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PARTISAN REVIEW
fathomable in these pages. But perhaps we take him too literally; per–
haps he does not mean that Darwin, Marx, and Wagner
sa;y
explicitly
what he attributes to them, but that they seem to imply it or suggest it in
some way. His interpretation of Wagner's leitmotif is typical of this kind
of analysis. The leitmotif represents, and when an artist, especially a
composer, uses representative devices, he is concerned with the
materials
represented. Therefore we have evidence of Wagner's
materialism.
Because
Darwin thought that random variations appear and that useful ones are
preserved and inherited, and because he thought that human beings were
subject to this process of natural selection, he was, in Mr. Barzun's eyes, a
mechanical materialist. And because Marx believed that there were uni–
formities in history, and that there were limitations upon the action of
single individuals, he too was a mechanical materialist. Leaving aside the
analysis of Wagner's leitmotif, one can only come to the conclusion that
to seek regularities in human behavior, in short to use scientific method,
is to be a mechanical materialist. Apparently Mr. Barzun finds it impos–
sible to believe that there are biological and social laws and also belfeve
that man's will is not powerless. That Darwin believed men consciously
sought goals is indicated by the fact that the whole theory of natural selec–
tion is modelled after the
willed
activity of breeding. And that Marx
thought men were not powerless is indicated by the fact that he held out
the possibility of barbarism if they did not use their power to produce a
better world.
The Science
All of the metaphysical accusations go hand in hand with elaborate
references to the special fields of Darwin, Marx, and Wagner. De Vries,
Bateson, and Mendel are trotted out as having produced the refutations of
Darwin. Jevons, Cournot, Walras, and Menger are spoken of with great
intimacy as the destroyers of Marx. The collapse of mechanism in physics
is described with equal authority and even mathematical logic is tortured
into the service of some of the more grandiose claims.
By far the most forceful "scientific" statements occur in connection
with Mr. Barzun's innuendoes about the present state of evolutionary
biology. Now it is a commonplace that Darwin asserted many false prop–
ositions and that he was ignorant of certain important facts concerning
heritable variations. It is also well-known that Bateson and De Vries per–
formed a very valuable function in criticizing Darwin. But the impression
given by Mr. Barzun is that these men and Mendel had unearthed material
which completely demolished the theory of natural selection. Yet an
examination of the work of competent contemporary biologists-for in–
stance that of T. H. Morgan-leads to no such rash conclusions. True,
Darwin has been corrected; the type of variation he contemplated has
been shown to he inadequate as a basis for the theory of natural selection.
But this has led to a patient study of the whole subject of heritable varia–
tions, and it is the opinion of many of the best workers in the field that
the so-called
mutations
perform the function originally assigned by Dar-
