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    Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior
    Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior
    Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior
    Ebook1,217 pages19 hours

    Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior

    By Robert J. Richards

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    With insight and wit, Robert J. Richards focuses on the development of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior from their first distinct appearance in the eighteenth century to their controversial state today. Particularly important in the nineteenth century were Charles Darwin's ideas about instinct, reason, and morality, which Richards considers against the background of Darwin's personality, training, scientific and cultural concerns, and intellectual community. Many critics have argued that the Darwinian revolution stripped nature of moral purpose and ethically neutered the human animal. Richards contends, however, that Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and their disciples attempted to reanimate moral life, believing that the evolutionary process gave heart to unselfish, altruistic behavior.

    "Richards's book is now the obvious introduction to the history of ideas about mind and behavior in the nineteenth century."—Mark Ridley, Times Literary Supplement

    "Not since the publication of Michael Ghiselin's The Triumph of the Darwinian Method has there been such an ambitious, challenging, and methodologically self-conscious interpretation of the rise and development and evolutionary theories and Darwin's role therein."—John C. Greene, Science

    "His book . . . triumphantly achieves the goal of all great scholarship: it not only informs us, but shows us why becoming thus informed is essential to understanding our own issues and projects."—Daniel C. Dennett, Philosophy of Science
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateJun 1, 2014
    ISBN9780226149516
    Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior

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      Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior - Robert J. Richards

      The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

      The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

      © 1987 by The University of Chicago

      All rights reserved. Published 1987

      Paperback edition 1989

      Printed in the United States of America

      98 97 96 95                7 6 5 4

      ISBN 0-226-71200-1 (pbk.)

      ISBN 978-0-226-14951-6 (e-book)

      Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

      Richards, Robert John

      Darwin and the emergence of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior.

      (Science and its conceptual foundations)

      Bibliography: p.

      Includes index.

      1. Genetic psychology.   2. Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882—Views on genetic psychology.   3. Psychobiology.   4. Human evolution.   I. Title.   II. Series.

      BF711.R53     1987     155.7         87-10891

      Darwin

      AND THE EMERGENCE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES OF MIND AND BEHAVIOR

      ROBERT J. RICHARDS

      Science and Its Conceptual Foundations

      David L. Hull, Editor

      The University of Chicago Press

      Chicago and London

      Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, 1805–1873, portrait done in 1864.

      To My Parents

      The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

      —William James, Varieties of Religious Experience

      Contents

      Illustrations

      Preface

      Introduction

      1. Origins of Evolutionary Biology of Behavior

      Controversies over Animal Instinct and Intelligence in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

      Erasmus Darwin’s Sensationalist Interpretation of Instinct and Evolution

      Cabanis’s Revision of Sensationalism

      Lamarck: Behavior as Product and Instrument of Species Transformation

      Reactions at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle

      Conclusion

      2. Behavior and Mind in Evolution: Charles Darwin’s Early Theories of Instinct, Reason, and Morality

      Preparations of an Evolutionary Thinker

      Instinct and the Mechanisms of Species Change

      The Roots of Rational Thought

      The Evolution of Morality

      Appendix

      3. Contributions of Natural Theology to Darwin’s Theory of the Evolution of Mind and Behavior

      Disputes of Natural Theologians over Instinct and Intelligence

      Contributions to Darwin’s Emerging Theory of Behavior

      The Wonderful Instincts of Neuter Insects

      Conclusion: Mind, Instinct, and Darwin’s Delay

      4. Debates of Evolutionists over Human Reason and Moral Sense, 1859–1871

      Darwinian Disputes over Human Nature

      Wallace and the Challenge of Spiritualism

      5. Darwin and the Descent of Human Rational and Moral Faculties

      Darwin’s Descent of Man

      Evolution of the Moral Sense and Intelligence

      Response of the Critics

      Expression of the Emotions

      Conclusion: Utilitarian and Darwinian Moral Theories

      6. Spencer’s Conception of Evolution as a Moral Force

      Early Life as a Nonconformist

      Social and Moral Science as Foundation of Evolutionary Theory

      The Development of Spencer’s Theory of Evolution

      Mental Evolution: Empiricized Kantianism

      7. Evolutionary Ethics: Spencer and His Critics

      Spencer’s Ethical System

      Critics of Evolutionary Ethics

      Conclusion

      8. Darwinism and the Demands of Metaphysics and Religion: Romanes, Mivart, and Morgan

      Prayer and the Imperatives of Scientific Reason

      Natural Selection and Natural Theology

      The Evolution of Mind

      Controversy with Mivart

      Evolution, Metaphysics, and the Return to Religion

      Morgan vs. Romanes on the Status of Comparative Psychology

      The Monistic Framework of Morgan’s Science

      Morgan’s Theory of Instinct

      Mental Evolution and the Theory of Organic Selection

      Conclusion: Science, Metaphysics, and Religion

      Appendix

      9. The Personal Equation in Science: William James’s Psychological and Moral Uses of Darwinian Theory

      James’s Depressive Period, 1865–1878

      The Psychological and Moral Uses of Darwinism

      Conclusion

      10. James Mark Baldwin: Evolutionary Biopsychology and the Politics of Scientific Ideas

      Training in the Old Psychology for the New

      The Foundations of Baldwin’s Psychological Science

      Genetic Psychology and the Theory of Imitation

      The Evolutionary Analysis of Consciousness in the Individual and the Race

      The Social Evolution of Knowledge and Morality

      Organic Selection and the Politics of Scientific Discovery

      Conclusion: Scandal and Professional Extinction

      11. Transformation of the Darwinian Image of Man in the Twentieth Century

      Decline of Evolutionary Theory in the Social Sciences

      The Reactions of the Biological Community to Theories of Mental Evolution

      The Biology of Mind and Behavior in Germany: From Darwinism to Neo-Darwinism

      The Rise of Sociobiology

      Conclusion: Transformation in the Darwinian Image of Man and the Schism in Contemporary Evolutionary Theory

      Conclusion: Darwinism Is Evolutionary

      Appendix 1. The Natural-Selection Model and Other Models in the Historiography of Science

      Five Models in the Historiography of Science

      Evolutionary Models of Scientific Development

      Conclusion: The Natural Selection Model as a Historiographic Model

      Appendix 2. A Defense of Evolutionary Ethics

      Constructing an Evolutionary Ethics

      Objections to Evolutionary Ethics

      The Naturalistic Fallacy Describes No Fallacy

      Justification of Evolutionary Ethics

      Notes

      Bibliography

      Index

      Illustrations

      Frontispiece. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. Portrait by George Richmond, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

      Opposite Introduction. Thomas Henry Huxley. Photograph by Cundall Downes, courtesy of the Wellcome Institute Library, London.

      1.1. Erasmus Darwin. Portrait by Joseph Wright, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

      1.2. Pierre-Jean Cabanis. Engraving by Ambroise Tardeu, courtesy of the Wellcome Institute Library, London

      1.3. Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck. Engraving by Ambroise Tardeu, courtesy of the Wellcome Institute Library, London

      1.4. Georges Cuvier. Portrait by J. Tomson, courtesy of the Wellcome Institute Library, London

      1.5. Frédéric Cuvier. Engraving by Ambroise Tardeu, courtesy of the Wellcome Institute Library, London

      2.1. Voyage of HMS Beagle. After A. Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle

      2.2. Charles Darwin. Watercolor by George Richmond, courtesy of Down House and the Royal College of Surgeons of England

      2.3. Harriet Martineau. Portrait by Richard Evans, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

      3.1. William Paley. Portrait by George Romney, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

      4.1. Charles Darwin. Photograph courtesy of Down House and the Royal College of Surgeons of England

      4.2. Thomas Henry Huxley. Portrait from Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley

      4.3. Francis Galton. Portrait by C. Furse, from Francis Galton, Memories of My Life

      4.4. Alfred Russel Wallace. Oil over photograph by Thomas Sims, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

      5.1. Charles Lyell. Sketch by George Richmond, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

      5.2. Alfred Russel Wallace. Photograph from Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life

      5.3. Charles Darwin. Photograph courtesy of Down House and the Royal College of Surgeons of England

      6.1. Herbert Spencer. Photograph from David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer

      7.1. Beatrice Potter Webb. Photograph courtesy of the London School of Economics and Political Science

      7.2. Herbert Spencer. Photograph from David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer

      7.3. Thomas Henry Huxley. Portrait by John Colier, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

      8.1. George John Romanes. Photograph by Elliott and Fry, from Ethel Romanes, Life and Letters of George John Romanes

      8.2. Conwy Lloyd Morgan. Photograph courtesy of the Librarian, University of Bristol

      8.3. August Weismann. Photograph courtesy of Professor Klaus Sander (Freiburg) and Professor Helmut Risler (Mainz)

      9.1. William James. Photograph courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and Alexander R. James

      9.2. William James. Self-portrait, courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and Alexander R. James

      9.3. William James and Josiah Royce. Photograph courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and Alexander R. James

      10.1. James Mark Baldwin. Photograph courtesy of the Ferdinand Hamburger, Jr. Archives of the Johns Hopkins University

      10.2. James Mark Baldwin, E. B. Poulton, and Robert Bridges. Photograph from James Mark Baldwin, Between Two Wars

      10.3. James McKeen Cattell. Photograph from James McKeen Cattell, Man of Science

      10.4. E. B. Titchener. Photograph courtesy of Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cornell University Libraries

      10.5. Hugo Münsterberg. Photograph courtesy of the Harvard University Archives

      11.1. John B. Watson. Photograph courtesy of the Ferdinand Hamburger, Jr. Archives of the Johns Hopkins University

      11.2. Ernst Haeckel. Photograph courtesy of Haeckel-Haus, Jena

      11.3. August Weismann. Photograph courtesy of Professor Klaus Sander (Freiburg) and Professor Helmut Risler (Mainz)

      11.4. Ernst Haeckel. Photograph courtesy of Haeckel-Haus, Jena

      11.5. Konrad Lorenz. Photograph courtesy of UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos

      Preface

      This book traces the development of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior from their first distinct appearance in the eighteenth century to their controverted state in the present. The focus, however, tightens on their evolution during the nineteenth century and on the various factors in the conceptual environment that gave them shape. Darwin’s ideas about instinct, reason, and morality—considered against the background of his personality, training, scientific and cultural concerns, and intellectual community—control the course of my reconstruction.

      This history has explanation as a principal aim. It attempts to specify the antecedent causal matrix which, I argue, makes intelligible the consequent evolution of ideas. I believe that historical narratives provide understanding to the degree that they show how one set of factors impinged upon a subsequent set, influenced it, caused it. The ideal history would recover and make explicit those causal lines that necessarily gave rise to the events of interest. Actual histories, of course, can only nod toward the ideal. In practice, historians must assume certain states of affairs and causal actions that can only be vaguely suggested, and then they highlight some few factors believed to have had considerable weight in producing the events. Not all historians and philosophers of science would endorse this conception of historical narrative. And fewer would be immediately receptive to the particular historiographic theory I use to support the conception—namely, a natural selection approach to ideas. I do not believe, though, that this historiographic framework cuts through the surface of the narrative so as to distress most historians of science. My formal justification for the theory behind the practice will be found sketched in the introduction and elaborated in the first appendix. My informal justification is the narrative itself.

      I have moved beyond strict narrative history in another and, I hope, equally unobtrusive way. I draw certain philosophical conclusions concerning ethics from this history. But again the argument is confined to an appendix. I do not think my narrative need collapse if the reader rejects either my notions about the evolution of ideas or my particular theory of evolutionary ethics, any more than, say, certain anatomical descriptions would need be abandoned should current theory in evolution be substantially revised. A higher-level theory might lead to refined observations, be justified by those observations, yet subsequently be replaced while the data remain intact. I do believe, though, that my theory of the evolution of ideas is sustained by the practices of sensitive historians.

      In this book, I have attempted to advance several connected arguments in history and philosophy of science. The introduction and conclusion epitomize these arguments. I realize, however, that not all readers would care to pursue the more general themes through a book of this size, so I have tried to make individual chapters and groups of chapters fairly self-contained. Thus chapters 1, 2–5, 6–7, 8, 9, and 10, as well as the two appendixes, can be read independently.

      I owe many debts for the support of this project. Small grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation enabled me to travel to archives in the United States and Europe and to make copies of needed materials. An Andrew Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard University during the academic year 1982–1983 provided an uninterrupted period to draft several chapters, and the masters of Lowell House, William and Mary Bossert, supplied living quarters and generous hospitality. The conclusion was written during the summer of 1986 while participating in a seminar on the history of the human sciences sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

      Librarians in charge of special collections and manuscripts at several institutions made research much easier. I am grateful for the aid received from staffs at the following libraries and archives: the library of the American Philosophical Society; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Boston Public Library; Bristol University Library; the library of the British Museum; the University Library, Cambridge University; Haeckel Haus, Jena; Houghton Library, Harvard University; the library of the Institut de France, Paris; the Johns Hopkins Library; the Library of Congress; Maastricht Natural History Museum, the Netherlands; the Joseph Regenstein Library, the University of Chicago; Senate House Library, University of London; University College Library, University of London; and the Wellcome Institute Library, London. Where necessary, I have obtained permission to quote from unpublished papers and correspondence.

      This book incorporates portions of some previously published essays, which originally appeared in Biology and Philosophy, British Journal for the History of Science, Harvard Library Bulletin, Journal of the History of Biology, and the book Scientific Inquiry and the Social Sciences, ed. M. Brewer and B. Collins (Josey-Bass).

      Many of my ideas have been tried out (and some have expired) under auspices of several organizations at the University of Chicago. The Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine, the Chicago Group for the History of the Human Sciences, and the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science created an intellectual environment that would test the mettle of the hardiest of ideas. These groups formed for me a kind of Tierra del Fuego of the mind.

      I am fortunate that friends who read drafts of various chapters did not dull their critical faculties on my account. I acknowledge with pleasure the help of Mitchell Ash, Keith Baker, Len Berk, Richard Blackwell, John Cornell, Kurt Danziger, Allen Debus, Robert DiSalle, Alan Gewirth, Sophie Haroutunian, David Hollinger, Malcolm Kottler, William Kruskal, David Leary, Gerald Myers, Peter Novick, Philip Pauly, Eugene Taylor, Stephen Toulmin, William Wimsatt, William Woodward, and Robert Wozniak. Richard Burkhardt, David Hull, and George Stocking patiently read the entire manuscript; I am especially grateful for their effort. These scholars saved me from many mistakes of fact and argument. They gave their advice thoughtfully and generously, and the reader may wish I had more often heeded it. My wife Barbara encouraged and supported me in all the ways possible—eis aiona tui sum.

      Darwin

      AND THE EMERGENCE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES OF MIND AND BEHAVIOR

      Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825–1895, photograph from ca. 1860.

      Introduction

      The scene is familiar and emblematic of the Darwinian revolution. Thomas Henry Huxley confronts Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860, a few months after publication of the Origin of Species. Wilberforce, armored in righteousness and crammed in biology by Richard Owen, represents orthodoxy both in religion and science. Huxley, Darwin’s partisan and an intellect of dazzling agility, stands for the new scientific order. Wilberforce spoke first. An auditor recalled much later, in 1898, that the Bishop intoned for full half an hour with inimitable spirit, emptiness, and unfairness. The recollection remained warm for almost forty years:

      In a light, scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution; rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?¹

      Wilberforce strode into disaster. Huxley slapped his knee and whispered to his companion, The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands. On this, the correspondent continued,

      Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure, stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us and spoke those tremendous words—words which no one seems sure of now, nor, I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning, and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one, jumped out of my seat.²

      Huxley conquered, there is no doubt, and Darwinism remains triumphant in our own time. Our usual assessment of the revolution in thought carried out by Darwin and other evolutionists of the period has, however, much the same texture as that remembrance of the Oxford debate. We are not sure of what actually happened, but we do know the meaning of the event. That meaning has become the received view, and almost every historian has been seduced by the clear vantage it offers on nineteenth-century science, as well as by its significance for contemporary biology.

      Components of the Received View

      Historians taking the long perspective—frequently sighting from just over theory in the last part of the twentieth century (particularly in genetics and systematics)—have reached some consensus about the significant components in that pattern of thought ascribed to Darwin and his followers. Darwinism, Mayr insists, introduced population thinking into biology and so banished essentialism—the idea that species members instantiated immutable types.³ Concomitantly, that intellectual movement undermined the teleological approach to nature, showing, Hull concludes, it was of no relevance to science.⁴ As the evolutionary constructions of chance and necessity arose, they pushed back the sea of faith, which submissively retreated from the scientific shore. Deism verging toward agnosticism, according to Greene, was the trajectory of Darwinism.⁵ Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, and most other scholars, agree that Natural-selection theory and physiological reductionism were explosive and powerful enough statements of a research program to occasion the replacement of one ideology—of God—by another: a mechanical, materialist science.⁶ An evolutionary process guided by purely material forces cannot guarantee progress. Neglect of this deep logical feature of Darwinism, in Mayr’s estimation, is richly displayed in the work of men like Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin.⁷ Cold-blooded Darwinism, by contrast, has come to regard nature as morally meaningless.⁸

      The historians who have thus described the Darwinian revolution as denying the biological reality of transindividual objects, as rejecting the operation of nonmaterial forces, and as destroying the doctrine of the purposeful development of life—these scholars have focused their analyses generally on the larger structural features of the theory. When they have cause to consider that one special part of Darwin’s conception—the citadel itself, man—they often move quickly to make the reasonable inferences. The Darwinian image of man is that of a competitively isolated individual, a completely material creature, subject to its evolutionary history, to its consequent biological form, and to its immediate natural environment. Darwinian man has a brain that requires no guiding mind; reason that cannot transcend its animal origins; religious aspirations that have become barren in the sterile light of science; and morals that are subjective and Benthamitic.

      Some historians and philosophers, while acknowledging this as the image of man forged by nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, are uneasy. Though Darwin mused that he who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke,⁹ these modern Darwinian scholars retain a nostalgia for Locke. They refuse to go the whole orang and instead insist, like Eiseley, that man was not Darwin’s best subject.¹⁰ Himmelfarb, with less reserve, simply maintains that Darwin’s efforts in biopsychology display his failures of logic and crudities of imagination.¹¹ Even Darwin’s enthusiasts defend him only obliquely. They often exculpate him by settling the human evolutionary debt on Spencer—urging that what goes under the rubric of social Darwinism ought really to be called social Spencerianism.¹²

      The received view has taken on a life of its own, irrespective of how adequately it represents what early evolutionists actually believed, wrote, and accomplished. But the historian must continually test such errant creatures of collective memory by reconstructing the past and pressing them against its sharpened edges. I do not wish to deny that the received view incorporates aspects of scientific thought in the last century. I do reject, though, the presumption that it embodies the essence of nineteenth-century Darwinism. We get a very different perspective on this intellectual movement if we examine subjects more immediately relevant for assessing the cultural shift the new biological thought produced, namely those sets of problems and proffered solutions forming the matrix of emerging evolutionary theories of mind and behavior. I believe a historical analysis with this focus will show, first, that what is called population thinking owes its origins to deeper philosophical foundations, which made Darwin’s own approach to species and to mind possible. Further, a redirected historical investigation reveals that endemic to evolutionary thought in the last century was the conviction that organisms were not simply passive products of their histories and immediate environments, but that they took an active part in their own transformation. Early evolutionists, such as Lamarck and Cabanis, through Darwin, Wallace, Spencer, and later Darwinians—all proposed, though in a variety of ways, that behavior and mind drove the evolutionary process. Many of these thinkers supported this scientific diagnosis with a carefully worked out metaphysics that stood completely opposed to mechanistic materialism. They philosophically dissected nature and found mind at its core. And with a sensitivity heightened by their novel examination, they detected the faint pulse of divinity yet animating the whole.

      The most significant reorientation produced by a study fixing on emerging evolutionary theories of mind and behavior occurs in respect to morals. The received view holds that the Darwinian revolution eviscerated nature of moral purpose and ethically neutered the human animal. Selfishness bred by competitive selection, so the tale goes, has seeped into the very marrow of man’s being, rendering all ethical behavior a pretext for individual advantage. Darwinism, according to Himmelfarb, de-moralized man in replacing moral man by amoral nature.¹³ But a closer historical and philosophical analysis demonstrates that Darwin, Spencer, and their disciples had a very different conception of the implications of evolutionary theory for man. They believed that their evolutionary constructions reanimated moral life, that the evolutionary process gave heart to unselfish, altruistic behavior. Man, I hope to show, was indeed Darwin’s best subject—and Spencer’s as well. Their scientific and philosophic considerations were penetrating and sophisticated. And while a contemporary philosopher might reasonably fault some features of their formulations, he or she cannot justly impugn the logical foundations or the basic thrust of their theorizing. I believe nineteenth-century scientists, particularly Darwin, disclosed a way to establish an evolutionary ethics unimpeachable by today’s standards. In the second appendix to this volume, I attempt to make the necessary alterations and defend an ethics based on evolutionary theory.

      Scope and Justification of This Study

      I did not originally intend to suggest revisions in the received view of Darwinian man. My interest was to explore those areas of evolutionary thought that joined science and philosophy. I wished particularly to understand how philosophical conceptions of mind, reason, and moral sense took on biological and psychological form within a scientific theory. No previous investigation has attempted to sound the several main currents of nineteenth-century evolutionary theories of mind and behavior—though some important studies have begun to recover aspects of that history; and virtually no effort has gone into restoring evolutionary theories of morals to their context. Almost every consideration of Darwinian or Spencerian ethics in the recent past has been curt and dismissive; historically contextualizing and philosophically impartial evaluations of these evolutionary moral theories are vanishingly few. Yet theories of mind and morals occupied most every major evolutionary thinker of the past century, and their reincarnation in the last quarter of ours rarely fails to transmogrify taciturn and reserved scientists into impassioned advocates or vitriolic critics. So the time for a thorough examination of evolutionary theories of instinct, reason, and morals appeared historically and philosophically ripe. What I take to be the needed revisions in the image of Darwinian man simply came as natural consequences of this original intention.

      I chose instinct, reason (including intelligence, from which it was sometimes distinguished), and morals as the subjects to instantiate more precisely my concerns with mind and behavior. I had several reasons for doing this. First, and most importantly, these topics played dominant roles in the general evolutionary theories of the scientists whom I consider. Second, these subjects were conceptually and logically conjoined by the theorists. They regarded instinct as the paradigm of evolved behavior, the model for weaving other aspects of mind into their evolutionary schemes. Depending on the thinker, instinct was understood to have given rise to intelligence or, for many, to be the inherited outcome of lapsed intelligence. Reason, as a more abstractive and generalizing faculty—sometimes assigned even to lower animals, sometimes reserved for man alone—formed the next step in phylogenetic development. And moral behavior came to be construed by Darwin, Spencer, and their disciples as a species of instinct brought under the guidance of reason. Instinct thus formed the evolutionary hinge linking the minds of lower animals with that of man. But I have focused on these three topics for an added reason. They require a historical analysis that more directly connects an individual’s scientific work with the broader philosophical, religious, social, and psychological features of his intellectual environment. Recently historians and particularly sociologists of science have tried to drop evolutionary theory into these general contexts. But their adhesion to the generic aspects of evolutionary theory has usually produced only suggestive rather than persuasive contextualizations, typically of the sort that portrays natural selection theory as merely the biologized version of capitalistic economy. But focus on ideas about the evolution of reason and morals in particular allows the historian to specify more exactly and, I think, convincingly the causal connections of evolutionary thought with its intellectual and cultural surroundings. Finally, the kinds of links among these three subjects wrought by scientists in the last century simply have their own fascinations.

      Reconstructions in history by their nature require boundaries. Even the conjectured ideal of a complete history of a period lets slip epistemological conundrums. The need for constraints, then, requires decisions about themes to be worked through, individuals to be considered, and depth and scope of analysis to be attempted. I have already mentioned the themes of this study—evolutionary theories of mind and behavior, especially as articulated by the concepts of instinct, reason, and morals. But in a history of science such as this, what thinkers should be chosen and what levels of analysis tried? Concerning this last decision, the historian might fabricate a broad survey, including as many relevant thinkers and their leading ideas as possible; alternatively he or she might stick to the development of only one or a few figures, mentioning others as seems important for illuminating the thought of the central characters. Broad surveys give an impression of a period but only superficial knowledge about the rise of and interaction among even the important theories. Surveys in intellectual history tend either to vulgar Platonism—by hypostatizing trains of disembodied and ill defined ideas—or to even more vulgar Marxism—by reducing vague ideas to vaguer yet social conditions. In contrast, studies of individual figures can provide intimate knowledge of the development of significant theory by situating ideas in their immediate causal contexts and allowing deeper logical analyses of their content—something especially important in the history of science. But scientists live in social and intellectual environments that alter the shape of their thought. They also come into conceptual legacies. To understand Darwin’s theory of instinct, for example, demands consideration of the views he derived from Erasmus Darwin (his grandfather) and Lamarck. Likewise the theories of his contemporaries must be taken into account—certain natural theologians, whose work he studied, and Spencer, some of whose notions he adopted and others he opposed. Moreover, to understand Darwin’s developing theory of instinct also requires, I am convinced, an appreciation of what it became in the hands of his disciples. Aristotle was right. To understand a historical entity, which a theory surely is, means that we must construe not only its origins, but its subsequent phases as well. To comprehend an idea or theory is also to discriminate those incipient structures that later become more manifest; but this can only be done retrogressively, by historically retracing the later florescence to the seminal elements. Consequently, though squeezing and concentrating all the intellectual juices from one major thinker can be profitable and satisfying, there are real advantages in treating several figures whose ideas intertwine. This history attempts to hit the just measure between broad survey and individual intellectual biography, though inclining toward the latter more than historians of science might think wise.

      My plan was to select major biologists and psychologists in the nineteenth century for consideration. While these professional categories are flexible and permeable, especially for sifting through scientific theories of the last century, they at least have enough stability to justify excluding philosophers such as Pierce and (fortunately) Hegel, on the one hand, and anthropologists such as Lubbock and Tylor, on the other. More coherent stories can be told of evolutionary philosophers and anthropologists by historians of these disciplines;¹⁴ and in any case the enduring contributions to evolutionary science have been made, I believe, by those who comfortably fit the two professional designations mentioned. I had intended to include, beyond England and America, biologists and psychologists of France and Germany as well. But I have only imperfectly realized that aim: pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory in France occupies the first chapter, and German developments are worked in along the way.¹⁵ I found that remaining primarily with British and American thinkers permitted a detailed and historically tight narrative. A cooled ambition anyway will lessen the strain on the patience and eyes of readers.

      The first chapter examines the origins of evolutionary biology of behavior, especially as it was fostered by the epistemology of Enlightenment sensationalists and achieved definition in the works of Erasmus Darwin, Pierre-Jean Cabanis, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, and Frédéric Cuvier. Chapter 2 describes the various roles of behavior in Darwin’s developing evolutionary views and considers particularly his early theories of instinct, reason, and moral sense. Chapter 3 discusses the work of certain theologians who brought Darwin to understand how natural selection might operate on behavior, but who also suggested a conceptual problem that threatened to undermine his entire evolutionary theory. Darwin’s several attempts to resolve this difficulty and his eventual success are detailed. In chapter 4, the ideas about human evolution advanced by Lyell, Huxley, Galton, Greg, and Wallace are assessed. Chapter 5 concentrates on Darwin’s own mature ideas about the evolution of man, especially human rational and moral faculties. That chapter also examines the reactions to Darwin’s conception of man and analyzes the connection of his moral theory with utilitarianism. The next two chapters take up Herbert Spencer’s achievements in evolutionary theory, with special attention given to his proposals about the evolution of moral sentiment and to Huxley’s rejection of his friend’s notions. Chapter 8 explores the metaphysical and religious dimensions of Darwinism as they are played out in the intellectual development of George Romanes, Darwin’s anointed, of St. George Mivart, Darwin’s great antagonist, and of Conwy Lloyd Morgan, who injected the genetical ideas of Weismann into evolutionary biopsychology. The two most influential purveyors of Darwinism in psychology on the American scene, William James and James Mark Baldwin, are the subjects of chapters 9 and 10. The last chapter attempts to account for the decline of evolutionary theorizing about mind and behavior during the first half of this century and then to sketch its gradual resurgence since the 1960s. Finally, there are two appendixes. The first explains the historiographic model that I have employed in this history, and the second defends a conception of evolutionary ethics, the elements of which have been drawn from the historical body of this volume.

      Let me add a few words about the much abused Herbert Spencer. In recent historical work, he is often neglected, sometimes purposefully: among the almost one thousand pages of his Growth of Biological Thought, which is devoted mostly to evolutionary history, Mayr reluctantly expends three paragraphs on Spencer. Other treatments, which allot proportionally more space, usually smother his ideas in invective. This historiographic practice makes it perfectly unintelligible why so many major evolutionary thinkers placed great value on his work, and why even those who reacted hostilely nonetheless felt compelled to confront his theories. A good deal of what came to be known in the later part of the century as Darwinism included equal parts of Spencer. Indeed, in some respects—which Spencer himself would be loath to acknowledge—the philosopher of the doctrine of Development, as Bain called him, might also be considered a Darwinian, so common a vision did the two major evolutionists of the period share. I have tried to adjust the historiographic balance a bit by taking Spencer as seriously as his contemporaries did.

      Internalistic and Externalistic Temper in History of Science

      While many historians reject Collingwood’s thesis that All history is the history of thought,¹⁶ few historians or philosophers of science would blanch at the emendation: all history of science is the history of thought. Historians of science have as their special subject the most refined and, in a perfectly straightforward way, the most successful kind of thought—that codified in the theories, hypotheses, observations, communities, and institutions of science. History has no argument, but historians do. In arguing the course of scientific thought, historians, with some interesting recent exceptions, have usually taken one of two basic approaches—that of ‘internalism’ or of ‘externalism.’ These categories creak a bit with age and no longer easily capture the practices of historians of science, yet they still serve remarkably well. Internalists focus on the development of scientific ideas and theories, tracing their internal logic and conceptual linkages, on the one hand, and the degree of their evidentiary support, on the other. In the extreme, internalists treat the historical transition from one set of ideas to another much as Platonic philosophers, weaving together the logical forms of ideas and evidence while ignoring their psychological and social embodiments. Externalists, by contrast, embed scientific ideas and theories in the human world, in the minds of scientists whose psychological interests and social concerns mediate logical implication and empirical confirmation. Extreme externalists cloak themselves in Freud or Marx (or less dangerously, stretch the point of the Annales school); they suppose that scientific ideas reflect only psychological complexes or social relationships, or perhaps, merely bob on the surface of the longue durée.

      Mayr’s Growth of Biological Thought, for instance, displays the internalist’s approach. Mayr concentrates on the history of scientific problems and concepts, recommending that the Dictionary of Scientific Biography and Nordenskiöld’s History of Biology be consulted for the biographical and sociological aspects of the history of biology.¹⁷ He executes his history with considerable historical and philosophical skill, and he brings a kind of sensitivity to the history of biology that perhaps only a great scientist who has made major contributions to his field can. Yet as an internalist, he forgets that ideas alone are causally impotent—that one idea cannot beget another. He fixes on the insights and concepts of biology, while prescinding from the fact that it is human biologists who produce those insights and concepts. But ideas become historically linked only by passing through minds trapped in flesh, human minds which respond to logical implications, evidentiary support, and the legacy of scientific problems and concepts, though also to high emotion, religious feeling, class attitudes, and even perhaps Oedipal anxieties. To deal adequately with their subject—the growth of scientific ideas—historians of science cannot neglect the explanatory strategies of social, political, and cultural historians. And they must take special heed, I believe, of the observation of William James that serves as the admonitory epigraph for this history.

      Orthodox internalists at times manifest externalist tendencies. This has been especially true of historians of evolutionary theory. Nordenskiöld, for instance, spun precisely in this direction when, in the early part of our century, he had to explain the currency of a conception that he knew had no logical or scientific merit:

      From the beginning Darwin’s theory was an obvious ally to liberalism; it was at once a means of elevating the doctrine of free competition, which had been one of the most vital cornerstones of the movement of progress, to the rank of a natural law, and similarly the leading principle of liberalism, progress, was confirmed by the new theory—the deeper down the origin of human culture was placed, the higher were the hopes that could be entertained for its future possibilities. It was no wonder, then, that the liberal-minded were enthusiastic; Darwinism must be true, nothing else was possible.¹⁸

      Internalist historians often appeal to external causes when earlier scientific ideas seem logically incompatible, not so much with the original scientific matrix as with the historian’s own scientific predilections—the real science of laboratory genetics in Nordenskiöld’s case. It would be foolish to deny, though, that definable features of earlier science arose from definite social or psychological determinants. The mistake to avoid is the general presumption that scientific and logical factors can always be neatly separated from other cultural notions. Extreme externalists do not err in this way. But in their constructions one can hear the ticking message of the intellectual anarchist.

      Extreme externalists, say of the Marxian or Durkheimian variety, explain scientific conception as they would any cultural artifact: they interpret it as totally determined by social and economic substructures. The more influential lately have been plying their trade out of Edinburgh. Bloor, for example, attempts to demonstrate that the apparently most objective, nonrelative, and certain of the sciences, mathematics, can be understood as a reflection of social practices that are conventional, varying, and epistemologically secure only in the sense that the community generally approves of its techniques. A culture radically different in relevant respects would, he argues, institute a valid mathematics, but one deviating from our own.¹⁹ While extreme externalists have forced important lessons on historians of science, their strong program can, I believe, be terminally infected by a simple tu quoque argument: their thesis of social determinism must also be determined; but why should we listen to those whose views only reflect their dour Scottish culture? Simpler still: if these historians reserve the word ‘knowledge’ for what is collectively endorsed, leaving the individual and idiosyncratic to count as mere belief,²⁰ certainly we ought to regard their idiosyncratic thesis as mere belief.

      Extreme internalists and extreme externalists stand by definition at the poles; the middle lattitudes support a larger population, among whom are some of the surest hands in the Darwin industry. These historians during the last decade and a half have mined the store of the Darwin papers at Cambridge to produce a richly detailed picture of the origins and early development of Darwin’s ideas. The studies of many of the best of these have recently appeared in the volume The Darwinian Heritage.²¹ My own debt to the real insights they provide will be made clear in the early chapters of this volume. What especially characterizes their meticulous efforts at reconstruction is the hybrid sentiment they express about internal and external factors. They recognize, for instance, that Darwin’s ideas about natural law contain what we might for convenience label logical, scientific, philosophic, social, and religious elements, but which he himself regarded as the deposit of coherent scientific principle. Yet this capacious attitude about the complexion of science in the nineteenth century, as expressed in the work of these sensitive historians, does require more careful formalization and justification. This it can attain only when a satisfactory historiographic model has been constructed and measured against models venting other sentiments.

      Models in the History of Science

      Historians disposed toward internalism or externalism, or toward the hybrid view, specify their tendency by adopting—usually unreflectively—a historiographic model in light of which they articulate their subject. In this respect they function much like scientists. For historians, after all, do formulate theories, construct hypotheses, gather evidence, and, of necessity, employ models. Historiographic models comprise sets of assumptions concerning the nature of science, its developmental character, and the modes of scientific knowing. That historians must use models can be argued a priori: without antecedent conceptions about the character of science, they would have no clue about where to look for their subject matter, nor could they define its limits or determine what evidence would be relevant. That models have in fact been used can be established by an empirical survey of histories of science since the Renaissance. So, for instance, a model familiar to most is Kuhn’s paradigm model (what might also be called a Gestalt model) of science. Gillispie, in his Edge of Objectivity, more traditionally employs a revolutionary model (not to be confused with Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolutions).²² This model, introduced by historians in the eighteenth century, assumes that a discipline must undergo a fundamental upheaval to put it on the road to modern science—before the revolution there was not science; afterward scientists gradually laid a path of truth leading right up to the modern age. This model has been used to forestall external stimulants to the heart of science. Gillispie, for instance, refused Lamarck the title of scientist because his ideas derived from romantic ideology, while he awarded Darwin the crown as the Newton of biology, since the Englishman had introduced a quantificational spirit into the discipline, transforming it into authentic science.²³

      The several other models to be found in the writings of historians of science likewise express internalistic or externalistic attitudes. I describe the more prominent of these models in the first appendix to this volume. These descriptions furnish comparative standards for justifying the model that guides my own historical account of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior. The model I favor incorporates, of course, the resourceful features of the other models, while avoiding, of course, their misdirections. It is a model, I believe, that captures the practice of sensitive historians, and like other such heuristic devices, it offers recommendations for the further reflective conduct of the historian’s craft. The first appendix also details this model and attempts to demonstrate its advantages. Here I will simply broadly sketch its features.

      The Natural Selection Model

      I have adopted what might appear initially as an implausible model of scientific development; it requires a moment of willing suspension of disbelief. I regard scientific conceptual systems as analogous to evolving biological species and the mechanisms of conceptual change to be formally similar to those available to the neo-Darwinian biologist.²⁴ The gene pool constituting such a specieslike entity consists of the ideas or concepts that form the genomic individuals—for example, the ideas making up Spencer’s theory of the moral sense. The genetic elements of conceptual systems are united by logical bonds of inclusion, implication, and coherence, as well as by the historical ties of a common evolutionary history. In biology the genome gives rise to different phenotypic expressions, depending on the environment; so too in the case of scientific thought. The individually identical system of ideas, those constituting James’s theory of mind, for instance, will be differently expressed in his textbook, in his lectures, and in his conversation. The genotype-phenotype distinction in conceptual evolution permits the historian, therefore, to ascribe the same theoretic system, individually the same, to a given scientist, who may express it differently in different circumstances. Or the historian may ascribe the same theoretic system, specifically the same, to a group of scientists (e.g., the Aristotelians, the creationists, the Darwinians), though their individual descriptions of the system may vary more significantly.

      The conceptual systems entertained by a scientist come to inhabit three distinguishable but continuous environments: his own mind, the scientific community, and the general culture. First, as the scientist begins to formulate his theory, selective pressures will be exerted by the private environment of his immediate conceptual concerns. This first intellectual niche may exhibit pressing problems from the scientific literature as well as from particular religious and philosophic ideas, psychological needs, or social interests. The selective fitness of the system will be a function of its heterogeneous terrain. A new theoretical formulation consequently will either survive in its intellectual niche because it is compatible with and supported by other resident conceptual systems, or if it is incompatible with the more firmly entrenched systems, it will be rejected by the scientist and perish. If the system of thought remains robust, it might then migrate into the wider and more challenging environment constituted by the mind of the scientific community. Finally, a conceptual system, such as Darwin’s own evolutionary theory, might eventually become a vital element in the larger culture, actually changing the ecological relationships and perhaps causing the extinction or greatly reducing the vitality of other sorts of systematic thought.

      This natural selection model of the evolution of conceptual systems raises to intelligibility, I believe, certain hard configurations in the history of science that other models attempt to grind away. It suggests, for instance, that science advances neither by reason of gradual increments of new truth, implied by the growth model of science (an internalistic model), nor by saltations of incommensurable paradigms, as required by Kuhn’s Gestalt model. Rather the natural selection model indicates that the elements of scientific evolution—its ideas—will be discrete but genetically related to prior conceptual states; that the usual sources of variability will be the recombination of ideas rather than novel mutations; and that in general, conceptual systems change more slowly in some climates, more rapidly in others, but never in profoundly discontinuous fashion. The model also demands that the historian attend not only to the logic of scientific theory and the evidence supporting it but also to the psychological, political, economic, and religious factors determining its shape. The model thus forbids the historian to assume a priori that any one feature of the ecology will necessarily dominate in determining the evolution of a particular system of ideas; it rather encourages the historian to assess differentially the pressures exerted by the variety of factors constituting the interlocking niches in which conceptual systems come to dwell. Growth and revolutionary models exclude ‘extrascientific’ causes of scientific thought, while Gestalt and psychosocial models, tending toward extreme externalism, refuse all else.

      Narrative Explanation in the History of Science

      This natural selection model of conceptual evolution aids in the formation of a narrative structure that preserves the power found in the best examples of historical explanation. This is no accident, for evolutionary biology is itself a historical science whose typical explanatory form is the narrative. Evolutionary biologists explain the development, adaptational features, or extinction of a species by telling a story, based on paleontological evidence and neo-Darwinian theory, of the circumstances in light of which we can understand such phenomena. In biology the circumstances include the presumed genetic heritage of the animal group, various entrenched morphological structures, and the environmentally produced selective pressures. Similarly the historian of science, guided by a natural selection model, will account for the fate of conceptual systems and explain their evolution by appeal to the legacy of past developments in science, to established organizational structures, and to the shaping forces of the variegated mental environments which these systems inhabit.

      Narratives in evolutionary biology and evolutionary history exhibit the sense of an ending. For in formulating the narrative, the researcher must begin with the terminus ad quem. The biologist who wishes to account for the rise of the mammals, for instance, already knows about the characteristics of contemporary mammals and therefore what needs to be explained. In the reconstruction the biologist may well discover new things about mammals of the past, may locate those peculiar transitional forms of the mammal-like reptiles, and as a result may conceive mammals of the present differently. But the researcher structures the story so that carefully isolated antecedent events make the subsequent events intelligible, so that they all contribute to the necessary conditions for explaining the phenomena of concern. Without this teleological structuring, narrative would degenerate into chronicle. There would be no sense of the connectedness of events, no way of weighting the various contingencies that produced explananda; explanatory force would be dissipated.

      I have attempted to structure the narrative that follows with a comparable sense of ending, without, I hope, reading back the triumphs and failures of the future into the past. Historians of science have been rightly wary of the dangers of presentism, which has infected a good deal of earlier writing in history of science. The retrospective abuse heaped on Herbert Spencer should stand as a warning against this historiographic sin. But virtue does not lie in a return to Eden. Some historians, attracted by the promise of new ethnographic methods in sociology of science, argue that the processes of knowledge acquisition can best be understood by going epistemologically native, by the historian divesting himself or herself of knowledge about what lies in the future of the actors in the narrative. But if the historian attempts to construct a narrative strictly from the point of view of the historical subjects, to make the tale rigorously nonretrospective, in Rudwick’s terms²⁵—this confuses the protagonists’ awareness with the historian’s. The plotting of a narrative demands selecting events, forming descriptions, and setting the scenes, none of which can be intelligently done without anticipating the next stages in the story. Darwin, of course, could not describe his own work on species in 1837 as pre-Malthusian, but the historian can—and quite properly does. Indeed, without the sense of an ending, the historian would not even have reason to mention Darwin’s reflections on species, rather, than, say, his worries about his railroad stocks. In the narrative, the actors’ thoughts and activities occur within the plotted frames, which carry the story toward its conclusion; the actors themselves should remain in the dark about the future. The historian, not the characters, portrays the sense of an ending.

      Because narratives exhibit a sense of an ending, they also incorporate either implicitly or explicitly value judgments about their subjects. The historian of evolutionary theory needs to sift out what was important—what prior experiences or beliefs had cognitive value, for example, in Wallace’s argument (after the late 1860s) that natural selection failed to operate in the case of man. The historian, however, must give account not only of what Wallace believed was important for his argument, the way he estimated it, but what actually was important—insofar as the evidence supports such judgments. This latter sort of historical evaluation constitutes a deep structure of narrative explanation and should not be thought another example of Whiggism or presentism. Even to describe Wallace as arguing, as opposed to saying, believing, or naively supposing, implies that the historian has tacitly invoked certain standards or norms (in this case logical ones), that is, certain values, to render the description. The danger to avoid, of course, is the application of evaluational standards that make a scientist either too wise or too benighted before his time. To condemn Wallace for foolish credulity because he believed in the spirit world, while praising Darwin since he thought spiritualism codswallop, again confuses the historian’s awareness with that of the actors. There may be reason for judging Wallace credulous, but it should be done on nineteenth-century grounds, not on ours. This danger should not, however, inhibit reflective evaluations in history of science. The historian has privileged knowledge denied the actors, sometimes even knowledge about motives the actors never consciously admit; narrative explanations must take advantage of that knowledge to give the best, that is, the truest account of the past.

      In what follows, I have employed considerations drawn from a natural selection model, without, I hope, allowing its framework to poke through the fabric of the narrative. Insofar as the model pretends to formalize sound historiographic practice, its stranger devices properly should not obtrude into the story. Some readers will likely feel that, as in the case of Ptolemaic models in astronomy, the course of events can be mapped onto a great many implausible formal models, and that it would have been better had I rendered my account unvarnished, without glossing it in the higher historiography. Even after considering the defense in the first appendix, they may remain unconvinced. I do not think this demur should seriously bias their judgment of the soundness of the history offered in the next eleven chapters. The deficiencies of the narrative will likely have more prosaic causes. But to the degree that the tale appears to capture the actual texture of the past and unravel its knotty complexes, to that degree some empirical confirmation will have to be conceded the model which guided it.

      1

      Origins of Evolutionary Biology of Behavior

      The sciences of ethology and sociobiology have as premises that certain dispositions and behavioral patterns have evolved with species and that the acts of individual animals and men must therefore be viewed in light of innate determinants. These ideas are much older than the now burgeoning disciplines of the biology of behavior. Their elements were fused in the early constructions of evolutionary theory, and they became integral parts of the developing conception of species transformation.¹ Historians, however, have usually neglected close examination of the role behavior has played in the rise of evolutionary thought.²

      Yet behavior has been an important consideration virtually from the beginnings of systematic biological theorizing. Aristotle devoted generous portions of his Historia animalium to discussion of species-typical habits and relative grades of animal intelligence. Galen conducted a set of elegant experiments to show that certain actions of animals were innate and not learned.³ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists often disputed violently over interpretations of animal behavior, contending whether the activities of brutes were to be regarded as congenitally fixed or as the consequences of reasoned choice. These debates formed the immediate environment for the emergence of evolutionary theories at the turn of the eighteenth century. In this chapter, I wish to focus on the problems that animal instinct and intelligence posed for early evolutionary theorists. A chief difficulty stemmed from their commitment to the doctrines of sensationalism. Adherents of this persuasion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries generally argued that all ideas merely imaged sensations and that rational behavior, of which even animals were capable, derived from habitually associated ideas. Sensationalists thus tended to deny the existence of innate and mechanically expressed instincts, the most likely candidates for evolutionary treatment. My intention here is to explain how evolutionists accommodated to sensationalist doctrine the conviction that behavior did evolve. For this purpose, I will examine the roles of instinct, intelligence, reason, and particularly the mediating construct of habit in the theories of four early evolutionists: Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Pierre-Jean Cabanis (1757–1808), Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829), and Frédéric Cuvier (1773–1838). Since I hold scientific theories to be analogous to evolving biological species, I will emphasize the conceptual legacies inherited by these early thinkers, the intellectual and cultural environments that shaped their ideas, and the competitive reactions they evoked from rivals.

      Let me briefly indicate some of the conclusions toward which this chapter arches. The history examined reveals, I believe, that evolutionary ideas developed in response, not only to narrowly conceived problems in zoology, but also to critical difficulties in the epistemological, psychological, and social-political doctrines of sensationalism. More specifically, it makes clear the central importance of conceptions of habit, instinct, intelligence, and reason for the first formulations of evolutionary principles. Finally, it shows that behavior was originally regarded, not merely as an outcome of the evolutionary process, but also as its principal agent.

      Controversies over Animal Instinct and Intelligence in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

      ⁴

      Aristotelians, Cartesians, and Sensationalists

      During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, disputes over the nature and capacities of human mind were frequently waged on foreign territory—in the field of animal psychology. Fresh evidence from natural history, whose practitioners increased in number during the period, was brought to bear on metaphysical and epistemological issues. This new evidence, however, did not so much test ideas in contention as open the battle on another front. The disputants grouped themselves into three camps, within which, of course, factional differences often arose. The Aristotelians distinguished the human soul, with its rational abilities, from the animal soul, which could be guided only by sensory cognition. The Cartesians also separated man from animals, though more decisively. For Descartes and his disciples, animals mimicked intelligent action, but operated as mere machines: brutes consisted of extended matter alone and functioned according to the laws of physics. Finally, the sensationalists (who adopted the basic tenets of Locke’s epistemology) held that human knowing drew exclusively on the same resources available to animals—sensations. The epistemology of sensationalism seemed to be confirmed by the successes of experimental methods in the various sciences and technologies; but toward the end of the eighteenth century, careful observations of animal behavior began to undermine the assumptions of sensationalist epistemology. Naturalists committed to sensationalism thus faced a critical problem, which had implications for their conception not only of animal psychology, but of human psychology as well. The disputes over animal abilities and the dilemma confronted by sensationalists centered on the problems of brute instinct and intelligence.

      Aristotelians and Cartesians differed profoundly on the ultimate principles of animal psychology. They nonetheless agreed that complex animal behavior (e.g., birds’ building their nests and bees’ their cells) should be explained by appeal to instincts, which they understood as blind, innate urges instilled by the Creator for the welfare of his creatures.⁵ Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) forcefully opposed this interpretation of animal behavior. In his Syntagma philosophicum (posthumous, 1658), he undertook a comparative study of animal and human cognitive abilities and discovered they were logically similar: both human and animal souls operated on sensory images to yield reasoned actions.⁶ Marin Cureau de La Chambre (1594–1669), an associate of Gassendi, concurred in his friend’s conclusions;⁷ and through the next century French sensationalists continued to be chary of the use of instinct in the account of animal behavior. The attitude of Jean-Antoine Guer (1713–1764), a historian of animal psychology writing in mid-century, is representative. Guer believed the ascription of instinct to animals confounded any real attempt at scientific explanation, for nothing is easier to say about whatever animals do than they do it from instinct.⁸ Rather than attempt to uncover the reasons for animal activities, the Aristotelians, according to Guer, invoked the myth of substantial forms (in the guise of brute souls), which were to serve as repositories for instincts that supposedly predetermined behavior. Guer held Descartes and his disciples in no higher regard. The Cartesians refused beasts even the low-level, sensitive cognition granted by Aristotelians. Instead, they presumed all animal behavior to tick off like a clock. Guer delighted in this absurdity of Cartesian animal psychology: Take your dog. Let us wind up that clock and set it, say, for six o’clock; that is, let us suppose a certain disposition in the organs of the animal, a certain arrangement, a certain sort of heat in its heart and stomach. Behold, the clock runs!⁹ The Cartesian beast machine, by sensationalists’ lights, could be neither living beast nor preset machine. It was not truly an animal, since animals obviously did perceive, feel, and act intelligently, nor a machine, since Cartesian matter lacked any active principles that could explain these qualities.

      Sensationalists easily exploited the dilemma of the Cartesians, who wished to explain behavior on simple, natural principles and yet to capture the complexities it revealed. The Abbé de Condillac (1715–1780), for instance, found an exemplar of this Cartesian problem in the theory of animal automatism formulated by the great natural historian Georges Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) in his Histoire naturelle (1749–1804). Condillac pointed out that Buffon’s insistence that animals were unthinking, instinctive machines clashed with his attribution to them of perception and feelings of pleasure and pain. In Condillac’s sensationalist epistemology, such predications implied that a creature could think and make rational determinations, which were merely the results of complex associations of sensory images.¹⁰

      The sensationalists resolved the Cartesian dilemma by reformulating both physical and psychological theory. First, they admitted that animals—and men—were machines, though not composed of inert matter. Thus Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s (1709–1751) L’homme machine (1748) did not merely extend a Cartesian mechanistic analysis to the human mind, but reconstructed the very idea of matter. According to La Mettrie, matter harbored active properties of motion and sensation, which were expressed when it became organized in living beings. This new conception of matter allowed La Mettrie and other sensationalists to refer intricate and complex behaviors to a medium plastic enough to produce them,

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