Volume One of the Principles took issue with the Flood, and began the process whereby the idea would be killed off. In volume two, Lyell demolished the biblical version of creation. Inspecting the fossils as revealed in the record of the rocks, he showed that there had been a continuous stream of creation, and extinction, involving literally countless species. In the eighteenth century, Linnaeus had speculated that there must once have been ‘a special corner of the globe’ that had been reserved as a ‘divine incubator’, where life and new species had started. Lyell demonstrated how mistaken this notion was. Life, he showed, had begun in different ‘foci of creation’. He thought that man had been created relatively recently but by a process that was just the same as for other animals.50
The big problem with Lyell’s theory was that it revived Hutton’s ‘steady-state’ theory of the earth, arguing that the world we see about us is the product of constructive and destructive forces. But where did the energy for all this come from? As the science of thermodynamics developed in the middle years of the nineteenth century, physicists such as Lord Kelvin argued that the earth must be cooling and calculated on that basis that it was at least 100 million years old. This was nowhere near the truth but still very much greater than it said in the Bible. (Only in the twentieth century did physicists realise that the radioactivity of certain elements is capable of maintaining the earth’s central heat.)51 With hindsight, one can say that Lyell’s book flirted with evolution. But it was only flirtation: he had no concept of natural selection. On the other hand, he did kill off Neptunism.
There were, however, a number of last-ditch attempts to marry the biblical narrative with the flood of scientific discoveries, and these culminated in a series of papers that became known as the Bridgewater Treatises. ‘This strange and, to the modern reader, deadly series was commissioned by the will of the Reverend Francis Henry Egerton, eighth earl of Bridgewater, a noble clergyman who had always neglected his parish assiduously and who died in 1829. Lord Bridgewater charged his executors, the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, and the president of the Royal Society, with the duty of selecting eight scientific authors, each from a main branch of the natural sciences, who were capable of demonstrating “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation; illustrating such work by all reasonable arguments, as for instance, the variety and formation of God’s creatures in the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms . . .”’ The eight ‘scientific’ authors chosen in fact comprised clergymen, physicians and geologists.52 None of them said anything that much advanced the debate but the very existence of the series showed how far some people were prepared to go to try to keep science in its place. Among the arguments used were the view that the universe is so improbable statistically that ‘divine direction’ must be at work, and that our world is so benevolent that it can only have been made by God – examples included the observation that fish have eyes specially suited to marine vision, that iron ore is always discovered in the neighbourhood of coal, by means of which it can be smelted, and so on.53 In the final treatise, Dr Thomas Chalmers insisted that the very existence of a conscience among men, the very notion of morality, was ‘conclusive evidence of an exquisite and divinely established harmony . . .’54
The treatises proved popular. Released between 1833 and 1836, each had gone through four editions at least by the 1850s. Their main weakness lay in their unreflective approach to science, each being composed as a final word, as if geology, biology, philology and the other new disciplines would not have further shocks up their sleeves, to add to those that had already occurred and which it had been the aim of the treatises to explain away.
The most immediate response to the Bridgewater Treatises was Charles Babbage’s unofficial Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, published in 1838, which argued that a creator could work as he himself had worked in creating his famous ‘calculating engine’, a forerunner of the computer, in which, he noted, he could programme his machine to change its operations according to some pre-determined plan. Thus was born an idea that was to prove popular – the ‘laws of creation’, rather like the laws of reproduction. This was made the most of by Robert Chambers, yet another Edinburgh figure, whose Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844, was a very radical break, so radical that Chambers published the book anonymously. This work promoted the basic idea of evolution, though without in any way anticipating Darwinian natural selection. Chambers described the progress of life as a purely natural process. He began by saying that life started through spontaneous generation ‘citing as evidence certain soon-to-be-discredited experiments in which small insects had apparently been produced by electricity’.55 Using Babbage’s Ninth Treatise as an example, he posited vague laws of creation to account for the progression. But his main contribution, as was introduced in the Prologue, was to organise the palaeontological record in an ascending system and to argue that man did not stand out in any way from other organisms in the natural world. Though he had no grasp of natural selection, or indeed of how evolution might work, Chambers did introduce people to the idea of evolution fifteen years before Darwin.56 James Secord, in his book Victorian Sensation (2000), has explored the full impact of Vestiges. He goes so far as to say that Darwin was, in a sense, ‘scooped’ by Chambers, that wide and varied sections of (British) society discussed Vestiges, at the British Association, in fashionable intellectual salons and societies, in London, Cambridge, Liverpool and Edinburgh, but also among ‘lower’ social groups, that the ideas the book promoted passed into general discussion, being referred to in paintings, exhibitions, cartoons in the new, mass-circulation newspapers, and that it was discussed among feminists and freethinkers. Secord makes the point that Chambers was not really a scientist but a middle-brow intellectual from a publishing family and that his book, which in essence provided a narrative of the ‘progress’ of history, drew as much on the narrative technique of recent novels (themselves a relatively new phenomenon) as much as science. Chambers believed his book would create a sensation: one reason he published it anonymously was in case it didn’t do well; another reason was in case it did do well. But the need for anonymity by the author, Secord says, shows that the whole question of evolution was very much in the air in the 1840s and very controversial. His especially important point is that it was Vestiges that introduced evolution to a huge range of people (there were fourteen editions) and that, viewed in such a light, Darwin’s Origin of Species resolved a crisis and did not create one: ‘The idea of evolution is not a Darwin-centred narrative’. This is a major revision in the history of ideas.57