so much pleasure in the mere freshness of my youthful enthusiasm and took so great an interest in my own life and welfare, that one day he proposed that we should become Dutz-freunde.
The last comment is particularly revealing. Modern English has lost its previous distinction (thou versus you) between intimate and formal address, a difference that remains crucially important—a matter not to be taken lightly—in most European languages. In German, Dutz-freunde address each other with the intimate Du, rather than the formal Sie (just as the verb tutoyer, in French, means to use the intimate tu rather than the formal vous). In both nations, especially in the far more conservative social modes of nineteenth-century life, permission to switch from formal to intimate address marked a rare and precious privilege reserved only for one’s family, one’s God, one’s pets, and one’s absolutely dearest friends. If an older and established intellectual like Marx suggested such a change of address to a young man in his early twenties, he must have felt especially close to Charles Waldstein.
Lankester’s first letter to Marx, written on September 19, 1880, mentions Waldstein, thus supporting Feuer’s conjecture: “I shall be very glad to see you at Wellington Mansions. I had been intending to return to you the book you kindly lent to me—but had mislaid your address and could not hear from Waldstein who is away from England.” Lankester and Waldstein remained close friends throughout their lives. Waldstein’s son responded to Feuer’s inquiry about his father’s relationship with Lankester by writing, in 1978, that he retained a clear childhood memory of “Ray Lankester . . . coming to dinner from time to time at my home—a very fat man with a face like a frog.”
Waldstein’s memories of Marx as a kind man and a brilliant intellectual mentor suggest an evident solution to the enigma of Marx and Lankester—once we recognize that we had been asking the wrong question all along. No error of historical inquiry can match the anachronistic fallacy of using a known present to misread a past circumstance that could not possibly have been defined or influenced by events yet to happen. When we ask why a basically conservative biologist like Lankester could have respected and valued the company of an aging agitator like Karl Marx, we can hardly help viewing Marx through the glasses of later human catastrophes perpetrated in his name—from Stalin to Pol Pot. Even if we choose to blame Marx, in part, for not foreseeing these possible consequences of his own doctrines, we must still allow that when he died in 1883, these tragedies only resided in an unknowable future. Karl Marx, the man who met Lankester in 1880, must not be confused with Karl Marx, the posthumous standard-bearer for some of the worst crimes in human history. We err when we pose E. Ray Lankester, the stout and imposing relic of Victorian and Edwardian biology, with Karl Marx, cited as the rationale for Stalin’s murderous career—and then wonder how two such different men could inhabit the same room, much less feel warm ties of friendship.
In 1880, Lankester was a young biologist with a broad view of life and intellect, and an independent mind that cared not a fig for conventional notions of political respectability, whatever his own basically conservative convictions. Showing a rare range of interest among professional scientists, he also loved art and literature, and had developed fluency in both German and French. Moreover, he particularly admired the German system of university education, then a proud model of innovation, especially in contrast with the hidebound classicism of Oxford and Cambridge, so often the object of his greatest scorn and frustration.
Why should Lankester not have enjoyed, even cherished, the attention of such a remarkable intellect as Karl Marx—for that he was, whatever you may think of his doctrines and their consequences? What could possibly have delighted Lankester more than the friendship of such a brilliant older man, who knew art, philosophy, and the classics so well, and who represented the epitome of German intellectual excellence, the object of Lankester’s highest admiration? As for the ill, aging, and severely depressed Karl Marx, what could bring more solace in the shadow of death than the company of bright, enthusiastic, optimistic young men in the flower of their intellectual development?
Waldstein’s memories clearly capture, in an evocative and moving way, this aspect of Marx’s persona and final days. Many scholars have emphasized this feature of Marx’s later life. Diane Paul, for example, states that “Marx had a number of much younger friends. . . . The aging Marx became increasingly difficult in his personal relationships, easily offended and irritated by the behavior of old friends, but he was a gracious mentor to younger colleagues who sought his advice and support.” Seen in this appropriate light of their own time, and not with anachronistic distortion of later events that we can’t escape but they couldn’t know, Marx and Lankester seem ideally suited, indeed almost destined, for the warm friendship that actually developed.
All historical studies—whether of human biography or of evolutionary lineages in biology—potentially suffer from this “presentist” fallacy. Modern chroniclers know the outcomes that actually unfolded as unpredictable consequences of past events—and they often, and inappropriately, judge the motives and actions of their subjects in terms of futures unknowable at the time. Thus, and far too frequently, evolutionists view a small and marginal lineage of pond-dwelling Devonian fishes as higher in the scale of being and destined for success because we know, but only in retrospect, that these organisms spawned all modern terrestrial vertebrates, including our exalted selves. And we overly honor a peculiar species of African primates as central to the forward thrust of evolution because our unique brand of consciousness arose, by contingent good fortune, from such a precarious stock. And as we northerners once reviled Robert E. Lee as a traitor, we now tend to view him, in a more distant and benevolent light, as a man of principle and a great military leader—though neither extreme position can match or explain this fascinating man in the more appropriate context of his own time.
A little humility before the luck of our present circumstances might serve us well. A little more fascination for past realities, freed from judgment by later out
comes that only we can know, might help us to understand our history, the primary source for our present condition. Perhaps we might borrow a famous line from a broken man, who died in sorrow, still a stranger in a strange land, in 1883—but who at least enjoyed the solace of young companions like E. Ray Lankester, a loyal friend who did not shun the funeral of such an unpopular and rejected expatriate.
History reveals patterns and regularities that enhance our potential for understanding. But history also expresses the unpredictable foibles of human passion, ignorance, and dreams of transcendence. We can only understand the meaning of past events in their own terms and circumstances, however legitimately we may choose to judge the motives and intentions of our forebears. Karl Marx began his most famous historical treatise, his study of Napoleon Ill’s rise to power, by writing, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.”
7
The Pre-Adamite in a Nutshell
WINSTON CHURCHILL FAMOUSLY DESCRIBED THE SOVIET Union as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” This essay, impoverished by contrast, features only two levels of puzzlement—the tale of an anonymous author defending an odd theory that only becomes, in Alice’s immortal words, curiouser and curiouser as one reads. However, in a fractal universe, a single mote can mirror the cosmos, giving literal meaning to Blake’s famous image of the “world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.” Forgotten documents that now seem ridiculous can offer us maximal instruction in human foibles and in the history of our attempts to make sense of a complex natural world—the enterprise that we science.
In his important book on the development of conventions for illustrating extinct faunas of the geological past, Scenes from Deep Time (University of Chicago Press, 1992), the British historian of geology (and former paleontologist) M. J. S. Rudwick reproduced a figure from 1860 that, in his words, “broke the standard mold by suggesting a sequence in deep time.” Previously, most authors had presented only one or two reconstructions of particular past moments or intervals—with Mesozoic dinosaurs and large Cenozoic mammals already emerging as “industry standards.”