Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Panpsychism
C. U. M. SMITH
Department o f Biological Sciences,
University o f Aston in Birmingham,
Birmingham, England
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
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),
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c. U. M. SMITH
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
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c. u. M. SMITH
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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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
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Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism
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Darwin, the Origin of Consciousness, and Panpsychism
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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-
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