the British author and adventurer William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) revisited the project of progress that Condorcet had laid out. Reade, born in Scotland, was a failure as a novelist but had modest success as an African explorer and war correspondent. He was in correspondence with Darwin, who is said to have used in The Descent of Man (1871) some information from Reade’s expedition to West Africa.17 While it seems like in his short life Reade never quite lived up to his own expectations for himself, his attempt at a universal history—an 1872 book called The Martyrdom of Man—was once highly regarded. W. E. B. Du Bois, Cecil Rhodes, H. G. Wells, and George Orwell all found reasons to praise it.18 Perhaps even the character Sherlock Holmes was a fan: in The Sign of the Four, Holmes says to Watson, “Let me recommend this book—one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. I shall be back in an hour.”19 From its original publication to 1910 the book went through eighteen editions in England and seventeen in the United States; one can only imagine that many a Baker Street Irregular has felt compelled to track it down.
The Martyrdom of Man began, Reade says, as an effort to give the hitherto neglected story of “Inner Africa” its due place within European history.20 But in the writing, the book became very much more: an effort to place human history within a larger natural history that eventually takes Reade right back to the development of the solar system and the origins of life.21 He adopts his own version of a Darwinian perspective, along with the theories about a geologically dynamic Earth, which were still rather recent in his day. Reade’s naturalism is particularly deployed in extensive efforts to provide non-supernatural explanations for the rise of religions.
But there is one crucial aspect of his argument that distinguishes it from most similar presentations in our own day: Reade believes that nature is purposive—and indeed, that something like a cunning of nature is evident in human history.22 That is to say, human activities like war and religion, or conditions like inequality, serve developmental purposes within a natural scheme of things beyond what is intended by the human beings participating in those activities.23 “Thus when Nature selects a people to endow them with glory and with wealth her first proceeding is to massacre their bodies, her second, to debauch their minds. She begins with famine, pestilence, and war; next, force and rapacity above; chains and slavery below. She uses evil as the raw material of good; though her aim is always noble, her earliest means are base and cruel. But, as soon as a certain point is reached, she washes her black and bloody hands, and uses agents of a higher kind.”24
To put it another way, Reade believes that there is a natural imperative for higher abilities and capacities to grow out of lower ones: “The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness. Loyalty and piety, the reverential virtues, are developed from filial love. Benevolence and magnanimity, the generous virtues, from parental love. The sense of decorum proceeds from the sense of cleanliness; and that from the instinct of sexual display.”25 Reade’s claim that the higher derives from the lower does not just apply to human beings. It is a characteristic of life itself, indeed a characteristic of matter, which he regards as inseparable from mind.26
We ought not to think there is anything degrading about thus understanding the higher in light of the lower, Reade argues. Indeed, his reductionism opens the door to remarkable possibilities:
It is Nature’s method to take something which is in itself paltry, repulsive, and grotesque, and thence to construct a masterpiece by means of general and gradual laws; those laws themselves being often vile and cruel. This method is applied not only to single individuals, but also to the whole animated world; not only to physical but also to mental forms. And when it is fully realised and understood that the genius of man has been developed along a line of unbroken descent from the simple tendencies which inhabited the primeval cell, and that in its later stages this development has been assisted by the efforts of man himself, what a glorious futurity will open to the human race! It may well be that our minds have not done growing, and that we may rise as high above our present state as that is removed from the condition of the insect and the worm.27
That we can assist in our own uplift and greatly transcend what we are today is crucial to Reade’s picture of the future, as it is to today’s transhumanists. In the natural order of things, the individual human life has limited potential, precisely because by nature we are parts of a whole with at least potentially greater significance:
As the atoms are to the human unit, so the human units are to the human whole. . . . Nature does not recognise their individual existence. But each atom is conscious of its life; each atom can improve itself in beauty and in strength; each atom can therefore, in an infinitesimal degree, assist the development of the Human Mind. If we take the life of a single atom, that is to say of a single man, or if we look only at a single group, all appears to be cruelty and confusion; but when we survey mankind as One, we find it becoming more and more noble, more and more divine, slowly ripening towards perfection.28
That Reade believes mankind is “slowly ripening towards perfection” implies that he is tolerably certain he understands the immediate project that faces humanity, and at least some of its longer-term consequences. Although he claims that he does not mean to suggest that humanity will ever understand the ultimate purpose of creation,29 he feels confident enough to assert that man was
not sent upon the earth to prepare himself for existence in another world; he was sent upon earth that he might beautify it as a dwelling, and subdue it to his use; that he might exalt his intellectual and moral powers until he had attained perfection, and had raised himself to that ideal which he now expresses by the name of God, but which, however sublime it may appear to our weak and imperfect minds, is far below the splendour and majesty of that Power by whom the universe was made.30
By the power of science rather than prayer, Earth, “which is now a purgatory, will be made a paradise.”31 The genuinely “Sacred Cause” is “the extinction of disease, the extinction of sin, the perfection of genius, the perfection of love, the invention of immortality, the exploration of the infinite, the conquest of creation.”32
So by making men mortal and immoral, nature points humanity in the direction of immortality and morality so long as we exercise our intelligence.33 Reade could already see signs of progress in this direction: “Life is full of hope and consolation; we observe that crime is on the decrease, and that men are becoming more humane. The virtues as well as the vices are inherited; in every succeeding generation the old ferocious impulses of our race will become fainter and fainter, and at length they will finally die away.”34 Delusions about an immortal soul will only stand in the way of such efforts; Christianity, which Reade treats under general headings such as “Religion” and “superstition,” will have eventually done the work intended of it as a tool of nature, and at that point can and must be destroyed, for it is in the nature of these tools to become obstructions once they have brought life to the next level.35 While human beings may never rival the great Creator of all things, there is a long way to go before that would become an issue.36 Echoing Francis Bacon,37 Reade notes that “we can conquer Nature only by obeying her laws, and in order to obey her laws we must first learn what they are. When we have ascertained, by means of Science, the method of Nature’s operations, we shall be able to take her place and to perform them for ourselves.”38 Nature intends that we rebel against being the serfs of nature.39
Having placed immortality explicitly on the agenda of the future, Reade considers space travel a necessary consequence:
Disease will be extirpated; the causes of decay will be removed; immortality will be invented. And then, the earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will become a Holy
