Myself In Freemason e v o r p m I ry To
DARWIN & FREEMASONRY Darwin was a practicing physician, a poet, and a scientist. He founded the Philosophical Society and became a Freemason in the famous Canongate Kilwinning Lodge No. 2 at Edinburgh, Scotland. As master of this lodge, with close ties to major European Freemasons of the day, Darwin was an important name in Masonic circles. His son Robert, also a physician, was a prominent Freemason. He made a name for himself as a medical practitioner, at which he made a small fortune, and as a writer of verse with scientific and evolutionist themes. According to Alan Moorehead (Darwin and the Beagle, 1969), he was a much respected, though somewhat controversial figure. Coleridge coined the word “darwinising” to describe his rather wild theorizing. Among his works was a virtually unknown poem, Zoönomia, or The Laws of Organic Life (17941796), quite famous at the time, from which the following sample is taken: Hence without parent by spontaneous birth Rise the first specks of animated earth; From Nature’s womb the plant or insect swims, And buds or breathes, with microscopic limbs. Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs’d in Ocean's pearly caves First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing. Clearly Darwin’s mind was more scientific than poetic, for the poem contains a system of pathology and he was known as one of England’s most prominent naturalists, who developed the main outlines of the theory of evolution from his experimental farm. Although Darwin did not develop his views into a scientific theory, they were the expression of a naturalist doctrine that accepts that nature has creative power. If all this seems unfamiliar to you, I must confess now that I am talking about Dr. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the
more familiar Charles Robert Darwin, author of the historic treatises on evolution, who was neither a physician nor a Freemason, who studied botany at Cambridge, and who made the famous five-year scientific exploration on The Beagle, identifying and classifying plants and animals, which resulted in four books: The Voyage of the Beagle (1845), On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), The Descent of Man (1871), and The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals (1872). Although Erasmus Darwin hoped to have his son Robert develop and publish his theory, it was his grandson Charles who undertook the task of developing what is now called Darwinian Evolution, which of course made him both famous and notorious. Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), prolific writer, publisher, artist, philosopher, and prodigious exponent of the arts, in Selected Writings (IX.224), wrote: “There is only one man in America putting forth any claim to intellectuality who derides, today, the Darwinian theory. That man is William Jennings Bryan.” Bryan, a presidential candidate who lost twice to McKinley and once to Taft, was better known as Wilson’s Secretary of State. His Masonic membership was Lincoln Lodge No. 19, Lincoln, Nebraska, and later Temple Lodge No. 247 in Miami, Florida. Hubbard also stated in a speech at Roycroft : “I thank Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, Englishmen, for liberating theology from superstition.” (Selected Writings (1922), IV, 16) “Simple, yet at times controversial, misunderstood and misused for social goals, the theory remains unchallenged as the central concept of biology, Charles Darwin, reluctant revolutionary, profoundly altered our view of the natural world and our place in it.” (From the American Museum of Natural History: www.darwinlibrary.amnh.org) Dr. E. Otha Wingo DDGL 38 otha@wingo.org
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