Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [89]
Reyles’s dying swan was a metaphor for Latin civilization in Europe, which the author, a wealthy Uruguayan and disciple of Nietzsche, believed to be doomed unless France, Italy, and Spain shook themselves free of political and clerical absolutism and turned to the acquisition of money and arms. As long as those countries remained at peace, they should cultivate an “ideology of force” to avoid being left behind by Northern powers, particularly Germany and the United States.
Roosevelt was revolted by the book, and not just because parts of it echoed his frequent celebrations of strenuosity. He found in it a “hard dogmatic materialism” indistinguishable from that of his new boosters on Wall Street. Modern worship of the golden calf (Reyles actually used the phrase métaphysique de l’Or) struck him as more pernicious than any medieval superstition. He rejected the pro-Americanism of a writer who could not distinguish between the democratic tradition of Washington and Lincoln and the anti-constitutionalism of tycoons.
Rigid materialistic standards in science, rejecting the imaginative or metaphysical eurekas that had always aided advances in knowledge, were equally retrogressive, in Roosevelt’s opinion. They worked against discovery. But he was uneasy with the Catholic values that Dwight, a venerable figure at Harvard, sought to apply to “infidel science.” Logically extended, they could “plunge us back into the cringing and timid ignorance of the Dark Ages.” He quoted Henry Osborn Taylor’s characterization of medieval man: “Subject to bursts of unrestraint, he yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty.”
Dwight was effective, however, in reminding the young czars of evolutionary theory of what Roger Bacon had proclaimed in the thirteenth century: “The first essential for advancement in knowledge is for men to be willing to say, ‘We do not know.’ ” There could be no advancement, Roosevelt wrote, in a scientific dogma that saw only itself, and liked what it saw:
The establishment of the doctrine of evolution in our time offers no more justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of the facts of the solar system a few centuries ago. Any faith sufficiently robust to stand the (surely very slight) strain of admitting that the world is not flat and does move around the sun need not have any apprehensions on the score of evolution, and the materialistic scientists who gleefully hail the discovery of the principle of evolution as establishing their dreary creed might with just as much propriety rest it upon the discovery of the principle of gravitation. Science and religion, and the relations between them, are affected by one only as they are affected by the other.
He took up the ancient antithesis of fides versus ratio and argued that an embrace of both faith and reason was necessary for a person of “conscience” to search for truth, as something wholly practical, yet (since truth-seeking was a form of prayer) divine. An egregious preacher of “intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism” was Dwight’s didactic opposite, the German anatomist Ernst Haeckel. Not only were Haeckel’s assumptions “unscientific” in their absolute refusal to accept mystery as part of knowledge, they were as ideological as the ecclesiastical tenets they sought to refute. Roosevelt noted that Boutroux, Bergson, and William James felt the same way about Haeckel as he did. It said something for the materialism of contemporary Germany that the man was still admired there.
For himself as a natural historian and social reformer, he most admired and identified with the great English prophet of natural selection. Wallace had followed a curious trajectory