David Ceccarelli

Beyond the Conflict Thesis. Edward Drinker Cope and the Neo-Lamarckian "Compromise" in the 19th Century

Ceccarelli David - "Tor Vergata" University of Rome (Italy). dave.ceccarelli@gmail.com

This essay aims to critically rethink the relation between the historiographical categorizations provided by the "conflict thesis" and the American controversies on evolution by analyzing the construction of biological and theological discourses which featured the works of Edward Drinker Cope, leader of the so-called "American school Neo-Lamarckism". As an authority in the American scientific community of the second half of the nineteenth century, Cope set forth a new conceptualization of design in nature based upon the active role displayed by organisms during their life. This assumption, in his own words, implied the reintroduction of theism in nature. Such case study, we argue, represents not only a great testimony of the permeable boundaries which characterized the interaction between scientific and extra-scientific discourses in the 19th century. It also seems to undermine the conflict argument as well as the idea that warfare was the norm in the American reception of Darwinism.

Keywords: conflict thesis, Neo-Lamarckism, post-Darwinian controversies, Edward Drinker Cope, design argument, evolution, teleology.

"Thesis about conflict" and american discussions about evolutions

The idea of an endless war between scientific and religious discourses was, in the words of Ronald L. Nambers, "a once-dominant cliche."-

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roko common in the literature 1. As a fascinating and haunting image, this dual model crept into Western culture with the support of positivist metaphysics and was fueled by the disputes about evolution that broke out at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. Following the general line of the "conflict thesis", individual episodes of the complex history of disputes about evolution were connected together and lined up in a certain line. The public clash in 1860 at the British Association between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce; the Harvard debate between the anti-Darwinian geologist Louis Agassiz and the botanist Asa Gray; the speeches of Bryan and Darrow during the famous "Monkey Trial" in Dayton - in fact, all these events were often depicted as different stages of the same eternal conflict. According to this popular opinion, this war was most actively fought in America.

The use of conflicting analogies and metaphors in relation to the relationship between science and religion is very typical for a significant part of Anglo-Saxon historiography. In his book The Post-Darwinian Controversies, James R. Moore argued that the works of William Draper (1811-1882) and Andrew Dixon White (1832-1918) presented human history as a gradual deconstruction of religious conceptions of nature through science and its triumphant march towards a better understanding of reality. According to Draper, the history of Science should not be "just a list of individual discoveries," but "a narrative about the conflict of two opposing forces: the unstoppable power of the human mind on the one hand, and the pressure of traditional faith and human interests on the other."2. Science, like Caesar and Napoleon, is constantly fighting an endless war for its independence-a war that consists of strategy, sieges, and brutal assaults. According to White, historians should talk about "the heaviness of throwing weapons" and "the selection of weapons"3, since the history of science is the history of the increasing liberation of scientific discourse from the dangerous interference of theology. Although the works of Draper and White

1. Numbers, R. L. (1998) Darwinism Comes to America, p. 21. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

2. Draper, J. W. (1875) History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, p. VI. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

3. White, A. D. (1877) The Warfare of Science. 2nd edition, p. 7. London: Henry S. King & Co.

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Their dichotomies became less popular over time, and they were widely used in nineteenth-century America, creating a very distorted image of post-Darwinian disputes. According to Moore, " there is no better proof of their enduring appeal than the ubiquitous use of the military metaphor to describe the forces of religion and science, first used by Draper and White in their books."4
More importantly, the use of such military metaphors could be said to have crossed the front line in both directions. Religious discourses and historiographies have indeed played a major role in establishing the "conflict thesis", especially at the time of the rise of American fundamentalism in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this regard, many historians point out that the use of hate speech, although it has become generally trivial, may have had an important heuristic power in analyzing the educational policies pursued by fundamentalists. As Laats points out, "hostility was certainly the norm": "even in the later culture wars, the struggle for schools in the twenties was really a struggle for the very soul of America." "Fundamentalists," Laats observes, "fought for control of higher education" and " fought to preserve campuses for the evangelical faith."5. The same Ronald Nambers speaks of the twentieth-century fundamentalist movement. as an "unprecedented crusade" 6, a struggle for conversion that has further reinforced the understanding of the problem in terms of "war".

Thus, the language of hostility has spread on both sides of the conflict, forming the vocabulary of scientists, historians and theologians. However, a proper study of the subject inevitably involves problematizing the concept of "conflict", particularly in relation to the evolution debate. In this regard, two main problems can be formulated, each of which, apparently, really undermines both the "conflict thesis" and the idea of mutual hostility as the norm of the American reception of Darwinism. First of all, religious resistance

4. Moore, J. R. (1979) The Post-Darwinian Controversies. A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, p. 40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5. Laats, A. (2010) Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era, pp. 43-44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

6. Numbers, R. L. Darwinism Comes to America, p. 117.

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Darwin's theory of evolution in America, as in other countries, was more than just a theological opposition. The charge of atheism was undoubtedly a key point of contention, especially in the United States. Charles A. Hodge, one of the leading spokesmen for the American Presbyterian reaction to evolutionism, launched a wave of criticism against Darwin in his 1874 book What is Darwinism?, stating the point succinctly: "What is Darwinism? This is atheism"7. Despite this, it can be argued that religious opposition was more often associated with various philosophical issues than with purely dogmatic resistance. When John Dewey devoted a book to Darwin's influence on philosophy in 1910, he suggested that "religious considerations inflame the fervor" of post-Darwinian controversies, " but do not provoke them." Dewey emphasized :" Although the ideas that rose up like warriors against Darwinism owe their strength to their associations with religion, their origin and meaning should be sought in science and philosophy, not in religion. " 8 In fact, a significant part of the forces opposing the theory of evolution in the second half of the nineteenth century were related to specific philosophical and epistemological issues. Even Charles Hodge, drawing on Princeton's common-sense realism, focused much of his criticism on Darwin's methodology:

Is there enough evidence to suggest that species may have evolved as a result of selection? that none of the phenomena associated with species is incompatible with this version of the origin of species? If these questions can be answered in the affirmative, Darwin's point of view passes from the category of hypotheses to the category of theories.9
If disputes about evolution were often an outward manifestation of broader issues, it can also be concluded that they were controversial in a broader sense. As is often pointed out, discussions about evolution did not necessarily imply

7. Hodge, C. (1874) What is Darwinism? p 177. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Company.

8. Dewey, J. (1910) The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, p. 3. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910.

9. Hodge, C. What is Darwinism? p. 74.

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the conflict between biology and theology. In most cases, the real basis for polemics was the problem of systematization of various discourses and values. When Darwin's work On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, a large part of American readers accepted it. With the exception of Harvard geologist Louis Agassiz and Princeton geographer Arnold Guyot, most of the American scientific community has accepted Darwin's idea of evolution. Professor Joseph Leidy, a Master of Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, supported Darwin and helped him gain membership in the Philadelphia Academy of Natural History. The theory was generally well received at Yale, Boston, and even Harvard, despite Agassiz's hostility.10 Historians have identified various forms of assimilation of Darwinism, emphasizing the ambiguity of the position of those who began to call themselves "evolutionists". For example, it has been argued that when reading Darwin, "American naturalists viewed the doctrine of evolution with caution, and those who accepted it tended to downplay the significance of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, which operates through random variation." 11 According to Moore, this revisionist Darwinism, devoid of the typical and characteristic Darwinian idea of randomness, served as a kind of "ideological function" for Protestant liberalism: its conceptualization was intended to rediscover the continuity between the spiritual and material worlds, based on a certain interpretation of modern scientific explanations.12 Whether or not the correlation between specific religious beliefs and evolutionary ideas has taken clear concrete forms13, American discussions of evolution can hardly be understood in terms of the war between science and religion alone.

To critically rethink the American reception of evolutionism, I propose an analysis of the biological and theological aspects of evolution.-

10. Jaffe, M. (2000) The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E. D. Cope and O. C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science, p. 151. New York: Crown.

11. Numbers, R. L. Darwinism Comes to America, p. 1.

12. Roberts, J. H. (2001) "Darwinism American Protestant Thinkers and the Puzzle of Motivation", in Numbers, R. L, Stenhouse, J. (eds) Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion and Gender, p. 152. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

13. Numbers, R. L. Darwinism Comes to America, p. 43.

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These discourses were typical of the so-called "American school of neo-Lamarckism". In particular, I will try to outline some of the religious and philosophical approaches developed in the works of Edward Drinker Cope , a leader of this movement whose ideas played a significant role in the rehabilitation of the "design argument" in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Edward Drinker Cope and neolamarkian theory evolutions

By 1876, the American entomologist Alpheus Pachard had identified three major " epochs "in nineteenth-century biology: the era of" systematic zoology, "during which paleontological research was"greatly accelerated by national and especially state research." Almost simultaneously came the era of "morphological and embryonic zoology", associated with the arrival of Agassiz in America in 1846. Then came the third era - the "era of evolutionism". This latter period, which began with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, is described by Packard as "an original and purely American school of evolutionism." 14 He would later refer to the same school as "neo-Lamarckism," 15 which was thus designated as an important page in the American history of science.

Scientists have been debating the historical and epistemological nature of this scientific movement for decades. In 1965, Edward J. Pfeiffer found that the American Neo-Lamarckians, unlike the British opposition to Darwin, were able to create a real "competing theory". Alpheus Hiatt and Edward D. Cope, the main representatives of the so-called "American school" of naturalists, developed an explanatory model, the ideas of which formed, in Pfeiffer's words, "a more complete system than Darwin's", since it provided answers to the main problems of Darwin's theory - for example, to the dispute-

14. Packard, A. S. (1876) "A Century's Progress in American Zoology", The American Naturalist. 10 (10): 592-597.

15. Packard, A. S. (1884) "On inheritance of Acquired Characters in Animals with a Complete Metamorphosis", Proc. Am. Acad. Arts & Sci 29: 331-370.

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the nature of variability 16. This approach, according to Bowler, did indeed have the theoretical difference from European Neo-Lamarckian views in that it included "many idiosyncratic ideas that were rarely taken seriously in Europe." 17 However, some historians have disputed the theoretical validity of the so-called American school due to the lack of clear coordination and unity among the Neo-Lamarckians. 18 Since the common-sense laws of "exercise of individual organs" and "inheritance of acquired traits" were understood as synonymous with" Lamarckism", the name of the great French naturalist quickly rose to prominence. the shield as the basis of self-determination of many American scientists, although their views are very different from each other 19.

Outside of historiographical disputes, however, it can be stated that by the mid-seventies of the nineteenth century, evolutionary theories that included some Lamarckian propositions represented a general, though not entirely unambiguous, answer to the thesis of natural selection in America. This theoretical approach was formed mainly between the second and third stages identified by Packard in 1876, when a new generation of American naturalists, especially paleontologists, recognized evolution as the cornerstone of their interpretations. Ignoring the laws of variability and heredity, along with the need to explain the apparent linearity that was observed in fossils, led many paleontologists to certain theoretical assumptions. Instead of accepting Darwinian natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution, the American school chose an approach based on the intersection of two sets of empirical observations - the stages of embryo development and the paleontological data provided by the study of fossils. Following the principle of "triple parallelism" proposed by Louis Agassiz.-

16. Pfeifer, E. J. (1965) "The Genesis of American Neo-Lamarckism", Isis 56 (2): 158-160.

17. Bowler, P. J. (1983) The Eclipse of Darwinism. Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900, p. 118. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

18. См. Greenfield, T. J. (1986) "Variation, Heredity, and Scientific Explanation in the Evolutionary Theory of Four American Neo-Lamarckians, 1867-1897". PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

19. Numbers, R. L. Darwinism Comes to America, p. 34.

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The American school has linked together these various sequences of facts by means of the biogenetic law, according to which ontogenesis is a short expression of phylogeny, and thus explained them as purposeful tendencies based on Lamarckian laws of adaptation.

This theory found its leading advocate in the person of Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897). Cope, described by Stephen Jay Gould as"America's first great evolutionary theorist," 21 was an influential figure in the Philadelphia scientific community. In his time, he achieved great fame, enriching the scientific literature on herpetology, ichthyology and mammaliology with more than 1,400 publications. In the course of his short life, he described 1,282 vertebrate fossils - about half the total number found in America between 1846 and 1897. 22 More importantly, Cope's scientific writings were not just evidence of the United States ' intellectual emancipation from the European academic community; by analyzing the deep interplay between biological and metaphysical questions, Cope's writings perfectly illustrate the complexity of reception of Darwin's theory of evolution in America.

The mind, movement and material: internalization arguments about reasonable the plan

Cope's evolutionary views developed, in a sense, "in a parabola." Born into a Quaker family, Cope grew up to be "an absolute creationist who literally sees the first chapter of Genesis as a true account of creation."23. Before reaching the age of twenty, he began working on the herpetological collections of the Academy of Natural Sciences and held a position in the Academy of Natural Sciences.-

20. According to Agassiz, each embryo demonstrates, throughout its development, the geological history of its own morphological structure plan (Bauplan). Although this approach does not include any evolutionary hypotheses, since the Agassiz parallelism is nothing more than a divine legacy, many American naturalists of subsequent generations have reformulated it in terms of an evolutionary system of views.

21. Gould, S. J. (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny, p. 85. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

22. Osborn, H. F. (1931) Cope: Master Naturalist. Life and Letters of Edward Drinker Cope, with a Bibliography of his Writings classified by Subject, pp. 19-20. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

23. Ibid., p. 527.

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cataloging reptiles and amphibians under the direction of Joseph Leidy. During his first explorations between 1860 and 1861. He began attending Leidy's course at the University of Pennsylvania, where he learned from his mentor about Cuvier's method of comparative anatomy. At the age of twenty-eight, Cope published his first formulation of the evolutionary process in On the Origin of the Genus (On the Origin of the Genera, 1868), "quite independently" of the similar theoretical constructions of Ernst Haeckel and Alpheus Hiatt. Arguing with Darwin and Wallace, he proposed an orthogenetic explanation of evolution based on the internal self-determination of stages in the development of embryos based on the alternation of accelerations and delays. According to Cope, such a mechanism is set in motion by a divine plan that ensures that each living organism in its ontogenesis repeats the stages of phylogenesis through which the development of biological species passes over time. However, there is no mention of "Lamarckian" processes in this paper by Cope. In this first version, the evolutionary process was actually determined only by morphological, internal, and non-utilitarian principles.

If so, how did Cope earn a reputation as the leader of the American Neo-Lamarckian school? As historians almost unanimously emphasize, Cope turned to the new philosophy of evolution in the early seventies in his essay "The Laws of Natural Development" (1871). Having revised his first anti-functionalist concept of organic variability, the great paleontologist turned his research to the problem of adaptation. However, the reasons for this epistemological turn are still unclear. Presumably, Cope realized "that references to the Creator as the only explanation for the reason why evolution moved in certain directions can no longer be scientifically acceptable." 25 In this regard, the application of the laws of the use and non-use of body parts and the inheritance of acquired traits could serve as further explanations to overcome the weakness of theistic evolutionism.,

24. Cope, E. D. (1896) The Primary Factors of Organic Evolution, p 8. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company.

25. Bowler, P. J. The Eclipse of Darwinism, p. 123.

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still riddled with supernatural arguments 26. One way or another, congruence between living things and the environment became a problem that had to be solved. And the solution took the form of a complex conceptualization of the relationship between mind, motion, and matter.

According to Cope, cell division is not limited to molecular interactions, but occurs due to a special force, which he called the "growth force" or "Bathmism". This force acts in strict accordance with other forces and factors. Thus, the more organisms interact with external conditions before reaching maturity, the better this growth force can be directed and localized through individually motivated action.:

Thus, the tendency given by exercise or non-exercise of organs in parental individuals leads to the addition of segments or cells to the organ being exercised. Thus, the exercise of the organ determines the location of new repetitions of already existing body parts (or organs) and at the same time causes an increase in the growth force as a result of an increase in the amount of food supplied to the organ, which in any creature is constantly accompanied by an increase in the work performed.27
Factors influencing "batmism" were inherited to a certain extent, since they "acted on the parent individuals" and acquired "some potential in their reproductive cells", becoming "energy sources in the growing embryos of the next generation"28. Thus, organisms can adapt or lose their no longer used properties, accelerated or reduced by the use of a single cell. repressed offspring at the last stage of ontogenesis. But how is this growth force directed? In an effort to avoid a radically physicalist explanation, Cope turns to other Greek neologisms and razgrani-

26. См. Bowler, P. J. (1985) "Scientific Attitudes to Darwinism in Britain and America", in Kohn, D. (ed.) The Darwinian Heritage, pp. 641-681. Princeton, Princeton University Press; Continenza, B. (1999) "Jean Baptiste Lamarck: Uno sguardo alla teoria dell'evoluzione attraverso gli occhi di un ‘capro espiatorio'", Capire la vita. Modelli matematici e teorie qualitative, pp. 65-101. Ancona: peQuod editore.

27. Cope, E. D. (1887) The Origin of the Fittest, p. 195. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

28. Cope, E. D. (1871) "The Laws of Organic Development", The American Naturalist 5 (8 / 9): 602.

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It determines the physiogenetic and kinetogenetic origin of properties. However important the simple arousal of contact with external elements in the muscles and organs may be, "it is impossible to say that the nutrition used is not directly controlled by the will through the mediation of the nervous force." 29
Kinetogenesis, that is, the influence of conscious and purposeful movements on organ development, was the core of Cope's new evolutionary philosophy and a veritable tangle of contradictions. It was on the basis of this new concept that the American paleontologist rebuilt his "design argument" and explained evolution as a functional mechanism responsible for the development of living things. In fact, it was an orthogenetic process caused by adaptive tendencies, the history of which is contained both in the history of fossils and in the ontogenetic development of each organism. In addition, you can see that we are talking about different ideas of " intelligent design "(design). While Cope's early work focused on what Thomas MacPherson called the "design plan," i.e., the concept of a God-ordered order, from 1870 onwards he began to adopt a more teleological point of view.30 The new concept of intelligent design was based on the active role of living organisms throughout their lives and, most importantly, on the supposed relationship between the inner growth-force and individual sensitivity (sensibility individual):

Protoplasm (...) it releases a force called "driving force" or neurism, which it converts from environmental forces due to its molecular (chemical) or atomic structure. Its spontaneous manifestations in the form of movements bring it into contact with surrounding objects, and then, with sufficient sensitivity to impressions, awareness of the painful or pleasant nature of sensations is awakened. Further, depending on the sensitivity and strength of the impression, the protoplasm retains this sensation in an unconscious form, and at the same time-

29. Cope, E. D. (1871) "The Laws of Organic Development", The American Naturalist 5 (8 / 9): 602., p. 603.

30. См. McPherson, T. (1972) The Argument from Design. London: Macmillan; Bowler, P. J. (1976) Fossils and Progress. Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Science History Publications.

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the next time you return to this object, pleasant or painful signs are also awakened according to the law of"adjacency". The intervention of the" vital principle " prevents the driving force from affecting the protoplasm if the sensation is painful, or allows it to rush to it if it is pleasant. This quality of the vital principle is the power of choice, and when applied consciously it is the will31
By using a vocabulary close to that of the Anglo-Saxon school of "physiological psychology," Cope actually marked a watershed between the more familiar associative empiricism and his own vision. On the one hand, he seems to have assimilated the basic theoretical propositions of associationism formulated by Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain. On the other hand, he rejected certain points, such as the origin of consciousness, psychophysical parallelism, and the relationship between movement and mind. In this regard, in the essay "The Origin of the will" Cope outlined several illustrative reflections on these topics. Referring to Bainow's model of trial-and-error behavior in animals, he emphasized how important, though not central, "aimless discharges and playful movements" play from an evolutionary point of view:

It is obvious that the primary movement precedes the sensation that changes it, or the experience that guides later actions. In the lower animals, the primary movement was undoubtedly a simple discharge of force; but the first purposeful action, the appropriation of food, was the result of a feeling of scarcity or hunger, which is a kind of pain. It was followed by satisfaction, a pleasure whose memory created a motive for even more clearly purposeful action.32
In addition to the primacy of time, the first step to building characteristic behaviors is a purposeful action (designed action). It develops out of a sensory perception of an internal state, such as hunger, and acts as an expression of the inner self.

31. Cope, E. D. The Origin of the Fittest, p. 35.

32. Ibid., p. 448.

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as the initial stage of kinetogenesis, which, as already mentioned, is able to localize the cellular growth force. This process was described by Cope in terms of a general law that can be traced both in the movement of the plant's tendril and in the intelligent choice of a person.33 "All actions," says Cope, " are stimulated and represent a design on the part of the doer. This is true of both the simplest and most complex actions of living beings. " 34 In The Theology of Evolution, Cope deepens his physiological argument by placing the core of the "design process" at the front of the brain. According to the paleontologist, it is here that after registering in the back of the hemispheres, "a line of energy is highlighted to obey the excitation, which means the process of deflecting, turning or aiming." This is how" what is called expediency manifests itself " (design)35. In supporting this view, Cope actually recognizes the dominance of mind over matter, since life's phenomena were nothing more than the result of energy determined by consciousness. This view, called archaesthetism Archaesthetism led the philosopher Henri Bergson to suggest that Cope's neo-Lamarckism was "one of the later forms of evolutionism, the only one capable of admitting an internal and physiological principle in development." 36 In a letter to his daughter written in May 1886, the American evolutionist summarized his philosophy as follows::

I think I can prove the pre-existence of mind, its existence in living matter before it evolved into complex structures. In other words, the structure was produced by the movement of the animal (the theory of "kinetogenesis"), and the movement was initially directed by sensation or consciousness (a synonym that is just a quality of the mind). This is essentially the foundation of the mind, which, with the support of memory, created the minds of animals and humans.37
33. Cope, E. D. The Origin of the Fittest, p. 208.

34. Ibid., p. 440

35. Cope, E. D. (1887) Theology of Evolution, p. 13. Philadelphia: Arnold and Company.

36. Bergson, H. (1922) Creative Evolution, p. 81. London: MacMillan and Co.

37. Osborn, H. F. Cope: Master Naturalist, p. 534.

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In Cope's own words, this assumption signifies the return of theism to nature: "The control of mind over matter,"he stressed in another personal letter," is the conclusion of neo - Lamarckian philosophy, which proves the superiority of reason, and therefore is theistic and absolutely fatal to atheism. " 38
It is not difficult to understand what problems Cope had to face, if we take into account the development of other naturalistic and scientific movements of that period. Recognizing consciousness as the main factor in evolution, he inevitably opposed himself to the materialistic concept of the origin of life and mind. In a lecture delivered in 1874 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, for example, he denounced the "Darwinian-Bainian school"for thinking of purposeful acts as movements "performed simply under the influence of various stimuli." 39 This critique led Cope to conceptually revise the typical evolutionary-materialist point of view. If life cannot be explained except from the vital properties based on consciousness, then it must be recognized that the vital properties preceded the life forms.

By adopting this approach, Cope came into conflict with his contemporary physician and philosopher Edmund Montgomery (1835-1911), who denounced the American paleontologist from the pages of the most influential American journals of the 19th century. In an attempt to defend his naturalism against both mechanismism and idealism, 40 Montgomery ironically stated in The Open Court magazine that "if Professor Cope really has such knowledge - if he can prove that mind dominates matter-then he has solved one of the central problems of modern philosophy." 41 Emphasizing the importance of consciousness in our understanding of internal states, Cope argued in Montgomery's response that Montgomery "must prove" that "the animal does not eat because it is hungry or thirsty; that it does not seek shelter because of bad weather or heat.";

38. Osborn, H. F. Cope: Master Naturalist, p. 541.

39. Cope, E. D. The Origin of the Fittest, p. 390.

40. Schneider, W. H. (1946) A History of American Philosophy, p. 363. New York: Columbia University Press.

41. Montgomery, E. (1887) "Cope's Theology of Evolution", The Open Court 1 (6): 162.

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that the sounds it makes do not express pain, desire,or pleasure; that the horse does not run because it is being urged on, and that the bird does not build a nest because it feels the need to lay eggs. " 42
This concept of mind As the primum movens of evolution, Cope found himself in a difficult position, not only in his argument with Montgomery, but also with regard to the concept of psychophysical parallelism in general. His approach implied the unverifiability of a reasonable causal agent. In fact, he did not allow for the cognizability of rational causes, nor the interaction between mind and body, because, as Bain put it, causal interaction implies "that we are free to talk about mind in abstraction from the body, and to assert its powers and properties in this separateness."43 While the English psychologist defined any supposed rational causes as "two-sided" and thought of mind and body as a single substance characterized by concomitant variations between the two sets of traits, Cope defended the significance of rational causes alone. In a lecture to the Brooklyn Ethical Association, he emphasized, for example,that a person can control the embodied nature of the mind through mental acts that are not related to matter. 44
As Montgomery pointed out in his critique, for Cope, "matter has undergone evolutionary changes not only because of its physical properties; it was not just raw material waiting for the supreme Artificer to shape it." 45 In fact, Cope's theories were both directed against materialism and against supernaturalism, since he thought of intelligent design as the ability of life to adjust itself rather than as the intervention of a transcendent force. So Cope had to fight on two fronts: he had to defend evolutionism against strict creationism, and he had to defend religion against radical materialism. Typical of its public settings

42. Cope, E. D. (1888) "Evolution and Idealism", The Open Court 1 (23): 656.

43. Bain, A. (1872) Mind and Body. The Theories of Their Relation, p. 130. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

44. Cope, E. D. (1889) "The Descent of Man", in Evolution: Popular Lectures and Discussions before the Brooklyn Ethical Association, p. 168. Boston: James H. West.

45. Montgomery, E. "Cope's Theology of Evolution", p. 161.

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It was a defense of both evolution and religion at the same time. During the eighties of the XIX century. Cope gave several lectures at Unitarian church meetings to point out a "third way"in the American battle between evolutionism and creationism. In 1886, he commented on the "Woodrow affair" at Columbia Theological Seminary, which resulted in Professor James Woodrow's conviction in 1884 for accepting the theory of evolution:

The fact of evolution was too well established to allow such "bulls against the comet" to influence modern thinking; and these "bulls" only made it more difficult to move along the path of truth. (...) This scientific doctrine does not necessarily exclude the possibility of a personal relationship between man and the Supreme Being in the universe of mind.46
As publisher of The American Naturalist between 1880 and 1890. Cope tried to popularize this "third way" between materialism and creationism, which was nothing more than his own vision of the conflict between evolutionism and religion. Since Cope's main hypothesis was that inner consciousness is the source of both inorganic forces and life itself, his approach took an intermediate position between Protestant theism and strict materialism: the Neo-Lamarckian explanation in this case was an instrument of compromise that sought to preserve intelligent design in nature.47
This idea was transformed as the structure of Cope's theoretical and religious beliefs changed. Bowler argues that"Cope never renounced his belief in the divine origin of life" 48: he moved from the dogmatic creed of the Quakers to the broader religious views of the Unitarians. At the same time, according to Jane Davidson, he gradually began to "pay more attention to his personal responsibility to God than before, and this change in his consciousness reflected the power of the Church."-

46. Packard, A. S., Cope, E. D. (1886) "Editors' Table", The American Naturalist 20 (8): 708-710.

47. Moore, J. R. The Post-Darwinian Controversies, p. 231.

48. Bowler, P. J. (1977) "Edward Drinker Cope and the Changing Structure of Evolutionary Theory", Isis 68 (2): 259.

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It was also reflected in his scientific and theoretical thinking. " 49 This scientific and philosophical transition was particularly pronounced in some of his critical statements about his early metaphysical reflections. Seventeen years after the publication of the essay "The Hypothesis of Evolution, Physical and Metaphysical" - a work in which Cope attempted to extend to anthropological and theological questions the principles established in his not yet neo-Lamarckian Origin of the Genus-the paleontologist assessed his earlier attempt as a failure "caused by a lack of information."50
Conclusions

Thus, the figure of Edward Drinker Cope, as well as many other American evolutionists of the last decades of the nineteenth century, makes us take a fresh look at the connection between the "conflict thesis" (between science and religion) and the reception of evolutionism in America. The United States was characterized by a philosophical agreement rather than a Manichaean confrontation. This does not mean, however, that the adoption of the theory of evolution in America went smoothly. Accusations against the theory of evolution were heard from Harvard to Princeton Theological Seminary. But the American response to Darwinism was largely driven by intellectual attitudes that are difficult to explain in terms of the pure emancipation of scientific discourse from theology and metaphysics.51 According to Cope, the conflict did not lead to a war between science and religion, but, one might say, caused an internal struggle for the mutual normalization of relations between scientific and theological points of view. Although Andrew White argued that "science has given us a much nobler concept and opened the way to a much more beautiful argument for design than any theological proof"52, in many cases

49. Davidson, J. P. (1997) The Bone Sharp. The Life of Edward Drinker Cope, p. 166. Philadelphia: Ac. Nat. Sc. Phil.

50. Cope, E. D. The Origin of the Fittest, p. VII.

51. "I say now to all those who oppose the introduction of metaphysics into biology that from the point of view of logic they cannot take this problem beyond the limits of the subject we are studying" (Ibid., p. 424).

52. White, A. D. (1896) A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. vol. I, p. 86. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

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this updated view took the form of a complex philosophical compromise between evolutionism and theology. Cope's Neo-Lamarckian theory, in this sense, was the cornerstone of such reconciliation. Although compromises in scientific discourse were portrayed by White as something that often suffers from "disappointing impotence" due to their theological bias, 53 in reality, they served as the evidence-based core of one of the leading theoretical schools in the history of post-Darwinian biology.

Translation with english Daria Pancake House

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