The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

When Berkeley for the first time clearly announced this novel conclusion to the world, it made a stir among the pundits, and seemed to offer a splendid exit from the infidelity of the Enlightenment. Here was a chance to reassert the primacy of mind, to reduce its threatening enemy to a mere province in its realm, and so to restore the philosophical bases of religious belief and immortal hope.

The supreme figure in this idealistic development was Immanuel Kant, perfect archetype of the abstract philosopher; Kant, who traveled much in Konigsberg, and from its promenaded streets saw the starry heavens melt into a half-unreal phenomenon, transfigured by perception into a subjective thing. It was Kant who labored best to rescue mind from matter; who argued so irrefutably (because so unintelligibly) against the uses of “pure reason” and who, by the prestidigitation of his thought, brought back to life, magician-wise, the dear beliefs of the ancient faith.

The world heard him gladly, for it felt that it could live by faith alone, and did not love a science that merely darkened its aspirations and destroyed its hopes. Throughout the nineteenth century the influence of Kant grew; time and again, when rationalism and skepticism threatened the old citadels, men fled for strength and refuge “back to Kant.” Even so matter-of-fact a man as Schopenhauer, and rabid a heretic as Nietzsche, accepted him, and looked upon his reduction of the world to mere appearance as the indispensable preliminary of every possible philosophy. So vital was Kant’s work that in its outlines and its bases it remains to our own day unshaken and intact; has not science itself, through Pearson, Mach, and Poincaré, admitted that all reality, all “matter,” all “nature” with its “laws,” are but constructs of the mind, possibly but never certainly known in their own elusive truth? Apparently Kant had won the battle against materialism and atheism, and the world could hope again.

10. CHARLES DARWIN And then Darwin came, and the war waged anew. We cannot know now what Darwin’s work may finally mean in the history of mankind. But it may well be that for posterity his name will stand as a turning point in the intellectual development of our Western civilization. If Darwin was wrong, the world may forget him as it has almost forgotten Democritus and Anaxagoras; if he was right, men will have to date from 1859 the beginning of modern thought.

For what did Darwin do but offer, quietly, and with a disarming humility, a world-picture totally different from that which had contented the mind of man before? We had supposed that it was a world of order, moving under divine guidance and omnipotent intelligence to a just and perfect fulfillment in which every virtue would find at last its fit reward. But Darwin, without attacking any creed, described what he had seen. Suddenly the world turned red, and nature, which had been so fair in the autumn’s colors under the setting sun, seemed to be only a scene of slaughter and strife, in which birth was an accident, and only death a certainty. “Nature” became “natural selection,” that is, a struggle for existence; and not for existence merely, but for mates and power, a ruthless elimination of the “unfit” of the tenderer flowers, the gentler animals, and the kindlier men. The surface of the earth seethed with warring species and competing individuals, every organism was the prey of some larger beast; every life was lived at the expense of some other life; great “natural” catastrophes came, ice ages, earthquakes, tornadoes, droughts, pestilences, famines, wars; millions and millions of living things were “weeded out,” were quickly or slowly killed. Some species and some individuals survived for a little while—this was evolution. This was nature, this was reality.

Copernicus had reduced the earth to a speck among melting clouds; Darwin reduced man to an animal fighting for his transient mastery of the globe. Man was no longer the son of God; he was the son of strife, and his wars made the fiercest brutes ashamed of their amateur cruelty. The human race was no longer the favored creation of a benevolent deity; it was a species of ape, which the fortunes of variation and selection had raised to a precarious dignity, and which in its turn was destined to be surpassed and to disappear. Man was not immortal; he was condemned to death from the hour of his birth.

Imagine the strain upon minds brought up in the tender philosophy of our youth, and forced to adapt themselves to the harsh and bloody picture of a Darwinian world. Is it any wonder that the old faith fought fiercely for its life, that for a generation “the conflict between religion and science” was bitterer than at any time since Galileo retracted and Bruno burned at the stake? And do not the victors, exhausted by the contest, sit sadly today amid the ruins, secretly mourning their triumph, secretly yearning for the old world which their victory has destroyed?

Apologies