The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 423 happiness as the end of life. It is disappointing that Semmel never pursues this issue for Mill's utilitarianism. Throughout the book Semmel assumes that Mill's preference for the pursuit of virtue is also a choice of free will over determinism, and that Mill inconsistently favors liberty as a means to virtue while also adopting associationist psychology and other necessitarian doctrines (e.g., 6, 9, 23, 186, 195). Both the claim of linkage and of inconsistency reflect a serious omission in Semmel's argument. Although Semmel never clearly defines the notions of free will and determinism, at one point he suggests the following characterization: necessitarians maintain that actions follow from character, which is wholly determined by education, circumstances, etc., and Mill favors free will in that one can modify one's own character, in that actions affect the agent's character (45, but cf. t86-98 ). But this notion of free will (and the pursuit of virtue) might be consistent with determinism: actions, social policies, and personal efforts to alter one's character all could be desirable precisely because they cause or determine desirable character traits. In short, Semmel completely ignores compatibilist accounts of free will and determinism. And since Mill himself advances a compatibilist view in the spirit of Hume, Semmel's omission seriously undermines his interpretation of Mill's liberalism as internally inconsistent about freedom. Furthermore, contrary to Semmel, Mill's own position permits consistently divorcing questions of political liberty, virtue, and free will: the latter is not crucial to the argument of On Liberty (165-66), and Mill did not see a close connection between his emphasis on virtue and contra-causal freedom (186). Professor Semmel is generally correct in pointing to Mill's emphasis on character and the "inner" person as a means to a better society. On Liberty is as much about the positive freedom of self-development or individuality as it is about the negative freedom from social interference with expression and action (166 ff.). But the central argument of Semmel's book is often unclear or inaccurate in certain respects, and as an interpretation of John Stuart Mill's views it is disappointing for its omissions. ROBERT W. HOAG Berea College Philip F. Rehbock. The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century Brit- /sh B/o/ogy. Wisconsin Publications in the History of Science and Medicine, number 3. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Pp. xv + 28x. $3o.oo cloth. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. In that work, he argued for life's evolution, and put biology on a path which leads directly to the present. There is somewhat of a tendency to assume that Darwin and everything after him was right, or at least (in the Popperian sense) genuinely "scientific," and that everything before Darwin was wrong, or at least not real science. The corollary is usually that pre-Darwinian thought was fairly directly religious, and this is certainly 424 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 24:3 JULY i986 not a conclusion challenged by the way in which today's "Creationists" set a stark disjunction between evolutionism and their own crude brand of Biblical literalism. Of course, as anyone with a feel for history either knows or senses, this simple vision has to be wrong. Ideas, particularly fundamental ones like Darwin's, do not just spring out of nowhere. In any case, responsible thinkers had been accommodating science and religion, at least as far back as Copernicus. Everything points to the fact that the students of organisms in the first half of the nineteenth century had to be making important empirical and theoretical advances, against which the biologists of the second half could react and on which they could build. Philip Rehbock's detailed monograph The Philosophical Naturalists does important service in showing this prediction is absolutely correct, and that the workers in the early part of the last century deserve respect in their own right, despite the later sneers and laughs of their evolutionary juniors. Essentially (using his own terms), Rehbock sees the transition in biology as manifesting a search for different types of Aristotelian causes. The eighteenth...