On the Origin of Species in the nineteenth century, Darwin does not mention human beings until the next to the last page, and then only in a single sentence: “Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” Twelve years later, in 1871, in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, he quite explicitly places human beings at the forefront of evolutionary theory, depicting them, along with other animals, as totally shaped by natural selection, a conclusion he had reached much earlier, in his notebook, in 1838, with the following absolute certainty: “Origin of man now proved—Metaphysics must flourish—He who understand[s] baboon would do more toward metaphysics than [John] Locke.” In the simplest terms, Darwin sought to wind back through time to uncover humankind’s ancestral traces, using every prehistoric cache of bones as evidence of the origin of species—ancient fingerprints of the ur-human being. Science would never reach a definition of the human being, Darwin reasoned, until it could fully explain its origins. In fact, its definition lay in its origins. The popular press interpreted his ideas in a simple, incorrect, and, for the great majority of people, frightening way: Human beings were descended from apes. It gave Edgar Rice Burroughs great delight to parody such ideas in his Tarzan books.
Darwin subtitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, “or The Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” Race was a convenient vessel into which scientists began to pour one of their major definitions of human essence. Here, as Darwin suggests, not all races compete as equals. Some, like Caucasians, are inherently more intelligent, stronger, craftier, and so on. Africans belonged to a much inferior race, a designation they could never shake. Caucasians could take heart that they enjoyed a superior existence. At the coaxing of many scientists, whites could at least define themselves by what they were not. And they definitely were not Africans. Testing would demonstrate the point—for instance, in cranial size. Centimeters mattered greatly.
Darwin and Galton—along with every other scientist in the nineteenth century—shared an almost religious fervor, as Stephen Jay Gould has observed, for the comfort of numbers: “rigorous measurement could guarantee irrefutable precision, and might mark the transition between subjective speculation and a true science as worthy as Newtonian physics.”13 Both Darwin and Galton constructed precise x-ray photographs of the roots of humanity, several decades before Wilhelm Roentgen discovered what many called the Roentgen Ray in his laboratory in 1895. Not knowing exactly what he had found, and refusing to name it after himself, Roentgen settled on the name x-rays. The x-ray camera functioned as the ultimate tool for revealing the blueprint—the basic skeletal structure—of a single human being. Just as the cosmos contained under its visible crust a compelling, invisible structure that held it together, so people carried bones under their flesh that functioned in the very same way. Roentgen’s discomfiting magic camera—people complained of its invasive and insidious nature—allowed everyone to miraculously see the human substructure without killing the patient. Think, today, about the outrage against proposed airport screening machines that can x-ray the entire body at various depths. In Paris, near the turn of the century, x-ray “technicians” purported to show photographs of ghosts taken with the new invention.
Self-styled social philosophers, roughly around the same time as Roentgen—that is, in the last decades of the nineteenth century—held that the skeletal structure of human interaction lay in language and the stories that percolated out of language. The Grimm brothers, before they began their project of collecting and sorting fairy tales, had helped to construct, in an early philological undertaking, the Proto-Indo-European family of languages. In their drive to find that same elusive origin of the human species, the Grimms pushed the beginning of language back beyond historical record to a construct called Proto-Indo-European, or Hypothetical Indo-European. Some philologists argued that in studying Greek one could discover humanity’s basic tongue. Others countered, No, one must tunnel farther back, to Hebrew, or even the older Aramaic, to hear pure utterance prior to the babble of the Tower of Babel. There, one could come into contact with speech uncorrupted by time and thus tune in to what provides human beings with their essential humanness. Whatever the language one settled on, the brothers Grimm launched the study called philology, arguing mightily for the philosopher’s stone in the first primal grunt.
What makes the pedigree of languages visible is something called cognates—words common to several languages but with variant spellings. Similar sound patterns and slight sound changes across languages suggest family members—from distant cousins to brothers and sisters. Using the analogy of cognates, a concept promulgated around 1827, Carl Jung constructed his theory of the collective unconscious, whereby our stories, myths, and even our dreams find expression in similar symbolic patterns from one culture to the next. Why else would themes repeat themselves in stories and dreams, from disparate countries over vast spans of time? Surely, such cultural echoes must reveal yearnings deep within the DNA of human experience.
An English physician named Peter Mark Roget embodied the period’s obsession for classification and ordering, coupled with a great love of the language. He was one of those remarkable people who knew a little about a vast range of things. He came to understand the way the retina made a series of stills into moving images, an observation that led to the discovery of an early version of the motion picture camera, the zoetrope. Roget also helped Humphry Davy with his experiments with nitrous oxide.
As a young man he made lists—of death dates, of remarkable events—but most of all he loved to collect words that had similar definitions. In 1852, he published one of his most extensive lists, of words with overlapping definitions, and gave it the title Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged So as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition.
The Grimms had dug through the culture at such a basic level that their work seemed in perfect harmony with the birth of both the idea of the “folk” and the idea of the “folk soul.” We owe to the nineteenth century the fact that we can talk so freely about such a thing as the German people as distinct from the French or the Irish. The anthropologist Peter Burke sets this most radical discovery into its historical context: “It was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when traditional popular culture was just beginning to disappear, that the ‘people’ or the ‘folk’ became a subject of interest to European intellectuals.”14 German philologists, like the Grimms, first posited the idea of “the people,” and introduced a cluster of new terms to help give shape to their discovery: folk song, folktale, and folklore. This idea had far-ranging implications, of course, for politics—just think about nascent nationalisms—but the idea also changed the face of education around the world.
A German educator, Friedrich Froebel, believed that the folk soul developed very early in children. And so, in 1840, to nurture that most basic quality, Froebel invented the idea of kindergarten. In those “children’s gardens,” where teachers planted their seeds of learning, Froebel hoped to bring out that very same thing that scientists and philosophers were also pursuing, “the divine essence of man.” To that end, Froebel designed a series of blocks in various forms—the world reduced into its constituent shapes—and asked children to make out of them stars, fish, trees, and people. (Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother bought her son a set of Froebel blocks with great results. Maybe the blocks helped shape his sense of space and form.) As an educator, Froebel was asking children to see everything in its basic, elemental parts. No wonder, for Froebel had a background in crystallography, and just as crystals grow from a molecular seed, he believed, children could create the world out of similar seeds—in this case, building blocks. His exercises further reduced the world to forms of nature (or life), forms of beauty (art), and forms of knowledge (science, mathematics, and especially geometry).
The British immediately delved deeply into their own country’s folk soul and found a rather distinctive and powerful one. Francis James Child, Britain’s first major folklorist—the British and American Folklore Societies have their beginnings in the nineteenth century—did for ballads what the Grimms, in their later careers, managed to do for fairy tales: He collected, described, and arranged them in the 1890s. And because he dated them as much earlier than most fairy tales, Child claimed ultimate cultural authority for his ballads, arguing, in fact, that he had caught more than English ballads in his net. He had far surpassed the Germans,