Reflections & Discussion Starters

The Book Of Nature 2
Father and Son – Philip and Edmund Gosse

The Origin of Species: Living the debate

In the 19th century, one of the foremost popular naturalists was Philip Henry Gosse, a devout Christian. He was the David Attenborough of his age. Today he is best remembered through his son, Edmund Gosse, who portrayed him in the memoire Father and Son. Many assume that Edmund’s picture is of a dark, repressive figure, but he loved and respected his father, even if he couldn’t share his faith. In recent years, particularly after the publication of Anne Thwaite’s biography of Philip Henry (Glimpses of the Wonderful, pub.2002), it is the father who has come to seem the most attractive of the two. He was, it is clear, a loving, honest man who, though his attentive observation of the natural world, rose from a poor background to become a popular writer who made genuine contributions to natural science. Edmund, who chose a career among the Edwardian metropolitan chattering classes, now seems by contrast a much more lightweight figure.

At the time, few could have been more familiar with the book of nature than P.H. Gosse. Edmund memorably describes him spending hours excitedly peering down a microscope observing microscopic sea creatures. Everything filled him with wonder. Here he is, in his most popular book, The Aquarium, describing the wonderful intestinal arrangement of the sea mouse:

‘…as soon as it is full, they collapse, and the filtered fluid, now deprived of its oxygen, is forcibly expelled at the anal groove. Well may the adoring Psalmist include among “the riches” of God, the “things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts,” wherewith “this great and wide sea” is filled!’

Gosse, though best remembered among modern Darwinists as the author of Omphalos (published in 1857, before Darwin’s Origin of Species), a book which argued that God created the world as if earlier phases of life had existed – fossils, for example, were created as fossils. For Gosse, Adam was created as a fully-grown man, so why couldn’t other creatures be formed in the same way? However, as his friend the Revd Charles Kingsley pointed out, this tended to make God something of a liar, or at least somewhat deceitful!

Omphalos was given little credibility at the time – and tends to be viewed with mockery today. Gosse retreated from the field of theoretical speculation and controversy, concentrating simply on observing the book of nature and reporting his observations. However, in his last popular book, A Year at the Shore (1870), he chose to round off the text (and his career) with an extraordinary outburst against ‘modern physical science’ which, he claims, substitutes for the ‘awful truth of God’s revelation…a mere sentimental admiration of nature, and teaches that the love of the beautiful makes man acceptable to God, and secures His favour.’ Possibly here he was making a point against his aesthetically-inclined son Edmund!

He goes on:

‘There is no sentimental or scientific road to heaven. There is absolutely nothing in the study of created things, however single, however intense, which will admit sinful man into the presence of God, or fit him to enjoy it.’

This is quite something for one of the foremost observers of nature to admit. And he ends his passionate outburst in bold capitals: ‘AND THERE IS NO WAY INTO THE HOLIEST BUT BY THE BLOOD OF JESUS.’

P.H.Gosse’s life was, in the end, tragic’ not because, as many narratives would have it, he was on the ‘wrong’ side in the great 19th century Darwinian debate, but because he became alienated from his precious only son, Edmund, over the thing that mattered most to him – the truth of Christianity.

Edmund would probably have tried to break free from his larger-than-life father anyway, but his father’s defence of untenable science allowed the son to view the separation as a form of progress – his father became an emblem of the outdated. On the other hand, P.H. Gosse’s impassioned critique of the limitations of science had – and surely still has – validity. Science doesn’t claim to map the road to heaven, and if such a place exists then it isn’t science that is going to help get us there.

Darwinianism created agnosticism – the term invented by Darwin’s militant apologist T.H. Huxley. Doubt about the claims of religion has come to seem the natural position for many who accept the authority of modern science, particularly its biological wing. Maybe the best reciprocal attitude towards the Book of Nature by believers is a form of agnosticism that mirrors that of T.H. Huxley towards God: we can wonder before the beauty, complexity and fierce dynamism of the natural world, but we can never fully know the nature of God’s relationship with creation outside the bounds of our own humanity. The Book of Nature is a text that could never answer our deepest questions.

Wonder tempered by agnosticsm… in some ways P.H. Gosse is making a tentative step towards such an approach to the Book of Nature in the conclusion to A Year at the Shore, but his biblical fundamentalism caused him to muddy the waters between science and religion. Possibly if he had left them clear, there would have been room for reconciliation between father and son.

NOTE: Edmund Gosse’s wonderful Father and Son is available in Penguin. Edmund’s affectionate but very skewed account of his father is put into context by Ann Thwaite in Glimpses of the Wonderful – The Life of Philip Henry Gosse 1810-1888, Faber 2002. Thwaite has also written a biography of Edmund.

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