Max Muller vs. Charles Darwin on The Origin of Consciousness

[AshvinP]

Barfield writes about a very interesting exchange between Max Muller and Charles Darwin on the origin of consciousness, which I had never heard about (unsurprisingly).

I have mentioned the subject of study of language as a means of insight into two different concepts of evolution, and it is interesting that a formerly well-known philologist was an outspoken, and (as Darwin himself admitted) successful objector to the application of biological evolution to human consciousness. Logically successful, but in terms of impact on his contemporaries, entirely unsuccessful. It is only in the very long run that naked reason will succeed in undermining and exploding a petrified paradigm. I'm referring to Max Muller, a name not much heard of today... He was a professor of Oriental languages, born in Germany, later settled in England, whose books and lectures were instrumental in arousing public interest both in Oriental philosophy and religion, and generally in words and their history... Muller did not question the primary Darwinian thesis...what he did refuse to accept was the tacit corollary that human consciousness has biologically emerged from animal consciousness.

As a student of ancient languages and of the development of meaning in speech, he told Darwin that whatever else his theory of evolution explained, it could not possibly be taken as explaining the origin of speech, and speech is of the course the endowment which most obviously distinguishes the human species from the rest of the living world. Whe I say he told Darwin, I'm speaking literally. For he not only delivered a series of lectures to the Royal Institution in 1873 under the title Mr. Darwin's Philosophy of Language, but the sent the pamphlet in which they subsequently appeared to Darwin, and afterwards called on him. "He listened most attentively," wrote Muller about the call, when he was describing the interview. "[Darwin] asked questions but raised no serious objections. Before he shook hands and left me, he said in the kindest way, 'You are a dangerous man'." And after reading another essay of Muller two years later, Darwin wrote to him.

Darwin wrote to him, "Though some of your remarks have been rather stinging, they have all been made so gracefully, I declare that I am like the man in the story who boasted that he had been soundly horse-whipped by a duke." "Horse-whipped!" ... But whatever the verdict may be [on conformity to reason as the acid test of any sound theory], what clearly emerges from the encounter between the two men and between the two minds, is that the light of reason was not Charles Darwin's guiding star... Darwin's irrational psychology is even more evidence from a candid and revealing confession in an earlier letter to Muller, written after reading his lectures. Darwin wrote as follows: "He who is fully convinced, as I am, that man is descended from some lower animal is almost forced to believe, a priori, that articulate language has been developed from inarticulate cries; and he is therefore hardly a fair judge of the arguments offered to this belief." You'll find a full account of the encounter in Nirad Chaudhuri's life of Max Muller, which was published in 1974 under the title Scholar Extraordinary. -History, Guilt and Habit

If you follow the link above, you will see a hardcover of Chaudhuri's book sells on Amazon for the affordable price of... $768.57!