Thomas W. H. Rolleston to Walt Whitman, 26 December 1882
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'82
Dec. 26.
29 Lange Strasse Dresden
Your card of Dec. 10 received1—together with printed sheets
of L. of G., from which I shall work in future. I have been reading your Specimen Days with great delight since it came.—I
had not seen so strong an utterance as yours in S. D. on the subject of Hegel before, though of
course I conjectured out of the L. of G. that you had
appreciated him.2 I have not read anything of the man
himself yet—though I find that my reading & thinking for long past has
been, more or less consciously, of the nature of a gradual investment of his
stronghold—preparation for a vigorous attack. You put the gradual but sure
evolution of good out of evil as his keynote, and that must surely be the keynote of
any sane philosophy. But what good? and when? and where? For suppose all the good
^(quâ, moral) imaginable,
realized in the world, would there not be a blank still—would we not be
inclined to say "and is that all"? I don't know whether the difficulty is an
insurmountable one, but I cannot help feeling that the reign of universal 
loc_af.01038_large.jpg virtue would not
be any improvement on the present state of things, since so much of the beauty and
power of virtue is only thinkable when existing in the midst of evil, & seen on
that background. Here then is a strange frame of mind, yet common to us all—we
feel it an imperious duty or a thrilling impulse to take part on the right side in
the great conflict, and fight therein on the principle of 'No Surrender,' yet we
think at the same time that the victory we strive for is never to be gained, is not
even conceiveably gainable. What is the justification of this seeming absurdity! I
suppose it must be this, that the Good we are really striving for transcends our
powers of concrete imagination: in the strife we fix our minds on something definite
and practical & make that our ostensible aim, while really working,
unconsciously, perhaps, most of us, for a Good not to be expressed in terms of
practical virtue. What private soldier of Frederick the Great, storming Torgau under
the fire of 400 cannon, felt—or if he felt could have
articulately said—that he was working for that most wonderful
accomplishment, 
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as yet not nearly gauged in its true significance, the establishment of a German
nation. The ridge of a bushy hill, which he should leave tomorrow, never to see
again, represented for him that great object.
Now that I am on speculative matters, I will tell you of an important judgment on
Darwinism recently delivered by the highest European authority on such subjects,
viz, Professor Virchow.3 He is a wide minded man, of
strong character (a leader of the Radical politicians in Germany) & of immense
knowledge in all domains of science, particularly anthropology. His judgment is that
of a serious thinker, who will take 20 years to make up his mind rather than say an
unconsidered word, and he is said to exercise, in scientific matters, a mind of
absolute impartiality and clearness. Recently then, ^some 2 months ago, I think, he has delivered an
address before the German Anthropological Soc. at Halle, which takes Darwinism as
its subject, and utters an unqualified condemnation of that theory. He says it is an
illustration of the pernicious 'Naturphilosophie' which tries to force theories on
Nature, and supposes that scientific truth can be reached by mere speculation,
instead of by patiently studying the facts of physical life. When the theory was
first proposed he was not carried off his feet by the waves of enthusiasm around
him. He was content to wait, taking the theory for what it was worth, for the proof
or disproof which the researchers 
loc_af.01040_large.jpg of the next few decades (dominated
as they have been by the desire to find facts bearing on that theory) would
certainly bring. Now he ^feels
himself entitled to say that the proof has not been forthcoming, and the
disproof has. And he is confirmed by seeing that a perceptible 'disillusionment' has
already made its appearance among many who were the most vigorous supporters of
Darwinism. It must be remembered that the 'Darwinism' here sentenced to death is not
synonymous with evolution. The latter doctrine existed, of course, before
D.—he only offered an explanation of it—& that explanation consisted
in the putting forward of the merely mechanical law of
'Natural Selection of the (physically) Fittest' as the only cause needed to explain all the phenomena
of organization. This cause does doubtless work, but V. denies that it accounts for
all the facts, and if it does not account for all, it
is by no means of the importance at first supposed. Such an utterance as this of
Virchow's ought to go far towards abating the dogmatic intolerance with which most
Darwinists regard all who refuse to take their doctrine as the central pivot for all
thinking.
Perhaps you have already heard of Virchow's speech, in which case, pardon this Mittheilung. If you didn't know of it I expected it would interest you.
I hope you have had a pleasant Christmas and are well.
Yours sincerely T. W. Rolleston.Notes
- 1. Thomas William Hazen Rolleston (1857–1920) was an Irish poet and journalist. After attending college in Dublin, he moved to Germany for a period of time. He wrote to Whitman frequently, beginning in 1880, and later produced with Karl Knortz the first book-length translation of Whitman's poetry into German. In 1889, the collection Grashalme: Gedichte [Leaves of Grass: Poems] was published by Verlags-Magazin in Zurich, Switzerland. See Walter Grünzweig, Constructing the German Walt Whitman (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995). For more information on Rolleston, see Walter Grünzweig, "Rolleston, Thomas William Hazen (1857–1920)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 2. The importance of the Hegelian influence on Whitman has been recognized, though there are varying opinions as to the nature of the relationship: whether Hegel was a source for many of Whitman's ideas or whether Whitman simply paralleled his expressions of thought. In any event, such Whitman concepts as cosmic evolution, pantheistic "unity," and the synthesis of Good in which the antithesis, Evil, merges and disappears are part of the Hegelian philosophy. [back]
- 3. The eminent director of the Pathological Institute in Berlin, Dr. Rudolf Virchow, was an interested commentator on the controversial question of evolution and Darwinism. Dr. Virchow delivered an important lecture in Munich on September 22, 1877, which seems to parallel the later talk in its emphasis on the necessity of distinguishing between science in the state of hypothesis and science in the state of fact. For example, he writes in the preface to the English translation of his lecture: "Nothing was any further from his intention than any wish to disparage the great services rendered by Mr. Darwin to the advancement of biological science, of which no one has expressed more admiration than himself. On the other hand, it seems high time to him to enter an energetic protest against the attempts that are made to proclaim the problems of research as actual facts, and the opinions of scientists as established science" (Fragments of Science, ed. John Tyndall [6th edition, New York, 1905], 415). [back]