“Symbolic Mutation”:
Thomas Carlyle and the Legacy of
Charles Darwin in England
David R. Sorensen
This essay is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the Musée d’Histoire
Naturelle, Nantes, France, as part of the “L’Heritage de Darwin dans les cultures
européennes,” hosted by the Centre de Recherche sur les identités nationales
et l’interculturalité de l’Université de Nantes and the Groupe de Recherche sur
l’Eugénisme et le Racisme de l’Université de Paris-Diderot, 3–4 April 2009.
J
ohn Tyndall (1820–93), physicist, Dar winist, and
director of the Royal Institution, returned on 19 August
1874 to his native Ireland in his capacity as president of
the British Association to deliver a presidential address in
Belfast entitled “The Beginning of Things, or, Science Versus
Theology.” Circumstances were ripe for controversy, and
temperamentally, Tyndall savored confrontations of this sort.
Raised a Protestant, he had never disguised his dislike of the
“Papist” church hierarchy in Ireland, and he was aware of
long-simmering disputes among its clergy about the dangers of
teaching science in the curriculum of the floundering Catholic
University. John Henry Newman, the first rector, had resigned
over the issue in 1858, and the institution had continued to
struggle without a coherent academic or theological plan.1 In
the ideologically fractious atmosphere of the times—Darwin’s
Descent of Man had been published only three years earlier—
it was expected by both believers and skeptics that Tyndall
would deliver a corrosive attack against Roman Catholicism. In
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certain respects, he did not disappoint them. As the historians
of science John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor explain, his
lecture provided “a more completely naturalistic account of
Darwinism than Darwin himself, pledging that science would
rest from theology the entire domain of cosmological theory”
(Reconstructing Nature 25).
But judged from a different perspective, Tyndall’s lecture
“was the culmination of a series of essays and addresses that
argued for a qualified materialism” (Barton 132). Seen in this
light, his real antagonist was atheism. Tyndall himself was
highly sensitive to the charge that his lecture might be misinterpreted as a celebration of the physical basis of life. Several
months later he wrote an anxious letter to Carlyle’s niece and
assistant Mary Carlyle Aitken, asking her if the rumors of
her Uncle’s disapproval of the Belfast address were true. She
replied promptly: “I need hardly say that your small request
gives me no trouble whatever & I hasten to comply with it. I
myself heard my Uncle use the expression ‘a philosophy fit for
dogs,’ but it was a reference to Darwin’s theory of Evolution not
to your Belfast address. He ‘the General’ bids me say that he
never said or thought anything of the kind in reference to what
you have said or written. As to the ‘similar story,’ I daresay you
yourself have often heard my Uncle repeat the words ‘Thou
has made him a little lower than the angels’; and add that the
Darwinites seemed to say ‘Thou has made him a little higher
than the tadpoles’” (Tyndall papers, 9 February 1875).2
At first appearance Tyndall’s request for reassurance seems
curious. Why did Carlyle’s views about Darwin matter so much
to him? The answer lies in his own complex attitudes to the
man whom he had referred to in an 1870 address to the British
Association in Liverpool as “our mightiest spiritual teacher” (Use
and Limit 36). The “General’s” approval was vital to him because
Tyndall found in the writings of the Chelsea prophet the most
profound and complete philosophical and historical confirmation of the Origin of Species (1859). Carlyle’s was an apologia that
for him transcended any other in its future significance. From
his first reading of Past and Present in 1843 while working as a
railway surveyor in Preston, Tyndall had recognized in Carlyle
what he later discovered in Darwin—he was a revolutionary who
had radically re-defined the relationship between the divine and
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63
the material realms of experience.3 For Tyndall, the two men
shared a common starting-point in their distinctive endeavors.
Both conceived nature synthetically, and stressed the mysterious intricacy of its parts and the ultimate indeterminacy of
its design. The impact of their work on science and philosophy
was already apparent: “[Physical science] is destined to produce,
immense changes—popular conception of the origin, rule, and
governance of natural things. By science, in the physical world,
miracles are wrought, while philosophy is forsaking its ancient
metaphysical channels and pursuing others which have been
opened or indicated by scientific research” (Use and Limit 43).
Tyndall believed that together, Carlyle and Darwin had liberated philosophy from the mechanistic orthodoxies that were
choking its intellectual development and constricting its future,
and by doing so, they had cleared a path to the eventual fusion
of science and religion.
In “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle” (1890),
Tyndall explicates the synthesis: “Quite as clearly as the
professed physicist [Carlyle] grasped the principle of
Continuity, and saw the interdependence of ‘parts’ in the
‘stupendous Whole.’ To him the Universe was not a Mechanism,
but an Organism—each part of it thrilling and responding
sympathetically with all other parts. . . . Other penetrative
minds have made us familiar with the ‘Social Organism,’ but
Carlyle saw early and utilized nobly the beauty and the truth
of the metaphor.” From Carlyle, Tyndall learned to appreciate that “the long line of his researches is, in reality, a line
of wonders” (New Fragments 385–86, 387). Darwin too, opened
peoples’ eyes to the congruity and multitudinousness of the
physical world. The theory of evolution described a sublime
scheme of nature that was not dependent on a pre-ordained
Creator. For Tyndall, Darwin had restored a vital sense of the
miraculousness of existence that earlier science, enfeebled by
an exhausted religious tradition, had denied and repressed.
In his Liverpool speech Tyndall boldly declares: “Strip [the
doctrine of evolution] naked, and you stand face to face with
the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse
and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism
of the human body, but that the human mind itself—emotion,
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intellect, will and all their phenomena—were once latent in a
fiery cloud. Surely the mere statement of such a notion is more
than a refutation. But the hypothesis would probably go even
farther than this. Many who hold it would probably assent to
the position that, at the present moment, all our philosophy, all
our poetry, all our science, and all our art—Plato, Shakespeare,
Newton and Raphael—are potential in the fires of the sun” (Use
and Limit 35).
The word that unites Carlyle and Darwin in Tyndall’s mind
is “wonder.” Gillian Beer has observed that the concept permeated both Darwin’s methods and language, and that it linked
him closely to Carlyle and Dickens: “The study of ‘fact’ was
for [them] an exploration of the fantastic. Darwin shared this
pleasure in ‘making strange’, in skimming off the familiar and
restoring it, enriched and stabilized. When the word ‘fact’
occurs in The Origin of Species it is usually intensified as ‘a truly
wonderful fact—the wonder of which we are apt to overlook
from familiarity’ . . . ‘this great fact’ . . . or ‘such wonderful
and well-established facts’” (259). Seen from this vantage point,
Darwin’s outlook is serenely compatible with Carlyle’s, “not
opposed,” Tyndall insists, “but supplementary—not mutually
exclusive, but reconcilable” (Belfast Address 64). In his Liverpool
address, he assures his audience that Darwin’s theory poses no
threat to true religion: “Fear not the Evolution hypothesis. . . .
Trust me, its existence as a hypothesis in the mind is quite
compatible with the simultaneous existence of all those virtues
to which the term Christian has been applied. It does not
solve—it does not profess to solve—the ultimate mystery of this
universe. It leaves in fact that mystery untouched. For granting
the nebula and its potential life, the question, whence came
they? would still remain to baffle and bewilder us.” Like Carlyle,
Darwinists “have as little fellowship with the atheist who says
there is no God, as with the theist who professes to know the
mind of God.” Tyndall concludes by citing Carlyle’s favorite
passage from Kant: “‘Two things . . . fill me with awe: the starry
heavens and the sense of moral responsibility in man.’ And in
his hours of health and strength and sanity, when the stroke
of action has ceased and the pause of reflection has set in, the
scientific investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same
awe. Breaking contact with the hampering details of earth, it
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65
associates him with a power which gives fullness and tone to his
existence, but which he can neither analyse nor comprehend”
(Use and Limit 36, 38). In such moments, the scientist and the
believer are at one in their mutual reverence of a knowledge
and power that eludes them both.
For Tyndall, Carlyle’s “Natural Supernaturalism” has
achieved for religion what Darwin’s natural selection has
done for evolution. In their respective spheres, each man has
reshaped the context of knowledge and belief. Carlyle began
with a simple proposition, that the actual universe radiated with
the life of the ideal. From this premise, he arrived at a startling
new configuration of morality and evolution. In his lecture
“Science and Man” to the Birmingham and Midland Institute
in 1877, Tyndall notes, “I think it is in one of the Latter-Day
Pamphlets that Carlyle corrects a reasoner, who deduced the
nobility of man from a belief in heaven, by telling him that he
puts the cart before the horse, the real truth being that the
belief in heaven is derived from the nobility of man.” Tyndall
elaborates the argument in distinctively Darwinian language,
showing how Carlyle anticipates the ways in which religion will
“adapt” to the irrefutable truth of the evolutionary hypothesis:
“Our ideas of God and the soul are obviously subject to this
symbolic mutation. They are not now what they were a century
ago. They will not be a century hence what they are now. Such
ideas constitute a kind of central energy in the human mind,
capable, like the energy of the physical universe, of assuming
various shapes and undergoing various transformations. They
baffle and elude the theological mechanic who would carve
them to dogmatic forms. They offer themselves to the poet who
understands his vocation, and whose function is, or ought to be,
to find ‘local habitation’ for thoughts woven into our subjective
life, but which refuse to be mechanically defined” (Fragments
2: 372, 360). Carlyle predicts the direction, but not the destination of what he calls “religiosity.” How this “central energy”
will find new vehicles of spiritual expression constitutes one
of the most pressing issues of the day, as crucial to religion as
Darwinian theory is to science.
What is most striking about Tyndall’s effort to enlist Carlyle
as the leading Darwinist of the age is the context in which
this recruitment occurs. By the 1870s Carlyle’s reputation as
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a surly advocate of a Prussian-style authoritarianism was well
established.4 The Scottish theologian John Tulloch trenchantly
summarized the critical consensus against Carlyle in his St.
Giles lectures of 1884. Carlyle’s refusal “to look steadily at spiritual as distinct from natural life” had vitiated his outlook.
In Tulloch’s view, the result of this fatal schism was that he
could not imagine life being created “save by a being who
had a moral sense like his own. . . . [H]e refused to acknowledge a Personal Life above his own life, a Life pitiful as well as
just, Love as well as Law. And so his idea of the Divine reality
sank into the idea of Supreme Force” (204). Tulloch accused
Carlyle of delighting “in the vagueness which lies necessarily in
[the] higher region,” and clinging “to it with scorn of all who
would give to the Supreme a more concrete meaning. And so
Spirit with him constantly passes into Force, Law into Might—
Righteousness into mere Order” (205). Darwin himself, an
admirer of Carlyle’s earlier writings, was dismayed by the illiberal turn that he had taken in such works as the “Occasional
Discourse on the Negro Question” (1848), Latter-Day Pamphlets
(1850), The History of Frederick the Great (1858–65), and Shooting
Niagara (1867). In his posthumously published Autobiography
(1887), Darwin declared: “[Carlyle] has been all-powerful in
impressing some grand moral truths on the minds of men. On
the other hand, his views about slavery were revolting. In his
eyes might was right. His mind seemed to me a very narrow
one; even if all branches of science, which he despised, are
excluded” (113).
Carlyle was equally scathing about Darwinian theory,
though he admired Darwin personally. He informed William
Allingham in 1878, “I don’t care three ha’pence for [it]. . . . It is
impossible to believe otherwise than that this world is the work
of an Intelligent Mind. The Power which has formed us—He
(or It—if that appears to anyone more suitable) has known how
to put into the human soul an ineradicable love of justice and
truth” (29 March; Allingham 264). Yet the assumption that
faith in such “Intelligence” amounted to the certainty of a preordained “design”—a notion dear to certain twenty-first century
opponents of Darwinism—did not move Carlyle. He loudly
derided Tyndall’s initiative to fuse his opinions with Darwin’s.
To Allingham he “spoke of the folly of Tyndall and others who
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went on about the origin of things; ‘I long ago perceived that
no man could know anything about that; but that the Universe
could come together by chance was, and is, altogether incredible. The evidence to me of God—and the only evidence—is
the feeling I have deep down in the very bottom of my heart of
right and truth and justice. I believe that all things are governed
by Eternal Goodness and Wisdom, and not otherwise; but we
cannot see and never shall see how it is all managed’” (14
November 1878; Allingham 268). But such disavowals, which
Carlyle frequently expressed, curiously buoyed Tyndall with
hope. Neither Darwin’s contempt for Carlyle’s “might is right”
nor Carlyle’s disdain for evolution discouraged him. On the
contrary, Carlyle’s “feeling . . . of right and truth and justice”
operated on Tyndall’s imagination as a galvanic agency, spurring him to champion a “symbolic mutation” between the two
thinkers that would benefit both science and religion.
Notwithstanding his attraction to the magnetic appeal of
Carlyle’s moral fervor, Tyndall appreciated the dangers and
pitfalls of discipleship. In 1866 he somewhat hesitantly became
involved in the Governor Eyre controversy. Having decided to
follow Carlyle in joining the Eyre Defense Committee, Tyndall
incurred the anger of fellow scientists, including his friend
and colleague Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95). Huxley
too had previously admired Carlyle, but he now insisted that
he no longer recognized the author of Sartor Resartus in the
utterances of the cranky reactionary who insulted humanity
by lauding militaristic regimentation. Dismayed by Carlyle’s
support for Eyre’s brutal suppression of the Jamaica revolt,
Huxley bluntly informed Charles Kingsley that henceforth,
he sided with those who “look upon hero-worship as no better
than any other idolatry, and upon the attitude of mind of the
hero-worshipper as essentially immoral” (8 November 1866;
Life and Letters 1: 303–04). 5 The anti-Eyre Jamaica Committee
issued a public letter to Tyndall, challenging him to justify his
decision to support the governor. Put on the defensive, Tyndall
tried to stake out a middle ground in the debate. In a letter to
the Committee sent from the Athenæum Club on 7 November,
he condemned Eyre’s use of excessive force but insisted that the
circumstances be judged in the context of the region’s history:
“I am not prepared to question the truth of these allegations
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[against Eyre]; I am not prepared to deny that the period of
punishment was too long, or that its character was too severe.
. . . But I would invite you to transport yourselves to the field
while the smoke hung upon it; to remember that a former
rebellion in Jamaica which everybody supposed to be quelled
in May broke out ‘with redoubled fury in June’; to think of
Governor Eyre with the blood of his slaughtered countrymen
before his eyes; with the memories of St. Domingo in his mind;
with the consciousness that the whole island round him was
near its point of combustion, and with no possible means of
estimating how near” (qtd. in Finlason 368).6
In trying to shift the ground of the dispute from broad
notions of might and right to the particulars of history, Tyndall
also signaled his strategy for redeeming Carlyle as a Darwinist. It
was no coincidence that Tyndall chose to proclaim the Chelsea
sage’s evolutionist credentials on his merits as a historian.
Carlyle had devoted the bulk of his career to three major works
of history, The French Revolution (1837), Oliver Cromwell’s Letters
and Speeches (1845), and The History of Frederick the Great (1858–
65), which Tyndall regarded as touchstones of his genius. They
provided convincing and exhaustive evidence that Carlyle’s
opposition to “mechanistic” logic was rooted in his inveterate
dislike of any kind of absolutism, either philosophical or political. These writings represented the triumph of the Darwinian
spirit in the recovery of the past, by combining a stubborn
devotion to empirical fact with an open-minded receptivity to
Goethean “many-sidedness.” What saved Carlyle from violating
the boundaries of morality and science was his acute historical
sense, which in turn nourished and fortified his dynamic vision
of nature. According to Tyndall, Carlyle was the writer who had
exerted the heaviest impact on the union between Romanticism
and science, investing human experience with a transcendent
dimension. In his excavations of the past, he enacted within
himself both the limits of reason and the imagination, while
simultaneously demonstrating their fruitful intercourse.
From Tyndall’s vantage point, it was Carlyle the historian
to whom all scientists should be indebted, because in his great
epics, he exploded the false “antithesis of spirit and matter”
and taught investigators to regard these polarities “as equally
worthy and equally wonderful; to consider them in fact as two
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69
opposite faces of the self-same mystery” (Use and Limit 36). If
Darwin’s evolutionary theory served as a powerful warning of
the dangers of imposing rigid patterns on the operations of
nature, Carlyle’s historical studies yielded a similar caution
to those who sought to extract “scientific” certitudes from the
study of the past. In his Belfast address, Tyndall cites Henry
Thomas Buckle’s best-selling History of Civilization in England
(1857, 1861) as a salient example of this misguided tendency.
In the book, which was hailed by critics as a landmark study
and was subsequently translated into German, French, and
Russian, Buckle speaks confidently of a new “science of history.”
With Gradgrindian zealotry, he trumpets “statistics . . . [as]
a branch of knowledge which, though still in its infancy, has
already thrown more light on the study of human nature than
all the sciences put together.” This new discipline demonstrates
unequivocally “that the advance of European civilization is
characterized by a diminishing influence of physical laws, and
an increasing influence of mental laws” (31, 142).
Buckle’s confident conclusion “that the history of the
human mind can only be understood by connecting it with
the history and the aspects of the material universe” (134)
illustrates his myopia. Like many of those thinkers who have
subordinated the past to a blueprint of rational progress—
among them, Turgot, Condorcet, the Saint-Simonians, Fourier,
Mignet, Dulaure, Buchez, Sismondi, Comte, John Stuart Mill,
Marx and Engels, Guizot, and Thierry—Buckle overlooks the
inherently untidy quality of historical facts. He too readily
accepts the “false antithesis of spirit and matter,” and as a
consequence, he diminishes the role of sympathy and imagination in the reconstruction of the past. In the Belfast address
Tyndall cautions thinkers to calibrate their conclusions in relation to what can be known: “All religious theories, schemes
and systems, which embrace notions of cosmogony, or which
otherwise reach into the domain of science, must, in so far as
they do this, submit to the control of science, and relinquish all
thought of controlling it” (Belfast Address 61). But in the italicized phrase, “in so far as they do this,” he specifies the limits of
both religion and science, and maintains that “[s]cience itself
not unfrequently derives motive power from an ultra-scientific
source.” The progress of the human intellect can never be
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divorced from other less measurable influences. In Tyndall’s
words, “Mr. Buckle sought to detach intellectual achievement
from moral force. He gravely erred; for without moral force to
whip it into action, the achievements of the intellect would be
poor indeed” (Belfast Address 61). By ignoring this vital dimension of experience, Buckle misconceives the purpose and value of
studying the past.7
In their respective research Carlyle and Darwin offered
a much richer harvest of historical insight. They taught that
science is as much as an internal as well as an external power.
It derives its inspiration from the ineffable quality of all knowledge, argues Tyndall: “Science desires not isolation, but freely
combines with every effort towards the bettering of man’s estate.
Single-handed, and supported not by outward sympathy, but by
inward force, it has built at least one great wing of the manymansioned home which man in his totality demands” (Belfast
Address 62). A true “science of history” is a contradiction, since by
its very definition it rejects the Darwinian recognition of science
as one room in a “many-mansioned” reality.8 At the conclusion
of his general introduction, Buckle hopes that his labors will
“open to historians a new field, by reminding them that everywhere the hand of Nature is that the history of the human mind
can only be understood by connecting it with the history and
the aspects of the material universe” (134). In Tyndall’s estimate, Carlyle and Darwin are the torchbearers of a deeper
truth, namely that the invisible life of the past also reveals “those
unquenchable claims of [man’s] moral and emotional life which
the understanding can never satisfy” (Belfast Address 64). Carlyle
approaches the study of the past in the same manner that Darwin
approaches the study of the natural world. Tyndall’s assessment
of Darwin’s methods in the Liverpool lecture is equally relevant
to Carlyle’s as a historian: “[The Darwinians’] business is not
with the possible, but the actual—not with a world which might
be, but with a word that is. This they explore with a courage not
unmixed with reverence, and according to their methods which,
like the quality of a tree, are tested by their fruits. They have
but one desire—to know the truth. They have but one fear—to
believe a lie. And if they know the strength of science, and rely
upon it with unswerving trust, they also know the limits beyond
which science ceases to be strong” (Use and Limit 38).
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Like Darwin, Carlyle revered facts but he never presumed
that they could divulge a complete or final knowledge of either
people or events. It was his ardor to re-create the past in its
essence that led him to inaccuracy. His struggle was always to
balance imaginative sympathy with accuracy. In instances such
as the Flight to Varennes, he lost himself in the drama of the
moment and failed to record the correct distance of the King’s
journey. Yet as Tyndall insists, his efforts to balance his poetic
and his empirical aims were laudable: “His labours were intensified by his conscientiousness. He proved all things, with the
view and aim of holding fast that which was historically good.
Never to err would have been superhuman; but if he erred, it
was not through indolence or lack of care. The facts of history
were as sacred in his eyes as the ‘constants’ of gravitation in the
eyes of Newton; hence the severity of his work” (New Fragments
57). A scrupulous scientist, he subjected his biases to rigorous
self-inquiry. For example, “the riddled Vengeur sinking to the
cry of ‘Vive la Républic!’ found in his strong soul sympathetic
admiration.” But, Tyndall asserts, “he prized courage less than
truth; and when he found the story of the Vengeur to be a lie,
he transfixed it, and hung it up as an historic scarecrow” (New
Fragments 395).
Carlyle boldly countered the orthodoxies of “the science
of history” by giving priority to human over political, philosophical, or ideological interests in his narratives. Whereas he
focused on the French Revolution both as a spiritual search for
a new “mythus” and as a primordial eruption against injustice
and materialism, members of the “scientific” school regarded
it, in Buckle’s formulation, as “a single part of that far larger
movement which was seen in every department of science, of
philosophy, of religion, and of politics” (851). Tyndall was first
attracted to the writings of Carlyle precisely because the sage
eschewed such lifeless Bitzer-like equations in favor of carefully
wrought delineations of real human feeling. Carlyle’s detailed
descriptions in Past and Present of the unemployed laborers in
Preston in 1842 indicated the emotional proximity between
him and his subject. A “eye-witness” to this same tragedy,
Tyndall merges Carlyle’s narrative of the Preston riots with
his own memories: “I found in it strokes of descriptive powers
unequalled in my experience, and thrills of electric splendour
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which carried me enthusiastically on” (New Fragments 349).
Carlyle’s historical writing is a combination of empirical fidelity,
spiritual wonder, and prophetic intensity. Darwin’s Origin of
Species memorably demonstrates that these are the prerequisites of great science, as well as great history.
For Tyndall, Carlyle’s re-creation of the past embodies
a “deep-set feeling which, since the earliest dawn of history
. . . incorporated itself in the Religions of the world.” In his
Belfast address, Tyndall warns his fellow scientists not to
ignore this “feeling,” which has always inspired the creative
impulse in art, literature, music, painting, and science. The
scientist’s denunciation of religion as the enemy of human
reason and progress constitutes “the problem of problems at
the present hour.” Tyndall concedes that “the religions of the
world” have been “dangerous, nay destructive, to the dearest
privileges of freemen . . . and would, if they could, be again.”
Notwithstanding their recondite aspect, they are also “capable
of being guided to noble issues in the region of emotion, which
is its proper and elevated sphere” (Belfast Address 61). Carlyle’s
point of view is vital not merely because it releases scientists
from the “old clothes” of religious dogmatism, but also because
it inspires them to re-channel their spiritual energies towards
their research. Similarly, Darwin’s open-mindedness shapes
the procedures of his disciples: “They best know that questions
offer themselves to thought which science, as now prosecuted,
has not even the tendency to solve. They keep such questions
open, and will not tolerate any unnecessary limitation of the
horizon of their souls” (Use and Limit 167).
Tyndall was not unique in seeing Carlyle as the pre-eminent
moral thinker of his time who, both instinctively and intuitively,
acted as a bridge between Darwinism and religion. One of
Carlyle’s earlier disciples Vernon Lushington (1832–1912) had
speculated fruitfully about their notable affinities in the Oxford
and Cambridge Magazine in 1856. A self-professed Carlylean
“believer,” Lushington’s aim was to vindicate his mentor’s
conviction that “Might and Right do differ frightfully from hour
to hour, but give them centuries to try it in, they are found to
be identical” (341). In his writings Carlyle poetically discloses
how the course of human history evinces Darwinian patterns
of competition, natural selection, adaptation, and mutation.
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Argues Lushington, “[He] has shown, the Feudal Barons were
in their day the right rulers of England; the Pope at Rome was
the right ruler of Christendom; the white Englishman was,
nay is, the proper master of the Jamaican negro. The title of
their authority was Might, but it was a good and true title, a
God-given one: the injustice of their practice was but weakness,
and in time their ruin. For by the self-same law, what is unjust
cannot last. Feudal Serfdom had to go; Roman Papacy had to
go; Black Slavery had to go, men enduring their wrongfulness
no longer. . . . Each of these institutions carried with it order,
organisation, and left but a sorry substitute in its room. There is
a penalty on Injustice! Might is Right still” (337). But Carlyle’s
later preoccupation with Frederick the Great and Prussia
soured Lushington’s enthusiasm. A convert to the Comtean
“religion of humanity” in the 1870s, he denounced Carlyle
as a militarist. Of The History of Frederick the Great, Lushington
laments, “This is not what we want. It is even what we don’t
want. We don’t want to increase, to feed our interest in war: we
want to reduce it” (qtd. in Taylor 93).
Yet it was to Carlyle’s Prussian biography that Tyndall
appealed as a sign of the author’s tolerance and tenacity. In the
book Carlyle stubbornly resisted his own authoritarian temptations. Part of him may have wanted to represent Frederick
the Great as an exemplary ruler, but he was too honest a historian to push this claim further than his evidence permitted.
Tyndall recalls that “He was continually pulled up by sayings
and doings on the part of his hero which took all enthusiasm
out of him. ‘Frederick was the greatest administrator this
world has seen, but I could never really love the man’” (New
Fragments 357). What emerged from this contradiction was an
evolutionary view of the Prussian iconoclast, whose rebellion
against the hypocritical diplomacy and political chicanery of
eighteenth-century Europe “ushers-in the French Revolution,
and closes an Epoch of World-History” (Frederick, Works 12: 6).
In the “Proem” to his Prussian epic, Carlyle poses a question
that reveals his own peculiar Darwinian leanings: “What part of
that exploded Past, the ruins and dust of which still darken all
the air, will continually gravitate back to us; be reshaped, transformed, readapted, that so, in new figures, under new conditions,
it may enrich and nourish us again?” (Works 12: 16). The answer
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lies in Frederick’s own commitment to “true Kingship,” which
is founded on justice rather than privilege or might. Tyndall
concedes that the “bias of [Carlyle’s] mind was certainly towards
what might be called the military virtues; thinking, as he did,
that they could not be dispensed with in the present temper
of the world. But, though he bore about him the image of a
great military commander . . . he would at any fit and proper
moment have joyfully accepted as the weapons of his warfare,
instead of the sword and sphere, the ploughshare and pruninghook of peaceful civic life” (New Fragments 395). Despite his
flaws, Frederick is a worthier leader than Napoleon Bonaparte
because he steadfastly refuses to equate guile with veracity or
might with right.
Paradoxically, Tyndall regards Carlyle—the alleged apostle
of the Prussian “drill Sergeant”—as the greatest and most
perceptive critic of “social Darwinism,” which “suggested that
nature would provide that the best competitors in a competitive
situation would win, and this process would lead to continuing
improvement” (Hofstadter 6).9 For Tyndall, Carlyle’s attitude
to nature stays true to the spirit of Darwin’s doctrine. Carlyle
looks forward to Darwin in the manner in which he envisages
truth “evolving” from lies and half-truths. This process involves
both competition and annihilation—a “natural selection”—
and eventually, a rational recognition of higher “mutation”
in the shape of a future common good. In Tyndall’s estimate,
Darwin and Carlyle meet at the junction of the known and the
unknown. Carlyle believes that “[o]ut of pure Unintelligence
. . . Intelligence never could have sprung, and so, at the heart
of things, he placed an Intelligence—and Energy which, ‘to
avoid circuitous periphrasis, we call God.’” Tyndall adds, “I am
here repeating his own words to myself. Every reader of his
works will have recognised the burning intensity of his conviction that this universe is ruled by veracity and justice, which
are sure in the end to scorch and dissipate all falsehood and
wrong” (New Fragments 396). In the endless interplay of “might
and right” in the world, Carlyle discerns that brute force will
never impose the truth, since such force implies a closure of the
very attitudes that nourish the possibility of greater wisdom.
For Carlyle, as for Darwin, there is an underlying hope
that the evolutionary dance might confirm the confluence of
David R. Sorensen
75
might and right. Tyndall reiterates that in this context, “Might
is not, in the abstract, offensive; for it meant at bottom the
assertion that . . . that only is might which has the ‘Law of
the Universe’ on its side. With Carlyle, as with Empedocles,
Lucretius, and Darwin, the Fit survives. His doctrine is the
doctrine of science, not ‘touched’ but saturated with religious
emotion. For the operation of Force—the scientific agent—his
deep and yearning soul substituted the operation of the Energy
. . . which . . . we call God” (New Fragments 396). In his frequent
discussions with Carlyle about Darwin, Tyndall observed that
his friend objected to Darwin’s doctrine of evolution primarily
on moral rather than scientific grounds. The possibility that
a new form of Benthamite social control would emerge that
scientifically determined “might” by the irrefutable laws of
Darwinian natural selection and laissez-faire troubled Carlyle
deeply. His admiration for Frederick the Great was largely
grounded in the Prussian king’s abhorrence of free trade, and
of the terrible human cost that this “Lie” imposed on society.
Tyndall recalled, “It was not the absence of scientific power
and precision, so much as the overwhelming importance which
Carlyle ascribed to ethical considerations and influences, that
determined his attitude toward natural science. The fear that
moral strength might be diminished by Darwin’s doctrine
accounts for such hostility as he showed to the ‘Origin of
Species.’ We had many calm and reasonable conversations on
this and kindred subjects; and I could see that his real protest
was against being hemmed in. He demanded a larger area than
that offered by science for speculative action and its associated
emotion. . . . It was the illegitimate science which, in its claims,
overstepped its warrant—professing to explain everything, and
to sweep the universe clear of mystery—that was really repugnant to Carlyle” (New Fragments 386–87).
Tyndall’s defense of Carlyle’s proto-Darwinism suggests
the paradoxical aspect of the sage’s legacy. On the one hand,
he inspired an entire generation by assailing Utilitarian selfinterest and awakening people’s minds to the wondrous
human possibilities of a world teeming with compassionate
and constructive energy. On the other, he brutally compromised this achievement by his cruel and perversely unhistorical
attacks against West Indian and American slaves, and by his
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cynical paeans to Cromwell in Ireland and Frederick in Silesia.10
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is difficult
to accept Tyndall’s judgment, at least without careful reservation, that “the cloud passes away, and the mountain, in its solid
grandeur, remains” (New Fragments 397). But it is a tribute to
Carlyle’s acumen as a historian that even when mired in the
darkness of his own volatile misanthropy, he could “readapt”
historical knowledge to throw light on the future. In his ardor
to re-tailor Carlyle as a type of “Reform Darwinist” who gave
priority to cooperation over competition, Tyndall underestimates the historical incisiveness of the prophet’s pessimism.11
In the wake of the Crimean debacle and the Indian Mutiny,
no alert Victorian reader could ignore the subtle parallels that
Carlyle painstakingly developed in Frederick the Great between
the corrupt cesspool of eighteenth-century diplomacy and its
nineteenth-century equivalent, where democracy masqueraded
as oligarchy, imperialism as Christian altruism, and capitalism
as freedom. Even in a diatribe as harsh as Shooting Niagara,
Carlyle can envisage the future with disturbing precision. In
the essay he frankly admits that “[i]f amid the thickest welter of
surrounding gluttony and baseness, and what must be reckoned
bottomless anarchy from shore to shore, there can be found
no man, no small but invincible minority of men, capable of
keeping themselves free from all that, and of living a heroically
human life, while the millions round them are noisily living a
mere beaverish or doglike one, then truly all hope is gone.” Had
he lived until the end of the century, he would have grasped
that his worst fears were being realized. In his Swiftian premonition of a mechanistic world undone by its own mechanical
contrivances, and of “actual fighting, bloody wrestling, and a
great deal of it” (Works 30: 21,23), Carlyle eerily envisages the
mayhem and carnage of Gallipoli, the Somme, and Verdun.
Yet Tyndall’s dream of a “symbolic mutation” between Carlyle
and Darwin should not be dismissed as a mere historical curiosity, if only because what he called the penchant for “sweeping
the universe clear of mystery” has not lost its dangerous allure,
either in science or history. Moreover, his Carlylean defense
of Darwinism revitalizes our appreciation of the theory of
evolution, both of its poetry and its science, in a period when
it is more vulnerable than ever to the often crude onslaughts
David R. Sorensen
77
launched against it by Creationists, laissez-faire ideologues, and
sociobiologists. Tyndall’s desire to conflate Carlyle and Darwin
reflects a profound and persistent need to heal the spiritual
wounds inflicted by The Origin of Species. Jonathan Howard has
rightly observed that “[m]ore than any other scientific theory,
the theory of evolution reaches into hallowed areas of spiritual
life. It is no longer easy to look to spiritual authority for a satisfying account of the ultimate issues of human existence: why are
we here? why does the world act so uncaringly? what is the sense
of the sublime? The Darwinian revolution has been a cruel one
in that it has taken many of the customary sources of consolation. To realize that the physical construction of human bodies
and brains is the outcome of processes as comprehensible as
those which form the ocean waves may give intellectual satisfaction but it does not necessarily compensate for the loss of divine
providence” (105). Tyndall saw in Carlyle’s writings a fountain of
solace, which delivered spiritual sustenance as well as intellectual
strength. In “Personal Recollections” he recalls the prophet’s
fondness for joining him in his scientific experiments: “To
Carlyle life was wholly mystical—incapable of explanation—and
the conclusion to which the experiments pointed, that life was
derived from antecedent life, and was not generated from dead
matter, fell in with his notions of the fitness of things. Instead,
therefore, of repelling him, the experiments gave him pleasure”
(351). It was this sense of the “fitness of things” that forever identified him in Tyndall’s mind as Darwin’s co-explorer, his fellow
sojourner on the paths of the natural and the supernatural.
Saint Joseph’s University
Notes
1.The Tyndall papers are published with the kind permission of the
Royal Institution, London.
2. For a balanced history of the controversy, see Colin Barr; see also
Wilfred Philip Ward, 1: ch. 11. In his lecture “Christianity and Scientific
Investigation” (1855), which was later included in The Idea of a University
(1853, 1858), John Henry Newman urged an ecumenical approach to the
truth: “I ask religious writers, jurists, economists, physiologists, chemists,
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geologists, and historians, to go on quietly, and in a neighbourly way, in
their own respective lines of speculation, research, and experiment, with
full faith in the consistency of that multiform truth, which they share
between them, in a generous confidence that they will be ultimately
consistent, one and all, in their combined results, though there may be
momentary collisions, awkward appearances, and many forebodings and
prophecies of contrariety” (Idea of a University 420–21).
3. Of Carlyle’s impact on Tyndall, Kenneth J. Fielding wisely observes,
“What his often younger, self-educated, self-improving readers admired was
exactly the vigorous rhetoric which broke with conservative tradition, and
his demand for freedom of though and self-dependence, combined with
purpose, and responsibility. The record of their response has fallen out of
sight—if it was ever in it. It may be because such readers were peculiarly
English, and of the unglossiest kind, that interest in them has now localised
to vanishing point. They were of the past not the present. Yet they once
constituted not just Carlyle’s audience, but were one to which he seems to
have pitched his voice” (45).
4. For example, it is instructive to contrast the arguments of Tyndall
with those of W. H. Lecky (1838–1903), Carlyle’s other great Irish friend at
this time. In Lecky’s view, Carlyle’s teaching “was essentially Darwinian. He
believed deeply in the survival of the fittest.” But Lecky also pointed out, “It
was not true, Carlyle often protested, that he taught that might is right—
though it must be owned that in some of his later works this accusation
might be brought against him with much plausibility” (xiv; see below, 237).
5. James G. Paradis points out that Huxley’s hero-worship of Darwin
was shaped by the his opposition to Carlyle. In his biographical essay on
Darwin, which appeared in Nature (1882), Huxley “found the humility and
simplicity of this reserved, self-secluding investigator almost mysterious.
In contrast to the Carlylean hero, Darwin was sedentary, a thinker, not an
actor” (69).
6.In his response to the letter Huxley seemed relieved that Tyndall
had eschewed Carlylean notions of might and right in his defense of Eyre.
Huxley admitted that he greatly admired “the tone” of the letter “without
being able to recognise in it any important fact or argument which had
not passed through my mind before I joined the Jamaica committee” (9
November 1866; Life and Letters 1: 304).
7.Darwin’s own appraisal of Buckle’s book was mixed. He informed
J. D. Hooker, 23 February [1858], “I am reading his Book, which with
much sophistry as it seems to me, is wonderfully clever & original & with
astounding knowledge” (Correspondence 7: 31).
8. Kingsley, another Carlylean disciple, had voiced a similar argument
in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in
David R. Sorensen
79
1860: “Even if . . . the history of mankind depended merely on physical laws,
analogous to those which govern the rest of nature, it would be a hopeless
task for us to discover an inevitable sequence in History, even though we
might suppose that such existed” (21–22).
9.Tyndall oddly anticipates Huxley in this belief. Frank M. Turner
astutely shows how “the confusion and richness of Carlyle’s thought . . .
contained the seeds for the most important nineteenth-century refutation
of might-makes-right social thinking”—Huxley’s Romanes lecture of 1893—
in which the latter “attacks the same specious use of scientific theory to
justify competition that Carlyle had castigated in Past and Present” (149–50).
Turner’s assessment also offers provides an effective antidote to the equally
specious attempts by Peart and Levy to diminish Carlyle and Ruskin’s
attacks against “the dismal science” by tying them to racism, eugenics, and
imperialism; see Peart and Levy 34–43.
10. A. N. Wilson shrewdly points out that Darwin was more
Carlylean in his racial attitudes than he liked to assume. Citing his
discussion of the disappearance of the Tasmanians at the hands of the
English colonists in The Descent of Man, Wilson observes: “[Darwin]
accepts Malthus’s view that barbarous races reproduced at a lower rate
than civilized ones and he appears . . . to believe that acts of genocide, if
perpetrated by the British, were somehow part of the Natural Process.
. . . This is the element which the twenty-first-century reader would find
most shocking in Darwin. Most Victorian readers would be untroubled
by the notion that European nations were superior to those in other
parts of the world” (375–76).
11. For “Reform Darwinism,” see Hawkins 151–83.
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