Voltaire wrote much about man and nature. A short letter to a friend on 24 November 1755 in the wake of the Lisbon earthquake picks up some perennial themes:
This is indeed a cruel piece of natural philosophy! We shall find it difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters… What a game of chance human life is! What will the preachers say – especially if the Palace of the Inquisition is left standing! I flatter myself that those reverend fathers, the Inquisitors, will have been crushed just like other people. That ought to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike. I believe it is our mountains which save us from earthquakes.
While Voltaire was always vocal about the Catholic church and a vocal supporter of free speech, this didn’t mean he necessarily supported more radical views of God and nature. Two decades later, he wrote of Baruch Spinoza, born 24 November 1632, that he was:
a philosopher of whom everyone spoke but no one actually read, and who even if he undeniably had a huge reputation, had no discernible impact.
Voltaire was wrong and Spinoza’s rather complex view of things has endured.
The physical and the metaphysical met afresh on 24 November 1859, with the first publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.
From 24 November 1959, Chicago hosted the Darwin Centennial Celebration with the keynote address by Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous – the author of Brave New World – and grandson of TH Huxley, a contemporary and huge supporter of Charles’s, remembered as “Darwin’s bulldog” and the inventor of the word “agnostic”.
While the evolution/creation debate keeps many people going, an interesting aside is the religious fervour that evolution has stimulated. It has been described in many ways but the popularly paradoxical “secular religion” is as good as any. Julian Huxley was a key proponent.
Another form of our social evolution has been the development over the last century of “self-transformation”. Its critics have it as a shift from the citizen with a core of inner strength to the corporate drone whose only measure of self-worth is the opinion of others. Its supporters have it as a fundamental reassessment of communications and relationships. Dale Carnegie, author of How to win friends and influence people and a key figure in the evolution, was born on 24 November 1888.
