Chamberlin, JE - Anatomy of Cultural Melancholy, (1981) 42 J Hist Ideas 691

AN ANATOMY OF CULTURAL MELANCHOLY

BY J. E. CHAMBERLIN

One of the persistent features of what Frederic Harrison called the very silliest cant of the day, the cant about culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century in England was that it increasingly turned upon some argument not as to what constituted but rather as to what afflicted culture. Social diseases of all sorts were not, of course, a monopoly of the Victorian period, but even as Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill the terms according to which they would be discussed by the coming generations were taking distinct form. Carlyle, lamenting in Past and Present (1843) that even the incorruptiblest Bobus Higgins, sausage-maker, could only at best elect some Bobissimus to provide wise leadership, and prophesying that the eter- nal stars shine out again, as soon as it is dark enough, gave a certain cue to the chorus of those who would over the next half century bother about what impeded the development or hastened the disintegration of culture, under- stood in a multitude of senses. Other formidable cultural evangelists, such as Matthew Arnold, celebrated the one great passion of culture for sweetness and light, but like most evangelists Arnold in particular spent much of his time lamenting the conditions of degeneracy and darkness which he en- thusiastically discovered all around.

The instinct which prompted this kind of discussion, the instinct to turn to what is wrong in order to clarify, if not to define, what ought to be right, is still very much with us. In our concern about the quality of education, say, or the quality of the environment, we establish standards of purity for the air and the water according to the percentage of contaminants they contain, and we gauge the character of our school systems by the number of our children who cannot read, write, or count. In like fashion, cultural health during the last decades of the nineteenth century was most often measured by its evidence of disease. Quite naturally, this evidence was marshalled along lines supplied by the sciences, for science in general was beginning to take a particular interest in abnormal or pathological states, from the perturbations of the planets to the palpitations of the heart2

A critical evolutionary debate during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies centered on whether the major structures (however complex) of the

l From an essay entitled bbOur Venetian Constitution which appeared in the Fortnightly (March 1867); reprinted as Parliament before Reform in Order and Progress (London, 1873, 150. The remark was quoted by Matthew Arnold in his Introduction to Culture and Anarchy (London, 1869).

2 The broad debate about the state of the national health continued into the nineteenth century after it developed during the 1780s and 1790s and included the application of models supplied by the newly discovered social sciences following from the premises of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, and the like. But, ironically, the questions which generally applied to culture (rather than to such issues as crime or capital accumulation) tended to be sui generis and to separate themselves from the powerful conservative arguments of Coleridge, for example. He

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692 J. E. CHAMBERLIN

adult individual are history is simply an

preformed in unfolding or,

the original cell (in which case the in the original meaning of the word,

. life an

evolution) or whether the complex form that the adult individual displays develops as a res ult of some external force working upon the egg which has the potential for, as distinct from the inevitability of, normal development. The difference in the two views is profound. While the second (or epigenetic) theory became orthodox during the nineteenth century, some of the issues in the debate (concern ing perceptions of development, notions of change, types of po tentiality , categories of cause and effect, and the legitimate uses of analogy), because they were of such general implication, influenced in a complicated way the analysis of all scientific data, including those which formed the bases of the new social sciences. Yet, over and above these and other complications, the prescriptions which were applied to cultural phenomena often depended in a , quite direct way on the descriptions which the sciences deve loped for the i dentification , classificati .on, and anal ysis of aberrant (or otherwise exceptional) conditions and for morbid states, as well as for the patterns of normal development against which these were measured.

There was, of course, an ob vious connection between the scientific doctrine of d isease, or pathology, and ordinary biology, though T. H. Huxley felt that the medical profession still needed reminding of this until quite late in the century. 3 More generally, however, biology during this period displayed an obsessive interest in phenomena which appeared abnormal, which literally defied description (that is to say, classification, such as Darwins favorite, the barnacle), or which gave indications of being in a state of developmental the expectation

decline . Both structures and processes which went beyond s of the normal organization and life of biologic .a1 phenomena

had a specific interest for scientists who were C oming to terms with the notion of descent with modification that Darw in had popu larized and with the theory of natural selection that he had affirmed. Whether variations of form and modifications of function were to be perceived as ultimately bene- ficial or harmful depended upon a wide range of considerations; and how they were to be explained constituted another, and often fierce, debate. Anyhow, their morphology, distribution, and aetiology were of critical con-

took extreme exception to the use of certain kinds of scientific analogies when applied to social phenomena and had set out some fairly compelling reasons when he argued against the laissez-faire model of society as a self-regulating machine in which all things find their level, with the objection that Persons are not Things-Man does not find his level (Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge [London, 19721, 6, 206). Philosophy had, in any event, always found it difficult to ennoble man and to explain nature at the same time, and discussion about culture in the nineteenth century continued to be plagued by this difficulty.

3 As Huxley noted in a lecture delivered in London in August, 1881 on The Connection of the Biological Sciences with Medicine, disease is a perturbation of the normal activities of a living body, and it is, and must remain, unintelligible, so long as we are ignorant of the nature of these normal activities (Science and Culture and Other Essays [London, 18811, 332-33).

AN ANATOMY OF CULTURAL MELANCHOLY 693

tern, and Huxleys principle that whatever change of structure or function is hurtful belongs to pathology gave analysis its cue.

As discussion moved to the character of society and the state of culture, the analogies often became somewhat clouded by the need to decide on a couple of central issues. First, there was the dilemma (which during the nineteenth century at least had the slightly less entangled counterpart, re- ferred to above, in the natural sciences) over whether the environment (nur- ture) or heredity (nature) were to be given responsibility for determining conditions. The former (in a distinguished tradition including Hartley, God- win, and Robert Owen) led to such idiosyncratic single-minded environmen- tal determinists as the English historian H. T. Buckle who was widely read and whose grand design was hotly debated during the early years of the Darwinian controversy. The latter reached its literary overload in Emile Zolas natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire, as the Rougon-Macquart novels were subtitled, and included the criminal behavior studies of Cesare Lombroso as well as the eugenics of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. When Oscar Wilde spoke (in 1890) of the scientific principle of Heredity as Nemesis without her mask . . . the last of the Fates, and the most terrible,4 he was reflecting a common conviction.

There was a second issue, pertaining to the discussions regarding cultural development, which has since become the subject of much dispute: the relative importance to be assigned, in establishing the causes of social change, to social structures on the one hand and to individual patterns of belief and action (often embodied in what were conceived as typical per- sonalities) on the other. While some saw the culture disintegrating as its representative forms or institutions crumbled, others insisted that cultural degeneration was the product of the degeneracy of its leading individuals. The uses and abuses of language brought these perspectives closer together; but there was still a fine line between viewing the decline of civilization as embodied in a falling away from accepted canons of good language and seeing this decline as a consequence of the shoddy habits of language use into which the many were being enticed by the few. Whatever the scheme, some sort of causal relationship between the state of the culture and either its institutions or its individuals was generally accepted; and those who saw this state as degenerate reinforced this model by a psychological analogy that was of wide appeal, viz., that any cultural psychosis is at the very least preceded, if not caused, by an individual or collective neurosis. And neuroses were the special province of the apostles of decadence, from the French d&dents of the mid-nineteenth century,5 down (in every sense) to the quite unnerving Max Nordau in the 1890s6 and up again to Freuds

4 The Critic as Artist, Complete Works (London, 1908), VI, 179. 5 A. E. Carter, in his fine book on The Idea of Decadence in French Literature

1830-1900 (Toronto, 1958), titles the chapter in which he discusses the psychopathol- ogy of decadence Nerve-storms and Bad Heredity and remarks on the pervasive identification of insanity, neuroses, genius, and degenerate conditions.

6 The English translation of the second edition of Max Nordaus Entartung (Ber- lin, 1892-93) appeared in London early in 1895 under the title Degeneration. (A


Totem and Taboo (1913), subtitled some points of agreement between the mental life of savages and neurotics. The generally nervous unease of the period-the political, religious, scientific, and artistic agitation-further en- couraged this kind of association. Nervousness, after all, is logically associated with nerves and neuroses.7

The question of degeneration is, in many ways, at the heart of the matter. In a very generalized form, and with regard to broadly cultural issues, the theory of degeneration defined itself as the opposite of the theory of the progressive evolution of cultures, and anthropologists beginning with E. B. Tylor espoused this definition. In more recent times, the opposite of evolution became (for some anthropologists, at least) functionalism, and then structuralism. This shift in the nature of anthropological argument has tended to obliterate the importance which was attached in Tylors time to the concept of survivals, a concept taken in large measure from the use made of the geological record by nineteenth-century biology.* The notion of survivals, in fact, generated a special kind of confusion, for it was used both by those who structured their cultural arguments along lines which gave priority to cultural progress and general advance, and by the advocates of theories of cultural degeneration. The idea that the so-called savage races represented a

French translation, Dkgk?rescence, was published in Paris in 1894.) Nordau had dedicated the book to Cesare Lombroso. It was exceptionally popular, in part because Oscar Wildes trials had drawn public attention to the subject of decadent art and its decadent purveyors. There were several replies to Nordau, the most notable being G. B. Shaws A Degenerates View of Nordau (which first appeared in the American Anarchist periodical Liberty in July, 1895 and was reprinted as The Sanity ofArt [London, 19081) and A. E. Hakes anonymously published Regenera- tion: A Reply to Max Nordau (London, 1895). Wilde himself, in a letter to the Home Secretary written from Reading Gaol on July 2, 1896, argued by reference to Nordau and Lombroso that his crime should rather be considered a disease, to be cured by a physician rather than punished by a judge (The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis [New York, 19621, 402).

7 There was wide interest in the nervous system in the nineteenth century; indeed, Cuviers system of animal classification was based in part on what he called the animal function (as distinct from the vegetative function which includes growth, reproduction, and so forth) to which the nervous system was essential. It was, however, with Huxleys work in the 1870s that this interest became most prom- inent, and there was during this time much relatively uninformed but intense discussion of the relationship of consciousness to the nervous system.

8 Charles Lyells Principles of Geology (London, 1830-33) established the basis for this use, as he contradicted the view (which had been given prominence by Cuvier, among others) of history as essentially catastrophic. Lyell, of course, had difficulty accepting Darwins own view and only did so in his Antiquity of Man (London, 1863). The interrelationships of the sciences during this period were extensive, and Darwins enlightenment on reading Malthus Essay on Population in 1838 was only the best known of a number of similar incidents in which one branch of science illuminated another. One may, perhaps, be forgiven a certain nostalgia at such open-mindedness.


degraded type, as degenerate descendants of the higher races whose civilized state was congenital to man, was at one time widely held; it was certainly demolished during the 1860s particularly by John Lubbock, but a residual confusion about exactly what could be said to be a survival, and of what kind of a progress or decline, continued throughout the century.

However, biology supplied a consistent principle which, though often unrecognized or disguised, still gave the discussion a firm basis.g Most explicitly in the work of the Naturphilosophen, drawing strength from the more general philosophical tenets of Goethe and Herder, there developed a recognition of some axioms in the study of biological phenomena derived from direct observation: that there are higher and lower species, that the progression from lower to higher corresponds to a progression from less to more complex, and that there is an increase of complexity, a development of the heterogeneous and specific from the homogeneous and general, during the life of an individual. These ideas together constituted a powerful analytic framework, a fixed warp and woof, within which any discussion of development that employed any analogy with biological processes had to fit. Fur- thermore, if a single direction to organic development is acknowledged and if this development is admitted not to confound the general set of laws which govern natural processes, then the stages in the life of an individual (or what is called ontogeny) will necessarily not only parallel but directly recapitulate the (usually adult) stages in the history of a lineage or species (phylogeny).lO

One of the most formidable, and recently most derided, nineteenth- century assumptions (usually associated with the ideas of progress that were a legacy of the enlightenment) was that the white races of Europe were higher or more advanced in the evolutionary scheme than the primitive or savage races, however enviable or idyllic their way of life might appear. Undoubtedly, much of this opinion was the result of crude ethnocentricity, much also the consequence of an ignorant belief in a particular creed of progress. But, given the commitment (of many of those who spoke on such matters) to the general principles of biological form and development (whether Darwinian or not made absolutely no difference), it was inevitable that their perception of organized societies would reflect their understanding that the life of particular forms, and the history of their collectivity, must by definition display a progression from less to more complex. It was a simple tautology to identify more complex societies and more advanced cultures in the context of social organisms which were less elaborate, Or, as Walter Pater did in his review of Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray, one might

g There was an acknowledged scheme according to which ethnology was seen as a branch of anthropology, itself a division of zoology, which in turn is the animal half of biology.

lo This principle is dealt with in some detail in Stephen Jay Goulds Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Mass., 1977) which presents the bases of biological understanding in the nineteenth century with exemplary judgment and clarity. Though it appeared after this paper was essentially completed, I have used Gould to confirm or in some instances correct my interpretation relating to the law of recapitulation, discussed below.


apply the argument to more specific considerations: To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wildes heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely as they can, is to lose, or lower, organization, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development. l1

There was no avoiding this mode of thought, certainly no way in which a practicing natural scientist could ignore its imperatives. So when E. R. Lan- kester, a distinguished disciple of Darwin and an original thinker on his own ground, as well as a man of wide general acwaintance with the artistic and social world of London, gave a lecture (published as a book) on Degenera- tion, he set up his argument as follows:

It is clearly enough possible for a set of forces such as we sum up under the head natural selection to so act on the structure of an organism as to produce one of three results, namely these: to keep it in statu quo; to increase the complexity of its structure; or lastly, to diminish the complexity of its structure. We have as possibilities either Balance, or Elaboration, or Degeneration. l2

Elaboration constituted, of course, the way forward. No one in the nineteenth century needed to be told that the alternative direction was backward. Discussing the conditions which lead in this direction, which is to say to a diminishing of the complexity of biological structure, Lankester suggests that we may sum up the immediate antecedents of degenerative evolution as, 1, Parasitism; 2, Fixity or immobility; 3, Vegetative nutrition; 4, Excessive reduction of size (52). Lankester then emphasizes the difficul- ties involved in identifying certain species as degenerate if the development of the individual happens not fully to recapitulate the development of the species. As an example, Cuvier classified barnacles as Molluscs, whereas they are more properly classified, in the light of the phylogenetic evidence which they display in ontogeny, as degenerate Crustaceans. Lankester adds, to drive home his point, that the vertebrate character of the Ascidians and the history of their Degeneration would never have been suspected . . . had the Ascidian tadpoles ceased to appear in the course of Ascidian development at a geological period anterior to the present epoch (55). Therefore, the current form of any species may possibly be the result of degeneration and yet offer no evidence of that degeneration in its immediate patterns of growth and development. The only reliable way of ensuring that the process and result of degeneration are recognized is by attending to those habits of

l1 A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde, The Bookman (November 1891). l2 Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London, 1880), 28-29. Lankester is to

some extent indebted, as he acknowledged in his article on Zoology in the ninth (1890) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (XXIV, 81 l), to the work of Anton Dohrn who pointed out in 1875 the limitations of the standard post-Darwinian as- sumption that all the change of structure through which the successive generations of animals have passed has been one of progressive elaboration and proposed instead that degeneration or progressive simplification of structure may have, and in many lines certainly has, taken place.


life (50) likely to lead to degeneration outlined above. Furthermore, Lan- kester insisted:

though we may establish the hypothesis most satisfactorily by the study of animal organization and development, it is abundantly clear that degenerative evolution is by no means limited in its application to the field of zoology.

In other fields, wherever in fact the great principle of evolution has been recognized, degeneration plays an important part. (57-58)

Lankester concludes his essay with a consideration of the real possibility of degeneration with regard to the European races; he suggests that possibly we are all drifting, tending to the condition of intellectual Barnacles or Asci- dians (60). The advantage which modern man has is the ability to ascertain the conditions conducive to higher development and the related conditions or habits which would favor degeneration. Since it was, and presumably always will be, difficult to reach agreement on these former conditions, Lankesters contemporaries attended with enthusiasm to the latter. And although Lankester, as an example, held no monopoly on thinking with reference to such issues, the lesson implied in his work was clear from a wide variety of scientific commentary, and the influence of such commentary on the shape and character of discussions about cultural development (and degeneration) was pervasive.

Despite the pattern which such analogies established and the general influence of scientific speculation on cultural debate, it is not easy to categorize the ways in which cultural degeneration in particular was de- scribed. One of the major impediments was inherent in the speculation itself, and displayed itself in an endemic confusion during the period between teleological (or vitalistic) and morphological (or mechanistic) explanations of all living processes. Whether such processes moved from some beginning, as it were, along a course determined only by antecedent conditions, or whether they moved to some end, according to some (however un- known or unknowable) purpose or design, was as contentious an issue as surfaced during this period, for it bore directly on religious and philosophical as well as scientific and cultural commitments. As Aristotle suggested, the house is there that men may live in it, but it is also there because the builders have laid one stone upon another.13

In descriptions of cultural pathologies that followed scientific analogies, it was natural that much attention would be paid to the stages and, by implication, to the direction of development (or decline). Crudely speaking, the issue was whether particular phenomena had proceeded in their development too far, or not far enough, or might even be regressing, and just how unhealthy each state could be said to be in relation to the norm. In the cultural domain, there were two interrelated themes here. The first involved one of several models of normalcy, in general under the guise of the ages of man ; versions were provided by Vito, Cousin, and Comte, among others, and there was always a residual ethnocentric provincialism modified,

l3 DArcy W. Thompsons On Growth avid Form (Cambridge, 1917) includes an extended and intelligent discussion of final and efficient causes.

693 . J. E. CHAMBERLIN

perhaps by fascination with one or more classical periods, to reinforce whatever norms were proposed. A second theme made possible the recognition of these stages in both societies and individuals, and depended upon an idea from the biological sciences to which reference has already been made. Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was the chief apostle of recapitulation in the nineteenth century (Lankester was one of the first to translate his work into English), and his championing of the fairly ubiquitous notion that (to take the way it was applied to the higher forms of life) every animal in the course of its individual development recapitulates the history of the race assured for this theme a central place in nineteenth-century natural science. He formu- lated his biogenetic law in the catchy phrase ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny ; this idea was used to affirm, for example, that children represent the thinking of their prehistoric ancestors and that savages think like children. Haeckels view of the matter was resolutely mechanistic: phylogeny was the mechanical cause of ontogeny, for the addition of new aspects to the end of ontogeny and the deletion of others (by condensation) to make room for these new features are phylogenetic processes. In other words, the life history of the individual exists only inasmuch as it constitutes a recapitulation of the history of the race. The elements of a ruthless biological determinism with application to human affairs are easily identifiable here; add to it a Lamarckian belief in the inheritability of acquired characteristics, a belief shared by Haeckel and at times by Darwin, and it is not hard to understand why many felt that close attention must be paid to identifying whatever was degenerate in society and to ensuring that characteristics which might encourage degeneration were not acquired by the culture. A complicated confusion of phylogenesis and history also developed from this habit of mind (and tied it to a more general genetic mode of explanation) according to which an explanation of what something is is to be supplied by a delineation of how it came to be.

There was a particular class of descriptions of cultural change and decay which followed directly from recapitulatory theory. The argument for recapitulation depended upon parallels among paleontology (the geological record), comparative anatomy (comparison between anatomical structures, especially adult forms), and ontogeny (individual development). l4 Analogies in specifically human terms might be history, cultural tradition (especially

l4 See Gould, 122-25. It is worth noting that the function of memory (whether Lamarckian, as propounded by Haeckel and Samuel Butler, or in broader terms taken to include cultural inheritance and a kind of collective unconscious) can be argued to supply a key to the development of individual or social organisms if any analogy between memory and heredity is accepted. W. K. Cliffords notion of a tribal self, which he posited as informing ethical behavior, belongs with this sort of analysis. See, for example, his essay on The Scientific Basis of Morals (1875), published in Lectures and Essays, ed. Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock (Lon- don, 1879). Paul Valery supplied a variation on this somewhat later in the 1930s (in essays such as La Liberte de lesprit) with his image of culture as capital, which is acquired and inherited, and for the management of which one needs a corps of professional custodians or brokers,


European -an adult form, as it were), and personality; in this vein, the true critic embodies the complete recapitulation of the culture:

For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneself one must know all about others. . . . Do you think that it is the imagination that enables us to live these countless lives? Yes: it is the imagination; and the imagination is the result of heredity. It is simply concentrated race-experience. . . . The culture that this transmis- sion of racial experience makes possible can be made perfect bv the critical spirit alone, and indeed may be said to be one with it. For who is the true critic but he who bears within himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure?15

So much for the cultural wealth of the world; but, as Ruskin asked in Unto this Last (1862), what about its illth ? The theory of recapitulation also had an interest in pathological conditions and turned to the study of abnormal development or teratology, for evidence, with particular attention to explanations of abnormalities as arrests of development. That is, if an animal passes through stages which represent the forms of animals lower on the developmental scale, as recapitulation theory affirmed, then malforma- tions may arise as a result of a partial arrest of development during early structural stages, so that the part in question does not pass through the stages it must in order to achieve normal growth appropriate to the adult form. This theory of developmental arrests was of great influence, far beyond the study of fetal monstrosities where it arose, to analyses of cultural phenomena and of individuals within a culture (which is to say, parts of the social organism). Henry Maudsley had proposed in Body and Mind (1873) that idiocy in particular, and insanity in general, are forms of arrested development. The interest in criminal anthropology, established by Cesare Lombroso and popularized in English by Havelock Ellis, depended on this kind of approach and had considerable influence on attitudes towards treat- ment of the criminal and the insane. Around the same period, the basic premises of recapitulation, especially a wide application of the theory of developmental arrests, and related accounts throughout other areas of the social sciences of cultures fixated by their primitive values and beliefs were used by Freud to support his theory of neuroses. Furthermore, the theory of recapitulation was employed in a disguised form to castigate cultures which appeared to have lost part of their motivation, following a belief that since one must assume a force of some sort informing development, any failure in the developmental program must indicate a corresponding deficiency of the informing force. Other explanations of what were perceived as cultural hand- icaps included widely different, but equally repulsive, arguments for racism, often supporting imperial domination, slavery, or genocide.

To this whole scheme of evolutionary recapitulation there was an impor-

l5 Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist , Works (London, 1908), VI, 178-81.


tant patristic analogue, first explicated by Saint Irenaeus (ca. 125202) in his theory of the recapitulatio:

There is one God the Father, and one Christ Jesus, who came by means of the whole dispensational arrangements connected with Him, and gathered together all things in Himself. But in every respect, too, He is man, the formation of God; and thus He took up man into Himself, the invisible becoming visible, the incomprehensible being made comprehensible, the impassible becoming capable of suffering, and the Word being made man, thus summing up all things in Himself: so that as in super-celestial, spiritual, and invisible things, the Word of God is supreme, so also in things visible and corporeal He might possess the supremacy, and, taking to Himself the pre-eminence, as well as constituting Himself Head of the Church, He might draw all things to Himself at the proper time?

In paraphrase, this amounts to a view of history (including creation) as recapitulated in Christ who exists at the effective center of time and sums up in himself the beginning and end of the world in one oikonomia or household of God. There is an analogy between those (from John Henry Newman to Gerard Manley Hopkins) who in their different ways attempted to realize the immanent character of the divine presence by means of a kind of imaginative structure derived from Irenaeus and those (such as Ernst Mach and Karl Pearson) who in the sciences were trying to get rid of metaphysical obscurities in the apprehension of the reality with which science is con- cerned by insisting on the nature of science as an economy of thought. l7 They come together, ironically, in the polemic of the great cultural materialists of the time who saw all processes and all structures converging in social phenomena which in their development recapitulate the often grim history of human societies.

There was another type of explanation of cultural pathologies which also followed an essentially mechanistic or morphological interpretation of

l6 Adversus Haereses, Bk. 3, Chap. 16, Sect. 6. Nineteenth-century translations of the Church Fathers included the Library of the Fathers, ed. Pusey, Keble, and Newman (Oxford, 183888), and The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Edinburgh, 1866-72; New York, 1884-86). This translation is from the latter edition and is quoted in James Finn Cotters The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Pittsburgh, 1972), 102. The paraphrase which follows the quotation is indebted to Cotters discussion.

l7 Pearson argued the case in The Grammar of Sciences (London, 1892), especially in a section entitled Science and Metaphysics, 18-23. (He also edited W. K. Cliffords posthumously published The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences [Lon- don, 18851.) Machs best known doctrine, that science essentially has the purpose of saving mental effort, was first presented in Die Gestalten der Fliissigheit (Prague, 1872) and in Die iikonomische Natur der physikalischen Forschung (Vienna, 1882), and embodied in his most famous work, Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung (Leip- zig, 1883), which was translated into English as The Science of Mechanics and published in London in 1893. Mach was later attacked for his idealist tendencies by V. I. Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism which was written following a visit by Lenin to London in 1908 for extensive studies of philosophical literature. It is translated as Vol. 13 of Collected Works (New York, 1927).


phenomena. It developed from a scientific analogy with the normal federa- tion of cells in a healthy organism and the proper subordination within the organism of the part to the whole; in social terms, this translated into the relationship between the individual and the society. When Havelock Ellis gave an account of the theory of decadence which Paul Bourget had outlined, he drew attention to this analogy:

If the energy of the cells becomes independent, the lesser organisms will likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy and the anarchy which is established constitutes the d&cadence of the whole. The social organism does not escape this law and enters into decadence as soon as the individual life becomes exaggerated beneath the influence of acquired well- being, and of heredity. A similar law governs the development and decadence of that other organism which we call language?

And as Lankester affirmed, making a distinction between degeneration of grammatical form and degeneration of language as an instrument of thought, true Degeneration of language is only found as part and parcel of a more general degeneration of mental activity (75).

Even this general scheme was not without its confusions, however. There were those such as Frederic Harrison who insisted in an essay on J. S. Mill, and in an effort to put on a solid basis his positivistic science of humanity, that the smallest substantive organism of which society is com- posed is the family, not the individual. In addition, it was easy to view all of this in a teleological perspective and to speak of the proper subordination not of parts to the whole but of means to ends, the end being the flourishing of the society or the growth and dominance of the culture.

Other explanations of cultural phenomena depended more directly upon fashionable notions of evolutionary struggle, and often took the form of a deduction that under certain circumstances the processes of normal evolut ionary conflict became suspended and certain phenomena developed in the hot hot Ise that might never (and should never) survive in th .e open air. If, as Herbert Spencer insisted, the survival of only the fittest ensured the evolutionary progress of the race, then it was necessary to ensure that each individual, as indeed each habit and belief, be tested against reality or the circumstances that were taken to constitute the evolutionary environment. This necessity was argued by Walter Bagehot, for example, in Physics and Politics, subtitled thoughts on the application of the principles of natural selection and inheritance to political society (1872), and was reiterated later by Karl Pearson who insisted (in an essay on Socialism and Natural Selection [ 18941) that without natural selection degeneration must set in. One of the nicest ironies in this connection is that Spencers views were quoted by Peter Kropotkin exclusively in support of what he called the scientific bases of anarchy and of his demonstration (in Mutual Aid [ 19021) of how group cooperation and the deliberate setting aside of competition had been important facts in ensuring the survival of the fittest species, as the

l8 A Note on Paul Bourget (1889), rpt. in Views and Reviews, 1 (London, 1932), 51-52. Cell-theory had assumed particular importance with the acceptance (following the work of Max Schultze) of protoplasm as the physical basis of life.


need to struggle merged with the need for solidarity. Where things went wrong, according to this collectivist view, was where the bees were not allowed to swarm.

In the nineteenth century the health of an organism was routinely judged (in an Aristotelian manner) by the energy it displayed, and this energy in the higher forms of life was associated with a particular kind of deliberate vitality and sense of purpose. What if this sense of purpose seems lost, or this vitality is no longer present? The analogies from science again provided a model, but in a somewhat complicated form. The difficulty was that one of the more arcane but also impassioned debates which centered around Dar- winian evolution depended on the interpretation of the status of teleological explanations of natural phenomena. The notion of a final cause came to the nineteenth century from a strong Aristotelian tradition which appeared in eighteenth-century physics and was hard even for the mechanists to shake, for their ideal was the reduction of all phenomena to the laws of chemistry and physics, many of which were inherited from the previous century.lg Claude Bernard (1813-1878), one of the most important physiologists of the era, vested in living organisms a unique vitalism that implied purpose. The Naturphilosophen were committed to the notion of design, and many in the second half of the nineteenth century discovered a teleological bias in Hegel. This was of special importance because of the influence of the Oxford Hege- lians of the 1870s such as T. H. Green and William Wallace, who instructed a generation how to read the older literary and the newer scientific classics through Hegelian bifocals. Organic evolution (of institutions as well as of other more natural species) tended to be likened more often to the design of a temple or cathedral than to the growth of a tree, while the ideologies of imperium and dominium depended in large measure on the acceptance of a sense of purpose, of manifest destiny, of grand design. This inclination was strongly reinforced by doctrines of utilitarian and liberal political development, both of which became excruciatingly evangelical in their claim to have the end in sight. Further support, if it were needed, was supplied by a residual Leibnizian faith that this world is (in a phrase from his Theodicy) the best of all possible worlds, and the philosophical issues were muffled by the Epicurean conviction that nature finds a use for everything.

Two generations of proponents of Darwin, represented by Huxley and Lankester, spent much of their polemical force describing how evolutionary theory, far from having contradicted teleology, is Ernst Haeckel claimed, had essentially refounded, reformed, and rehabilitated it. This was the bur- den, for example, of Lankesters article on Zoology in the ninth (1890) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Vol. XXIV, 799-820, especially 802). When the telos- however it was conceived-was lost or remained undiscovered, then the evolutionary processes were either suspended or misunderstood.

For some curious reason, perhaps related to the fact that Hamlet was a

lg Cf. Georg Simmel in 1903, reflecting on how the calculating exactness of practical life resulting from a money economy corresponds exactly to the idea of natural science; that of converting the world into a problem of arithmetic and of transforming each of its parts into a mathematical formula.


Dane, it was the Scandinavian writers of the period who especially focused their attention on this pathology, as they did on other social aberrations and anomalies when Ibsen and Strindberg established their formidable presence. The great Danish novelist Jens Peter Jacobsen, a naturalist by training and the first major translator of Darwin into his native language, wrote in NieIs Lyhne (1880) about the modern (cultural) spirit of the time, about a vague purposelessness, a lame reflectiveness.20 Others wrote about being (in the words of the title of a novel by Jacobsens fellow countryman and con- temporary Sophus Schandorph: Uden Midpunkt) without a center and W. B. Yeats and lesser poets from the nineties underlined how, when the times are thus confused and purposeless, the center cannot hold anyhow. Idleness and indolence were obvious gestures to reflect this state of affairs, implying as they did a loss of energy as well as of purpose.

The transposition of scientific analogies to social and historical processes was reinforced by the wide interest in methodologies of comparative analysis whereby the structures of linguistic, social, psychological, economic, and historical experience were abstracted in a way that em- phasized elements of purpose, design, and progress, or their notable ab- sence. In addition, the utilitarian inclinations of Karl Marx, which (in a phrase he used about Adam Smith) penetrated to the inner relations, the physiology as it were, of the bourgeois system, conceived historical dialec- tics as analogous to evolutionary biology. He developed his theory of surplus value using quite ostentatiously scientific analogues, writing in the preface to Das Kapital that in bourgeois society the commodity-form of the product of labour- or the value-form of the commodity-is the economic cell-form, 21 and arguing throughout that the surplus value of labor upon which capitalism feeds represents an aberration in the organically conceived social system, a disease of the material organism. Marxs tendency to see the disease as mortal and to prophesy economic catastrophe and social revolu- tion, though it dismayed and disappointed some of his colleagues, was really little more than his version of Leibnizs entelechy whereby the process has as its telos the completing of itself?

2o Trans Hanna Astrup Larsen (New York, 1967), 99: There was in Niels Lyhnes nature a lame reflectiveness, child of an instjnctive shrinking from decisive action, grandchild of a subconscious sense that he lacked personality. He was always struggling against this reflectiveness, sometimes goading himself by calling it vile names, then again decking it out as a virtue that was a part of his inmost self and was bound up with all his possibilities and powers. But whatever he made of it, and however he looked upon it, he hated it as a secret infirmity.

21 From the Preface to the first German edition (1867), trans. by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Friedrich Engels (London, 1887); included in The Marx- Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1978), 295.

22 As Huxley insisted in an essay on Science and Culture (first delivered as a lecture at the opening of Sir Joshua Masons Science College in Birmingham in October ISSO), social phenomena are as much the expression of natural laws as any others; no social arrangements can be permanent unless they harmonize with the requirements of social statics and dynamics; in the nature of things, there is an arbiter whose decisions execute themselves. (Published in Science and Culture and Other Essays, 22 .)


For the apostles of culture, these analogies were not simply instructive, they were compelling. If perceived in teleological terms, certainly, it became fairly easy to isolate unhealthy cultures as either failing in a sense of purpose, a recognition of design, a display of energy, or as not fitting into a pattern of use and order that is ac commodated to the perceived and accepted purposes of society. A . culture that displayed neither motive nor motif, neither purpose nor design, would inevitably lack the vital energy, the creative force necessary to survive, not to mention prevail, in a world that was constantly changing and continuously testing.. From Ernest Renan to Fried- rich Nietzsche, European thinkers instructed English readers in this logic from a position closer to an understanding of the variety of cultural forms than their island audience could achieve. It was not that everything in a healthy culture must be strictly compatible and contribute direct1 well-bei ng-only thoroughgoing pedants seem to h .ave believed that.

.y to its Renan,

for example, had a stock image (which he used in his book LAvenir de la Sciencez3) of a digestive system in which waste is inevitable, a system which is (in social terms) able to absorb errors and crimes into itself or expel them normally while still remaining healthy. But the more urgent question still related to the definition and perception of cultural purpose, and here the function of leadership and the recognition of the characteristic features of a culture became crucial. The scheme, acknowledged or not, was derived from the natural sciences; as soon as the characteristic function or distinct identity of an organism ceased to be demonstrable, the organism ceased its progressive evolution. Of course, the question of demonstrability was always an open one; but with reference to a culture, some demonstration of its defining characteristics was an essential component of its defense as a viable entity, especially in the conte xt of Spencer s particu lar formulation of the general principle of evo lution as a change from an ind efinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity. 24 The progressive dif- ferentiation which thereby constitutes the increased complexity of the higher forms was assumed to be embodied in a coherent cha racterization, a clearly identifiable pattern of functions and interrelationships among the co nstituent parts of the

There is organic whole. a final point here: although analogies with lower forms of life

were suggested, a culture was ultimate1 .y expected to function accord ing to models supplied by the higher forms. The key di sti nction between these forms was provided by the idea of consciousness, and scientists such as G. J. Romanes (1848- 1894) explained how the dividing line for late nineteenth-

23 Written in 1848-49, it was not published until 1890, although material from it appeared earlier in other works by Renan. It was translated into English and published as The Future of Science: Ideas of 1848 (London, 1891).

24 First Principles (London, 1862), 216. This definition appears in Part 11, Chap. 3, entitled The Law of Evolution (Continued). Chap. 2, The Law of Evolution, is nearly identical with the first half of an essay on Progress: its Law and Cause, originally published in the Westminster Review (April 1857); the part of that essay which was included in First Principles ended with a rather less complete definition: That in which Evolution essentially consists, is the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous (174).


century natural science was almost straddled by the sea-urchin.25 Jacob von Uexkiill (1864- 1944), a zoologist of the early twentieth century who had considerable influence on the thinkers of the German Bauhaus, had a trope that when a dog runs, the dog is moving his legs; when a sea-urchin runs, the legs are moving the sea-urchin.26 For our nineteenth-century chroni- clers any culture that allowed itself to become like the sea-urchin might move quite quickly but certainly was headed in the wrong (evolutionary) direction. It must, like the dog, know what it is about. And the paradoxical lesson in this was that the healthy growth of a culture must ultimately depend on the ability of its informing conditions to determine its structure without over- whelming its self-conscious identity, that is, on an ability to establish and maintain a balance between an organic determinism (or mechanism) that would confirm the prerogatives of evolutionary process and a creative free- dom (or teleology) that would allow for independent definition of those cultural characteristics which should be retained and reinforced. After all, if characteristics are to be acquired and inherited, it is only prudent to acquire those which suit the perceived purposes of the cultural organism, so that its growth and development may conform to internal as well as external imperatives. Whether this growth itself is properly conceived as a force or as a process was accepted as an open question, though an important one, for according to the dynamic model that prevailed, as soon as a culture ceased to grow it began to fail. This failure could then be attributed to an aberration or obstruction in the process of its development, on the one hand, or to an atrophy of its vital force, on the other.

University College, University of Toronto.

25 See Jelly-fish, Star-fish and Sea-urchins, being A Research on Primitive Nerv- ous Systems (London, 1885). Romanes broad argument, which he developed in works such as Mental Evolution in Animals (London, 1883), traced the relationship of consciousness to the elaboration of nerve-centers throughout the animal kingdom.

26 Quoted by Konrad 2. Lorenz, The Role of Gestalt Perception in Animal and Human Behaviour, Aspects of Form, ed. L. L. Whyte (London, 1968), 159.

Documents

Chamberlin, JE - Anatomy of Cultural Melancholy, (1981) 42 J Hist Ideas 691