Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Daniel Pick
of choice (as say in the French Revolutionary notion of the foreign sympa-
thiser ‘becoming’ a citizen, even being elected to the Assembly), more and
more in terms of inheritance, blood, soil and inalienable roots (Hobsbawm
1990).
In the second half of the nineteenth century, criminology and psychiatry
were consolidated as distinct disciplines and in each case drew heavily on
ideas of evolution and of its reverse. They became centrally concerned with
innate biological factors in the make-up of personality. Political agitators
were sometimes subjected to forensic appraisal, as likely to be labelled as
degenerates, recidivists or evolutionary ‘throw-backs’ as rational opponents.
Each individual criminal case could be under stood as the subset of a particu-
lar degenerate type, demanding close bodily investigation. Fear and folklore
went scientific and claimed a new unassailable objectivity as the supposed
inferiority and peculiarities of, inter alia, colonial subjects in India or new
immigrants to London, Paris and New York, were solemnly charted. Fin-
gerprint samples, studies of handwriting, diagnosis of the art of the insane,
even medico-psychiatric analysis of tattooing became popular. Claims to
have created a science of the criminal – replete with images of the thief’s
handle-shaped ears and the murderer’s monkey-like torso – were developed
most spectacularly by Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) and his circle of fol-
lowers inside and outside Italy. But this was only the most dramatic of many
such endeavours, claiming some allegiance to Darwin (alongside other sci-
entific luminaries), and aiming to provide a reliable guide to biological and
moral differences (Gibson 2002;Pick1989).
Deviants emerged from the womb, according to several prominent Italian
criminologists in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Alterna-
tively the criminal was warped by the noxious ‘brew’ of the social milieu.
This was claimed by various French specialists in a long-running argument
about the ‘born criminal’ and the wilder claims of the ‘Italian school’.
Either way, it was feared that modernity was in the grip of biological decay.
Lombroso and some of his followers argued for preventive detention of
the potentially most dangerous types, in advance of their crimes – ideas that
were to fascinate novelists ranging from Conrad to Tolstoy. The proposals
gained considerable traction later on, for instance, in fascist Italy. In the
earlier period, however, such policy recommendations were often met with
opposition and rejection, leading the theorists either to find ever more inge-
nious justifications and classifications for their science, or sometimes to tone
down their more strident claims. In Lombroso’s final years, the intense focus
on criminal bodies gave way to a new preoccupation with spiritualism: he
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The politics of nature
conducted a series of experiments in a bid to make contact with his dead
mother.
Many specialists in criminal science or more generally in racial anthropol-
ogy saw their target as the sentimental ideas about equality or the human tab-
ula rasa to be found within the Enlightenment. Science proves that humanity
is not a democracy, thundered the anthropologist James Hunt in England, as
he excoriated ‘sentimentalism’ on behalf of other ‘races’ (or as the polygenist
Hunt believed, other species). Thomas Carlyle had fulminated about much
the same thing in his notorious Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.
30
But Hunt gave the scathing anti-sentimentalist view a powerful new scien-
tific patina. Committed to the view that there were distinct species rather
than races, Hunt and his associates at the newly founded Anthropologi-
cal Society (1863) did not find Darwinism congenial.
31
Only after Hunt
died in 1869, was the impasse between monogenist and polygenist theory
overcome, when the Ethnological Society and the Anthropolog ical Society
merged to form the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
(1871).
Darwin himself remarked blithely that he expected the ‘less intellec-
tual races’ to be ‘exterminated’ in the course of time (F. Darwin 1887,
ii,p.211). Yet Darwin did not accept this notion (
`
a la Hunt) of separate
species of man, corresponding to contemporary racial categories. Nor could
he countenance the idea that any bodily feature or psychological trait was
historically immutable. But the polygeny argument did not simply vanish
once Darwin began to publish; only slowly did the view of separate human
species retreat. It should be added that the assumption that all people were
part of the same species still lent itself perfectly well to theories of racial
inferiority and superiority. Other races might be seen not as irredeemably
30 First printed in Fraser’s Magazine in 1849, the polemic was subsequently published in revised form in
1853. For John Stuart Mill’s ardent critique of Carlyle’s views, see Mill 1850. The dispute exposed
the two thinkers’ fundamentally different assumptions about law and the moral basis for Western
rule, and indeed about the nature of deeper human affiliation itself, across the so-called races. Their
distinct arguments and styles exemplified ideological divisions in Victorian thought that can in turn
be traced back through various conflicting strands of Enlightenment and romantic theory (Stepan
1982). Mill considers his own complex relationship to Carlyle’s style and thought in his Autobiography.
For an exploration of shifting utilitarian views of race, assimilation and conquest in Anglo-Indian
relations, see Stokes 1959. For analyses of the intellectual argument, social context and sexual politics
of the Mill–Carlyle exchange, see Hall 2002.
31 There is an extensive secondary literature on the uses of evolution and the language of race in the
history of anthropology and medicine. Helpful older surveys include Lorimer 1988;Melman1991;
Stepan 1982;Stocking1987. For an illuminating recent regional study see Anderson 2002.
675
Daniel Pick
backward (anatomy as destiny), but rather as less biologically (as well as cul-
turally) evolved. As Huxley declared in a speech relating to the American
Civil War, the abolition of slavery was right, not on the grounds that all are
equal, but rather on the grounds that the superior white man should show
moral compassion. Non-whites would be unable to compete with their
‘bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival’, in a contest which is to be carried
on ‘by thoughts and not by bites’. The highest places in the hierarchy of
civilisation, he added, ‘will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky
cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted
to the lowest’ (Huxley 1865). Innate inequality of intelligence and morals
was widely treated as immutable scientific fact. Thus the French writer,
Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1935), author of Social Selection (1895),
said that the slogan liberty, equality, fraternity ought to be replaced with the
words, determinism, inequality, selection (Burrow 2000,p.94). The political
disputes that underlay the many variants of such Social Darwinism could
not be resolved by science itself not least because the unit of analysis was
so arbitrary. Some sought to discuss evolution at the level of the individual
body; others spoke of groups, cities, nations, races or continents. In short
the so-called biological data tended to be manipulated to fit the required
hypothesis (Burrow 2000,pp.92–108).
The cluster of beliefs now referred to under headings such as the new sci-
entific racism or Social Darwinism certainly provided new positivist ration-
alisations of older social hatreds and hierarchies, but they also restyled in
powerful ways Western understandings of international relations, laws and
institutions. Images of atavism and degeneration haunted the peripheries
of empire and the heart of the European city. And in the final years of
the nineteenth century the sense of bio-medical crisis was often cranked
up. Thus parasitism was to fascinate biologists, social investigators and racial
theorists alike in the 1880sand1890s. Degeneration theory has a complex
history of its own, and its widely recognised founding text had been pro-
duced in 1857 by the Catholic psychiatrist, Dr Benedict-Augustin Morel
(1809–73). He worked in Rouen in Northern France. As the date of his
most significant treatise suggests, this text was written independently of the
impending Darwinian tradition. By the last decades of the century, however,
books with titles such as Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (Lankester
1880) sought to consolidate the debate in terms of evolutionary naturalism
and natural selection.
Who were ‘the degenerate’ and ‘the unfit’? These groups, whilst variously
designated, included prisoners and inmates of mental hospitals. Sometimes
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The politics of nature
the terms were used with anti-aristocratic innuendo (the effete and pathetic
privileged class, as pictured for instance in Huysmans’ tale, Against Nature
or in H. G. Wells’ TheTimeMachine), but generally they were taken to refer
to specific subgroups amongst the socially disadvantaged, the casual poor
or new immigrants, the ‘residuum’ and ‘outcast‘ of the cities (or sometimes
remote ‘uncivilised’ rural hinterlands), the white or black ‘trash’ so often
conjured in American hereditarian thought. Ideas about culling the unfit
(or sending them to labour colonies) were openly discussed at scientific
congresses. In various countries, militant ‘new women’ who placed career
or politics before motherhood and marriage aroused worry and contempt
amongst eugenic lobby groups. Robust, intelligent and socially privileged
women were urged to do the appropriate thing – marry and replenish the
‘stock’ with a plentiful supply of babies to support the requirements of the
economy, the army or the empire (Kevles 1985;Richardson2003; Ronsin
1980; Semmel 1960). Meanwhile militarists echoed Hegel’s more chilling
formulations about the tonic effects of war (as set out much earlier in The
Philosophy of Right) and combined them with the language of Darwinism
and sometimes with shrill pronatalism.
Romantic endorsements of or damning attacks upon the modern state
were equally possible through a Social Darwinist lens. These arguments
were certainly pervasive, but were also significantly affected by local cultural
concerns and political anxieties in different countries.
32
An individualistic
reading of the science had been most influentially elaborated by Herbert
Spencer and reached its fullest extension in the United States. It was here
that Spencer had his greatest audience and achieved the most dramatic sales
(cf. Bannister 1979; Peel 1971;Wiltshire1978). He had attacked state inter-
vention remorselessly. He had viewed various forms of charity, for instance,
as anathema to progress and seemed to accept the need for the natural
wastage of the ‘inferior’. Civilisation was its own worst enemy, retarded
by its supposedly humane policies, stymieing nature’s broader tendencies to
betterment. The tone was generally rather optimistic; the future, Spencer
believed, belonged to the ‘industrial’ rather than the ‘militant’ form of
society. Peace and progress were inextricably tied together; trade was the
catalyst of progress and formal empires were unnecessary. By the 1880sand
1890s, even Spencer had his doubts about the pacific intent of the nations
32 The literature covering the global reception, diffusion and elaboration of these arguments and models
is now copious. See for instance, Bannister 1979; Conry 1974;Dik
¨
otter 1992; Engs 2005;Gasman
1971;Glick1972; Hofstadter 1955b; Kelly 1981; Kohn 1986;Pancaldi1983;Pusey1983; Vucinich
1988.
677
Daniel Pick
of modern Europe, including Britain. To his horror, he came to see that
these two supposedly distinct ‘types’ of society, the industrial and the mil-
itant, were converging, as even Britain became increasingly ‘Prussianised’
(Spencer 1876–1896, iii,ch.24).
A pioneering study of the American context of Social Darwinism by
Richard Hofstadter (1944) generated much historical enquiry in its wake.
33
Hofstadter showed how a class of rich businessmen drew on evolutionary
ideas to rationalise economic procedures. Thus John D. Rockefeller: ‘The
growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest.’ Business was
perceived as the working out of nature, although in practice, as has been
pointed out by Peter Gay (1994), Carnegie and Rockefeller seemed to prefer
mergers and monopolies to cutthroat competition. Amongst the American
apostles of free trade evolutionism, W. G. Sumner provides a particularly
striking example. He argued fervently that society ignored Darwin’s law
at its peril. ‘If we do not like the survival of the fittest’, he told the Free
Trade Club in 1879, ‘we have only one possible alternative, and that is the
survival of the unfittest’ (quoted in Gay 1994,p.58). In a piece on state
interference in 1887, Sumner acknowledged his extreme scepticism about
the value of state ‘meddling’ with nature (Sumner 1911,p.213). This was
laissez-faire with a vengeance. The title to another of Sumner’s polemics
against intervention in 1894 was ‘The Absurd Effort to Make the World
Over’. Egalitarianism, he argued, was mere wishful thinking.
The French translator of The Origin,Cl
´
emence-Auguste Royer, derived
not only a laissez-faire moral, but also a distinctly anti-clerical message from
the text (J. P. Clark 1984; Conry 1974). In Germany, statist versions of
Darwinism were perhaps more typical.
34
In Italy, the first translation of
The Origin appeared in 1864 and Darwinism, whilst remaining highly con-
tentious, especially when materialist theoreticians and doctors challenged
lawyers and priests as to the idea of free will, was nonetheless quickly to
find some resonance in nationalist ideology (Landucci 1981; Pancaldi 1983).
33 Hofstadter made clear that the notion, widely disseminated in the period of the two World Wars,
that social Darwinism was a bellicose philosophy largely emanating from Germany, involved an
extremely partial reading of the history. Arguably, however, he oversimplified the American situation
by focusing so much on the free-trade ethos and so little on other models. For a critique of Hofstadter,
see Bannister 1979 and, in turn, for a critical response to the latter’s work, see Jones 1980. Hofstadter
stimulated other historians to trace Darwinism in diverse national cultures.
34 Studies of German Social Darwinism also show the remarkable range of political claims that were
made upon Darwin. Feminists and anti-feminists, liberals, conservatives and socialists, imperialists
and internationalists all sought to find some support in his work. For comparative comments on
the national reception of Darwinism, see Glick 1972;cf.Gasman1971; the useful appendix, ‘Social
Darwinism’ in Crook 1994,pp.200–6; Crook 2007; Kelley 1987; and Kohn 1986.
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The politics of nature
In Spain, various novelists and painters took up the Darwinian theme with
relish, although the Catholic Church was perhaps to prove more effective
than in Italy at mobilising intellectual and political opposition to these new
ideas (Paul 1972).
Even as argument raged, and Darwinists of left and right offered their
own competing interpretations, many fundamental assumptions were really
shared. Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), for instance, a Marxist enthusiast for Dar-
winism, appeared to assume the real existence of superior and inferior races,
despite his trenchant opposition to early twentieth-century blood myths and
his endeavour to substitute the term ‘peoples’ for ‘races’ (Kautsky 1926, pas-
sim, 1988,pp.52, 127, 143). Evolutionary naturalism and political prophecy
went hand in hand. Kautsky’s Marxism, as Eric Hobsbawm writes, was the
‘definer of its orthodoxy’ in its phase of triumphant late nineteenth-century
confidence: ‘It was materialist, determinist, inevitabilist, evolutionist, and
firmly identified the “laws of history” with the “laws of science”.’
35
Kaut-
sky’s assumptions were in fact generally Lamarckian, but this presented no
problem, as he viewed Lamarckian and Darwinian perspectives as much the
same thing (Kautsky 1988, p. xxxiii).
‘Darwin, Spencer and Marx’ were placed side by side, in the subtitle of
a noteworthy book by the Italian socialist politician, and follower of Lom-
broso’s criminology, Enrico Ferri (1905 [1896]). In Russia, some Marxists
were critical of Social Darwinism, although others – Plekhanov is the best
example – were attracted to the view that Darwin‘s principles constituted a
natural corollary of Marxism (Vucinich 1988,pp.356–66). Darwin’s theory,
Plekhanov claimed, was impressively dialectical (Plekhanov 1934,p.172).
Naturally, both Plekhanov and Kautsky were more critical of the politically
gradualist conclusions many other commentators had drawn from Dar-
winian materials (Plekhanov 1969; Salvadori 1979,pp.23–4). The struggle
for existence, they insisted, should be conceived not in terms of the indi-
vidual but collective efforts. Even the Great War was understood merely
as a temporary deviation on the general march of socialist and evolution-
ary progress (Kautsky 1988, p. xxxvi). English Fabianism’s far from trivial
flirtation with Social Darwinism or eugenics involved many of the same
presumptions; the unit of evolutionar y analysis was no longer the individ-
ual, but the class, society or nation (Jones 1980). Economics, physiology
35 Hobsbawm 1987,p.267;cf.Salvadori1979,p.23. On the origins of the ‘Darwinian left’, see Stack
2003.
679
Daniel Pick
and heredity were run together in a new hybrid form of diagnosis: physi-
ological ‘capital’ was said to be vital in the struggle for survival of nations,
whilst racial ‘expenditure’ demanded the keenest actuarial scrutiny; soci-
ety, one commentator explained, must be analysed in terms of ‘biological
economics’ (Geddes 1886,p.1166).
Thus the celebration of individualism that can be gleaned sometimes in
Darwin’s work, and far more stridently, in Spencer’s, was countered by a
later generation of evolutionists who stressed the indispensability of groups
and insisted on the advantages of social co-operation over struggle. The
Fabian-leaning David G. Ritchie (1853–1903) wrote a characteristic work
of the time, Darwinism and Politics (1889), in which he sought to ally pro-
gressive policy ambitions (social justice, a greater role for education and so
forth), with the logic of evolution. Societies, he suggested, advance through
imitation and co-operation, not simply through the brute force of individ-
ual will. In organised communities, social sympathy could mitigate the
‘internal strife’ of bloody nature. Ritchie’s work exemplified the spirit of a
new ‘reform Darwinism’ (Hawkins 1997,ch.7), evident in the motley pro-
nouncements of various anarchists, socialists and ‘new liberals’. L. T. Hob-
house (1864–1929), a prominent journalist, did much to champion this new
view. Governments were urged to think about ‘the community’, and to do
far more to tackle the problems of modern poverty, ill-health and industrial
inefficiency, in the interests of all (Freeden 1978).
36
Welfare was no longer
a dirty word. References to altruism and co-operation, and also a certain
reverence for nature, in Darwin’s own accounts were now eagerly taken up
and drawn out. We see this new focus in the work of an obscure clerk from
the British Civil Service, Benjamin Kidd (1858–1916), who quietly penned
Social Evolution (1894), only to discover he had a best-seller on his hands.
Here religion made a come-back, now seen as evolution’s best friend, its
values extolled as those best adapted to ensure socio-biological progress.
4 Uncertain futures
Friedrich Lange pointed out how Darwin wanted to jettison the supernat-
ural and the unknowable in favour of the natural and the comprehensible.
Whilst this is true, such an account does not quite capture the fluidity of
Darwin’s thought nor the bold imaginative gambles that he took. Despite
36 For related discussion of political philosophy in France, and specifically on the emergence of bio-
medical ideas about social solidarity and social defence, see Nye 1994.
680
The politics of nature
the congruence of some of his pronouncements with those of Galton and
company, the style, tone and capacity for self-doubt were different. We
also know, as Lange could not, that Darwin’s thought was by no means
encompassed by his best-known, formal works. The range of his writing,
published and unpublished, was much wider. In addition to his private cor-
respondence, he filled a series of notebooks with an extraordinary range
of speculations. The first notebook entitled ‘The Transmutation of Species’
had opened in July 1837; such scribblings continued unabated into the sub-
sequent decade. Darwin cannot be seen in conventionally defined terms as a
political firebrand any more than he can be dubbed a consistent reactionary.
Undoubtedly he was appalled by some social and political disorders he wit-
nessed in his lifetime, but his work also displayed a remarkable openness of
thought and a willingness to probe boundaries of many types. He deployed
materialist terms even where this allied him uncomfortably with politically
revolutionary ideas. These jottings, bold in conception, shy of publicity,
ranged across sexual desire, inheritance, theology, the moral sense, evil as
a function of our biological descent, God as human projection, morality
as a function of the influences to which we are subjected, and many other
matters. Darwin probed the materialist origins of our behaviour; yet he
also dreaded where the work was taking him. The potentially subversive
implications of this trajectory were clear enough to their author but he was
unable to censor his ‘free associations’ any more than he could the saliva,
which, he declared in a notebook, ran freely at moments of sexual desire,
whether consciously willed or not.
37
Several recent commentators have suggested that materialism rather than
evolutionism caused the deepest moral disturbance, both for Darwin himself
and his critics. It was this aspect of his work which Victorian readers either
failed to grasp or refused to countenance (Bowler 1989,pp.86–7). But Dar-
win was not comfortable with the idea that he might provide ammunition
to radical political dissenters, low-life anti-clerics and other extremists. The
prospect of being associated with outright hostility to the church or state
37 ‘Sexual desire makes saliva to flow / yes, certainly / curious association: I have seen Nina licking her
chops. – someone has described slovering teethless-jaws as picture of disgusting lewd old man. One’s
tendency to kiss, and almost bite, that which one sexually loves is probably connected with flow of
saliva, and hence with action of mouth and jaws. – Lascivious women are described as biting : so do
stallions always. – No doubt man has great tendency to exert all senses, when thus stimulated, smell,
as Sir C Bell says, and hearing music, to certain degree sexual. – The association of saliva is probably
due to our distant ancestors having been like dogs to bitches.’ Grubar 1974,p.338. ‘Nina’ was one
of Darwin’s dogs.
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Daniel Pick
appeared to made him wretched, indeed to make him retch.
38
Through the
1820sand1830s, some political radicals and medical men had sought to use
evolutionary ideas as well as materialist arguments as part of a wider cam-
paign against current political arrangements as well as orthodox morality.
Darwin’s modern interpreters have debated the timing of his move from
theism to ‘agnosticism’ (Huxley’s word) and have argued over the degree
to which he continued to believe in a preordained design, even if the very
notion of such a blueprint went against his own most challenging formu-
lations (Ospovat 1980). How had his teachers and associates, in Edinburgh,
Cambridge or London, affected him? To what degree did his family’s fate
and values impinge upon his scientific views – from the enduring religious
faith of his wife, to the devastating loss of his daughter, Annie? That death,
it has been argued, caused him to discard the last vestiges of the Christian
creed.
It is now and then claimed that Darwin, in the end, definitively accepted
that the world was entirely devoid of God. But to seek that final resolution
of Darwin’s beliefs is to conjure away the contradictions that mark his
oeuvre and to travesty this most complex of modern Victorians. To see
evolutionism at large as necessarily at war with religion also underestimates
the ingenious accommodations that have continued to be made long after
Darwin’s death (see Lustig et al. 2004,ch.1). One very significant merit
of the greater literary and metaphorical emphasis that was to mark late
twentieth-century studies of Victorian evolutionary thought has been a
greater appreciation of the plurality of connotations, the rich novelistic
and imaginative quality of Darwin’s work and more generally of scientific
communications.
39
Sometimes Darwin’s public references to religion have
been interpreted away as mere rhetorical subterfuge. But it seems doubtful
that we can make so crude a distinction in Darwin’s case between a genuine
belief in and a cynical deployment of God. The language of religion, even of
demonology, sometimes informed the very insights in which he shook the
faith. Indeed even in his notoriously ‘blasphemous’ notebooks, it is striking
how often Darwin brings in metaphysics and religious images, even as he
seeks to make them redundant. Darwin’s equivocation on such matters was
matched by the twists and turns of faith evident in many of his scientific
contemporaries. His concessions to religious belief were arguably exceeded
38 Darwin’s chronic experience of illness has prompted extensive interpretation and a rich vein of
speculation; see Bowlby 1990;Colp1977; Desmond and Moore 1991.
39 See Beer 1983;Levine1988. For Darwin’s ‘metaphor’, see Young 1985. Other works on literary
Darwin or the Darwinian strain in literature (in Hardy or Conrad, for example) have followed.
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The politics of nature
by those of Spencer, who generally had a ‘let-out clause’ for the materialism
which shaped his pronouncements.
Darwin’s autobiographical remarks lend some weight to the view that
he became increasingly disillusioned with religious, providential and natu-
ral theological explanations of nature, but he remained famously cautious
about open dissent and continued to doubt himself. He would advise his
son George to ‘pause, pause, pause’ before writing an article which uncom-
promisingly attacked religion (Desmond and Moore 1991,pp.602–3).
40
Expediency and moral confusion remained difficult for anyone to disentan-
gle. As he declared on one occasion to Hooker, ‘My theology is a simple
muddle; I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can
see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind, in the
details.’
41
In the autobiographical sketch which he produced for his children
in 1876, he vividly described the internal struggle he had in overcoming
orthodox religious philosophy. He admitted to them his growing realisation
that with the theory of selection, natural theology ‘which formerly seemed
to me so conclusive, fails’ (F. Darwin 1958,p.63). To spell out the conclu-
sion: ‘There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings,
and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind
blows’ (F. Darwin 1958,p.63). Darwin told his children that belief in an
intelligent God must be drawn from ‘deep inward conviction and feelings
which are experienced by most persons’. But he confided that the religious
sentiment had never been very strongly developed in him (F. Darwin 1958,
p. 65). Interestingly, however, he cast his agnosticism as a loss of perception,
rather than as a firm conviction. It was like being colour-blind (F. Darwin
1958,p.65).
40 The moral problem of speaking out on the subject of religion, Darwin considered ‘frightfully
difficult’. For his view that overt attacks on religion were counterproductive, and to be avoided,
see Desmond and Moore 1991,p.26. Despite his diffidence, it seems likely that the damage his
work inflicted on orthodox faith was a major factor in preventing him from being knighted. When
the idea was mooted by Palmerston (the incoming Prime Minister in 1859), the idea was blocked,
probably through the intervention of the Bishop of Oxford, Wilberforce.
41 Letter to J. D. Hooker (12 July 1870) (Darwin and Seward 1903,I,p.321). A young science lecturer,
Dr Edward Aveling, asked Darwin if he might dedicate a book to him. The work in question was
due to appear in the International Library of Science and Freethought, under the editorship of Annie
Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, MP. Darwin replied that although he was a strong support er of free
thought, he thought it best to avoid discussion of religion and had always ‘confined myself to science’
(quoted in Desmond and Moore 1991,p.26). On the other hand, to take a conflicting example,
note Darwin’s (cautious) support in the 1870sforThe Index,anAmericanweeklyfromtheradical
wing of the Free Religion Association, a grouping of Unitarians and philosophical unbelievers who
demanded freedom from dogma and promoted a humanistic ‘free’ religion (Desmond and Moore
1991,p.591).
683