The Book That Changed America

LISTEN. If our Evolution in America course were a couple weeks longer, I'd assign Randall Fuller's The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited America as our third text.

It reveals that the New England Transcendentalists were deeply affected by the evolutionary hypothesis as delivered by Darwin in 1859, and that Thoreau went to his grave in 1862 having substantially absorbed its message. Fuller explicates Thoreau's appreciation:

For one thing, [Darwinian natural selection] no longer relies upon divinity to explain the natural world... Emerson had prodded Thoreau to look through nature -- not at it -- in order to perceive the godhead. To a degree, Thoreau had always resisted this approach; he loved the hard surface of things too much. But now, within the short span of a year, Darwin had propelled him toward a radically different vision of creation... a natural world sufficient unto itself -- without the facade of heaven. There was no force or intelligence behind Nature, directing  its course in a predetermined and purposeful manner. Nature just was.

Darwin himself pulled up short, in public at least, of such a  sweeping about-face when he told a correspondent "I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.— I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind."

Thoreau was discrete in public as well, famously returning his aunt's question "Have you made your peace with God?"  with "We never quarreled."

But when asked if he was ready for the next world he answered as an unambivalent naturalist. "One world at a time."

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Postscript. Today is the anniversary of The Great Debate at Oxford between “Darwin’s Bulldog” T.H. Huxley and Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, the one that supposedly had ladies in the gallery fainting from the scandal of a churchman being put in his place by a man of science...