Biographical Essay
Henry Drummond and the Development of a Theme
Late-nineteenth century theories of degeneracy which initially concentrated solely on its purely biological or zoological ramifications soon broadened to include a new, highly moralistic aspect of degeneration. This was all the more dangerous as it appeared by all accounts to remain objectively scientific. This was due to contemporary commentators immoderate rhetoric, and to the ease with which biology could slip into an evolutionary brand of social psychology. As the author Peter Morton has written, ‘it was those very writers most anxious to promote the tenets of evolutionism who were most troubled by warnings of decay and who were most eager to respond with moral exhortation’ (The Vital Science [London: George Allen and Unwin]: p. 91).
In Edwin Ray Lankester’s influential Degeneration (1880), the link between zoological degeneration and that of humans and societies remained vague. Yet as the 1880s passed, the human and moralistic tone of degenerationists moved gradually from the periphery of the debate to its heart. Andrew Wilson’s article in an 1881 edition of Gentleman’s Magazine was one of the first in the wake of Lankester to forge a connection between, for example, a crustacean which becomes parasitic and a crime against nature (Morton, The Vital Science, pp. 92-3). But the most sustained interrogation of the relationship between the natural world and morality remains Henry Drummond’s extraordinary Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883).
Drummond (1851-1897) whom the great American evangelist Dwight Moody called the most Christ-like man he had ever met, was born in Stirling and studied at Edinburgh University but left before actually receiving his degree. He turned to divinity and took up study at the Free Church, New College, Edinburgh. In the mid-1870s, he assisted Moody on his ‘revival’ tours of the United States and Britain, later returning to New College where in 1877 he became lecturer in natural science. In 1884, he was conferred with a professorship of theology. In the guise of a geologist, he made tours of America, Australia, and Africa. Drummond argued that Christianity was the natural progression of an awareness of the discoveries of science. His critics attacked his views on the compatibility of science and religion, but his supporters adored his charm and missionary zeal. They made sure that his books, like the enormously popular The Greatest Thing in the World and other addresses (1894) were all best-sellers. His last years were marked by the onset of an excruciatingly painful disease, sclerotic in nature but which doctors were unable to fully diagnose, which he suffered in good humour, and which seemed to increase the belief in his saintliness among his followers.
Few books have suffered a more dramatic fall from popularity than Drummond’s Natural Law. Entirely forgotten today, by 1907 it had gone through forty-two editions since its original publication in 1883. According to Morton, it had sold ‘at least 70,000’ copies in its first five years. Drummond imagined degeneration as something that happened to humans when they neglected themselves, as something dormant in one’s own nature which had to be constantly combated. Going beyond the actual practice of sinning, a man could ‘go bad’ simply by forgetting himself:
If a man neglect himself for a few years, he will change into a worse man and a lower man. If it is his body that he neglects, he will deteriorate into a wild and bestial savage - like the dehumanised men who are discovered sometimes upon desert islands. If it is his mind, it will degenerate into imbecility and madness - solitary confinement has the power to unmake men’s minds and leave them idiots. If he neglect his conscience, it will run off into lawlessness and vice. Or lastly, if it is his soul, it must inevitably atrophy, [and] drop off in ruin and decay. (page references at end)
Here was something almost wholly original. The degeneration models of Morel, Nordau, and Lombroso all claimed that degeneracy lay beyond the individual’s control. It occurred through a primary set of hereditary, environmental, and societal factors relating to the destructive impositions of modernity. In contrast, Drummond was, with one imperious gesture, removing all suggestion of an external genesis for decline. Instead, he emphasised the struggle within man himself. Although such ideas were hardly original in a religious context, they were important because Drummond was presenting them in the guise of hard science in his role as lecturer of natural science. In fact, he eschewed accusations of clear moral evangelism by quoting, for instance, extensively from Lankester’s scholarly volume. Collectively, this suggests that Natural Law was as symptomatic of nineteenth century science’s veiled agenda as it was of, more specifically, degeneration theory’s turning in upon itself.
For Drummond, progressive evolution was something to be ceaselessly concentrated upon by an individual, for degeneration was above all a stealthy adversary. Like the devil whispering into one’s ear, a man within its shadowy clutches ‘feels within his soul a silent drifting motion impelling him downwards with irresistible force.’ His theories of pure biological or zoological degeneracy were saturated by metaphors of temptation, sin, and vice. Hence, the blind fish of Kentucky’s darkest caves were creatures who could not accept God’s teaching, had disobeyed His eternal laws, and were mockeries who had ‘chosen’ to live in sin. To keep charges of moralism in abeyance, and to better suit his purpose, Drummond directly translates Lankester’s purely biological tri-fold formula of ‘Balance, Evolution, and Degeneration’ into the spiritually and morally loaded ‘Salvation, Escape, and Neglect.’ For Drummond, those three words summarise a ‘doctrine [which] is scientific, not arbitrary.’ He later defined evolution in a similarly ‘scientific’ way: it means ‘the putting on of Christ. It involves the slow completing of the soul and the development of the capacity for God.’
Yet perhaps most illustrative of Drummond’s methods are his staggeringly anthropomorphic case studies of animals which are guilty of sin and have degenerated. A parasitical animal like the hermit-crab, for example, is a degenerate because it ‘will not take the trouble to find [its] own food, but [will] borrow or steal it from the more industrious.’ Particularly egregious for him is ‘the Dodder plant’ which Drummond gracefully admits begins its life ‘with the best intentions,’ appearing as if it intended ‘to be independent for life’. However, after ‘a little experimenting’ it opts for the parasitic life. Parasitism was, for Drummond, quite literally a lifestyle choice, but it was a choice that involved ‘one of the gravest crimes in Nature,’ those guilty of which are attacked as ‘isolated, indolent, selfish, and back-sliding.’ Turning his ire to the humble hermit-crab, Drummond admonishes it for ‘disobey[ing] the fundamental law of its own being’ by living in ‘disgrace’ in the cast-off shells of other creatures. Asserting that the hermit-crab was plainly ‘meant for higher things,’ he proceeds to mercilessly chastise the creature for its ‘laziness,’ its failure to live ‘a life of high and vigilant effort.’ Consequently, and in contrast to other species of crab who lead ‘free and roving’ lives, the hermit-crab’s sin has been punished with degenerated limbs and enfeebled movement.
His most invective wrath however is reserved for Sacculina, an anonymous, anenome-like organism. Itself a parasite of the hermit-crab, it belongs to a family which develop into crustacea. ‘When we inquire into the life-history of this small creature we unearth a career of degeneracy all but unparalleled in nature.’ In its youthful days, Sacculina follows an existence in the best accordance with the Victorian ideals of self-help and laissez-faire: it ‘paddles briskly through the water,’ and for ‘a time leads an active independent life, industriously securing its own food and escaping enemies by its own gallantry.’ The little creature however is cursed, for ‘the hereditary taint of parasitism is in its blood,’ and it will inevitably ‘adapt itself to the pauper habits of its race.’ ‘In an evil hour’ it attaches itself to the hermit-crab and ‘settles down for the rest of its life as a parasite.’ For Drummond, such a state of affairs was unthinkable and unforgivable: ‘in the eyes of Nature this [is] a twofold nature. It was first a disregard of evolution, and second, which is practically the same thin, an evasion of the great law of work.’ Such an offence cannot fail to receive punitive measures: Sacculina’s penalty for violating Nature’s laws is that, unlike its brethren, it is forever denied the right to become a full-blown member of the crustacea ([London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907]: pp. 99, 101, 114, 117, 317, 319, 320, 322-4, 342-4).
These passages from Natural Law in the Spiritual World might seem absurd. Yet crucially, they are extreme examples of how attractive the theory of degeneracy was to those seeking a moral bias. Secondly, they demonstrate how easily degeneration could blend almost imperceptibly into the field of social Darwinism and the eugenic project. Interestingly, there seems to be a paradox at play throughout Drummond’s work. At one and the same time, degeneracy - or parasitism - was represented as both an immoral choice of the more weak-willed (the hapless Dodder plant is imagined as an organism in a quandary, eventually giving in and favouring the life of a parasite) and simultaneously a road which could not be veered from, however hard an organism might try (Sacculina is unable to prevent itself from slipping into a degenerate state for its behaviour is ‘in its blood’). The conflation was a highly evocative one. Drummond had in fact successfully inverted earlier French models of degeneracy. Where the latter had admitted that degeneracy contained the possibility of leading to immoral behaviour such as criminality, Drummond confidently claimed that immorality would result inexorably in degeneration. His analogy of parasites in the animal world with paupers and criminals in the human world was nothing less than a triumphant championing of determinism: the problem of vagrancy and recidivism was not an outgrowth of a man-made system nor one that could be rectified through, say, economic reform.
The solution could only lie in a sterilisation of a far more basic kind. Just three years after Lankester’s pamphlet had tacitly raised the issue, degeneration was already being seized upon as a tool that would encourage ‘correct’ moral attitudes and industrious, self-sufficient lives. At the same time, it represented an aggressive and censorious response to society’s definition of the deviant, the subversive, and the diseased. Stephen Arata has helpfully called this sliding - or dissemination - of originally specialised degeneration theories into a wider cultural arena of public ownership and utilisation an example of a concept becoming ‘common sense,’ losing as it does so any form of methodological rigour, and opening itself to conceptual contradictions, while retaining its power and currency (Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996]: p. 3).
Richard Walter seems to be grossly over-simplifying the matter when he stated in 1956 that the loss of complexity or degeneration ‘did not become associated with moral or value judgements’ (‘What Became of the Degenerate? A Brief History of a Concept,’ Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 11 (1956): pp. 422-9: p. 428). On the contrary, the vocabulary of degeneration had, by 1898, become so informed by moral judgement that Eugene Talbot was able to write a seemingly physical description of an atavist which appears almost to relish its use of richly connotative language: degenerates were ‘puny,’ ‘peculiar,’ ‘sluggish,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘mean in figure,’ ‘irritable,’ ‘violent, and too often quite incorrigible.’ They had a ‘singularly stupid and insensate look,’ were ‘ugly,’ and had, as a rule, a ‘repulsive appearance’ (Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs, and Results [London: Walter Scott]: pp. 18-9). The conflation of moral and physical degeneration had been set. It is clear from such writings that though degeneration may have provided an illusory aura of scientific authority and respectability, their primary purpose was to supply traditional moral instruction under the patronage of the vanguard of science: in effect science was being used as a method of justifying what religion had been preaching for centuries.