THE ROMANES LECTURE
1910
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY
BY
DELIVERED
BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
JUNE 7TH, 1910
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMERICAN BRANCH
35 WEST 32d STREET, NEW YORK
——
LONDON: HENRY FROWDE
1910
Copyright, 1910, by
Oxford University Press
American Branch
Romanes Lecture
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY
An American who, in response to such an invitation as I have received, speaks in this university of ancient renown, cannot but feel with peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities, and all the memories that make them great, are living realities in the minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them and who dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations are no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are not. My people have been for eight generations in America; but in one thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of the Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who came from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of our people is slowly changing so that constantly the race tends to become more and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that, as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among the English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my ancestors, Holland or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come to Oxford in 'the spacious days of great Elizabeth,' would have felt far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in the things of the body.
More than ever before in the world's history we of to-day seek to penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages, from the immemorial past when in 'cramp elf and saurian forms' the creative forces 'swathed their too-much power,' down to the yesterday, a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of man became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet; and studying, we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of animal life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the highly complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when we speak of nations and civilizations.
It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence. In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances in scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held by the men of science with reference to those engaged in other pursuits. I am not now speaking of applied science; of the science, for instance, which, having revolutionized transportation on the earth and the water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the air; of the science that finds its expression in such extraordinary achievements as the telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which have so accelerated the velocity of movement in social and industrial conditions—for the changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary life during the last three generations have been greater than in all the preceding generations since history dawned. I speak of the science which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our everyday life than literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know something of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather against his having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge. At present all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in scientific discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, and the rapidity with which ideas originating among students of the most advanced and abstruse sciences become, at least partially, domiciled in the popular mind.
Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased respect naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been a certain tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields. This is particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only have scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the history of man, especially in its early stages, in connexion with what biology shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has arisen a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science. Both positions are in their essence right; but as regards each position the more arrogant among the invaders of the new realm of knowledge take an attitude to which it is not necessary to assent. As regards the latter of the two positions, that which would treat history henceforth merely as one branch of scientific study, we must of course cordially agree that accuracy in recording facts and appreciation of their relative worth and