Shaw's evolution
Sir: Benny Green, in his sympathetic and Perspicacious essay on Shaw (August 10), thinks there is "no sadder sPectacle throughout the realm of Philosophic speculation" than the evolution of man, in Back to Methuselah, towards the Superman. But was this truly "a disenchanted philosopher daydreaming," as he suggests, or was it the conscious echo by a widely-read man, not only of the Lamarckian theory of the evolutionary 'jump,' but also of the eighteenth century philosophes whose influence extended well into Shaw's time?
It was the late R. B. White who Pointed out, in The Anti-Philosophers, the curious affinity of Shaw's idea to that of La Mettrie in L'Homme Machine: "The original shape of a creature," wrote La Mettrie, "degenerates or perfects itself through necessity . . I wouldn't rule out that man might end by being nothing but a head."
Shaw's climax of creative evolution — the Ancients who are virtually walking brains — is surely a case, if not of derivation, at least of an extraordinary Parallel of philosophic thought.
Audrey Williamson 29 Turner House, Erasmus Street, London SW1
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