Unsuspecting Souls Read online

  Through his superhuman powers of deduction, Holmes plays the pure scientist, discarding everything superfluous to arrive at the rock-bottom, basic truth. At certain moments, when Holmes finds himself stumped by a crime, he reaches a heightened awareness—actually, just the sort of state that the chemists were after—by using his favorite seven-percent solution, cocaine. Under the influence, or high, Holmes, following the model of Andrew Jackson Davis, claims for himself the clarity of insight or the seer or the clairvoyant. (Recall, Freud recommends cocaine use for increasing levels of awareness.) In the middle of a welter of information and facts, Holmes sees an immediate pattern; or, rather, the cocaine, like an intellectual magnet, pulls all the particles into a pattern.

  In a story titled “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” (1892), some unidentified culprit has sent a box to an old lady, containing two severed ears. Who would do such a vile thing to a nice old lady? Such is Holmes’s usual problem, and the reader’s usual delight. Holmes solves the case using a version of Gall’s “medical semiotics” (recall, Conan Doyle had been a doctor before he took up writing):‘As a medical man, you are aware, Watson, that there is no part of the human body which varies so much as the human ear. Each ear is as a rule quite distinctive, and differs from all other ones. . . . Imagine my surprise when, on looking at Miss Cushing, I perceived that her ear corresponded exactly with the female ear which I had just inspected. The matter was entirely beyond coincidence. There was the same shortening of the pinna, the same broad curve of the upper lobe, the same convolution of the inner cartilage. In all essentials it was the same ear.’

  Of course, I at once saw the enormous importance of the observation. It was evident that the victim was a blood relation, and probably a very close one.

  Usually, when Holmes comes down from one of his highs to confront Watson, he assumes the intellectual strategy of Socrates, a seeming knownothing—who of course knows everything—and more, allowing Watson to come to the solution as if through his own powers of induction. As the characters trade roles, Conan Doyle makes apparent to his readers that Holmes and Watson are really twin aspects of each other. In “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” however, Holmes instructs: The details are too important, the lessons too crucial. He lectures the doctor on his own profession, about the most crucial topic, a way of seeing individuality.

  In this example of semiotics at work, Holmes attempts to deduce the solution to a crime based on one small set of details, in this case the shape of the pinna and lobe and cartilage of one ear. Carlo Ginzburg, in “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes,” connects the case to a nineteenth-century art historian named Giovanni Morelli who authenticated paintings in museums across Europe based not on stylistic features like color and strokes, but on such “inadvertent little gestures” as the shape of the ears of the artist’s figures. Ginzburg points out that Freud had read and commented on Morelli’s strategy, causing Ginzburg to realize “the considerable influence that Morelli had exercised on [Freud] long before his discovery of psychoanalysis.” Detective, psychoanalyst, and art historian all share (or exhibit) the age’s obsession for ordering and classifying: for the semiotics of seeing.

  The task for all the practitioners of the so-called human sciences, then, was precisely Holmes’s task—to find the pinna, the lobe, that one essential truth. Like Holmes, they were trying to solve a major crime, the theft of human essence, to find ultimate meaning in the marginal, the irrelevant—the detail, to quote Freud, that lay “beneath notice.”11 No one particularly cared who had pulled off this particular slick robbery. The idea was just to return the booty, to redefine the human being at the core level. The academic branch we now know as the social sciences, devoted to the study of human behavior, came into existence in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of its first fields of study was something called eugenics, a word coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, the same man who eventually concluded his career, out of exasperation, with fingerprints.

  Just as Holmes arranged seemingly random details into recognizable patterns, Galton applied statistical methods to myriad physical characteristics and arranged them into basic definitions and types. By so doing, he caused the century to face new, bizarre questions: What does it mean to be classified as a Negro (or Ethiopian, to use the nineteenth-century term), or a Mongoloid, or—of supreme importance for Galton—a person who occupied the most elevated of those categories, a Caucasian? In his 1869 study Hereditary Genius, Galton expressed his fear about the demise of superior breeding if the upper classes did not maintain their dominance. After all, they had the good fortune of occupying that premier category, the “highly evolved” white race, and that meant they had certain responsibilities; for instance, they were charged with keeping the race pure.

  While Galton turns out to be a somewhat obscure but pivotal figure in the debate over heritable traits, his new science of eugenics supplied the necessary foundation for all the later discussions of the key essentialist idea of the late nineteenth century—race. Galton argued that people inherited all their behavior, and insisted that those traits could and should be measured. Moreover, he wanted to rank them so as to demonstrate the relative worth of one group of people over another: Bad behavior meant bad genes. So, for example, in a shocking display of racial hubris, Galton proposed to show the superiority of whites over blacks by examining the history of encounters of white travelers in Africa, their manners and deportment, with unruly, hostile black tribal chiefs.

  In the most public display of quantification—in which he used statistical methods to reduce living human beings to numerical arrays—Galton set up a makeshift laboratory at the International Health Exhibition of 1884. For threepence, a man in a white smock would test and measure participants for all sorts of indices, including head size and its alleged concomitants, intelligence and beauty. People came in one end of the tent as personalities, and left the other end as averages, norms, and deviations. Each of these measurements, Galton believed, would take the world of science that much closer to the ultimate definition of the human being.

  So convinced was Galton that he had found the way to define human essence, he wanted to use his theory to effect a social cleansing. In Galton’s scheme, heredity governed not only physical characteristics but talent and character as well, so, he said, “it would be quite practical to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.”12 In Macmillan’s Magazine, a popular monthly, he proposed an idea that mimics Victor Frankenstein’s—the creation of life. His plan involved state-sponsored competitions based on heredity, celebrating the winners in a public ceremony, culminating with their weddings at no less a location than Westminster Abbey. Then, through the use of postnatal grants, the government could encourage the birth of eugenically superior offspring. (Later, he would argue that the state should rank people by ability and authorize more births for the higher- than the lower-ranked unions.) Finally, he would have the state segregate and ship off to monasteries and convents the categorically unfit and unworthy, where society could be assured that they would not propagate their enfeebled kind.

  Charles Darwin went beyond mere individual races. He believed that he had found the secret for the collective human species. Like the death of God, evolution was an eighteenth-century idea that took hold in the nineteenth century. No one in early Christian Europe took seriously the idea that the present emerged out of the past. Of course, people observed change, but they did not necessarily hold to the idea of continuity, for Christianity postulated a world of living things completed in six days, a creation that forever after remained unchanged. The Christian worldview could accommodate sudden change, even catastrophe, but not slow, small changes over long stretches of time. For Christians, today’s natural world has existed this same way since its creation, except, as with Noah’s flood, when God chose to alter it.

  In titling his 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Darwin deliberately overreach
ed, for the idea that the origin of anything could exist outside God, he knew, would smack of heretical thinking. Against every acceptable theory of the scientific community, Darwin set out to prove by himself the mechanism by which plants and animals—most notably humans—had achieved their present form. How could anyone get any more fundamental than Darwin, who was after all determined to plumb the very origin of every species on Earth, to trace our evolutionary ancestors back to the primordial muck from which they arose? With just one overarching mechanism, natural selection, Darwin could account for the endless variety of nature using only three related principles: one, all organisms reproduce; two, within a given species each organism differs slightly; and three, all organisms compete for survival. Not a divine plan, but changes in climate, weather, geology, food supply, and numbers and kinds of predators, created nature’s incredible biodiversity. Darwin had no patience with the idea of creation through any supernatural force.

  Ironically, despite the tremendous controversy surrounding 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 “chil
dren’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).