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Charles Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and

Panpsychism
C. U. M. SMITH
Department o f Biological Sciences,
University o f Aston in Birmingham,
Birmingham, England

"How does consciousness commence? ''1 The evolution theory stem-


ruing from the work of Charles Darwin has obvious implications for the
problem of the mind's place in nature. This was recognized by Darwin
himself, by his contemporaries, and by his immediate successors. What
was Darwin's own position with respect to this problem?
The mind2-b ody problem has troubled philosophers since philosophy
began. Numerous solutions have been proposed. Probably the best
known is the two-substance view, which holds that mind and body are
two separate and separable entities? Other thinkers have rejected this
dualism: they have held either that all things proceed from the mind
(idealism) or that all things are material (materialism). The advent of
evolutionary theories provided materialists with two alternative ex-
planations for the phenomenon o f mind. Either it could be argued
that mind "emerges" from previously "mindless" matter when matter
achieves a certain level o f complexity or a special configuration, or,
alternatively, it could be argued that subjectivity, albeit of an incon-
ceivably primitive variety, is a feature of all matter - organic and
inorganic. The former view is usually termed "emergentism," the latter
"panpsychism." Emergentism is well expressed by Lewes when he
writes "co-operation o f things of unlike kind leads to an emergent
unlike [any of] its components. ''4 Panpsychism, by contrast, conceives
that higher orders of mentality develop concomitantly with higher
orders of material complexity. There is no sudden emergence of a new

1. C. R. Darwin, "Old and Useless Notes," p. 35 (~ 1838), transcribed by


P. H. Barrett and H. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study o f Scientific
Creativity (London: Wildwood House, 1974).
2. For the purposes of this paper I shall, following the definitions in the
Oxford English Dictionary, take the terms "mind, .... soul," "consciousness," and
"awareness" to be largely synonymous: the essence of the concept is the fact of
subjective experience - pain, hunger, redness, and so forth.
3. This view receives its best-known exposition in the work of Descartes, but
its lineage extends far back into classical and preclassical times, e.g., Plato (Phaedo,
77), Aristotle (DeAnima, 413a5), Genesis, 2:7.
4. G. H. Lewes, Problems o f Life andMind (London: Trubner, 1875), II, 413.

Journal o f the History ofBiology, voL 11, no. 2 (Fall 1978), pp. 245-267.
Copyright © 1978 by D. R eidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland.
c. u. M. SMITH

property, but instead, as William James puts it, "there must be an in-
finite number o f degrees o f consciousness following the degrees of
complication and aggregation of the primordial mind dust. ''s
The purpose o f this paper is to trace the origins and development o f
Charles Darwin's thought in this area and t o determine, so far as it is
possible in so cautious a writer, his mature position.

Looking back in 1873, Darwin believed that his scientific tastes had
been formed by his youthful passionate addiction t o field sports and
b y his Beagle circumnavigation. 6 His father, exasperated, had told him,
" Y o u care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you
will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family. ''7 He writes in his
Autobiography that as a y o u t h he had been so obsessed with shooting
that he had been accustomed to leave his boots already opened when he
went to b e d at Maer, his future father-in-law's home, so that he would
lose no time in putting them on in the first light o f the morrow's dawn. 8
A second strong trait in Darwin's outlook was the firm family con-
viction that man's inhumanity t o man (and to animals) was insupport-
able and ought to be reduced. Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin's maternal
grandfather, had been prominent in the late eighteenth-century anti-
slavery campaign. 9 He had designed and struck, at his own expense,
medallions showing pictures of chained Negroes inscribed " A m I not
a man and a b r o t h e r ? " and " A m I n o t a woman and a sister?. ''1° His
paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a colleague o f Josiah Wedgwood

5. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), pp. 149-
150.
6. This summing-up is contained in Darwin's answers to the questionnaire
which Galton sent in 1873 to Darwin and a number of other eminent thinkers in
an attempt to discover the origins and background of high achievement: Life and
Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. F. Darwin Murray, (London: John Murray, 1887),
III, 178.
7. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters, ed. F. Darwin
Dover (New York: Dover, 1958).
8. Ibid., p. 16. The Autobiography contains many other striking instances of
Darwin's early absorption in field sports.
9. Josiah Wedgwood, although an "accurate" and, indeed, autocratic master,
displayed the paternalistic concern common among nonconformists with the
well-being of his workers - indeed he worked among them himself at times. His
evangelical conscience revolted in particular at the physical cruelties inflicted by
slaveowners on their slaves. See D. B. Davies, The Problem o f Slavery in the Age
of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 230,
465, etc.
10. Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, p. 66.

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Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism

in Birmingham's Lunar Society, was similarly active in the antislavery


campaign. His strong feelings are expressed in a couplet which his
grandson quotes in the biographical note which he affixed to the trans-
lation of Krause's biography: 11

Hear him, ye Senates! hear this truth sublime


He who allows oppression shares the crime. ~2

In the Journal o f Researches, where Charles reports the experiences


of his Beagle voyage, this family feeling comes through strongly. Writ-
ing, for instance, of the slavery he had observed in Brazil, he says: "It
makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishrnen
and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have
been and are so guilty. ''~3
Darwin disembarked from the Beagle at Falmouth on October 2,
1836, and the following ten years were perhaps the most creative of
his life. Fortunately, m a n y of the diaries, notebooks, and manuscripts
which he wrote during these ten years have survived and have in some
cases been transcribed and published. 14 These, together with the

11. K. Krause, The Life of, Erasmus Darwin with a Preliminary Notice by
Charles Darwin, trans. W. S. Dallas (London: John Murray, 1879). Charles also
quotes with approbation the following passage from Erasmus's monograph on the
education of girls (.4 Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding
Schools, 1797): "Compassion, or sympathy with the affairs of others, ought also
to extend to the brute creation . . . to destroy even insects wantonly shows an
unreflecting mind, or a depraved heart."
12. E. Darwin, The Loves o f Plants (London, 1789). Furthermore Josiah
Wedgwood's antislavery medallion is described (and illustrated) in the second
canto of this poem.
13. C. Darwin, Journal o f Researches (London: Ward Lock, 1836), p. 471. If
mental attitudes can be classified as tough or tender, Darwin's seem to fall into
the latter category. The well-known incident which (he says) contributed to turn-
ing him away from medicine at Edinburgh (Autobiography, p. 12), his abhorrence
of unnecessary vivisection (Life and Letters, III, pp. 199-210), and the incident in
the crowd at Cambridge with Henslow (Autobiography, p. 23) all testify to his
sensitivity to injustice and his appreciation of the suffering of others. It is interest-
hag to observe this "tender-mindedness" also at work in the Darwinian "reduc-
tion." His openness to animal life, his awareness of the personality of animals,
predisposes him to believe that, as he says, "we are all netted together," we are all
equal members of one creation.
14. J. C. Greene, "Reflections on the Progress of Darwin Studies," Z Hist.
Biol., 8, (1975), 243-273, reviews the recent spate of Darwin scholarship and the
recent transcriptions of his notebooks. I have, in particular made use of the M
notebook (July-October 1838), the N notebook (October 1838-August 1839),

247
c. U. M. SMITH

Autobiography, especially the version edited b y Nora Baflow, the three


volumes of Life and Letters, the two volumes of More Letters, plus the
many books and papers he published during his lifetime provide a re-
markably rich data base from which to reconstruct his thought.
I have already indicated that b y his own account, and that of others,
Darwin's early outlook was colored by a passionate involvement in field
sports and b y a hatred of cruelty and oppression. Is We can see these
predilections at work in his early notebooks. In B, p. 232, for instance,
he writes: "Animals our fellow brethren in pain, disease death and
suffering and famine . . . . our companion in our amusements, they may
partake, from our origin in one common ancestor we may all be netted
together." Throughout these early notebooks, Darwin insists on the
close relationship between man and at least the other members of the
Anthropoidea. He makes, for instance, m a n y inquiries and observations
on whether or n o t monkeys and apes recognize women (D, p. 137; M,
p. 156; H. p. 138; and so on). He remarks that if we visit an orangutan
in captivity, "hear its expressive whine, see its intelligence when spoken
to, see its affection for those it knows, see its passion and rage, sulkiness
and every action of despair" (C, p. 79), we can hardly help making a
favorable comparison with the naked, unintelligible Fuegians with
whom he had been so struck during hisBeagle voyage. ~6 This might be
compared with a passage from a contemporary investigation of the
biology of the higher primates; after several years of close involvement
in chimpanzee research, Hebb and Thompson write: "exposure to a
group of adult chimpanzees gives one the overwhelming conviction that

the notebook which he later dubbed "Old and Useless Notes," or OUN (1837-
1840), and extracts from the B. C. D and E transmutation notebooks (1837-
1839), all of which have been transcribed by Barrett and published in Darwin on
Man (citations to these are henceforth given in the text); I have also been able to
make use of the recent publication of Darwin's first draft of his "Big Species
Book," a prrds of which formed The Origin of Species in 1859: this with a very
useful bibliography has been edited by R. C. Stauffer and published as Charles
Darwin's Natural Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
15. It might, of course, seem to us, who can hardly be unaware of the anti-
blood-sports movement in late twentieth-century society, that these two com-
mitments were somewhat contradictory. In the very different circumstances of
the early nineteenth century, this contradiction (if contradiction it is) was not
obvious: hunting and shooting did not seem cruel or oppressive to Darwin; he
felt only that he was pitting his wits against the wits of his game animals and
hence became absorbed in animal life and in animal ways (see theAutobiography,
p. 16).
16. Darwin, Journal of Researches, p. 206.

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Darwin, the Origin o f Consciousness, and Panpsychism

one is dealing with an essentially human set of attitudes and motiva-


tions. ''17 Social attitudes of many varieties can be detected: friendli-
ness, anger, desire for attention, malice, and boredom. In much of this
there seems to be an element o f awareness which points toward the
beginnings o f conceptual thought.
Darwin believes that it is largely arrogance which prevents us from
accepting that "we are all n e t t e d together": "Animals whom we have
made our slaves," he writes (B, p. 231), "we do not like to consider our
equals - (Do n o t slave-holders wish to make the black man other kind?)
- animals with affections, imitation, fear of death, sorrow for the dead
- respect"; and in C, pp. 196-197, he asserts: "Man in his arrogance
thinks himself a great work w o r t h y the interposition o f a Deity. More
humble and I believe truer to consider him created from animals."
Similar sentiments are expressed in C, p. 158. Once again one can ob-
serve this openness to the dignity o f animal life forming one o f the
roots of the Darwinian reduction.
The view that men and animals are all to be caught in one net is a
first step, although certainly not the last, toward an acceptance of the
general position o f panpsychism. Before going any further, however, it
will be well to clarify the provenance o f the concept and to indicate the
extent o f its influence in the early nineteenth century.
The idea goes back t d classical antiquity, where it merges with a gen-
eral feeling that the world is active rather than passive and inert. Thales,
it will be recalled, conceived the world to be "animate and full of
divinities. ''18 Democritus, the cofounder of classical atomism, believed
that a certain t y p e o f atom, spherical and thus highly mobile, formed
the substance of the mind. 19 Gassendi, also, in reintroducing the atomic
t h e o r y to the modern world, supposed that the atoms possessed a
"sensus naturalis," a native awareness. 2° This view resurfaces, in a more
sophisticated form, in the monads of Leibniz's philosophy, 21 and was
widespread in French biological theory during the eighteenth century. 22

17. D. O. Hebb, and W. R. Thompson, "The Social Significance of Animal


Studies," in Handbook o f Social Psychology, ed. G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, vol.
II (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1968).
18. Aristotle, DeAnima, 411a7.
19. Ibid., 405a11.
20. J. E. McGuire, "Atoms and the Analogy of Nature," Hist. Phil. Sci., 1
(1970), 3-58.
21. G. W. yon Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, trans.
R. Latta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).
22. Maupertuis, La Mettrie, and Diderot were all familiar with the idea of or-
ganic units and/or molecules having some lowly form of intelligence or sensibility.

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c. u. M. SMITH

In England, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning


of the nineteenth century, a more mystical type of cosmic panpsychism
or hylozoism was common. Erasmus Darwin, for instance, introduces
the Zoonomia with the following adaptation of Virgil:

Earth, on whose lap a thousand nations tread


And Ocean, brooding his prolific bed
Night's changeful orb, blue pole, and silvery zones,
Where other worlds encircle other suns
One mind inhabits, one diffusive Soul
Wields the large limbs and mingles with the whole. 23

A similar spirit breathes through the verses of his posthumously pub-


lished Temple o f Nature (1803). At about the same time in the late
eighteenth century the young Wordsworth was filled with a similar
conviction that the world was animated by a vital force. This reaction
to nature is expressed in many places in his poetry 24 and perhaps most
famously in the lines composed above Tientern Abbey:

A motion and a spirit, that impels


All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things

Coleridge, also, expresses the same perception in the Aeolian Harp:

And what if all animated nature


Be but organic harps diversely framed
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze
At once the soul of each and God of all

The imaginative debt which Coleridge owed Erasmus Darwin has


been well documented. 2s It is interesting to find that not only Erasmus

See J. Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pense~ franqaise du XVIIIe sibde
(Paris: Colin, 1963).
23. E. Darwin, Zoonomia (London, 1796).
24. See R. D. Havens, The Mind of a Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1941), esp. pp. 74-75, 186-188.
25. See Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. K. Cobttrn (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), no. 73;pp. 2093, 2325, 2331, 4342, etc. J. L.
Lowes's famous study The Road to Xanadu, also shows the extent of Coleridge's
imaginative debt to Erasmus Darwin.

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Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism

but also his famous grandson shared some of the perceptions of the
Lake Poets. In the posthumously published autobiographical fragment
where Charles remembers himself as a ten-year-old boy, he writes that
"the memory now flashes across me of the pleasure I had in the evening
of a blowy day walking along the beach by myself and seeing the gulls
and the cormorants wending their way home in a wild and irregular
course. Such poetic pleasures, felt so keenly in after years, I should not
have expected so early in life ''26 (my italics). One also reads in the
Autobiography that "up to the age o f thirty, or beyond it, poetry of
many kinds, such as the work of Milton, Gray, Byron and Shelley gave
me great pleasure. ''27 As is well known, Darwin lost this sensitivity to
poetry (and, indeed, to music) later in his life and was very sorry for it.
In Germany, also, the end of the eighteenth century and the begin-
ning o f the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a Romantic Nature
philosophy. This proved deeply antipathetic to less metaphysical minds.
Naturphilosophie reached a climax in the work of Schelling and Oken
and produced a reaction to biological theorizing which lasted well into
the 1850's. 2s Although it is clear that Charles Darwin was familiar with
the writings o f the Nature philosophers 29 it is also clear that their form
of Spinozoistic panpsychism held no appeal for him. He would have
nothing to do with what most biologists of his time regarded as their
"overspeculation," with the belief common in many of their writings
that homologous forms were in some way the working out of a unifying
theme in the mind of God: In spite of a family temperament which
may have predisposed him to favor the Romantics, his approach to the
phenomena of biology was far more down-to-earth than that of his
grandfather. As he writes in the Origin: "On my theory unity of type is
explained b y unity o f descent. ''3°
Charles Darwin was much closer to the facts than were most of the

26. C. R. Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. F. Darwin (London:


John Murray, 1903), I, 5.
27. Autobiography (Barlow's edition), p. 138. Indeed, he boasts that he was
so fond of Wordsworth that he read The Excursion through twice soon after he
returned from his circumnavigation.
28. See the account in C. U. M. Smith, The Problem of Life (London:
Macmillan, 1976), chap. 18.
29. C. R. Darwin, Natural Selection, ed. R. C. Stauffer (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1975), VII, fol. 40, fok 79; VIII, fol. 97; C. R. Darwin,
Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication (London, John Murray,
1868), vols. I and II.
30. C. R. Darwin, The Origin o f Species by Means o f Natural Selection (1859).
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 233.

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c. u. M SMITH

German philosophers o f Nature; his understanding developed directly


from his experience of field sports and as a field naturalist. Neverthe-
less, he seems to have felt early on that even the views he derived from
this source could not be expressed without caution. Early in his M note-
b o o k (p. 57) he writes: "To avoid stating how far I believe in Material-
ism say only that emotions, degrees o f talent, which are hereditary are
so because the brain of the child resembles the parent stock." It m a y
be, as Gruber suggests, 31 that Darwin's early experience at a meeting of
the Plinian Society had made him very careful about expressing his true
views in this area. In his Autobiography we read that this was one o f
the few university societies he assiduously attended. 32 Gruber shows
that a paper presented b y his friend and fellow student W. A. Browne,
which argued that b o t h life and mind were emergent properties o f in-
creasingly organized matter, caused such a furor that it was struck from
the minute-book. This happened in 1827, when Charles Darwin was just
eighteen years old.
Browne's views on the origin of mind, seem, however, to have been
very close to those which Charles Darwin, following once more in his
grandfather's footsteps, 33 himself accepted - at least at this period in
his life and for some years after. For we fmd that he is deeply concerned
with this topic throughout his early notebooks. He reports, for example,
discussions with his future brother-in-law, Hensleigh Wedgwood, who
insisted that to say that "the brain thinks is nonsense" (M, p. 61e). 34
But Darwin goes on to note that " t o see a p u p p y playing cannot doubt
that they have free-will" (M, p. 72) and hence consciousness (OUN,
p. 25a), and if "all animals, then an oyster has and a polype." And in
M, p. 101 e, he writes, "The facts of half-instincts when two varieties are

31. Gruber, Darwin on Man, pp. 39-40.


32. Darwin, Autobiography, p. 14.
33. That Erasmus Darwin found no difficulty in believing that mind was an
emergent property of complexifying matter is shown by U. 269-280 of the first
canto of the Temple of Nature:
Next the long nerves tmite their silver train
And young SENSATION permeates the brain

Last in thick swarms ASSOCIATIONS spring


Thoughts join to thoughts, to motions motions cling
Whence in long trains of catenation flow
Imagined joy and volufitary woe.
34. Hensleigh Wedgwood's deep interest in psychology is attested by the
publication in 1848 of a small monograph called On the Development of the
Understanding.

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Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism

crossed as in Shepherd dogs . . . is valuable it shows that new instincts


originate - strong argument for brain bringing thought, and not merely
instinct, a separate thing superadded - we can trace causation of
thought - it is brought within the confines of examination - obeys the
same laws as other parts of the structure." In the N notebook, which
immediately follows the M notebook, we read (p. 5): "To study meta-
physics, as they have always been studied appears to me like puzzling
at astronomy without m e c h a n i c s . . , the mind is function of the body
- we must bring some stable foundation to argue from."
Instances could be multiplied. All of these notes, the M, N, and OLIN
notebooks, and many of the early transmutation notebooks are full of
queries and struggles about man, mind, and materialism. The material
comes not only from the science journals and the intellectual and
philosophical periodicals of the day, not only from Darwin's Beagle
experiences, but also from his family and friends, his pets and domestic
animals, his nephews and nieces, uncles, aunts, and especially his father.
At this period in his life Charles Darwin was far more than a specialist
in biology: his interest spread over the whole of human experience,
though it was mostly seen through the prism of his family, in a truly
philosophical manner.
But as one reads through the notebooks, one also catches the occa-
sional tone of exasperation. Referring to Kirby's 1835 Bridgewater
Treatise, 3s Darwin writes (OUN, p. 36): "Kirby extends instincts to
plants" (Kirby conceived that the development of plant seed-dispersal
mechanisms was an instance of instinct operating) ; "But," says Darwin,
"surely instincts imply willing, therefore word misplaced. The meanings
of words must be made out: Reason, Will, Consciousness."
And be goes on (OUN, pp. 36-37): "no soul superadded, thought
however unintelligible it may be seems as much a function of organ, as
bile of liver. - is the attraction of carbon, hydrogen in certain definite
proportions (different from what takes place outside bodies) really less
wonderful than thoughts." Perhaps there is an allusion here to the
debate about vital forces which enlivened the work of physiological
chemists in the 1830's and 1840's. Although Darwin does not refer to
Chaptal, Berzelius, or Liebig, it is worth remembering that while at
school Charles and his elder brother Erasmus gained some notoriety
for pursuing chemical experimentation in a shed at the bottom of the
garden, and, looking back in later years, Charles remembered these

35. W. Kirby, On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as Manifested in


the Creation of Animals and in their History, Habits and lnstincts (London, 1835).

253
c. u. M. SMITH

experiences "as the best part of my education at s c h o o l . ''36 Returning


to the OLIN, however, we find that Darwin ends this particular passage
with an expression of agnosticism or despair: "What is matter? the
whole thing a mystery." It is not surprising that Darwin's effort to
unravel so many different strands of thought and fit them into the
theory he was forming gave him violent headaches, so that he was
forced to unwind by reading Dickens (M, p. 81) and by allowing his
attention to skip aimlessly from one topic to another while on a trip to
Woolwich (M, p. 90).
But even while he relaxes, he observes himself and later notes his
observations. And this leads into another important theme in Charles
Darwin's psychophysiology. This is the concept of "double conscious-
ness." This, he writes (M, p. 78), must be "considered profoundly." In
some cases he appears to be concerned with instances of schizophrenia
(often examples occurring in his father's practice); in others he is refer-
ring to a group of five anonymous articles in Blackwood's Magazine
entitled "Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness. ''37 In M,
p. 155, he notes, "Read: paper on consciousness in Brutes and Animals
in Blackwood's magazine, June 1838"; and immediately below this
note he adds: "copied." These papers, written in fact by James Ferrier,
Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, put
forward an interesting and penetrating theory.
Ferrier points out that psychologists make a profound mistake when
they attempt, as he puts it, to "objectise" the human mind. "Man him-
self," he writes, "is not to l~e found in this calculating machine. He with
all his true phenomena, has burst alive from under her [i.e., science's]
petrific hand and leaves her grasping 'airy nothings.' ,38 Man, says
Ferrier, is not a tripartite affair: body, mind, and observing sell That
analysis is, he argues, absurd. "The mind," he writes, "cannot be an
object. An object can be conceived only as that which may possibly
become an object to something else. Now what can the mind become
an object to? Not to me for I am it and not to something else. Not
to something else without again being denuded of consciousness. ''39
"Man," Ferrier concludes, "is an existent who knows that he exists.
This is the human phenomenon. ''4°

36. Darwin, Autobiography, p. 11.


37. J. Ferrier, "An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness," Black-
wood's Mag., 43, (1838), 187-201,437-452, 784-797 ;44, 234-244, 539-552.
38. Ibid., 43, p. 193.
39. Ibid., 43, p. 194.
40. Ibid.,43, p. 201.

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Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism

But what, to quote Charles Darwin, of the "Brutes and Animals"?


Ferrier is quite prepared to accept that they show marvelous evidence
of reason; but it is all "instinctive reason." Completely unwittingly do
they construct their nests and hives, migrate and follow their reproduc-
tive rituals: "none of these creatures," Ferrier writes, "know that they
exist, no notion of themselves accompanies their existence and their
various changes, neither do they take account to themselves of the
reason which is operating within them. It is reserved for man to live
this double life. To exist and be conscious of existence; to be rational
and to know that he is so. ''41
But how can we be so sure that animals do not possess, to use the
existentialist term, this "reflective" consciousness? Because, writes
Ferrier, they do not show the features which consciousness causes in
man: conscience, morality, responsibility. Only humans, continues
Ferrier, show these features, and hence consciousness "marks man off
from all other things with a line of distinct and deep drawn demarca-
tion. ''42 "It is in virtue of this fact," he concludes, "that we are free,
moral, social and responsible beings." In parenthesis here, we might
nowadays suspect, precisely because of Darwin's work, that cause and
effect are the other way about: the evolution of social life is not the
consequence of but the cause of self-consciousness.
Ferrier's theory is clearly challenging to an evolutionist. And, from
the evidence of the early notebooks as well as from some of the later
published works, Darwin rose to the challenge. In M, p. 24, we read of
how "Squib [a dog] at Maer [his uncle Wedgwood's estate] used to
betray himself by looking ashamed before it was known that he had
been on the table - guilty conscience. Not probable in Squib's case any
direct fear." Is it possible for animals or humans to feel ashamed if they
have not notion of self?. In M, p. 144, Darwin writes, "What is the
philosophy of shame and blushing?" This is, of course, a topic which
forms an important chapter in the 1872 Expression of the Emotions. In
M, p. 140, he writes: "Jenny [the orangutan] will often do a thing she
has been told not to do - when she thinks keeper will not see her - but
then she knows that she has done wrong and will hide herself - I do
not know whether fear or shame - when she thinks she is going to be
whipped, will cover with straw or a blanket." In M, p. 161, Darwin cites
his future wife: "Emma W. says that when she is playing by memory
she does not think at all, whether she can or cannot play the piece, she

41. Ibid., 43, p. 199.


42. Ibid., 43, p. 201.

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C. U. M. SMITH

plays better than when she tries, is this not precisely the same, as
double-conscious kept playing so well." And in M, p. 62, he quotes
with strong approval Lord Brougham's 1839 opinion that "the differ-
ence between man and animals only in kind. ''43
The whole drift of Darwin's argument is to eliminate any 'deep-
drawn demarcation" between man and animals. An animal is not for
Darwin, as it was for Ferrier, "nothing but a machine, or thing agitated
and usurped by a kind of tyrannous agency, just as a reed is shaken by
the wind. ''44 Darwin is much closer to the judgment of Alison, whose
article in Todd's Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology 4s he cites
many times in Chapter X of his "Natural Selection" manuscript. Alison
continued the line of thought publicized by Erasmus Darwin in the
Zoonomia, which he quotes frequently, though not uncritically. 46
Alison believed, contrary to Kirby who, like Ferrier, saw animals as
merely puppets or automata actuated by the divine will, 47 that "animals
are as conscious of mental effort as we are ourselves. ''48
But if Charles Darwin saw animals as conscious beings very much
like ourselves, in contrast to the mechanisms perceived by Ferrier,
Kirby, and Descartes, the question naturally arises: How far through
the living world does consciousness reach? Where and when does con-
sciousness commence?
Darwin's struggle with this problem is recorded in the pages of the
notebooks. In OUN, p. 16, he writes: "A Planaria must be looked at as
an animal, with consciousness, it choosing food - crawling from light -
yet we can split Planaria into three animals and this consciousness

43. H. Brougham, Dissertations on Subjects of Science Connected with


Natural Theology, Being the Concluding Volume of the New Edition of Paley's
Work (London, 1839).
44. Ferrier, " I n t r o d u c t i o n , " 43, p. 447.
45. R. B. Todd, The Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology (London,
1836), voL III.
46. E. Darwin, Zoonomia, XVI, 17: " I f we turn our eyes u p o n t h e fabric of
our fellow animals, we find that t h e y are supported with bones, covered with
skins, moved b y muscles; that t h e y possess t h e same senses, acknowledge t h e same
appetites and are nourished b y t h e same aliment with ourselves; a n d we should
hence conclude f r o m t h e strongest analogy, that their internal faculties were also
in s o m e measure similar to our o w n . "
47. Kirby, Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, II, 255-256: " T h e organisa-
tion of t h e brain a n d nervous system m a y b e so varied a n d f o r m e d b y the Creator
as to respond in the way he wills to pulses u p o n t h e m from t h e physical powers o f
nature.
48. Alison, T o d d ' s Cyclopaedia o f Anatomy and Physiology, III, 16.

256
Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism

becomes multiplied." In OUN, p. 35, writing of animal growth and


development, Darwin notes: "Hence a sensorium which receives com-
munication from without and gives a wondrous power of willing."
But he footnotes immediately beneath: "can willing be used without
consciousness, for it is not evident what animals have consciousness."
He then continues (OLIN, p. 35), "How does consciousness com-
mence?" and answers his question in terms which Sherrington was later
to make familiar: "where other senses come into play, when relation is
kept up with a distant object, when many such objects are present."
But Darwin is not sure. He writes immediately afterward: "all this
can take place and man not conscious as in sleep, or in sleep is man
momentarily conscious but memory gone? .... Where pain and pleasure
is felt where must consciousness be? . . . . How near in structure is the
ganglionic system o f the lower animals and the sympathetic in man?"
"Can insects live with no more consciousness than our intestines have?"
It is after this series of striking questions that, as we have already
noticed, he mentally throws up his hands and writes that "the meanings
of words must be made out: Reason, Will, Consciousness" and con-
cludes that "the whole is a mystery." And writing to G. J. Romanes at
the end of his life (March 7, 1881) he says, referring to his work on
earthworms (Formation of Vegetable Mould by the Action of Worms,
1881), "I tried to observe what happened in m y own mind when I did
the work of a worm . . . . If I come across a professed metaphysician I
will ask him for a more technical definition, with a few words about
the abstract, the concrete, the absolute and the infinite . . . . When I
think of how it has bothered me to know what I mean by 'intelligent' I
am sorry for you in your great work on the minds of animals. ''a9 Forty
years earlier, in C, p. 166, he had focused on the theme of arrogance,
writing: " w h y is thought being a secretion of the brain more wonderful
than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration
of ourselves." Here we see yet another example of that continuing atti-
tude: Darwin's reductionism.
The notebooks reveal the ferment of ideas from which Darwin's
mature works grew. His interests in comparative psychology and
psychophysiology are aspects of and adjuncts to his overall purpose: to
provide an explanation of the origin of species. It is thus not altogether
surprising to find that they never received the full working-up and
publication that he accorded material more central to his theory. Never-
theless the long manuscript "Natural Selection," on which he was

49. F. Darwin, ed., MoreLetters, II, 213.

257
C. U. M. SMITH

working when he received Wallace's momentous communication, con-


tains a Chapter X entitled "Mental Powers and Instincts of Animals."
Parts of this chapter were to form Chapter VII of the Origfn, entitled
simply "Instinct." Most of the manuscript, however, remained unpub-
lished during Darwin's lifetime. We find in folio 2 that he has (probably
wisely) given up puzzling about the origins and nature of consciousness:
"we are no more concerned with the first origin of the senses and the
various faculties of the mind, than we are with the first origin of life. ''s°
And he reiterates this agnosticism in the 1871 Descent o f Man, where
we read: "In what manner the mental powers were first developed in
the lowest organisms is as hopeless an enquiry as how life itself first
originated. These are problems for the distant future, if ever they are to
be solved by man. ''sl
It is well known that Darwin handed over his notes, clippings, and
manuscript on comparative psychology to his younger contemporary
and friend G. J. Romanes. 52 Romanes wove some of this material into
his book Mental Evolution in Animals 53 and published the major part
of the manuscript of Chapter X of "Natural Selection" as an appendix.
It is thus instructive to note what Romanes has to say on the subject,
for it may point to Darwin's own unpublished and less explicit position.
On p. 8 o f Mental Evolution in Animals, we read: "if the doctrine of
Organic Evolution is accepted, it carries with it, as a necessary corollary,
the doctrine of Mental Evolution"; and on p. 16, we read: "starting
from what I know subjectively about the operations of my own individ-
ual mind, and of the activities which in my own organism these opera-
tions seem to prompt, I proceed by analogy to infer from the observable
activities displayed by other organisms, the fact that certain mental
operations underlie or accompany these activities." Compare this with
Darwin's comment on his earthworm research quoted above. Romanes
goes on to ask what the behavioral signs of consciousness might be, and
concludes (p. 17) that they are activities "indicative of choice." But
this first definition will not, he says, do: for a host of purely reflex
activities seem also to indicate intentional, choosing, behavior. For
instance, we may read, as doubtless Romanes did, in Huxley's 1878
account of Hume's philosophy of a decerebrate frog "on the flank of

50. Charles Darwin's "Natural Selection," ed. R. C. Stauffer (Cambr/dge:


Cambridge UniversityPress, 1975), p. 467.
51. The Descent o f Man (London: John Murray, 1901), p. 100.
52. See Stauffer, ed., Charles Darwin's "Natural Selection," pp. 463-466.
53. G. J. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals (London: John Murray,
1883).

258
Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism

which a tittle drop o f acid has been placed, rubs it off with the foot o f
the same side; and, i f that foot being held, performs the same operation,
at the cost of much effort with the other f o o t . . , the whole operation
is a reflex operation of the spinal cord. ''s4 Romanes is thus driven to
conclude that mentality is indicated b y behavior which involves choices
which are not predictable b y an outside observer. But this is d e a r l y a
very weak definition; what, for example, are we to make nowadays of
chess-playing artifacts - are they conscious or not? ss
However, leaving this conundrum on one side, and turning back
t o Mental Evolution in Animals, we fred that immediately after this
struggle to define the necessary and sufficient signs of consciousness
Romanes refers to the writings o f the Cambridge mathematician and
thoroughgoing panpsychist W. K. Clifford. s6 A n d if we turn to Ro-
manes's more philosophical essay "The Fallacy of Materialism" (1882),
we find that he quotes with acceptance and approval the following
passage from Clifford's essay "Nature o f Things in Themselves": "Mind-
stuff is the reality which we perceive as matter . . . . A moving molecule
o f inorganic m a t t e r does n o t possess mind or consciousness, but it
possess a small piece o f mind-stuff. When molecules are so combined
together as to form the film on the under side o f a jelly fish, the ele-
ments of mind-stuff which go along with them are so combined as to
form the faint beginnings of sentience . . . . When matter takes the com-
plex form of a living human brain, the corresponding mind-stuff takes
the form o f a human consciousness, having intelligence and volition. ''s~
Romanes thus draws far-reaching conclusions from the Darwinian
theory. However, we should perhaps not pursue these conclusions t o o
far at this point. Although Romanes was personally intimate with

54. T. H. Huxley, "Hume's Philosophy," in Hume: with Helps to the Study


of Berkeley: Essays (London: Macmillan, 1898), pp. 130-131. Huxley makes
exactly the same point in almost identical words in the 1874 "On the Hypothesis
that Animals Are Automata and Its History," concluding that in this case, "we
have the most complete assurance t h a t . . , the frog is not acting from purpose,
has no consciousness, and is a mere insensible machine" (in Method and Results
[London: Macmillan, 1898], p. 233).
55. See, for instance, H. Putnam, "Minds and Machines," in Dimensions of
Mind, ed. S. Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1960).
56. See, for instance, W. K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays (London: Kegan
Paul and Trench, 1874), II, 61: "we are obliged in order to save continuity in our
belief, that along with every motion of matter, whether organic or inorganic,
there is some fact that corresponds to the mental fact in ourselves."
57. G. J. Romanes, "The Fallacy of Materialism," The Nineteenth Century,
12 (1882), 871-888.

259
C. U. M. SMITH

Darwin, his speculations are not necessarily those of his friend. Darwin,
as his remarks on Herbert Spencer make clear, s8 possessed a far more
cautious temperament. However, there is one more pointer in Charles
Darwin's published w o r k which indicates his mature position concern-
ing the mind's place in nature. This is the theory of pangenesis, which
b o t h he and Wallace regarded as one of the most important things he
had done. s9 The theory is set out in Chapter 27 o f Volume II o f Varia-
tions in Plants and Animals. It represents Darwin's f n a l solution to the
problem o f how the variation, which is central to his theory, is trans-
mitted from one generation to the next. The proposed mechanism is, o f
course, a mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It
is interesting (and relevant) to observe how large a part the assumed
inheritance of acquired behavior plays in the formulation of this theory.
I f we turn to the "Natural Selection" manuscript, written some fif-
teen years before the publication of Variations, we find that in folio 2
o f Chapter X Darwin writes: "I cannot doubt that an action performed
many times during life and thus rendered habitual, tends to become
hereditary." There are many places in the M and N notebooks and in
the OUN n o t e b o o k where the same idea is adumbrated. For instance, in
M, p. 30, Darwin writes: "One is t e m p t e d to believe phrenologists are
fight about habitual exercise of the mind altering the form o f the head
and thus these qualities become hereditary." A n d in M, p. 128: "Plato/
Erasmus/says in Phaedo that our 'imaginary ideas' arise from preexist-
ence of the soul, are n o t derivable from experience. - read monkeys for
preexistence." And in OLIN, p. 48: "My theory o f instincts, or heredi-
tary habits fully explains the cementation o f habits into instincts."
A n d in Variations o f Plants and Animals he writes: " A horse is trained
for certain paces and the colt inherits similar consensual movements.
The domesticated rabbit becomes tame from t o o close confinement,
the dog, intelligent from associating with man; the retriever is taught to
fetch and carry; and these mental endowments and bodily powers are
all inherited. ''6°

58. F. Darwin, ed., More Letters, II, 235 (June 30, 1866): "I am almost
finished the last number of Herbert Spencer and am astounded at its prodigality
of original thought. But the reflection constantly recurred to me that each sugges-
tion to be of real value to science, would require years of work."
59. F. Darwin, ed., Autobiography and Selected Letters, p. 282 (1892):
Wallace writes that "It is a positive comfort to me to have any feasible explana-
tion of a difficulty whieh has always been haunting me and which I shall never be
able to give up tiU a better supplies its place, and that I hardly think possible."
60. Ibid. (1868), II, 367.

260
Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism

The t h e o r y o f pangenesis reminds us once more o f the intellectual


lineage between Charles and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Although
in his Autobiography Charles remarks that a second reading of his
grandfather's w o r k in his maturer years had left him markedly less
impressed than when he had first studied him as a youth, 61 one cannot
help seeing Erasmus's influence in Charles's t h e o r y of the inheritance
of acquired behavior. Erasmus, in a famous passage in the Zoonomia,
writes: "The ingenious Dr Hartley in his works on m e n . . , has been o f
the opinion that our immortal part acquires during this life certain
habits o f action, or o f sentiment, which become forever indissoluble,
continuing after death in a future existence; and adds, that if these
habits are o f a malevolent kind, they render their possessor miserable
even in heaven. I would apply this ingenious idea," Erasmus Darwin
continues, " t o the generation, or production, o f the e m b r y o n or new
animal, which partakes so much of the form and propensities of the
parent. ''62 Charles in the 1872 Expression o f the Emotions writes:
"That some physical change is produced in the nerve-cells or nerves
which are habitually used can hardly be doubted, for otherwise it is
impossible to understand how the tendency to certain acquired move-
ments is inherited" ( m y italics). 63
These passages give us ~ inkling o f the significance of consciousness
in Charles Darwin's vision of the living world. Habits which are inherited
and stabilized to form instincts all originally start in conscious inten-
tional effort. Charles writes, for instance, that "it is scarcely credible
that the movements o f a headless frog, when it wipes a drop o f acid
or other object from its thigh, and which movements are so well co-
ordinated for a special purpose, were not at first performed voluntarily,
being afterwards rendered easy from long-continued habit so as at last
to be performed unconsciously. ''64 Consciousness is not a mere epiphe-
nomenon o f no evolutionary significance. On the contrary, according
to this analysis, it forms one o f the basic motors o f the evolutionary

61. Ibid. (1892), p. 13.


62. Ibid., XXXIX, 1.
63. Ibid., p. 29.
64. C. R. Darwin, On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(London: John Murray, 1872), p. 40. This is not to say that Charles Darwin
believed that all instincts originated from consciously developed habits. He also
believed that many instincts originated in randomly arising "profitable" behaviors,
which give an animal a selective advantage in "the great battle of life": see
"Natural Selection," chap. X, fols. 2 and 3 ; and "Origin of Certain Instincts," in
The Collected Papers of Charles Darwin, ed. P. H. Barrett (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1977), II, 172-176.

261
C. U. M. SMITH

process. Because of his acceptance of the inheritance of acquired char-


acteristics, Darwin's view of evolution contrasts starkly with the evolu-
tion theory of the late twentieth century, Consciousness plays no such
guiding role in present-day theory. It must be recalled, moreover, that
consciousness ran for Darwin throughout the entire animal kingdom,
from planarian to man, and for many Darwinists also existed in the
plant kingdom. 65
There is one final indicator of Darwin's position. This is provided
by his reaction to the latent controversy between A. R. Wallace and
T. H. Huxley about the mind's place in nature. In the Quarterly Review
of April 1869 Wallace reviewed the tenth edition of Lyell's Principles
of Geology. 66 In this review he expressed the opinion that "in the
development o f the human race a higher intelligence has guided the
same laws for nobler ends," much as mankind has selectively bred
animals and plants. Darwin wrote a triply underlined NO against this
passage in his copy of the Review. 67 And in a letter dated April 14,
1869, he writes that "as you expected I differ grievously from you
and am very sorry for it. ''68 Wallace also diverged from his friend on
another matter. He writes in the Review, "Neither natural selection
nor the more general theory of evolution can give any account what-
ever of the origin of sensational or conscious life . . . these laws etc.
cannot be conceived as endowing the newly-arranged atoms with con-
sciousness. ''69 Wallace had become convinced that the evidence showed
that the Cartesian gulf between mind and matter was in principle un-
bridgeable. This conviction appears to have arisen partly as the result
of witnessing what he refers to as "a series of remarkable phenom-
ena ''7° and partly in response to Huxley's clear statement of the
opposite view.
In Huxley's 1868 essay "On the Physical Basis of Life" we read:
"thoughts are the expression of molecular changes in the matter of life

65. Ernst Haeckel, who counted himself a thoroughgoing Darwinian, writes


that "whoever ascribes consciousness to the lower animal forms cannot refuse it
to vegetal forms"; The Riddle of the Universe (London: Watts, 1899), p. 144.
66. A. R. Wallace, "Review of the Principles of Geology by Sir Charles Lyell,"
Quart. Rev., 126 (1869), 359-394.
67. See M. J. Kottler, "Wallace, the Origin of Man, and Spiritualism," Isis, 65
(1974), 152.
68. F. Darwin, ed., Life and Letters, III, 116.
69. Ibid., p. 391.
70. J. Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences (London:
Cassell, 1916), I, 244.

262
Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism

which is the source o f our other phenomena" ;71 and in his 1874 address
to the British Association "On the Hypothesis That Animals Are
A u t o m a t a and Its History," he says much the same thing: "nor can
there be any reasonable doubt that the emotions of brutes and such
ideas as they possess are similarly dependent upon molecular brain
changes. ''72 The first Huxley passage is quoted in Wallace's Contribu-
tions to Natural Selection and calls forth the following response. " I f
a material element, or a combination of a thousand material elements
in a molecule, are alike unconscious, it is impossible for us to believe
that the mere addition o f one, two or a thousand other material ele-
ments t o form a more complex molecule could in any way tend to
produce a self-conscious existence . . . . There is no escape from this
dilemma, - either all matter is conscious or consciousness is, or pertains
to, something distinct from matter and in the latter case its presence in
material forms is a p r o o f o f conscious beings, outside and independent
of, what we would term matter. ''73 Indeed, Wallace seems to have
wished t o return to the eighteenth-century idea o f a scale of nature in
which there were just as many beings superior to man as there were
inferior. 74
The "series o f remarkable phenomena" which buttressed Wallace's
rejection of Huxley's view were those he had observed and tested dur-
ing spiritualist s6ances. Wallace, as we have already noticed, wrote to
Darwin, saying, "My opinions on the subject have been modified solely
b y consideration o f a series of remarkable phenomena, physical and
mental." Darwin, however, would have nothing to do with spiritualism.
In a letter to the Reverend Innes dated September 6, 1860, he writes:
"I must say I am a complete sceptic about the powers at w o r k - curious
as your stories are. What stories one hears about the spirit-tapping
nowadays - the old saying to believe nothing one hears and only half
one sees is a golden rule. ''Ts In January 1874, he writes of having at-
tended a s6ance himself and comments: "The Lord have mercy on us
all i f we are to believe such rubbish. ''76 He had, in fact, retired upstairs
halfway through the proceedings, exhausted with the experience, b u t

71. T. H. Huxley, "On the Physical Basis of Life," in Method and Results
(London: Macmillan, 1898), p. 154.
72. Ibid., p. 239.
73. A.R. Wallace, Natural Selection and Tropical Nature (London: Macmillan,
1870; reprinted Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers, 1969), p. 209.
74. Ibid., p. 205.
75. R. M. Stecher, "The Darwin-Innes Letters," Ann. Sci., 17 (1961), 205.
76. F. Darwin, ed., Life and Letters, III, 187.

263
C. U. M. SMITH

he got his self-styled "bull-dog," T. H. Huxley, to attend later a smaller,


more carefully organized meeting. Huxley reported what he regarded
as the imposture to Darwin in a long letter 77 and Darwin replied with
great relief: "and now to m y mind an enormous weight of evidence
would be required to make one believe in anything beyond mere
trickery. ''Ta
A sufficient sample of Charles Darwin's thought, both overt and
covert, has now been taken to allow us some insight into his stance
vis-A-vis panpsychism and the origin of consciousness. As we have al-
ready noticed, Darwin's forte was long-continued, detailed work. 79 He
was far too cautious a writer to risk the larger vision of his grandfather
or the murky Weltanschauungen of the German Nature-philosophers.
Nevertheless, the foregoing pages have shown that he accepted his
grandfather's view (and Alison's) that animals are conscious in the same
way that we are ourselves. Indeed, he is inclined to go further: in the
summary and concluding remarks of the 1880 Movement of Plants, he
writes the following passage about the root tip: "It is hardly an exag-
geration to say that the root tip of the r a d i c a l . . , acts as the brain of
one of the lower animals ... receiving impressions from the sense organs
and directing the several movements. ''8° Early in his career he believed
that consciousness was the outcome of sufficient material organization:
"It looks as if consciousness is effects of sufficient perfection of organi-
sation" (OUN, p. 16). This view is never retracted in his later work. To
this extent, he sides with Huxley, to whom he refers in one of his last
letters - "I wish to God there were more automata in the world like
you! ''sl - and against Wallace. Thus far he is a panpsychist, resembling
the famous neurologist Wilder Penfield, who writes: " I f one is to make
a judgment on the basis of behavior, it is apparent that man is not alone
in the possession of a mind. The ant (whose nervous system is a highly
complicated structure) as well as mammals . . . shows evidence of
consciousness and individual purpose. ''82 It will be remembered that

77. T. H. Huxley, Life and Letters o f T. 1-1. Huxley, ed. L. Huxley (London:
Macmillan, 1900), I, 421.
78. F. Darwin, ed., Life and Letters, III, 187.
79. A. R. Wallace commented on this feature of Darwin's character in a letter
to Professor A. Newton in 1887: "I have not the love of work, experiment and
detail that was so pre-eminent in Darwin"; F. Darwin, ed., Autobiography and
Selected Letters, p. 45.
80. C. R. Darwin, Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants (London: John
Murray, 1880), p. 573.
81. F. Darwin, ed., Life and Letters, III, 538.
82. W. Penfield, "The Mind and the Brain," in The Neuroscienee: Paths of

264
Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism

Darwin once referred to the brain of the ant as the most marvelous
speck of matter in the world. 83 I can find, however, n o evidence that
he is a panpsychist in the thoroughgoing sense of his younger contem-
porary W. K. Clifford, or of more recent thinkers, such as the Australian
zoologist W. E. Agar, who writes that the mental factor cannot "have
made its appearance out of the blue at some date in the world's his-
tory, ''84 or of C. H. Waddington, who writes that "something must go
on in the simplest inanimate things which can be described in the same
language as would be used to describe our self-awareness, ''Ss or, finally,
of the evolutionary biologist Bernard Rensch, who conceives that con-
tinuity requires that all matter possess a protopsychical character. 86 All
of these thinkers believe that acceptance of evolutionary theory implies
that mentality is in some way a property of matter, which, like gravita-
tional force, makes itself apparent when matter assumes certain appro-
priate configurations. There is no evidence that Darwin accepted this
interpretation because, so far as I can find, he resolutely refused to
speculate (in print at any rate) about the origin of life from inorganic
matter. As he writes in the passage from The Descent o f Man already
quoted, the subject of biopoeisis is "a hopeless enquiry" and must be
left to the "distant future" - to, in fact, ourselves.
Nonetheless, panpsychism seems to be a persistent theme in man's
attempt to understand his place in nature. 87 The acceptance of nine-

Discovery, ed. F. G. Worden, J. P. Seazey and G. Adelmann (Cambridge, Mass.:


M.I.T. Press 1975).
83. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1901 ed., p. 81: "It is certain that there
may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of
nervous matter; thus the wonderfnily diversified instincts, mental powers, and
affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the
quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one
of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the word, perhaps more so than the
brain of man."
84. W. E. Agar, The Theory of the Living Organism (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 1943), p. 109.
85. C. H. Waddington, The Nature of Life (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1961), p. 121.
86. B. Rensch, Biophilosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971),
and "Polynomistic Determination," in Studies in the Philosophy o f Biology, ed.
F. J. Ayala and T. Dobzhansky (London: Macmillan, 1974).
87. See, for instance, G. T. Fechner, Nanna: oder tiber das Seeleben der
Pflanzen (Leipzig, 1903); Zend-Avesta: oder i~ber die Dinge der Janseits (Ham-
burg, 1906); an English-language selection was edited by W. Lowrie as Religion
of a Scientist (New York, 1946). Another well-known exposition of the pan-
psychist position was published by F. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie

265
c. u. M. SMITH

teenth-century evolutionary theory and, especially, of Charles Darwin's


work, has thrown it into prominence. This is emphasized, i f emphasis is
required, b y the writings of the metaphysical-zoologist Ernst Haeckel,
who asserts, for instance, that "I am at one with Romanes and Darwin
in almost all their views and convictions" and goes on t o maintain that
" t h e future o f scienEfic p s y c h o l o g y . . , is not, as it once was, the exclu-
sively subjective and introspective analysis o f the highly-developed
mind of a philosopher, b u t the objective, comparative study o f the long
gradation b y which man has slowly arisen from a vast series o f lower
animal conditions. This great task of separating the different steps in
the psychological ladder and proving their unbroken phylogenetic con-
nection has only been a t t e m p t e d in the last ten years, especially in the
splendid work o f Romanes. ''as Haeckel elsewhere in his fairly volumi-
nous writings defines the substratum of psychic life as "psychoplasm,"
which, he says, differentiates to form the neuroplasm of nervous sys-
tems; he writes of the cell-soul" or " c y t o p s y c h e " ; he believes that
atoms have "sensation and will. ''89
This was the effect of the Darwinian theory on one turgid and philo-
sophically uncritical mind. Darwin himself, o f course, strongly depre-
cated such "overspeculation." He writes ironically in the Autobiography,
referring to metaphysics, "I was not well fitted for such studies. ''9°
However, one hundred years later, when many o f the gaps in the
Darwinian vision have been filled, when many philosophers of mind are
coming to accept sohae form of central-state materialism or dual-aspect
theory, 9a when millions o f dollars are being poured into exobiology on

(Stuttgart and Berlin, 1909), trans, by F. Thiliy, Introduction to Philosophy (New


York, 1916). An interesting contemporary instance is provided by Globus, who
writes: "The awareness of the flower is the faintest whisper of awareness, a
primordial hum hardly distinguished from the background noise . . . yet it is
immeasurably more conscious than the rigidly ordered rock enduring nearby...
Our science conditioned minds," he continues, "find this almost impossible to
fathom." G. G. Globus, "Mind, Structure, and Contradiction," in Consciousness
and the Brain, ed. G. G. Globus, G. Maxwell, and I. Savodnik (New York: Plenum
Press, 1976).
88. Haeckel, Riddle of the Universe, pp. 87-88.
89. Ibid., p. 180.
90. Ibid., p. 33.
91. See, for instance, H. Feigl, The "'Mental" and the "Physical" (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1967); J. J. C. Smart, "Sensations and Brain Pro-
cesses," in The Philosophy of Mind (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962);
D. H. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1968); G. G. Globus, "Unexpected Symmetries in the 'World Knot,' "
Science, 180 (1973), 1129-1136.

266
Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism

the assumption that living processes do originate spontaneously in


appropriate planetary environments, the panpsychist's challenge be-
comes more insistent: How far through nature does mentality reach?
How does consciousness commence?

267

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