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This graduate school thesis surveys the evolutionary ideas that preceded and influenced Darwin and analyzes Darwin's extra-scientific strategies in Origin of Species. I call them extra-scientific because Darwin had no empirical substantiation for the theory of human and animal descent from a common ancestor. In reality, millions of years of gradual change cannot be observed, so Darwin had to rely on fictional illustrations, arguments, analogies, extrapolations, familiar imagery, rhetoric, etc. Sadly, 150 years later, much of the scientific community uses the same strategy today. They hold dearly to their evolutionary faith, which is what it always will be since the actual process of speciation cannot be proven or falsified scientifically. (By the way, I am not denying that change over time takes place on the earth and within species, but this idea by itself is very different from Darwin's.) Read on to find out more.
RHETORIC AND ROMANTICISM IN CHARLES
DARWIN’S ORIGIN OF SPECIES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION ........................................................................................................................................ i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................................... ii
ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................................... iii
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................. 1
I. Darwin's Extra-Scientific and Evolutionary Influences ...................................................... 5
II. Darwin's Rhetorical Strategies: Origin as "One Long Argument" ................................... 23
III. Darwin and Romanticism: Evolution and Poetry Meet ................................................. 44
CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................... 60
WORKS CITED ..................................................................................................................................... 62
DEDICATION
This thesis is dedicated to Professor of Rhetoric and Communication John Angus Campbell, whose innovative approach to Darwin’s literature confirms the validity of cross-curriculum endeavors and assures English majors everywhere of their usefulness.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Dr. John Thomas Lloyd, Professor, Literature and Philosophy Department, whose thought-provoking seminar inspired me to study carefully the life and literature of Charles Darwin. Dr. Lloyd was particularly instrumental in his recognition and explication of Darwin as an appropriator of Victorian literary conventions and classical rhetoric. I would also like to thank Dr. Douglass H. Thomson, Professor, Literature and Philosophy Department, for sharing with me his insights and expertise in the area of Romanticism and Dr. Timothy D. Whelan, Associate Professor, Literature and Philosophy Department, for his advice regarding Darwin’s rhetoric. I further thank Dr. John B. Humma, retired professor, and Dr. Bruce J. Krajewski, former professor and chair of the Literature and Philosophy Department, for their overall guidance regarding procedural and administrative issues. Finally, I would like to express gratitude to all of those on staff at the Zach S. Henderson Library for their invaluable assistance.
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ABSTRACT
RHETORIC AND ROMANTICISM IN CHARLES
DARWIN’S ORIGIN OF SPECIES
Charles Darwin’s fame and success as a scientist were undoubtedly based on the reception of the evolutionary paradigm he articulated in Origin of Species. Although many of Darwin’s ideas were only ideas at the time of Origin’s publication, they indubitably fostered the widespread acceptance of the evolutionary worldview among scientists and non-scientists. And this phenomenon took place in a relatively short period of time. The fact that much of Darwin’s evolutionary thesis was well received and yet was clearly, and by his own admission, hypothetical, may seem to be a curious development.
This thesis project will center on two factors that contributed to Origin’s success: Darwin’s persuasive and argumentative skills and his appropriation of romantic literary devices. Along with Darwin's rhetoric, I will examine his use of conventional romanticist poetic discourse and typology within an overarching systematic mythology. In short, I will demonstrate that Darwin’s success as a scientist was contingent upon his rhetorical skills and, to some degree, his cultivation of romantic themes, prose, and myth.
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In order to understand the author and his audience better, I will introduce my argument by exploring some background information on Darwin and the currents of thought in the Victorian Era. I will also analyze Darwin’s copiously documented correspondence, reflect upon his pre-Origin notes, and highlight other biographical material.
Subsequently, I will demonstrate that 1) Darwin was deeply committed to his view but was unable to demonstrate it in a limited time frame or substantiate it with empirical evidence, 2) Darwin’s presentation in Origin was self-consciously and strategically designed to subvert the creationist paradigm that already was under attack during his era, and 3) It was necessary for Darwin to resort to various and sundry rhetorical and literary strategies in order for this presentation to be effective. As a result, I will present my view of Origin as much more an exercise in rhetoric, literary innovation, and mythology than the verifiable and objective categorization of scientific facts.
As Darwin himself called Origin “one long argument,” I will examine, in depth, his rhetorical strategies especially in relation to classical rhetoric. Aristotle’s Rhetoric along with the poignant research of rhetorician John Campbell will be instrumental towards these ends. Along with Darwin’s mastery of rhetoric, his early reading and writings will confirm his affinity with Romanticism.
I will consequently document the relationship between the nature-worship and language of the Romantics and the naturalism and poetic discourse that is foundational in much of Origin. I will make such connections in part by discussing Darwin’s ideas and writing style in terms of the poetry of men like Wordsworth and Tennyson. I will also identify Darwin’s use of Romanticism as a clever literary strategy designed to appeal to Romanticist-influenced Victorians. Finally, I will examine Darwin’s ability to create a counter-mythology to creationism.
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INTRODUCTION
In 1859, Charles Darwin publicly introduced his evolutionary theory on biology and origins by publishing On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Although the reception of Origin was initially embroiled in great controversy among non-scientists and scientists alike, much of the world saw science quite differently afterwards and in a relatively short period of time. Darwin’s role in fostering the successful subversion of creationism and the subsequent predominance of the evolutionary worldview indeed should not be underestimated. Origin’s promulgation of naturalism, after all, was a major facilitator of an all-embracing scientific and philosophical paradigm shift.
Thinkers since Darwin’s era have devoted much analysis to this phenomenon. How could the ideas of one man affect the ideological landscape so dramatically, and what were the dynamics behind this scientific and cultural transformation? Certainly, no simplistic answer is warranted, as Thomas Kuhn has argued in his influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. However, amidst the complications regarding the evolutionary paradigm’s rise to prominence, scholars have been able to identify contributing factors. This thesis will examine two of those factors, namely, Darwin’s rhetorical strategies and his appropriation of romanticist thought and style in Origin of Species.
As the title of this composition suggests, I will be looking at Origin from a rhetorical and literary point of view. Representatives of the scientific community may protest such an approach. They may argue that a non-scientist, and perhaps even a non-biologist, is simply not qualified to analyze a scientific work that is inundated with the technical details of biology as Origin is.1 However, upon closer examination, Origin proves to be much more than simply a technical manual on natural science. Contrary to the stereotypically objective, calculating, and often rather abstruse style of standard scientific discourse, Origin’s presentation moves into other realms.
Although Darwin spoke much of his observations in the empirical world, he did so with a unique style and language that often resembles the artistic, the humanistic, and the philosophical. As such, Darwin’s presentation is accessible and understandable in many respects to today’s non-scientist. And perhaps more significantly, Origin was highly understandable to the non-scientist of the Victorian Age due to the cultural climate of 1859.
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Darwin is commonly known as a shaper of the science and thought of the Victorian Age due to the dissemination of his ideas after Origin’s publication. But just like any other major thinker, Darwin had influences of his own. And many of those influences were coming from outside of the scientific community. Hence, this thesis focuses on Darwin’s extra-scientific influences for part of Chapter I, not to diminish his scientific acumen but to address the significance of his largely unexamined philosophical and literary interests. Put simply, Charles Darwin was the quintessential Victorian; he was by no means a one-dimensional character.
What does this reality have to do with Darwin’s scientific presentation in Origin? As it turns out, extra-scientific influences had considerable impact on Darwin’s thought and discourse. I will therefore initially explore Darwin as a man of the humanities, utterly well read and heavily influenced by many of the great literary figures of his day. Along with the many literary influences, I will offer a brief background of some philosophical figures who also affected Darwin including his own poetry-writing grandfather, Erasmus, the political economist Thomas Malthus, the philosopher George Combe, and the sociologist Herbert Spencer.
The influence of Men like Combe and Spencer is particularly noteworthy because they were prominent evolutionary thinkers. And here is where the paradox of the Victorian Era begins. Although Darwin is often celebrated as the “inventor” of evolutionary theory, the Victorian Age had been cultivating evolutionary thought well before The Origin of Species. Hence, to better understand what went on behind the successful publication of Origin, Chapter I will briefly sketch the ascendancy of evolution as a philosophy before Darwin. Such a task would have to include Robert Chambers, who also was not a scientist, yet whose influence on Darwin was quite instrumental. Chambers’ writing, released more than ten years before Origin, was indeed highly influential on many Victorians, as the reception statistics confirm.
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Along with Chambers and the other non-scientists, the last part of Chapter I will focus on evolutionary thought within the scientific community before Darwin. Perhaps the Frenchman Jean Lamarck and the Briton Charles Lyell were most noteworthy in this respect, at least concerning general evolutionary principles. In addition to the proponents of general evolution, there were others who held specific “Darwinian” ideas before Darwin.
But as it turns out, these evolutionists ultimately fell short of recognition and remain largely unknown today. The inability of these, Darwin’s ideological forefathers, to earn distinction as evolutionary scientists seemed to indirectly give birth to his success; Darwin subsequently became the “father of evolution.” In light of these realities, I do not characterize Darwin in the ensuing chapters as so much a discoverer but rather a mobilizer of evolutionary thought.
Where the first chapter highlights what influenced Darwin, the second counters with Darwin’s influence on his audience. “Rhetorical Strategies” will first look at Darwin’s educational background and how it shaped his rhetorical skills despite his autobiographical protestations to the contrary. Darwin’s emphatic repudiation of his own communicative strength is significant since he wrote his Autobiography 17 years after the first edition of Origin and well after his magnum opus had proven to be successful. As a result, I view Darwin’s public renunciation to be a major aspect of his rhetorical scheme.
Despite his humble self-evaluation, Darwin’s persuasive skills were indeed most obvious, especially considering the wealth of inside information left behind in his voluminous correspondence, his early notebooks, journals, and other sources. When Darwin’s private thoughts are compared with his public presentation, his rhetorical powers become most evident. For instance, Darwin wasted little time maneuvering rhetorically with his introductory statements in Origin. He started with a brilliantly orchestrated self-portrait, offering readers the popular Victorian image of the consummate scientific investigator à la Francis Bacon.
Darwin upheld this inductivist image throughout Origin regardless of his actual methodology, which turned out to be rather unorthodox by Victorian scientific standards. Yet his overall presentation was strong enough to impress his contemporaries, a reality we can attribute at least in part to the scientific image he created.
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At this point I move to the crux of Chapter II where Darwin’s ability to sway his readers is paralleled squarely with Aristotelian rhetorical modes. In doing so, Darwin not only popularized the evolutionary thesis but also changed the face of scientific philosophy. And he did so despite the protestations of many in the scientific establishment who viewed with suspicion the use of artful rhetoric like the literary analogy in place of empirical evidence. By offering up arguments based on Aristotelian deductive reasoning, Darwin preferred ideas to experience and made possible a host of other rhetorical strategies. Epitomizing the discourse of a seasoned rhetorician, Darwin argued from the familiar to the unknown, endeared his audience with “ethos” and moved them emotionally with “pathos.”
“Darwin and Romanticism” fittingly takes center stage at this juncture and the thesis accordingly moves from a focus on persuasion to expression. Chapter III commences by highlighting the natural relationship between Romanticism and evolutionary thought. The relationship is important because Darwin manifested in his discourse many of the standard ideals and themes of romantic thought in Origin’s scientific prose. Perhaps most essential in this category was Darwin’s creative imagination, a romantic value that came in handy throughout Origin, especially when he was postulating theories.
Also in Chapter III is the analysis of a most outstanding literary innovation. Darwin employed romantic expression and weaved it together with scientific discourse, lifting Origin, at least in some parts, to the status of poetic science. The Romantics had apparently thought of a similar idea, further testifying to Darwin’s affinity with Romanticism.
In extolling the beauty of nature, Darwin added a unique touch to natural science and remained ideologically synchronized with his Romanticist predecessors. And in describing the struggle for existence that occurs under the auspices of natural selection, Darwin romanticized the darker side of nature. He then ended Origin the way he started, at least stylistically, with grand romantic drama and emotion from the “mystery of mysteries” to a view of life with “grandeur.” And like the high Romantics and their ideal of organic wholeness, Darwin envisioned a glorious future for all of nature’s children.
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NOTES
1 It has always perplexed me that Origin is not required reading for biology students, even though neo-Darwinian scientists tell us that the principles therein are absolutely foundational and indispensable to modern science. Biology professors and students alike (who have not read Origin themselves) have told me that science has progressed so far beyond Darwin that it is no longer necessary to even ponder the ideas in Origin. The philosophy has become axiomatic. But if Darwin was the founding father of modern biology and evolutionary science, it would make sense for all biologists to be directly knowledgeable of at least some of Origin’s important principles and arguments despite whatever science is outdated. Origin, after all, may well be considered the “bible” of natural selection.
CHAPTER I
Darwin’s Extra-Scientific and Evolutionary Influences
Charles Darwin has been known primarily if not exclusively as a man of science ever since Origin of Species changed the scientific landscape over a century ago. As a result, an attempt to point out extra-scientific influences in Darwin’s life may sound like an exercise in irrelevance. But an understanding of Victorian cultural trends before Darwin’s rise to fame turns out to be considerably significant. In addition, the idea that Darwin had evolutionary influences might seem even more paradoxical since Darwin is generally acknowledged to be the chief discoverer of evolution with natural selection as its mechanism. However, the forces of nineteenth-century evolutionary science were palpable well before Darwin and had remarkably impressed his life and work. A consequent look at Victorian cultural and philosophical trends will prove helpful in understanding Darwin and his applied strategy and style in Origin of Species.
Darwin’s writing style must be viewed first as Victorian because Darwin was a Victorian himself and a product of his time. His reputation as a mover and shaker of minds and ideas inside and outside of science is generally acknowledged with little dispute. But just as Darwin’s ideas had a powerful impression on writers and thinkers of his era, there were others who also influenced him. As such, his manner of presentation did not take place in a cultural vacuum. And many of the influential ideas from the Victorian Era did not originate in scientific circles but were often the provinces of philosophy and the humanities.
Some may question this judgment in light of Darwin’s scientific disposition, not convinced of a strong relationship, or any relationship, between science and the humanities. Scientist and fiction novelist C. P. Snow identified this phenomenon, designating each realm as opposing ends of “two cultures.” According to Snow, there were “Literary intellectuals at one pole -- at the other scientists ... Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension” (169).
The situation that Snow had observed was obvious, at least during the 1950’s, the time period in which he lectured about and wrote The Two Cultures. However, the same assessment would not have been accurate for the 1850’s. For this reason, George Levine judges any radical juxtaposition of Victorian science and art as opposing realms a "false antithesis” (639).
The antithesis, as Levine describes it, does indeed show itself to be less reliable when we acclimate ourselves with Victorian thought. The compartmentalization and specialization of knowledge that exists to a large degree in the early twenty-first century was definitely much less the case in Victorian England. As a result, a scientist in the 1850’s could have had aptitudes in a wide range of fields and endeavors.
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As an erudite and multidimensional Victorian, Darwin had numerous extra-scientific interests along with his extensive scientific knowledge in biology, botany, and geology. In his Autobiography, for instance, Darwin discussed a love for literature that extended back to his early school days:
With respect to diversified tastes, independently of science, I was fond of reading various books, and I used to sit for hours reading the historical plays of Shakespeare … I read also other poetry, such as the recently published poems of Byron, Scott, and Thomson's Seasons... (43)
He later described his literary tastes as an adult gentleman:
Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure. (138)
It is true that Darwin characterized himself in his Autobiography as less aesthetically inclined in his latter years due to a single-minded devotion to scientific pursuits. He described it as a “curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes” and later explained, “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts” (139).
Darwin chose a self-assessment strongly reminiscent of the classic Victorian paradigm in which analysis and rationalism had deadened the ability to “feel.” John Stuart Mill called it the “dissolving influence of analysis” (138) and lamented, “In vain I sought relief from my favourite books … I read them now without feeling” (134). In expressing a similar “curious and lamentable loss” of artistic tastes, Darwin’s reflections mirrored the familiar angst of his contemporaries. But could Darwin have had an ulterior motive for advertising this connection with his Victorian peers? Considering his efforts to change the face of science with controversial ideas, he would actually have had a strong incentive to do so; by emphasizing the disposition of a rational, objective analyst “grinding” out scientific laws from facts, Darwin was boosting his scientific credibility.
In retrospect, Darwin’s reputation as a man completely given over to Snow’s “scientific culture” turns out to be greatly exaggerated. L. Robert Stephens, for example, questions the accuracy of Darwin’s anaesthetic self-portrait based on a close look at his reading notebooks. Stephens explains,
It is time to alter the claim that Darwin was an anaesthetic specialist getting on with his job in an intellectual vacuum…. He did stop reading poetry at about age thirty-six (not thirty) but only after reading a great deal of very good work. Even then he continued virtually every other form of humane reading, that is, the literary essay, philosophy, biography, and the novel at least to age fifty-one. (53)
Darwin turned age fifty in 1859, the year of Origin’s publication, so it is reasonable to consider the impact and accumulated influence of Victorian humanistic literature on his mind and work.
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Darwin’s son Francis corroborated Stephens' point by showing us that even at the height of his scientific endeavors, his father continued to indulge in other reading interests:
He had two or three books in hand at the same time--a novel and perhaps a biography and a book of travels. He did not often read out-of-the-way or old standard books, but generally kept to the books of the day obtained from a circulating library. (Life and Letters 1.125)
Included among Darwin’s eclectic literary tastes were works of historical fiction, psychology, political science, political economy, natural philosophy, natural theology, and even mysticism.1
It would therefore not be overly astonishing for Darwin to have been influenced as a scientific writer by his excursions into extra-scientific literature and philosophy or even for him to mesh quantitative scientific analysis and qualitative humanistic themes from literature. Levine’s assessment is appropriate: “He [Darwin] never would have imagined that science and literature were incompatible and his own career shows a mutual shaping of those forces” (644).
Based on our knowledge of Darwin’s humanistic influences, his application of popular ideas and writing styles in Origin is somewhat feasible. Since Darwin’s acquaintance with a wide range of contemporary literature must have informed him ideologically and stylistically, we would expect him to have maximized that knowledge. Such erudition, after all, gave Darwin insight into the spirit of his age and more than likely qualified him to deal with the complications of connecting with his audience. That Darwin consciously used his mental repository of literary knowledge in order to make the thesis in Origin more attractive and successful, as it clearly turned out to be, is therefore a reasonable assertion. Furthermore, Darwin’s writing style involved an element of philosophical creativity, enough to have stimulated the intellectual curiosity of his cultural peers.
Many other broadminded Victorians were indeed receptive to what they considered progressive ideas in an age of industrial invention, political emancipation, literary innovation, and scientific discovery. In this sense, and contrary to the popular and often mythological image of the Victorian mind, the literature of Origin undoubtedly struck the right chord with a good many of Darwin’s contemporaries, as the reception statistics suggest. After all 1,250 copies rapidly sold out the first day of the book’s release, Darwin responded, “My book has been as yet very much more successful than I ever dreamed of: Murray [the publisher] is now printing 3000 copies” (Life and Letters 2.241).
All 3000 copies of Origin’s second edition also sold out and the book eventually went through six editions, selling 12,500 copies by release of the sixth edition in 1872, and over 22,000 copies by the time of Darwin’s death in 1882 (Rushdoony 22). According to the publication standards of Darwin’s era, such numbers are quite impressive,2especially for a book of science (Secord 34).
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Darwin having had a receptive audience amongst many non-scientists of his day may also speak much about his affinity with the cultural climate. A study of Victorian trends will in fact reveal that the environment had already been created well before Darwin for the acceptance of general evolutionary thought inside and outside of the scientific community. A. Dwight Culler comments on this phenomenon:
This revolution [of evolutionary thought] was not limited to the world of nature, nor was it the unique possession of Darwin. It had already occurred in several other areas of thought, and its repetition, in one sphere after another, must be accounted a central feature of the Victorian Age. (228)
Culler’s assessment of evolutionary thinking having “already occurred” before Darwin and as a “central feature of the Victorian Age” is a telling and seemingly iconoclastic statement. However, a survey of pre-Darwin nineteenth-century literature will support his assertion. In particular, the world of creative and imaginative literature, a province of the humanities, had been the perennial domain of evolutionary thought.
The Romantic Movement, which was in full force in England during the early part of the century, is an appropriate case in point (Mead 127). And neither Darwin nor his fellow Victorians escaped the full sway of Romanticism’s influence, artistically or ideologically. The nature-adulating overtones of the Romantics created the ideal backdrop for the rise of the Victorian naturalistic worldview, from Wordsworth to Coleridge to Shelley and interestingly, to a man credited with influencing all of these writers, Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus (Hassler 95).
Erasmus Darwin was by trade a physician but was known by the British more for his poetry and prose writing and the romantic naturalism he helped to popularize through it. Among his more famous works was his long nature-centered poem, The Botanic Garden, with two parts: The Loves of the Plants (1789) and The Economy of Vegetation (1792).
In Loves of the Plants, Erasmus set forth the personification of nature based on the idea that plants can “feel” the way humans do (King-Hele 64). The theme was one that Wordsworth would later echo: “And ‘tis my faith that every flower / enjoys the air it breathes” (“Early Spring” 11-12). Shelley wrote similarly: “But the Sensitive Plant which could give small fruit / Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root” (“Sensitive Plant” 1.70-71).
Erasmus Darwin also emphasized nature’s life-changing power. In The Temple of Nature (1803) he declared, “While Nature sinks in Time’s destructive storms, / The wrecks of death are but a change of forms” (4.397-398). Many Romantics would resurrect the concept of nature’s awe-inspiring power to change the phenomenal world as with Shelley’s West Wind, a “Wild Spirit … moving everywhere” (1.13), destroying the old and bringing forth new life and new forms. Thus, Erasmus Darwin’s poetic temperament and naturalistic subject matter had a direct influence on the high Romantics, who in turn impressed the Victorians.
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Aside from the naturalistic influence of Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus’ writings also contained more distinct evolutionary ideas that would reemerge in Victorian thought.Zoonomia (1794), for instance, discussed animal life and prefigured two major evolutionary concepts. In the work, the elder Darwin first spoke of the competition of males for females: “The final cause of this contest among the males seems to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved” (qtd. in King-Hele 22). In another striking evolutionary portent, Erasmus wrote,
Would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament? (397)
Such passages seem to divulge a relationship between Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary thought and similar Victorian ideas that would eventually be expressed by his grandson.
However, as with Charles’ professed aesthetic dullness, he downplayed the seemingly inevitable influence of his grandfather’s ideas on his own work: “I had previously read the 'Zoonomia' of my grandfather … but without producing any effect on me” (Darwin 13). In light of the familiar imagery seen later in Origin including the struggle between stronger and weaker animals, improved species, animals arising from one common ancestor, millions of years, and modification of forms, the direct influence of Erasmus the evolutionist on Charles the Victorian is nonetheless too obvious to dismiss.
There were yet other figures who had influenced the collective Victorian mind, and by extension Darwin, concerning evolution and its undergirding philosophies. One such author was the phrenologist and natural philosopher George Combe. Combe’s major mark on Victorian society came with his 1828 book The Constitution of Man in Relation to External Objects, which went through eight editions and sold a phenomenal 350,000 copies by 1900 (Van Whye 1).
Combe’s book, perhaps more than any other work of its day, contributed to the acceptance of naturalism in the Victorian Era and undoubtedly played a major role in laying the foundation for Origin. Similar to William Paley’s deistic views on nature, Constitution argued for the preeminence of “natural law” which ruled not only over the vegetable and animal kingdoms but also over humanity as well (1). Combe’s view, therefore, essentially saw man as a part of nature, quite similar to Darwin’s presupposition in Origin.
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Constitution’s triumph was undoubtedly an indicator of where the tides of Victorian thought were drifting and how Origin was a product as well as an appropriator of the era’s developing worldview. And there were other direct contemporary influences on Darwin, as evidenced by his adoption of Thomas Malthus’ thesis.
Malthus was a professor of political economy who wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. The essay theorized on the mathematical implications of human population growth in the face of a limited food supply. Malthus then compared this idea with similar activity in the plant and animal kingdoms:
They are all impelled by a powerful instinct to the increase of their species … the super-abundant effects are repressed afterwards by want of room and nourishment, which is common to animals and plants, and among animals, by becoming the prey of others. (Malthus 3-4)
The connection between Malthus’ philosophy and Darwin’s science, which also emphasized the “struggle for existence,” is obvious.
Moreover, Malthus’ argument was a major impetus, by Darwin’s own admission, for Origin’s guiding idea and central concept:
I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work. (Autobiography 120)
Although we could accuse Malthus of crossing over into natural science with his analogy rather than convict Darwin for leaving it, the impression of a political economist on a naturalist remains nevertheless.
Origin’s text reveals that Darwin frequently employed analogy as Malthus did and also built upon Malthus’ observation of the “struggle for existence” in order to activate his “natural selection” concept. Darwin’s testimony attests to the interrelationship between other realms of knowledge in his era and Origin’s ideology.
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Darwin based his ideas not only on particularly borrowed concepts but also on entire systems of thought. The influence of positivism on Victorian thought, for example, testifies to the philosophical foundation that had already been laid for Darwin. According to positivist pioneer August Comte,
The direct study of the universe suggests and develops the great idea of the laws of nature, which is the basis of all positive philosophy, and capable of extension to the whole of phenomena, including at last those of man and society. (Vol I, 295)
In positivism, the laws of nature were preeminent just as they were in Darwin’s biology. Hence, to critics like Herbert Marcuse, positivism’s naturalistic scheme was obvious:
Positive philosophy tended … to equate the study of society with the study of nature, so that natural science, particularly biology, became the archetype of social theory. Social study was to be a science seeking social laws, the validity of which was to be analogous to physical laws … Society was viewed as governed by rational laws that moved with a natural necessity. (343-344)
Comte’s views, meanwhile, related even more specifically to evolutionary thought:
The whole system of biological philosophy indicates the natural progression…. In like manner we see that our social evolution is only the final term of a progression that has continued from the simplest vegetables and most insignificant animals, up through the higher reptiles, to the birds and the mammals, and still on to the carnivorous animal and monkeys … This comparative estimate affords us the scientific view of human progression, connected, as we see it is, with the whole course of animal advancement. (Vol II, 124)
From these passages, we can see that the study of society was already tied in with biological materialism and progressive determinism in nature.
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Herbert Spencer was the eminent British philosopher and sociologist who translated the positivist tradition more directly into British thought. Spencer was an intellectual who had gained fame in Victorian England for his radical views on political science and social progress.
In his first book entitled Social Statics (1851) and published eight years before Origin, Spencer grounded his progressive views on Comtean and Lamarckian principles3 (Sweet 2). As such, his work revealed the materialist and evolutionary presuppositions from which he interpreted all knowledge including economics, ethics, psychology, jurisprudence, education, public policy, and even population studies à la Malthus.
Darwin the biologist would share the same guiding principles as Spencer the sociologist, a point made more clearly in his correspondence. For example, Darwin wrote letters in 1856 and 1858 thanking Spencer for copies of The Principles of Psychology (1855) and Essays, Scientific, Political and Speculative (1858). His comments on Essays are particularly instructive:
I beg permission to thank you sincerely for your very kind present of your Essays. I have already read several of them with much interest. Your remarks on the general argument of the so-called development theory seems to me admirable. I am at present preparing an Abstract of a larger work on the changes of species; but I treat the subject simply as a naturalist, and not from a general point of view, otherwise, in my opinion, your argument could not have been improved on, and might have been quoted by me with great advantage…. Furthermore, by a curious coincidence, expression has been for years a persistent subject with me for LOOSE speculation, and I must entirely agree with you that all expression has some biological meaning. (Life and Letters2.141-142)
Despite our inability to ascertain to what extent Spencer’s ideas influenced Darwin’s, we can see that Darwin had enthusiastically affirmed them. Yet Spencer was by no means4 a naturalist or a part of the scientific community (Sweet 1).
Although Darwin stated that his approach to the “development theory” (evolution) was “simply as a naturalist,” he concurred with Spencer’s “general point of view” despite Spencer’s status as a non-naturalist. Furthermore, Darwin’s observation that “all expression has some biological meaning” agreed with Spencer’s philosophical view; Spencer depended on this concept not as one scientifically proven but as an assumption.
Darwin’s comments accordingly reveal how the scientist had already been influenced by evolutionary viewpoints accepted outside of science. We may not normally expect a biologist to have much common ground with a sociologist, but Darwin was able to recognize and appreciate the connection ideologically and methodologically.5
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Spencer’s own evolutionary views were closely tied in with a historical progressivism that had also become popular in England thanks to the influence of Georg Hegel. Hegel was known for his complex and comprehensive philosophical system that viewed history in process or development (Clark 440). According to Hegel, the “course of the World’s History” progresses by way of “mutations which history presents have been long characterized in the general as an advance to something better, more perfect” (56).
In this worldview, the forces of history gradually move in a particular and inevitable direction; society and its institutions continually advance toward perfection in the wake of “older periods of growth” and their “decay” (58). Hegel wrote, “We behold also continued processes of growth; structures and systems of culture in particular spheres, rich in kind, and well developed in every direction” (58). He later continued, “If then we cast a glance over the World’s History generally, we see a vast picture of changes and transactions; of infinitely manifold forms of peoples, states, individuals, in unresting succession” (75).
In speaking of “mutations,” “continued processes of growth,” “infinitely manifold forms,” “unresting succession” and “continually moving toward perfection,” Hegel utilized terminology that powerfully prefigured Darwin’s own discourse in Origin. Hegel also spoke of the “principle of Development” and a “continuous process of changes” (57) and then eloquently and more intensely depicted evolutionary imagery in his description of the “Spirit”:
Spirit--consuming the envelope of its existence--does not merely pass into another envelope, nor rise rejuvenescent from the ashes of its previous form; it comes forth exalted, glorified, a purer spirit. It certainly makes war upon itself--consumes its own existence; but in this very destruction it works up that existence into a new form, and each successive phase becomes in its turn a material, working on which it exalts itself into a new grade. (76)
Hegel’s “destruction” in history uncannily anticipated what Darwin later called the “struggle for existence,” and “extinction” in nature, and Hegel’s “Spirit” working up into a new form similarly foreshadowed Darwin’s “modifications.”
As such, Hegel’s ideology along with his terminology presaged Darwin’s. George Mead notes, “Hegelian dialectic was essentially an evolutionary theory, a recognition, that is, that new forms arise out of conflicts of old forms” (145). And the degree to which Hegel’s doctrine of historical process had influenced nineteenth-century British thought was substantial. Darwin subsequently would herald ideas in Origin that were far from the new and unusual.
13
Another thinker also captured the prevalence of evolutionary philosophy in nineteenth-century England. Indeed, no man better demonstrated the acceptance that pre-Origin evolutionary thinking had already attained among the British than Robert Chambers. Chambers, an Edinburgh folklorist, journalist, and businessman, anonymously authored Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and had it privately published in 1844. The book presented a complete evolutionary worldview ranging from cosmology to the origin of man and turned out to be a smashing overnight sensation, arresting the public consciousness on the subject of evolution.
According to Janet Browne, Vestiges “swept through the country as soon as it was issued” (457). Moreover, in what was rare for any piece of literature of the day no less a book on science, the book remained a sensation, going through 10 editions by 1854, and selling 23,750 copies by 1860 (Secord 34). And this phenomenon occurred despite Vestiges’ censure by the academic community as wildly speculative and unscientific, more of a fantasy novel than a scientific exposition 6 (Hull 10).
The implications of this development are profound. Chambers had proven that the popularity of evolutionary thought in Victorian England was substantial amongst non-scientists. Vestiges had tapped into the ever-growing public receptivity to evolutionary progressivism and had simultaneously raised its status higher. As William Irvine observes regarding the period, “The air was electric with evolution” (69).
The degree to which Chambers’ dramatic depiction of evolution had captivated Victorians was perhaps best summed up in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1847 novel, Tancred. In the story, a young woman excitedly describes her understanding of the chic, new evolutionary thesis:
You know, all is development. The principle is perpetually going on. First there was nothing, then there was something; then, I forget the next, I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came, let me see, did we come next? Never mind that. And the next change there will be something very superior to us, something with wings. Ah! That’s it; we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows. (qtd. in Browne 463)
Notwithstanding the obvious sarcasm, Disraeli had accurately characterized the craze that evolutionary thought had become in Victorian England.
14
Despite Vestiges’ immense popularity, however, Chambers made no headway in convincing the scientific community that his work was to be taken seriously. Yet the pseudo-scientific book did have Darwin’s undivided attention; as one who took his life’s work seriously, Darwin scrutinized it methodically. According to Francis Darwin, “My father’s copy [of Vestiges] gives signs of having been carefully read, a long list of marked passages being pinned at the end” (Life and Letters 1.301).
Darwin’s intensity is understandable when we recognize him for the man of strategy that he was and the stake that he held in the race to become science’s next Copernicus.7 Francis went on to mention how his father’s careful inspection of Vestiges caused him to notice and avoid many errors that he perceived had cast an unscientific light on evolutionary theory.
On the other hand, Darwin also must have noticed Chambers’ manner of presentation and perhaps grudgingly acknowledged the positive response that Vestiges had achieved as a result. Chambers had beaten Darwin to public acclaim even though Vestiges’ version of evolution, at least in Darwin’s mind, was an insult to science. His thoughts are revealed in his 1844 letter to Joseph Hooker:
I have also read the “Vestiges,” but have been somewhat less amused at it than you appear to have been: the writing and arrangement are certainly admirable, but his geology strikes me as bad, and his zoology far worse. (301-302)
He referred again to the book in an 1845 letter to his cousin William Darwin Fox:
Have you read that strange, unphilosophical but capitally-written book, the “Vestiges”: it has made more talk than any work of late, and has been by some attributed to me--at which I ought to be much flattered and unflattered. (301)
Darwin probably felt more unflattered than flattered, but certainly not defeated. In fact, the entire development had almost certainly strengthened his resolve. He was first able to decipher scientific and “unphilosophical” errors in Vestiges and also sit back and observe the reaction of the scientific community to them. In doing so, Darwin would avoid the same mistakes (or what Victorians would perceive as mistakes). And as a careful observer, Darwin would emulate some of what made Vestiges successful, what he called “writing and arrangement” that was “certainly admirable” in a book “capitally written.”
15
Darwin, the calculating scientist, may have lost the battle but would eventually win the war as the definer of evolutionary theory. His motivation to succeed is evident from part of another letter written to Asa Gray in September, 1857:
In regard to my Abstract, you must take immensely on trust, each paragraph occupying one or two chapters in my book. You will, perhaps, think it paltry in me, when I ask you not to mention my doctrine; the reason is, if any one, like the author of the “Vestiges,” were to hear of them, he might easily work them in, and then I should have to quote from a work perhaps despised by naturalists, and this would greatly injure any chance of my views being received. (Life and Letters 1.478)
After Vestiges, the scientific community was still waiting to be presented with a satisfactory evolutionary theory. As a result, the door remained open for Darwin’s views to be “received.”
It is evident that the reception of Darwin’s views depended a good deal on the philosophical groundwork having already been laid outside of the scientific community. But the same was true for ideas inside the scientific community. For example, Darwin was able to glean from evolutionary thinkers like French naturalist Jean Lamarck, who had already postulated his own version of evolutionary ideology.8
Lamarck’s general argument for transmutation, well known by Victorian scientists, provided a foundation for Darwin:
It is not a futile purpose to decide definitely what we mean by the so-called species among living bodies and to enquire if it is true that species are of absolute constancy, as old as nature, and have all existed from the beginning just as we see them today; or if, as a result of changes in their environment, albeit extremely slow, they have not in course of time changed their characters and shape. (45)
With the questioning of the concept and the constancy of species and the notion of extremely slow changes in the course of time, this excerpt from Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy could easily be mistaken for what Darwin later wrote in Origin.
16
Meanwhile, British geologist Charles Lyell provided Darwin with more evolutionary principles upon which to build. Darwin’s views were in fact heavily influenced by Lyell’s 1830-1833 Principles of Geology, which he studied while on board the Beagle. (Appleman 49). Concerning evolution, Lyell wrote,
[I]t is not only the present condition of the globe which has been suited to the accommodation of myriads of living creatures, but that many former states also have been adapted to the organization and habits of prior races of beings. The disposition of the seas, continents, and islands, and the climates, have varied; the species likewise have been changed. (Principles 384-385)
As with Lamarck, Lyell had already postulated ideas very similar to those seen later in Darwin’s thesis, this time concerning adaptation, prior races of beings, and changes of species. Lyell even provided a methodological framework that Darwin would later utilize:
The geologist … will regard every fact collected … as affording him a key to the interpretation of some mystery in the archives of remote ages … the permanency of the great causes of change will enable him to reason from analogy, and to arrive, by a comparison of the state of things at distant epochs, at the knowledge of the general laws which govern the economy of our system. (50)
Darwin also spoke of collecting facts, interpreting mysteries, and recognizing general laws in Origin and made reasoning from analogy one of his major methodological strategies. Lyell’s contributions indeed turned out to be quite valuable for Darwin.
Others in the scientific community also demonstrated an affinity with evolutionary thinking and revealed the extent to which Victorian science had already been influenced. Historian of science David Hull has chronicled positive pre-Origin attitudes of scientists towards evolution like Joseph Hooker (81) and William Benjamin Carpenter (87). And other scientists revealed a pre-existing evolution friendly stance in their letters to Darwin, like H. C. Watson:
A quarter of a century ago, you and I must have been in something like the same state of mind on the main question [general evolution] … I was also one of the few who then doubted the absolute distinctness of species, and special creations of them. (Life and Letters 2.22)
Despite examples like Watson’s, Darwin downplayed the extent to which the currents of evolutionary thought were evident in science before Origin. He wrote, “It has sometimes been said that the success of the Origin proved ‘that the subject was in the air,’ or ‘that men's minds were prepared for it.’ I do not think that this is strictly true” (Autobiography 56).
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Perhaps Darwin took such a stance in order to reinforce his own sense of originality. Or conceivably, by “strictly true,” he meant that evolutionary thought had not been revealed specifically in terms of his ideas. However, ideas strikingly similar to and even identical with Darwin’s particular mechanism, what he called “natural selection,” had been published well before Origin. One such publication9 came by way of a physician named William Wells. Wells delivered an 1813 paper to the Royal Society with a thesis quite similar to Darwin’s.
Like Darwin, Wells wrote about changes produced by domestic animal breeding. He then compared those changes to the natural phenomenon he had observed in a woman with unusual skin color: “What is here done by art [speaking of artificially imposed changes] seems to be done with equal efficacy, though more slowly, by nature, in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for the countries they inhabit” (qtd. in Darwin’s Century 121).
Wells continued, “[A]mongst men as well as among other animals, varieties of a greater or less magnitude are constantly occurring” (121). By initially placing humans under the influence of what Darwin later called natural selection, Wells actually foreshadowed Origin and Darwin's subsequent 1871 work, Descent of Man, which more explicitly postulated human evolution from animal ancestors.
Patrick Matthew was another precursor to Darwin whose early version of natural selection was even closer to Darwin’s than Wells’ was. Matthew was an agriculturist who published On Naval Timber and Arboriculture in 1831. In the book he wrote,
As nature in all her modifications of life has a power of increase beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls by Time’s decay, those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing--either a prey to their natural devourers; or sinking under disease … their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind who are pressing on the means of subsistence. (qtd. in Darwin’s Century 128)
Matthew then came to a familiar dichotomous conclusion based on his interpretation of geology:
Geologists … discover an almost complete difference to exist between the stamp of one species or stamp of life, of one epoch from that of every other. We are therefore led to admit either of repeated miraculous creation; or of a power of change, under a change of circumstances, to belong to living organized matter. (128-129)
Matthew had accurately framed the creation/evolution debate, encapsulating the natural selection concept and professing a conflict between his observations and creationism. And he had done so well before Darwin publicly took up the challenge in Origin.
18
Perhaps the most interesting early scientific influence on Darwin came from a zoologist named Edward Blyth. Blyth’s essay10 on animal varieties appeared in the Magazine of Natural History in 1835. In the article, Blyth argued similarly to Darwin concerning the struggle for survival in nature:
[A]s the sexual passions excite to rivalry and conflict, and the stronger must always prevail over the weaker, the latter, in a state of nature, is allowed but few opportunities of continuing its race … all the young which are produced must have had their origin from one which possessed the maximum of power and physical strength; and which, consequently, in the struggle for existence, was the best able to maintain his ground, and defend himself from every enemy … the one best organised must … transmit its superior qualities to a greater number of offspring. (46)
Blyth’s example provided Darwin with some archetypal imagery that found its way into Origin including the stronger over the weaker, the struggle for existence, the weaker race becoming extinct, and the superior race transmitting its qualities to the offspring.11 Blyth then went on to admire the beauty he saw in this process:
How beautifully do we thus perceive, as in a thousand other instances, the balance of nature preserved: and even here we see another reason why sickly or degenerate animals … must soon disappear. (53)
Darwin waxed eloquently in a similar manner concerning similar phenomena. Blyth had certainly provided Victorian science a taste of what was to come.
Along with the writings of Wells, Matthew, and Blyth, there was another scientist who conceptualized what would later be called Darwin’s natural selection. Now seen as a minor figure compared to Darwin, Alfred Wallace presented a thesis in 1858 entitled On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.
As the title suggests, Wallace argued for the unlimited potential of evolution, what he called “progression” (62), at the hands of nature. Wallace wrote,
Now the scale on which nature works is so vast--the numbers of individuals and periods of time with which she deals approach so near to infinity, that any cause, however slight, and however liable to be veiled and counteracted by accidental circumstances, must in the end produce its full legitimate results. (59)
This brief description uncannily mirrors Darwin's central evolutionary catalyst.
19
Besides coming up with the natural selection concept independently of Darwin, Wallace also exhibited a thorough understanding of evolutionary thought in his earlier writings. This phenomenon is evident from his 1855 abstract, On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species. Wallace wrote in its introduction,
Every naturalist who has directed his attention to the subject of the geographical distribution of animals and plants, must have been interested in the singular facts which it presents ... a great light has been thrown upon the subject by geological investigations … the change of organic life has been gradual: the first appearance of animals now existing can in many cases be traced, their numbers gradually increasing in the more recent formations, while other species continually die out and disappear. (184)
Wallace’s concepts were an indication of how influential evolutionary thought had become by the middle of the nineteenth-century. Loren Eisley writes accordingly, “If any additional proof were needed that the first half of the ‘wonderful century’ was stirring with half-formulated evolutionary ideas, the life of Wallace would supply such evidence” (Darwin’s Century 290-291).
Eisley’s point is well taken, but to call Wallace’s life representative of “half-formulated” evolutionary ideas seems a bit shortsighted. His ideas as expressed just in the introduction of his 1855 paper aptly summarized the major points of the evolutionary thesis. They were in fact very similar to the views Darwin presented in his introduction to Origin of Species:
WHEN on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle,’ as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species (1) … I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species. (6)
The similarities between Wallace and Darwin are striking. Both men spoke in their introductions of their work as naturalists, the geographical distribution of organic life, geological observations, the changes in species that have occurred over time, and the extinction of other species. Wallace and Darwin were obviously drawing their ideas from the same evolutionary sources.12
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Aside from the obvious conceptual affinity between Wallace’s and Darwin’s introductory statements, how should we judge their use of identical arguments and expressions? Both men, for example, stressed the preeminence of facts and spoke of “light” being thrown on their subjects. Such likenesses in and of themselves may pass as coincidental, but not upon further examination of Wallace’s paper.
Indeed, while both men were recipients of evolutionary thought, Darwin was also a direct recipient of Wallace’s imagery and argumentation. Wallace wrote, for instance, on the divergence of new species: “[T]he species being so numerous and the modifications of form and structure so varied … produced a complicated branching of the lines of affinity, as intricate as the twigs of a gnarled oak” (187).
Darwin’s version of the same phenomenon reads, “The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree…. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides” (Origin 129). In this case, the accidental use of virtually identical analogies is extremely unlikely.
In another example, Wallace boasted of his theory’s explanatory power, further providing Darwin with a compelling model:
It has now been shown … how the law that “Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species,” connects together and renders intelligible a vast number of independent and hitherto unexplained facts. (On the Law 196)
Darwin wrote similarly in Origin:
He who will go thus far, if he find on finishing this treatise that large bodies of facts, otherwise inexplicable, can be explained by the theory of descent, ought not to hesitate to go further. (188)
To conclude his essay and establish the certainty of “nature’s law” as he saw it, Wallace used a familiar parallel from science: “Granted the law, and many of the most important facts in Nature could not have been otherwise, but are almost as necessary deductions from it, as are the elliptic orbits of the planets from the law of gravitation” (On the Law 196). The parallel was familiar enough for Darwin to make use of it as well: “[T]hese elaborately constructed forms … have all been produced by laws acting around us … whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity” (Origin 489-490).
Further similarities abound as one paleobiologist testifies: “All the major Darwinian themes are clearly portended by Wallace--gradualism, utility, adaptation to different environments, allopatric speciation, imperfection of the fossil record, and so forth” (Michaux). And since Origin was not published until four years after Wallace’s paper, its influence on Darwin is clear.13
21
Wallace and the others who preceded him were all early proponents of natural selection and had unveiled evolutionary views more or less identical to what later made Darwin famous. And all had made their presentations in the form of scientific abstracts. However, the abstracts failed to gain the attention of the scientific community or were eventually forgotten in the shadow of Darwin. In these cases, unlike Chamber’s Vestiges, the perspectives were presented in a manner closer to the standard mode of scientific discourse, perhaps dry, but certainly more closely tied to an empirical methodology. Yet, like Vestiges, they were also unable to push their evolutionary views through to the level of scientific orthodoxy.
Darwin’s correspondence reveals that he was definitely acquainted with all of the men who had formulated their natural selection theories before Origin (Life and Letters 2.207). The same letters and the work of biographers have shown that Darwin was familiar with their writings as well (Mr. X. 80-83). Moreover, as with his scrutiny of Chambers’ Vestiges, Darwin was undoubtedly attentive when it came to these abstracts on natural selection.
We can accordingly envision Darwin, the tactician, carefully sizing up each of their presentations, weighing the good and the bad, and gleaning wherever possible in order to perfect his own arrangement in Origin. Where the evolution of Chambers and the natural selection of Wells, Patrick, Blyth, and Wallace had failed to impress, Darwin would succeed by synthesizing the literary flair of Vestiges and the science of the others. In this sense, Darwin’s non-scientific and scientific predecessors had inadvertently passed the baton of evolutionary ideology on to him.
Our brief overview of evolutionary trends in the Victorian Era has shown that much of Darwin’s success was due to his place in the historical, philosophical, cultural and scientific “evolution” of evolutionary thought. Darwin was, in effect, a scientist right for his time and right on time, riding the cusp of an ideological wave that had become inevitable. He had emerged to rally a message that although previously accepted by many on philosophical grounds, was nonetheless rejected by the scientific guild. As the earlier evolutionary messengers had learned, true success would take more than a simple presentation. Subsequently, Darwin had to make the most of the situation, strategically and even opportunistically.
The forthcoming examination of Darwin’s rhetorical strategies and romantic literary style will therefore seek to refocus the image of Darwin as the “discoverer” of evolutionary theory. Darwin was a scientist and often remained true to empiricism; but his predecessors had done the same with no success. Origin needed to do more to become highly influential. Because Darwin took on the added roles of astute philosopher, persuasive communicator, and strategic facilitator, he was able to succeed where others had failed.
Along these lines, Leon Harris has noted, “It is true that by the late 1830’s evolution was part of the spirit of the times, but although the spirit was willing, the evidence needed to convince scientists appeared to be weak until Darwin mobilized it”14 (134). Darwin would indeed "mobilize" evolutionary thought in various and sundry ways, as a closer look at Origin of Species will conclusively demonstrate.
22
NOTES
1 A partial list of Darwin’s reading prior to Origin’s publication (as evidenced by his correspondence) includes Evelyn's Life of Mrs. Godolphin, Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, Spencer’s Principles of Psychology, Miller’s First Impressions of England and its People, Von Humboldt’s Thoughts and Opinions of a Statesman, Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, Paley’s Natural Theology, and Oken’s journal, Isis. According to Stephens, other notable works in Darwin’s literary repertoire included Cowper’s translation of the Iliad, Reynolds’ Discourses, Toqueville’s Democracy, Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, Thackeray’s Lectures on English Poets, Newman’s On the Soul, and Pepys’ Diary. Darwin also read at least 100 biographies of literary figures such as Montaigne, Bunyan, Brontë, Collins, Swift, Dryden, and Goethe, and read nearly every major poet from Shakespeare to his own day. Stephens notes that according to Darwin’s reading list, he read more on lives of literary than of scientific figures! (636)
2 Are sales statistics alone enough to determine the reception of a piece of literature? Many scholars would be skeptical without comparative data. According to Victorian scholar James Secord, “[f]irst editions of Dickens's novels regularly had print runs of ten thousand or more, as did Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England. A book of advice or almanac might sell hundreds of thousands of copies” (34-35). Comparing statistics in these cases seem to diminish Origin’s influence, but not when we consider other factors. Secord notes, “Publishers usually issued from 500 to 1,000 copies of new titles, and the great majority never went into a second edition … if a book failed to make an impact in the first weeks after publication it was unlikely ever to do so” (34-35). For Darwin to sell 1,250 copies on the first day does, then, have significance. The exceptional popularity of Dickens and Macaulay notwithstanding, Origin’s initial and eventual long-term reception was substantial.
3 Consider William Sweet’s analysis of Spencer’s first work: “In 1851 Spencer's first book, Social Statics, or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness appeared. ('Social statics'--the term was borrowed from Auguste Comte--deals with the conditions of social order, and was preliminary to a study of human progress and evolution--i.e., 'social dynamics.') In this work, Spencer presents an account of the development of human freedom and a defense of individual liberties, based on a (Lamarckian-style) evolutionary theory” (2).
4 Spencer did dabble in biology as a young man and later interpreted natural science, as he did everything else, according to his evolutionary framework. But he could not be considered remotely comparable to a biologist of Darwin’s caliber.
5 The ideological connection in this case was the philosophical foundation that both men adhered to--Comte’s materialism. They also both presupposed a general concept of evolution, although each held different versions of a similar idea. If Darwin actually is responsible for “proving” evolution, then evolutionary thought before Darwin (in this case Lamarckian) was still only theory: it had not been empirically “verified.” As a sociologist, Spencer presupposed Lamarckian evolution (based on inherited characteristics) as a philosophy and viewed all of his studies in terms of it, while Darwin claimed to argue for evolution (based on natural selection) solely (or “simply”) from within his discipline (as a naturalist). But did Darwin really stay exclusively within the discipline of natural science? If Darwin meant by a naturalist, “empirical biologist,” he could not have since he, like Spencer, presupposed materialist and evolutionary philosophy--a crossing over into metaphysics. This is also where the methodological similarity that Darwin mentions (“loose speculation,” a.k.a. theoretical science) comes in.
6 Chambers may not have been the greatest scientist, but he evidently was an astute businessman, at least when it came to selling literature.
7 Was Darwin ambitious enough to think in these terms? His friends must have known so. Consider this excerpt from J.M. Herbert’s letter, sent to Darwin during his Beagle expedition: “[Y]ou are now engaged in collecting materials for future fame; that you are about to couple your name, already intimately connected with science, with those of a Cuvier and a Humboldt. Don’t think me guilty of flattery--I know that you will do great things, as it is impossible that your assiduity and talents should not succeed” (Correspondence 1.224). Darwin’s own thoughts as recorded in his 1838 transmutation notebooks are also revelatory in this regard. He spoke of his work as “a most laborious and painful effort of the mind” that “will never be conquered by anyone who just takes up and lays down the subject without long meditation” (qtd. in Gruber 449). He then revealed the ambitious extent of his quest: “What the Frenchman [Lamarck] did for species between England and France, I will do with forms.--Mention persecution of early Astronomers,--then add chief good of individual scientific men is to push their science a few years in advance only of their age” (450). Gertrude Himmelfarb fittingly responds, “Resolved to make of this his lifework, he braced himself for the ambitious task that lay ahead. And he indulged himself in the gratifying fancy that, like the intellectual pioneers of old--Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo--he had to be prepared to brave persecution” (151).
8 Popular myth often sees Darwin as the original perpetrator of evolutionary thought although the naturalistic legacy preceding him is considerable. General evolutionary ideas (and often very specific “Darwinian” ideas) had been around at least as far back as the ancient Greeks, with Anaximander, c. 580 BC (Denton 39) and Empedocles’ 480 BC On Nature (39). The philosophy surfaced in France with Leibniz’s 1691 Protogaea (Harris 104), and resurfaced with Maupertuis’ 1751 Système de la Nature (106), Diderot’s 1754 Pensées sur l'interpretation de la Nature (109), and Lamarck’s 1809 Philosophie Zoologique (110), all products of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, in Germany, evolution-friendly naturalistic concepts were proposed in Goethe’s 1790 The Metamorphosis of Plants (Hartner 147), Kant’s 1790 Kritik of Judgment (Kant 20-21), and Oken’s 1802 Naturphilosophie (“Oken”). This, of course, is only a partial list.
9 Wells’ essay was published in 1818 after his death. It was entitled An Account of a Female of the White Race of Mankind, Part of Whose Skin Resembles That of a Negro; With Some Observations on the Causes of the Differences in Colour and Form between the White and Negro Races of Men.
10 Blyth’s essay was entitled An Attempt to Classify the "Varieties" of Animals, with Observations on the Marked Seasonal and Other Changes Which Naturally Take Place in Various British Species, and Which Do Not Constitute Varieties. Darwin has been accused of plagiarizing Blyth’s idea, which correspondence has shown he had read. The accusation has fallen, for the most part, on deaf ears. (See Loren Eisley’s Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X. New York: Dutton, 1979.)
11 Despite the similarities, Blyth came to completely different conclusions than Darwin did. For instance, Blyth felt that modifications in offspring would never supercede the qualities of the original form: “The original form of a species is unquestionably better adapted to its natural habits than any modification of that form” (46). This was the opposite of Darwin’s adaptations, which would produce superior offspring. Also, Blyth drew an analogy from the struggle in nature to show how the domestic breeding of animals could be directed by man: “The same law, therefore, which was intended by Providence to keep up the typical qualities of a species, can be easily converted by man into a means of raising different varieties” (46). Darwin, meanwhile, argued in the opposite direction, from domestic breeding to natural selection! Perhaps most conspicuous is the fact that Blyth invokes “Providence” while Darwin attributes the same activity exclusively to nature. It is most curious how Blyth interprets his observations of nature in terms of a Creator, while Darwin uses the same phenomena to dismiss that Creator. This is further evidence that Darwin’s rhetoric about attending to “facts” was a red herring. The issue was never over facts but the proper interpretation of those facts. Darwin’s comments in a letter to Joseph Hooker are instructive in this regard: “How differently people view the same subject, for I look at insular Floras … as leading to an opposite view to yours” (Correspondence 3.89).
12 According to Eisley, both men shared the same reading background and were subsequently heavily influenced by Lyell’s Principles of Geology, as is obvious from their introductions. Wallace also read Malthus and Chambers’ Vestiges (Darwin’s Century 291).
13 That Wallace may have been more influential on Darwin rather than vice versa may seem heretical to loyal Darwinists. Could not Wallace have gotten his imagery and arguments from Darwin? It is unlikely considering Eisley’s revelation: “Darwin had written to Wallace that he agreed heartily with an earlier (1855) paper expressing evolutionary views.… Correspondence indicates that Darwin had told Wallace he was working on ‘the species problem.’ He generously urged Wallace on in his own speculations but politely declined to divulge his own theory” (Darwin’s Century 291). Much has been said about Darwin’s gracious willingness to share credit for his ideas with Wallace, as they presented their similar theories jointly to the Linnean Society in 1858. But in Origin, Darwin repeatedly refers to natural selection and the surrounding argumentation as “my theory.” Nonetheless, it seems like Darwin was indebted to Wallace much more than Wallace was to Darwin.
14 Harris’ use of the word “evidence” is characteristic of the neo-Darwinist alacrity to equate evolutionary theory with empirically demonstrable fact. But Darwin himself confessed that his theory was not demonstrable in the experimental and observable sense. He wrote, “[T]he change of species cannot be directly proved” and “[T]he doctrine must sink or swim according as it groups and explains phenomena” (Life and Letters 2.155). For this reason, it is more accurate and honest to say that Darwin mobilized the evolutionary paradigm. To use the word “evidence” is to give the impression that Darwin had proven his theory, where in reality and by his own admission, he had only made an argument for its plausibility. He did not (and could not) use phenomena in the natural world as evidence for natural selection as a means to speciation per se but rather interpreted those phenomena according to his theory. This is why he said that his theory “explained facts” in the natural world. This is very different from “evidence.” More on this issue will be discussed in the next chapter.
CHAPTER II
Darwin’s Rhetorical Strategies: Origin as “One Long Argument”
An initial browse of Origin of Species may not lead the average reader to conclude that Charles Darwin’s success as a scientist was due in any major way to his abilities as a rhetorician. At face value, many would consider the text long, needlessly repetitive, and full of meandering, technical discourse. More than one critic past and present has in fact commented on the dullness of much of Origin’s prose. Darwin’s friend and apologist Thomas Huxley, for instance, commented, “Exposition was not Darwin’s forte” (31).
In a more recent criticism, Soren Lovtrup, perplexed at Darwin’s ability to displace Lamarck’s theory, asserted that the style of Origin was “boring” (413). Interestingly, Darwin himself had great apprehensions about publishing Origin due to what he felt were its many inadequacies. He confessed that its prose could not be “mere light reading,” and that “some parts must be dry and even rather abstruse” (qtd. in Barzun 26).
Darwin also did not consider himself to be much of a communicator in the general sense, as he expressed in his Autobiography: “[D]uring my whole life I have been singularly incapable of mastering any language” (16). Further complicating the issue were the conditions under which Origin was published. Although Darwin spent years compiling, arranging, and mulling over his notes on “transmutation” prior to 1859, he actually rushed Origin into premature publication that he would later call “only an abstract, and very much condensed” (Life and Letters 2.16). This phenomenon was due, of course, to Darwin’s discovery of a competing thesis that was virtually identical to his own in the hands of fellow naturalist, Alfred Wallace.
Darwin’s self-portrait of his formative years also does little to indicate that the arguments in Origin manifest long hours of rigorous rhetorical training. Of his early education at a private boarding school he commented, “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr. Butler’s school, as it was strictly classical … The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank” (Autobiography 16).
A classical school, according to Darwin, was more or less a prison house of irrelevance and drudgery with its emphasis on literature and language to the exclusion of any scientific studies. Such an education normally involved the rote memorization of literary passages and entire books, extensive practice with grammar rules, language translation, written composition, and other related activities (Horner 144).
Darwin spoke of just this type of learning in his day-school curriculum, for instance, with regard to memorization: “Much attention was paid to learning by heart the lessons of the previous day; this I could effect with great facility, learning forty or fifty lines of Virgil or Homer” (Life and Letters 1.29-30). As such, Darwin’s educational regimen was indeed a far cry from his professed natural boyhood interests, which included the exploration of nature, the collection of any and every specimen, and scientific experiments of all kinds (Autobiography 13). But regardless of his scientific predisposition, the young Darwin would have to bear the yoke of a classical education.
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Despite Darwin’s autobiographical complaints, however, his early classical training could not have been as nearly as bankrupt as he advertised. A closer look at the specifics of the curriculum reveals why. Winfred Horner discusses the grammar and writing skills that were taught in the schools of Darwin’s day:
Grammar exercises associated with the old rhetoric were widely used by students at all levels: imitation; varying, which involved changing a sentence into all of its possible forms; paraphrasing, and prosing, turning a verse into prose. Transposition, a common exercise, was placing of words out of their natural order, to render the sound of them more agreeable to the ear. (144-145)
Darwin alluded to this form of training in another grammar school reminiscence: “Especial attention was paid to verse-making, and this I could never do well. I had many friends, and got together a good collection of old verses, which by patching together, sometimes aided by other boys, I could work into any subject” (Life and Letters 1.29). Although Darwin humbly confessed to his inadequacies in this area, his efforts to patch together verses and “work” them into “any subject” were successful with help from his friends. Apparently, the skill resurfaced for Darwin as an adult, as much of his scientific writing would manifest a skill quite similar to “transposition.”
After his grammar school career and a brief stint at Edinburgh, Darwin moved on to Cambridge where he was exposed to yet another heavy dose of classical studies. And once again, Darwin decried his experiences: “During the three years which I spent at Cambridge my time was wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned, as completely as at Edinburgh and at school” (Life and Letters 1.40).
Aside from his associations with some professors of science, Darwin recognized little redeeming value in his curriculum at Cambridge with one important exception. The work of William Paley, English ecclesiastic and philosopher of natural theology, seems to have stood out in Darwin’s mind as a rare positive educational influence. Darwin’s recollection is pertinent:
In order to pass the B.A. examination, it was also necessary to get up Paley's “Evidences of Christianity,” and his “Moral Philosophy.” This was done in a thorough manner, and I am convinced that I could have written out the whole of the “Evidences” with perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley. The logic of this book and, as I may add, of his “Natural Theology,” gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the academical course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind…. I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation. (40-41)
Darwin here conceded that his education did benefit him intellectually after all, at least in the case of Paley. Noteworthy in this regard is Darwin’s attention to “clear language” and his admission that he was “charmed and convinced” by Paley’s “long line of argumentation.” Language and argumentation that is charming and convincing has all the qualities of the “old rhetoric” that Darwin worked with back in grammar school and later at Cambridge. As with the skill of transposition, he would reflect argumentative influences like Paley's in his own discourse as well.
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The popularity of William Paley’s essays at Cambridge and their subsequent influence on Darwin was certainly a portent of historical serendipity. And the influence of Paley’s argumentative style was not the only reason why. In addition to the art of discourse modeled at the university, Darwin’s Cambridge years happened to coincide with a transitional period in the curriculum of early nineteenth-century England. As a result, his rhetorical education received an added benefit. Horner explains: “Another important pedagogical shift that began in the eighteenth century and continued through the nineteenth is the shift from the spoken to the written, the oral to the literate” (124).
As a writer and one who would make his claim to fame through written discourse, Darwin would profit immensely from this development.1 His written exercises, however detached they were from scientific subjects, were done as he commented “in a thorough manner.” This discipline unquestionably went back to his earliest training and would soon manifest during his future career as a naturalist.
In the wake of his classical education, Darwin’s endeavors as a naturalist were ironically made possible through his connections at the university. According to the biographical accounts, the key turning point in Darwin’s life took place toward the end of his Cambridge years when his mentor and botany professor John Henslow recommended him for the position of ship’s naturalist aboard H.M.S. Beagle.
Darwin was accepted, and the 1831-1836 voyage around the world is accordingly seen as the beginning of his true education and calling in life. Darwin himself accentuated the importance of his Beagle explorations and discoveries: “The voyage of the ‘Beagle’ has been by far the most important event in my life, and has determined my whole career … I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind” (Life and Letters 1.51).
With such reflections, Darwin painted a clear picture of the dichotomy: he was first and foremost and by nature and experience a scientist and would like to be remembered as such, while conceding throughout his Autobiography that dexterity with language and communication was the province of others. But our knowledge of Darwin’s educational background along with a closer examination of his discourse in Origin present more than a few anomalies. They are anomalies that do not fit the image of Darwin as brilliant scientist but poor and artless communicator.
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Scholars have conceded that Darwin was self-conscious and profoundly strategic about a rhetorical strategy. John Campbell, for example, asserts that “[t]he testimony of Darwin’s notebooks argues strongly that Darwin thought long and hard about persuasion” (“Rhetorician” 75). As a result, it may be necessary to separate Darwin’s carefully self-created public image from his goals as an ambitious scientist.
Although Darwin was more than likely honest about his apprehensions concerning his early education, they do not require us to take his public assessments completely at face value. There in fact were a few skills that survived into his adulthood and that he put to good use as a scientific writer. Those skills would quite conspicuously correspond with Origin’s rhetorical proficiency.
Perhaps the finest example of Darwin the rhetorician at work appears at the beginning of Origin of Species where he provided some introductory remarks about the scope and intent of the work. Indeed, in the very first line Darwin set the tone for Origin’s rhetorical strategy: “When on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts” (qtd. in “Scientific” 360). Notice how Darwin first emphasized the forcefulness of the facts upon his mind and not a theoretical predisposition.
Darwin’s ostensible passivity before the “facts” is quite significant in this initial case and a good many times after and for good reason. To speak of being “struck” with facts plainly depicts the observer as an objective witness with a tabula rasa, one who does not bring a bias into his examination or a presupposition into his interpretation of the phenomena.
To keep the imagery alive for his readers, Darwin consistently used the “struck” terminology and its variants (“strike” and “strikes”) throughout Origin’s first edition, 65 times to be exact (360). Darwin continued, “These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species--that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers” (Origin 1).
Darwin did not waste any time letting his readers know about the monumental importance of his observations while emphasizing how the facts and not his opinions were causing the impressions. It was the facts that seemed to “throw some light” on the ultimate mystery and the facts that manifested themselves for all who had eyes to see, or as the cliché goes, the facts “speak for themselves.”2
As we read on in Origin’s introduction, we begin to see even more clearly Darwin’s initial rhetorical strategy:
On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years' work I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions, which then seemed to me probable: from that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision. (1)
Passages like this one cast considerable doubt on the idea that Darwin had hastily thrown his statements together without carefully weighing their impact on his audience. Darwin was rather quite purposeful with his language about how he had come to formulate his grand theory, “patiently accumulating,” “reflecting on all sorts of facts,” and only after five years of this type of work finally “allowing” himself to speculate on the subject, drawing up notes, coming to probable conclusions, and “steadily” pursuing his ultimate thesis.
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Unlike Robert Chambers in Vestiges of Creation, Darwin was sure to play down the role of speculation and assumption in his work.3 Instead, he advertised his conclusions to be the outworking of patient, logical, and calculated dependence on “facts” made available through empirical, experimental science and not dependent on a priori hypothesis and conjecture. In short, Darwin was presenting his theory in the introduction as one arrived at primarily via inductive reasoning.
The importance of Darwin’s rhetorical strategy early in Origin cannot be underestimated once we understand the extent to which empiricism and Baconian inductivism were the predominant methodologies in Victorian science. Rhetorically, Darwin wisely catered to the philosophy of science that Francis Bacon had set in motion with his 1620 treatise, Novum Organum (or True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature). Bacon’s plan was to reorganize the sciences away from the traditional a priori, deductive method, based on Aristotle’s “logical works” (Organum).
For Bacon, deductive reasoning placed an unhealthy emphasis on ideas and hypotheses by starting with generalizations, speculations, or assumptions that could not be empirically substantiated and that would inevitably bias the interpretation of the physical phenomena under investigation. And in Bacon’s mind, deductivism caused the scientist to rely too heavily on what he called the “anticipation of nature” in which human imagination invariably set the scientist on erroneous paths, chasing after and eventually argumentatively defending presuppositions, theories, myths, and superstitions about the phenomenal world (Novum sec.46).
Bacon went on to warn against what he called idols: “false notions that … beset men’s minds that truth can hardly find entrance” (sec. 28). These idols included the fallibility of human understanding, which “distorts and discolors the nature of things” (sec. 41), “is prone to abstractions and gives a substance and reality to things which are fleeting” (sec. 51), and “when it has adopted an opinion, draws all things else to support and agree with it” (sec. 46), a phenomenon that Thomas Kuhn later called a “paradigm.”
The result of this dependence on a priori, hypothetical reasoning is that “what a man had rather were true he more readily believes … [and] rejects difficult things from impatience of research” (sec. 49). Bacon then directly indicted Aristotle, whose “natural philosophy [was] a mere bond-servant to his logic” (sec. 54), and through whose method “many hypotheses may be constructed, so likewise (and more also) many various dogmas may be set up and established on the phenomena of philosophy” (sec. 42).
Given the human error involved in a priori theorizing, Bacon called on scientists to give preeminence to the “matter rather than forms” (sec. 51), today generally known as “empiricism,” and deemed Aristotelian argumentation fraudulent as a means of scientific proof “since we agree neither upon principles nor upon demonstrations there is no place for argument” (sec. 61). Bacon’s inductivist alternative would minimize “distortion and error” by methodically observing and collecting physical phenomena and experiences, carefully analyzing exactly what could be known for certain, and then theorizing and generalizing based on those most reliable facts that had been observed and tested.
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In Origin’s introduction, we can see how Darwin presented himself as one who followed Bacon’s script with unflinching devotion. He spoke of first having “patiently” accumulated “all sorts of facts,” “reflecting” upon them for years, and only after having done so, speculating (or theorizing) and coming to certain conclusions that seemed probable. And Darwin was emphatic about not having been led astray due to what Bacon called “impatience” of research: “I have not been hasty in coming to a decision” (Origin 1).
Darwin further corroborated the inductivist self-portrait in his Autobiography: “My first note-book was opened in July, 1837. I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale” (53). Here, as in Origin, we have Darwin painting the image of the neutral and unbiased investigator only in search of the truth that must eventually call out to the empirical examiner; and this truth would call out only from the “facts” that had been accumulated methodically and conscientiously. Darwin continued in the Autobiography:
I was so anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some time to write even the briefest sketch of it. In June, 1842, I first allowed myself the satisfaction of writing a very brief abstract of my theory in pencil in 35 pages. (54)
Of course, Darwin’s claims to neutrality and public renunciation of a priori deductivism must be interpreted loosely, especially when we delve into his early journal and notebook passages. In his Beagle Journal, for example, Darwin alluded to his evolutionary-influenced belief that man was an animal in a November 14, 1833 passage. After his observations of a South American native, he remarked, “A naked man on a naked horse is a very fine spectacle; I had no idea how well the two animals suited each other” (qtd. in Gruber 433).
Meanwhile, in his ornithological notes also composed while on board the Beagle, Darwin wrote, “[T]he zoology of the Archipelagos … will be well worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of the species” (qtd. in Denton 30). Revelations as such certainly betray Darwin’s methodology as far more premeditated than he let on in public presentation. Later, in his “Transmutation Notebooks,” completed between July, 1837, and February, 1838, he wrote,
If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death, suffering, and famine--our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements--they may partake [of?] our origin in one common ancestor--we may be all melted together. (qtd. in Autobiography 120)
And elsewhere in the same notebooks, Darwin encapsulated his famous natural selection concept:
With respect to extinction, we can easy see that variety of [the] ostrich Petise may not be well adapted, & thus perish out, or, on the other hand, like Orpheus [a Galapagos bird], being favourable, many might be produced. (qtd. in Gruber 444)
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In these instances, Darwin was at least fair enough to use conditional language, although he still seemed to be doing some very “un-Baconian” early theorizing. And rather than being conclusions he came to only after employing the most methodical, drawn out, and rigorous of scientific skepticism, common ancestry and natural selection, the two major concepts in Origin, were very clearly expressed more than twenty years before Origin’s publication and even four (or five) years before Darwin said he began his 35 page abstract in 1842.
Darwin’s son Francis, who edited the notebook material, commented significantly concerning his father’s speculations: “He had at this early date visions of the far reaching character of the theory of evolution” (Autobiography 121). Francis spoke of the following notebook passage from his father:
My theory would give zest to recent and fossil comparative anatomy; it would lead to the study of instincts, heredity, and mind-heredity, whole [of] metaphysics, it would lead to closest examination of hybridity & generation, causes of change in order to know what we have come from & to what we tend, to what circumstances favour crossing & what prevents it, this & direct examination of direct passages of structure in species, might lead to laws of change, which would then be main object of study, to guide our speculations. (122)
From these early notes, we can see that Darwin eagerly anticipated the day when evolutionary thought would infiltrate other realms of science and even the “whole [of] metaphysics.” That is, he foresaw evolutionary thought as a reigning paradigm, which it in fact turned out to be. And as a fully functioning paradigm, it certainly would be used to “guide” speculations.4 Darwin’s image of neutrality, as so convincingly set out in Origin’s introductory rhetoric, begins to loom even larger as we compare it to what went on behind the scenes.
Regardless of evidence to the contrary, the image of empirical objectivity that Darwin portrayed with his early rhetoric in Origin was effective and remains so to this day. For instance, Darwin anthologizer Philip Appleman writes, “[H]e [Darwin] had been a tenacious empiricist, a tireless gatherer of facts … [and] spent the next twenty years in dogged pursuit of his evolutionary hypothesis” (6). Appleman seems to accept what Darwin had so cleverly advertised about his procedure in Origin, even crediting him with painstakingly and cautiously pursuing a hypothesis instead of starting with one.
Others have been similarly influenced, like George Pickering: “It is not easy for us living in the second half of the twentieth century to appreciate how deeply a man of Darwin’s scientific integrity in the early nineteenth century would hate hypothesis … he passionately hated speculation” (85). Pickering in this case is either naïve, misinformed, or deliberately seeks to perpetrate the myth of Darwin the inductivist. In reality, Darwin speculated quite often and freely and considered frequent theorizing a regular and acceptable procedure.
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He privately affirmed this propensity in his correspondence: “I am a firm believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation” (Life and Letters 1.465). In light of this, Darwin’s actual procedure, Gertrude Himmelfarb notes:
If Darwin’s facts were not all they might be, neither were his claims to have worked on “true Baconian principles,” collecting facts for five years without any theory and without any speculation. As the notebooks amply demonstrate, he was speculating boldly from the very beginning of this period, and his speculations were all directed to a particular theory--that of mutability. (154)
David Hull argues similarly: “Five years may have elapsed before he permitted himself to write an essay on the subject, but he had speculated and collected facts in the light of these speculations from the very first” (8). The discrepancy between Darwin’s actual and stated methodologies in view of these revealing and accurate observations becomes rather evident. In the words of Lovtrup, “Darwin was as much a theory maker as Lamarck, but publicly, he portrayed himself as an empiricist, thus disarming many potential critics” (415).
Those Darwin naturally sought to “disarm” and convince first were his close colleagues and associates in the scientific community, Joseph Hooker having been probably the closest. Hooker’s initial response to Origin shortly after its publication was accordingly quite commendatory: “Your glorious book--what a mass of close reasoning on curious facts and fresh phenomena--it is capitally written” (Life and Letters 2.23). Hooker identified Darwin’s “mass” of reasoning as having been based “on curious facts and fresh phenomena,” certainly the language of the inductive empiricist.
There were, contrarily, others in the scientific community who were not disarmed by Darwin’s stated commitment to inductivism, like Adam Sedgwick. Sedgwick was one of Darwin’s professors at Cambridge and the president of the Geological Society who wrote Darwin in December, 1859, in response to Origin:
You have deserted -- after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth -- the true method of induction … Many of your wide conclusions are based upon assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved, why then express them in the language and arrangement of philosophical induction? (43)
Sedgwick gives Darwin the benefit of the doubt in this assessment and questioning of his methods. But Darwin's correspondence reveals a more calculated ideological procedure on his part.
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Indeed, the answer to Sedgwick’s question would come years later in one of Darwin’s 1863 letters to John Scott. In the letter, Darwin advised Scott to depend on theory instead of induction, as he himself did, but to conceal that methodology in print:
I would suggest to you the advantage, at present, of being very sparing in introducing theory in your papers (I formerly erred much in Geology in that way): let theory guide your observations, [emphasis Darwin's] but till your reputation is well established, be sparing in publishing theory. It makes people doubt your observations. (qtd. in “Scientific” 362)
Darwin's advice was based on his own experience as a rhetorician.
Interestingly, there were other men like Charles Lyell who recognized Darwin’s departure from empiricism and induction in his initial response to Origin, yet remained supportive:
It is a splendid case of close reasoning, and long substantial argument throughout so many pages … I mean that, when, as I fully expect, a new edition is soon calld for, you may here and there insert an actual case to relieve the vast number of abstract propositions. So far as I am concerned, I am so well prepared to take your statements of facts for granted. (Life and Letters 2.2)
Darwin’s older brother Erasmus also recognized Origin’s deductive approach yet shared Lyell’s devotion: “In fact the a priori reasoning is so entirely satisfactory to me that if the facts won't fit in, why so much the worse for the facts is my feeling” (29).
In the responses of Darwin’s detractors and supporters, we begin to see his strategy further unfurled; while attributing his theory to inductive reasoning and often pointing to empirical data (for example, with “curious facts and fresh phenomena”), Darwin resorted to the deductive approach whenever necessary using a priori reasoning, unprovable assumptions, abstract propositions, and long arguments. In other words, Darwin would turn the clock back to pre-Baconian science or Aristotle’s Organum.
Although Darwin needed to stray from the scientific orthodoxy of his day, his ideas did turn out to be convincing, a fact recognized even by opponents such as the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz. Agassiz observed that Darwin's explanations had persuasive elements largely due to his manner of presentation regardless of his departures from induction:
Darwin has placed the subject [of Natural History] on a different basis of that of all his predecessors, and he has brought to the discussion a vast amount of well-arranged information, a convincing cogency of argument, and a captivating charm of presentation. His doctrine appealed more powerfully to the scientific world because he maintained it at first not upon metaphysical ground but upon observation. Indeed it might be said that he treated his subject according to the best scientific methods, had he not frequently overstepped the boundaries of actual knowledge and allowed his imagination to supply the links which science does not furnish. (qtd. in Hull 434)
Notice how Agassiz acutely identified Darwin's use of rhetorical strategies, for example, “well-arranged information,” “cogency of argument,” and “charm of presentation.” He then attributed Darwin’s ability to “appeal more powerfully to the scientific world” to his professed initial dependence on empirical observation.
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Agassiz concluded the statement by declaring Darwin's ostensible dependence on empiricism to be unreliable since he “allowed his imagination to supply the links which science does not furnish.” This estimation was prescient: Darwin was persuasive in Origin largely because of his ability to make a strong rhetorical presentation in lieu of phenomenal evidence. As a result, he was able to make his ideas, many of which arose from his “imagination,” seem rather compelling.
Agassiz’s revelation on Origin’s success confirms the methodological connection between Darwin and Aristotle. Darwin later confirmed that affinity in his Autobiography while defending his persuasive reasoning abilities: “The Origin of Species is one long argument from the beginning to the end, and it has convinced not a few able men” (96). In light of this comment, current day rhetoricians also discuss the early success of Origin:
Campbell immediately discards one possible explanation; viz., Darwin's theory prevailed because it was demonstrably true and its evidential base was unassailable. On the contrary … Darwin, who called the Origin “one long argument” was acutely conscious of gaps in his evidence and sought to neutralize those gaps by practical reasoning that was closer to rhetoric than logic. The Origin relies upon analogy in particular and imagery in general to develop an argument whose conclusions are not certain but, at best, probable. (Gaonkar 52-53)
Both Darwin and the rhetoricians correctly categorized his work in Origin as, first and foremost, an “argument” instead of an explication of observable and testable facts. As Michael Denton has observed, “There can be no question that Darwin had nothing like sufficient evidence to establish his theory of evolution. Neither speciation nor even the most trivial type of evolution had ever actually been observed directly in nature” (69). As a result, Darwin needed to rely on reasoning that was “closer to rhetoric,” rhetoric “anciently and properly defined as the art of persuasion” (Weaver 140).
If nineteenth-century rhetorical modes have roots in Aristotle, and those trends influenced Darwin to some degree, then we should expect to see Aristotelian rhetorical patterns in Origin; this is precisely the case. As literature that was designed to persuade, much of Darwin's argumentation in Origin draws frequently upon various and sundry Aristotelian argumentative tactics.
Darwin's use of such an approach reveals his philosophy: to persuade an audience that a theory is conceivable is as good as demonstrating it by testing it and verifying it experimentally. This idea is based on a strategy originally articulated by Aristotle, who declared in Rhetoric,
It is clear, then, that rhetorical study, in its strict sense, is concerned with the modes of persuasion. Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated. (1.1355a)
Unlike Plato, who thought that rhetoric could prove nothing as a “cosmetic art,” Aristotle advocated its use as a solid methodology for persuasion.
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Aristotle's deductive reasoning fell under the category of “pistis” (proof), which does not mean proof in the empirical sense (apodexis), but rather a “demonstration of what, in a given set of circumstances, a reasonable person might take to be reasonable” (Nash 205). Aristotle's use of deduction, which he called the enthymeme, “is not a close fisted logical process; it is openhanded plausibility, the reasonable case which readers or listeners must judge for themselves” (206).
We could immediately detect the advantages that Darwin would see in using such an approach in his argumentation. He knew he had to argue around the admitted lack of empirical evidence that his ideas suffered from. He also knew that the enthymemic argument did not require in its premises a factual or logically unassailable proposition. In this sense, Darwin took a cue from the arguments he so admired in Paley: “I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley's premises … taking these on trust” (Life and Letters 1.41). The scientist turned rhetorician then induced his own audience to accept arguments on similar grounds.
With such a foundation, Darwin offered up his hypotheses as plausible by supporting them with imaginary illustrations, metaphors, analogies, speculative theories, and other devices. If he could demonstrate that an idea were imaginable, given the assumed naturalistic framework within which he interpreted all of his data, a cooperative audience (for example, one that was eager to adopt his anti-creationist presuppositions) would most likely receive it.5 This approach was indeed a radical departure from the Baconian protest, “[T]here is no place for argument” (Novum sec. 61).
Since the process of species-to-species evolution as postulated by Lamarck and others had already provided an ideological foundation for Origin to build upon, Darwin felt that his primary task was to define evolution’s mechanism, which he believed to be natural selection. This was the key concept in Origin as the instigator of speciation, but since speciation was not empirically demonstrable, Darwin had to use analogies and metaphoric constructions in place of observations. As Aristotle instructed, the effective use of the metaphor “ought to set the scene before our eyes” (Rhetoric 3.1410b).
Darwin himself was forthright about his frequent use of “illustrations” (Origin 90), “simile” (129), “hypothesis” (160), and as stated in later editions of Origin, “metaphorical expressions” (Origin 3rd ed. 64) in defense of his idea that natural selection led to speciation. Aristotle's advice on the use of analogy sheds further light on Darwin's strategy:
Fables are suitable for addresses to popular assemblies … You will in fact frame them just as you frame illustrative parallels: all you require is the power of thinking out your analogy, a power developed by intellectual training. (Rhetoric 2.1394a)
The skillful rhetorician, therefore, substitutes one known and observable idea for another unobservable one to make it seem plausible.
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Although Darwin did not formally introduce the natural selection concept until Chapter IV (Origin 80), he spent most of the first chapter developing the idea with his “domestic breeder” analogy. He gave detailed descriptions of the work of animal breeders (for example, with pigeons, horses, and dogs) in carefully controlling the mating habits of animals. By selecting the healthiest, strongest, or fastest parents, the breeder was able to produce the desired favorable characteristics in the animals’ offspring. Necessarily, slight changes took place in the offspring until, over time, those changes became increasingly pronounced.
Man, as such, could “artificially” orchestrate a type of gradual evolution. With this picture in mind, Darwin then lowered the rhetorical boom on his audience with a seemingly non-threatening question and answer: “Can the principle of selection, which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply in nature? I think we shall see that it can act most effectually” (Origin 80). And the metaphor was born. If man could in a relatively short time frame effect these changes in animals, nature must have been able to do so even more profoundly over millions of years.
Natural selection leading to speciation necessitated millions of years of gradual, infinitesimal changes, a process that could not be emulated in real time. But in substituting a well-known phenomenon for an unknown one, Darwin created a persuasive analogy; he “set the scene” before his readers’ eyes. Of course, the work of an animal breeder ironically involves human intelligence and interference with the otherwise natural process of animal reproduction.6 But in personifying nature as an agent that could “select” the way an animal breeder did, Darwin subtly transferred the characteristics that were formerly attributed to a Designer or Creator over to natural processes. Here was the true power of his rhetoric.
The manner in which Darwin worked out his analogy for natural selection was also ingeniously constructed. Darwin first broke down the skepticism in his audience by announcing, “The great power of this principle of selection is not hypothetical [emphasis Darwin's]” (Origin 30). In reality, Darwin must have been well aware that his understanding of natural selection was greatly hypothetical in many respects. Yet he was able to rhetorically coerce his audience by pointing to the success that breeders could achieve by design.
He called this phenomenon the “principle” of selection and implied that readers should recognize it whether there was a human agent overseeing the process or not. He then gave a specific example of how directed selection occurs: “[E]minent breeders try by methodical selection, with a distinct object in view, to make a new strain or sub-breed, superior to anything existing in the country” (34). This type of breeding procedure was quite deliberate and resulted in calculated and definite improvements.
Next, Darwin provided another scenario, this time orchestrated by a less purposeful agent of change:
But, for our purpose, a kind of Selection, which may be called Unconscious, and which results from every one trying to possess and breed from the best individual animals, is more important. Thus, a man who intends keeping pointers naturally tries to get as good dogs as he can, and afterwards breeds from his own best dogs, but he has no wish or expectation of permanently altering the breed. Nevertheless I cannot doubt that this process, continued during centuries, would improve and modify any breed. (34)
In this case, the agent that effected the modifications did so far less methodically and consciously than a professional breeder would with no intentions of “permanently altering the breed.” Yet over time, the modifications and improvements occurred nonetheless.
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Darwin then gave a third example, this time involving an even less directed and less sophisticated source of change:
If there exist savages so barbarous as never to think of the inherited character of the offspring of their domestic animals, yet any one animal particularly useful to them, for any special purpose, would be carefully preserved … and such choice animals would thus generally leave more offspring than the inferior ones; so that in this case there would be a kind of unconscious selection going on. (36)
The savage represented to Darwin a far cry from the professional breeder in intention and in method, but the results were the same; modifications took place and those “choice animals” left more offspring. From the breeder to the savage, Darwin’s deft analogy used a series of “diminishing human agencies of change” (Fahnestock 30) while the general principle of selection remained.
Predictably, Aristotle had already set out the guidelines for this type of series argument known as incrementum and gradatio: “[A]rgue from greater and less degrees” (Topics 2.114b). In the same manner, Darwin was able to bring the reader along in logical steps, with the analogy for natural selection, and demonstrate how either deliberate or “unconscious” human selection could evoke the same results.
By pushing his readers along such an argument, Darwin led them to the “next intelligible step [which] removes the human agent altogether and allows nature to select” (Fahnestock 30). Instead of seeming like an analogical “leap of faith,” the graded argument softened the blow for the reader who might have seen how nature would also unintentionally select and yet produce superior offspring.
Darwin’s crafty use of graded metaphoric constructions not only ameliorated objections that his ideas were irrational and implausible but also invoked an argumentative technique that took the audience from the known, or familiar, to the unknown. The tactic was another one that Aristotle endorsed: “[A] man who reasons correctly demonstrates his proposed conclusion from premises that are generally more accepted, and more familiar … the less familiar is to be inferred through the more familiar” (Topics 8.159b).
For Darwin’s purposes, uniformitarianism was one such familiar idea. In the 1830’s, Charles Lyell popularized the uniformitarian approach to geology, as opposed to the catastrophist view, and it subsequently became well known by the time of Origin’s publication. Based on his observations of certain erosion patterns and geological formations, Lyell argued that the earth was much older than had been previously believed.
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The extra time (in millions of years) was deemed necessary because the erosion and sedimentary buildup that he observed occurred incrementally and uniformly, hence the definitive term, “uniformitarianism.” Darwin built upon this idea in his chapter on natural selection:
I am well aware that this doctrine of natural selection, exemplified in the above imaginary instances, is open to the same objections which were at first urged against Sir Charles Lyell’s noble views … Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure. (96)
In this passage, Darwin allied his less familiar natural selection concept with Lyell’s more familiar and “noble views” on geology, views that had “almost banished” young earth catastrophism. He then obligated his reader to accept the implications of the alliance. If uniformitarianism was acceptable, then Darwin’s reader also should acknowledge natural selection’s gradual work in species evolution; in Darwin’s scheme, “natura non facit saltum” (Origin 194) or “nature makes no leaps,” must have been true in biology as it was in Lyell’s geology.7
Darwin demonstrated other examples in Origin of commandeering familiar concepts to advance his own arguments. In the famous closing passage of the work, for instance, he made some striking final allusions:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms … have been, and are being, evolved. (490)
If Darwin had not already impressed upon the audience the grand significance of his theory, he made sure that his final words did so. As he described life being imbued into a few forms or into one, the familiar Genesis phrase “breathed into” would certainly have resonated with Victorians.
However, Darwin's use of the passive voice (having been breathed) conspicuously accentuated the forms and not the agent of creation. It is clear on this point that Darwin was using a familiar concept only to take his audience where he desired. Philip Kitcher’s comments in this regard are pertinent: “Here I think we can see Darwin as the master of the ‘glib and oily art’ of rhetoric and legitimately accuse him of ‘speaking and purposing not’” (19).
Darwin also emphasized a world that operated according to the impersonal forces of natural law over and against Divine Providence with his mention of the planet “cycling” according to the “fixed law of gravity.” This terminology is significant first, because it implicitly equated his own evolutionary concept with the surety of Newton’s law. Secondly, Darwin deliberately invoked the universe of Newton, the one that ran on its own with mathematical, clocklike precision and fixed law similar to Lyell’s uniformitarian world.
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Only in this setting would natural selection work. And in this world, supernatural intervention was rendered null and void. Like Darwin’s series arguments that took the reader in the direction he prescribed, this closing passage gently and almost deceptively moved his audience away from the familiar special creation account that he so cleverly echoed.
Darwin rhetorically moved his audience from the familiar to the less familiar in earlier sections of Origin as well, perhaps most noticeably with his use of well-known terminology. In particular, Darwin maximized the language of natural theology, as epitomized by William Paley, his Cambridge hero. In his 1802 work entitled Natural Theology, Paley asserted that design in the material creation implied a designer (41-42). His central metaphor involved a watch representative of intricate design that necessitated a “watchmaker,” a term used to symbolize the “Creator.”
According to Paley, an examination of the watch, also known as a “contrivance,” should have the following impact on its examiner: “The first effect would be to increase his admiration of the contrivance, and his conviction of the consummate skill of the contriver” (42). The use of the term “contrivance” was quite deliberate since it enhanced the notion of design and purpose in nature and by extension a purposeful designer or “contriver.” And thanks to Paley and others in the natural theology movement, “contrivance” would remain a corresponding theistic-friendly watchword for many in the nineteenth-century (“Scientific” 361).
Paley’s term “contrivance,” despite its normally theistic-friendly connotations, did show up multiple times in Origin (361). But for Darwin, the use of the word was meant to convey an interpretation starkly opposed to Paley’s. He used the term first in Chapter I in his discussion of the remarkable features of a plant variety: “[M]any botanists believe that the fuller's teazle, with its hooks, which cannot be rivalled by any mechanical contrivance, is only a variety of the wild Dipsacus” (Origin 30). “Mechanical contrivance” was a direct reference to Paley's watch and spoke of man's less effective efforts to bring about variations in plants artificially compared to the process of natural selection.
Later in Chapter IV, where Darwin described the anatomy of flowers, his contrivances were nature's workmanship: “The contrivance seems adapted solely to ensure self-fertilization,” “[T]here are special contrivances which effectually prevent the stigma from receiving pollen,” and “[I]n Lobelia fulgens, there is a really beautiful and elaborate contrivance” (98). Paley certainly would have agreed with Darwin that these natural wonders were “contrivances,” but for Darwin they were the products of natural selection as contriver, not a transcendent Designer or Creator.
As Darwin appropriated ideology from uniformitarianism, he did the same with terminology from natural theology, almost in parodic fashion. Darwin's use of natural theology's vocabulary, in this case and elsewhere, was indeed a clever exercise in subversion. In a more pronounced instance of this strategy, Darwin went so far as to invoke the suggestive term “Creator” as well. Although he often used the word simply when discussing the arguments of creationists and not as an advocate of their position, there are several instances where used it as any Victorian theist would have.
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In one exemplary segment, Darwin stated, “To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception” (167). In another portion, he asked, “Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?” (188). Darwin continued along the same vein in his concluding chapter:
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator. (488)
Interpreted prima facie, these arguments are not terribly different from the deistic approach of the natural theologians. Darwin first acknowledged the Creator and then credited Him with “works,” “powers,” and having “impressed” laws on matter. The crucial difference emerged not over the existence of a Creator but as manifest in the third example, with the manner of creation, whether “each species has been independently created” or whether life has been “originally breathed into a few forms or into one” (490).
Such discourse may seem enigmatic to readers who have always viewed Origin as Darwin’s “atheist” manifesto. But as a skillful and tactful rhetorician, Darwin knew that a frontal attack on popular orthodoxy would have been suicidal for his theory (Himmelfarb 387). He instead resorted to a more clandestine approach. Darwin revealed his appreciation for this type of strategy in one of his letters:
Lyell is most firmly convinced that he has shaken the faith in the deluge far more efficiently by never having said a word against the Bible than if he had acted otherwise … I have read lately Morley's Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the powerful force and vigor of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect; real good seems only to follow silent side attacks. (qtd. in Himmelfarb 387)
Darwin’s having called attention to “silent side attacks” on Christianity and the Bible is quite noteworthy and gives us insight into his motivation as a strategic manipulator of language. And Origin’s prose does in fact testify that Darwin learned from his colleagues: the most effective arguments often eschew the direct confrontation, disarming otherwise hostile opponents. This strategy makes Darwin’s appeal to the Creator understandable and ironic, since it verbally invoked the conventional terminology for God but served ultimately to strip Him of any creative power.
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Darwin’s multiple applications of the term “Creator” also indicated his ability to cunningly appease the religious minds in his Victorian audience. According to Kitcher, Darwin’s strategy was to “avoid any appearance of conflict with the doctrines of religion” and to “deploy the preferred phraseology of religious texts and of nineteenth-century natural theology to advance doctrines that might otherwise seem threatening” (19).
For those who were not aware of Darwin’s underlying intentions, appeals to the Creator gave the plausible impression that he was not wholly committed to an anti-theistic stance. Campbell notes, “Rather than question the being of God, Darwin … relies upon God” (“Scientific” 366). However, while relying on the concept of God to buttress some of his arguments, he simultaneously emphasized the preeminence of nature’s immutable laws in place of that God.8 Darwin in this case, demonstrated the ability to rhetorically sabotage an opposing ideology while luring those who held to it onto his side.
Darwin’s appeals to a Creator become all the more ironic when we recognize the degree to which he openly challenged creationism. In Origin he wasted little time with his anti-creation argument, first with a prefatory quotation from William Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise: “[E]vents are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws” (ii). Darwin’s use of this quotation as his first impression rather politely suggests that the Creator’s providential activity in the cosmos should not be assumed in “each particular case.”
Early in the introduction Darwin remained reserved but hinted more strongly of his questioning of Divine Providence: “In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist … might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species” (3). And by the end of the introduction, Darwin had moved from the suggestive to the absolute:
I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained--namely, that each species has been independently created--is erroneous. (6)
Darwin followed suit throughout the rest of Origin, at times suggesting the improbability of a Creator’s fiat creative power and elsewhere virtually denying any such possibility.
To defend his idea that special creationism was untenable in the face of the observable facts, Darwin offered frequent and skillful straw man arguments. By framing various scenarios that he asserted could be explained by natural selection but not by creationism, Darwin brought his readers along a custom made path of argumentation that was less threatening to his own ideas; he consequently led the audience to his desired conclusion. His argument from homology, for instance, held that the natural selection process explained the “affinities of all organic beings” (128).
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Darwin craftily avoided discussing the differences that also could have been pointed out in the organic world and then posed some questions for the creationist:
Why should similar bones have been created in the formation of the wing and the leg of the bat, used as they are for such totally different purposes? … Why should the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils in any individual flower, though fitted for such widely different purposes, be all constructed on the same pattern? (437)
If all species had descended from one original form, then Darwin’s thesis as he presented it would seem to fit the facts; and for Darwin, a similar factuality was not so with the creationist paradigm:
Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes…. On the ordinary view of the independent creation of each being, we can only say that so it is;--that it has so pleased the Creator to construct each animal and plant. (435)
The possibility that a Creator would have fashioned the entire organic world with certain affinities was not an option for Darwin nor for his readers, thus making his version of the creationist position look “hopeless” in his argument.
Darwin framed other more sophisticated straw men for creationism, for instance with regard to varieties of species. He suggested that the variations among the species were analogous to new species “notwithstanding that intermediate linking forms [as fossils] have not been discovered” (59). With Darwin’s blurring of boundaries between varieties of species and completely new species and his inference that “innumerable intermediate links” (280) would eventually be discovered, he was able to strengthen the appearance of his argument.
Once he persuaded his audience to accept his analogies, he confidently declared, “[W]e can clearly understand these analogies, if species have once existed as varieties and have thus originated: whereas, these analogies are utterly inexplicable if each species has been independently created” (59). By forcing his interpretation of the natural world on the creationist paradigm, Darwin again demonstrated his skill as a master manipulator of language and ideas.
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Darwin also used (and possibly exaggerated) the observable reality of variability among species to heighten his attack on creationism. If the Creator designed the species and their specific parts with particular functions, why was variation so prevalent among those organisms? He thusly argued,
[T]he part in this case is eminently liable to variation. On the view that each species has been independently created, with all its parts as we now see them, I can see no explanation. But on the view that groups of species have descended from other species … I think we can obtain some light. (153)
Darwin then anticipated a rebuttal to his argument with regard to particular species. He presumed that a detractor might “assert that each species has been created with a tendency to vary,” (167) and if so, could have creationism without dismissing the observable changes that take place among organisms.
But for Darwin, creationism and variation without speciation were mutually exclusive; if a phenomenon were not explained in terms of his notion of natural selection, then it was unintelligible, or as he argued, “To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and a deception” (167).9
Perhaps Darwin’s most impressive straw man for creationism concerned rudimentary organs. In boasting of natural selection’s explanatory power, Darwin realized that his theory was not immune to counter-argument. If natural selection always worked to the advantage of the organism and “every detail of the structure has been produced for the good of its possessor” (199), then what was the explanation for organs that were obviously not useful or advantageous?
To his credit, Darwin did not avoid the issue: “I fully admit that many structures are of no direct use to their possessors” (199). And then, he shrewdly provided an alternative: “[E]very detail in structure in every living creature … may be viewed either as having been of special use to some ancestral form, or as being now of special use to the descendants of this form” (200).
In other words, if an organism had a structure that was not advantageous, it must have been advantageous at one time in the past. Darwin thus rhetorically rescued the unlimited power of natural selection and then turned around to use the same argument against creationism:
On the view of each organic being and each separate organ having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable it is that parts, like the teeth in the embryonic calf or like the shrivelled wings under the soldered wing-covers of some beetles, should thus so frequently bear the plain stamp of inutility! (480)
What should have been “absolutely fatal” (199) to Darwin’s theory became ammunition for his own argument against creationism. In turning such apparent weaknesses into strengths, Darwin again demonstrated his adeptness as a rhetorical “escape artist.” As Himmelfarb notes, “This technique for the conversion of possibilities into probabilities and liabilities into assets was more effective the longer the process went on” (317).
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Besides representing special creationism in a way that was advantageous to his own theory, Darwin utilized another effective rhetorical strategy throughout Origin. Thomas Huxley called attention to this temperament in his commendatory reaction to Origin’s style: “Nothing, I think, can be better than the tone of the book, it impresses those who know nothing about the subject” (Life and Letters 2.26).
In recognizing the “tone” of Darwin’s prose, Huxley offered another testimony to Origin’s rhetorical character. Francis Darwin elaborated on his father’s writing style:
His courteous and conciliatory tone towards his reader is remarkable … The reader feels like a friend who is being talked to by a courteous gentleman, not like a pupil being lectured by a professor. The tone of such a book as the Origin is charming, and almost pathetic.… The reader is never scorned for any amount of doubt which he may be imagined to feel, and his scepticism is treated with patient respect. (132)
It was obvious to men like Huxley and Francis Darwin that Origin’s tone had qualities that were effective outside of the actual content of argumentation. And Darwin having used a “courteous” and “conciliatory” manner that was “charming” and that befriended the reader was, not surprisingly, another major characteristic in Aristotelian argumentation. According to Aristotle, the presentation of the speaker’s character or “ethos” as trustworthy was a primary consideration (Kennedy 56).
Aristotle's comments along these lines are pertinent: “[T]he orator must not only try to make the argument of his speech demonstrative and worthy of belief; he must also make his own character look right and put his hearers, who are to decide, into the right frame of mind” (2.1377b). He later instructed, “Furthermore, this way of proving your story by displaying these signs of its genuineness expresses your personal character” (Rhetoric 3.1408a). Darwin in like manner developed an ethos favorable to his audience.
Darwin worked almost immediately on this image in Origin in an initial pitch to allay the suspicions of skeptics and gain the confidence of wary fence sitters:
This Abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect. I cannot here give references and authorities for my several statements; and I must trust to the reader reposing some confidence in my accuracy. No doubt errors will have crept in, though I hope I have always been cautious in trusting to good authorities alone. (2)
Instead of storming into his presentation by denouncing his opponents and ridiculing creationism, Darwin chose to speak softly with humility and genuineness that admitted the potential for error and appealed to the reader’s trust.
And Darwin did not reserve such language merely for his introduction but used it frequently throughout Origin. In using a form of discourse that admitted doubt and uncertainty with conditional expressions like “perhaps,” “may,” “would,” and “seem,” Darwin lowered the defenses of his audience and maintained a modest, cautious, “nonassertive,” and “nonthreatening” demeanor10 (Crismore/Farnsworth 101).
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Darwin also used expressions that conveyed the courteous disposition that Francis recognized. In one excerpt he argued, “In order to make it clear how, as I believe, natural selection acts, I must beg permission to give one or two imaginary illustrations” (90). Darwin politely begged “permission” in this case and similarly submitted elsewhere, “I may state,” “I may illustrate,” “I may remark,” “I may add” and so forth. And when Darwin did come to definite conclusions, he often used subjective language that advertised a genuine sincerity with expressions like “I believe,” “I think,” “I am convinced,” “I am bound to confess, that, with all my faith in this principle” (242), and the “theory … seems to me to be in itself probable” (469).
One reader, who noticed this tendency in Darwin’s discourse, commented, “If I must criticise, I should say, ‘we do not want to know what Darwin believes and is convinced of, but what he can prove.’” (Life and Letters 2.36-37). When Darwin offered in response that he “would endeavour to modify” the “believes” and “convinceds,” his critic responded, “You will then spoil your book, the charm of (!) it is that it is Darwin himself” (37). Darwin’s construction of an effective ethos was indeed substantial. As one who suggested rather than demanded, Darwin showed himself to be a tactful presenter of ideas, one able to put his hearers into Aristotle’s “right frame of mind.”
A most intriguing demonstration of Darwin’s strategic ethos in action occurred at length in Chapter VI of Origin where he discussed the weaknesses of his theory. Darwin introduced his “Difficulties on Theory” chapter thusly: “Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered” (171). He then went on to chronicle major objections to his theory in Chapter VI and the next two chapters.
Darwin wrote of one objection, “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances … could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree” (186). With such language, Darwin’s admissions may seem far too conciliatory and even “pathetic” as his son Francis commented. Although earning the trust of an audience through humility is helpful, could Darwin have gone too far down the path of self-deprecation by surveying a “crowd” of difficulties? Some critics would say so. However, by carefully looking at the structure of the arguments, we can see that even in the midst of his deepest doubts and questions, Darwin the rhetorician was at work.
Darwin portrayed himself as a trustworthy scientist who was honest enough to consider “grave” difficulties and struggle through them. Yet after his confession that the evolution of the eye seemed “absurd,” Darwin amended his befuddlement with the language of confident discovery. Phrases like “reason tells me,” “the difficulty … can hardly be considered real,” “[w]ith these facts,” and “I can see no very great difficulty” suggest that Darwin’s ostensible doubts had only strengthened his resolve to dispel the difficulties through an appeal to reason and facts. Thus, according to Darwin
He who will go thus far, if he find on finishing this treatise that large bodies of facts, otherwise inexplicable, can be explained by the theory of descent, ought not to hesitate to go further, and to admit that a structure even as perfect as the eye of an eagle might be formed by natural selection. (188)
From making an admission that his idea seemed absurd to obligating his audience to accept that idea, Darwin orchestrated a clever juxtaposition, making his investigation-based solution seem all the more reliable.
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Darwin wrote similarly in other sections of his “problem” chapters and even in some places argued gradually, starting dumbfounded before the mountainous difficulties but slowly emerging as the triumphant scientific discoverer. Throughout much of the Chapter VI analysis, for instance, Darwin endeared himself to his audience by appealing to them in moments of uncertainty and difficulty. Early in his argument we see phrases like “can we believe,” “how can we account for,” “if I am right,” and “I lie under a heavy disadvantage.”
As Darwin worked his way through the difficulties, he framed his argument in more personal language, bringing his readers along with him in his struggle. And by the time he reached the end of his argument, his tone had changed dramatically with expressions such as “we have seen,” “we may confidently believe,” “we can clearly understand,” and “it is generally acknowledged.” In a skillful application of Aristotelian ethos, Darwin guided his audience and arrived at what Aristotle considered the all-important status of “sincere and confident authority” necessary to strengthen the argument (Nash 207). Once again, Origin clearly demonstrated the power of rhetoric.
Darwin’s ethos was also closely related to his application of another Aristotelian rhetorical technique. As he involved his audience in his arguments with inclusive and personal language, Darwin did the same with an expressive tenor, what Aristotle called “pathos.” A prime example of this strategy occurred in Darwin’s argument for the superiority of natural selection over the efforts of human breeders. Darwin wrote,
“How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods” (84).
Here, as elsewhere in Origin, Darwin confronted his readers with a style that hardly resembled that of a scientist. As the dramatic and the emotional took the place of the technical and objective, Darwin’s audience was impressed with argumentative passion and heartfelt emotion. Aristotle’s instructions regarding effective pathos are relevant:
Your language will be appropriate if it expresses emotion and character.… This aptness of language is one thing that makes people believe in the truth of your story … an emotional speaker [or writer] always makes his audience feel with him, even when there is nothing in his arguments. (Rhetoric 3.1408a)
Darwin argued accordingly throughout Origin, employing phrases such as “[H]ow false a view is this!” (74), “How strange are these facts!” (99), “How inexplicable are these facts on the ordinary view of creation!” (437), “[H]ow utterly groundless was my astonishment!” (319-320), and “There is grandeur in this view of life” (490).
In another segment, Darwin wisely anticipated the criticism that there was no fossil evidence to corroborate his theory. He consequently posed an emotion-laden argument for the imperfection of the fossil record. Darwin declared,
What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years! Now turn to our richest geological museums, and what a paltry display we behold! (287)
Those willing to consider Darwin’s “infinite” generations and the “long roll of years” which “the mind cannot grasp” should have certainly recognized the limitations of geology’s “paltry display.” Darwin’s vivid and animated discourse, then, compelled his audience to recognize his speculations to be obvious realities. With language that faithfully utilized expression and emotion, Darwin proved capable of capturing his audience where his arguments were vulnerable.
Much more can be said about Origin’s argumentative strategies, but it is sufficiently evident that Darwin was able to set forth much of his thesis with rhetoric.11 He did so with an obviously well calculated array of tactics including an inductivist self-portrait, the use of metaphor, arguing in degrees, moving from the familiar to the less familiar, the straw man, and the presentation of a credible ethos. And in functioning according to pathos, Darwin’s rhetorical strategy also hinted of a stylistic tendency evident in Origin: a relationship with Romanticism.
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NOTES
1 The pedagogical shift was beneficial to Darwin not only because he was a writer but also because he was terrified of confrontation and public debate. For this reason, Huxley earned the nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog” debating in his stead.
2 The idea that “the facts speak for themselves,” which is in essence the principle Darwin claimed to depend upon, is simply not the case with his theory. This reality is obvious from Origin’s discourse. Darwin argued metaphorically and with fictional illustrations throughout Origin trying to persuade his readers that speciation from common descent was self-evident in nature. But why would self-evident truths and empirical facts depend so much on abstract propositions and analogy based argumentation? Even if Darwin’s thesis was dependent predominantly on observable phenomena, the facts still would not speak for themselves since all facts need to be interpreted and are always interpreted according to presuppositions. And everyone has presuppositions, including Darwin, as seen from his once private notebooks. As evolutionary geologist Stephen Jay Gould noted, “We see the world in light of theories and ideas” (348). Fellow scientist Peter Medewar concurred: “[I]nnocent, unbiased observation is a myth” (Gould 348). Darwin knew that he needed to impose his interpretation onto the facts for his thesis to work and boldly did this in Origin. However, while doing so, he did not admit his dependence on presupposition as he accused his opponents of having, arguing that their creationist findings were the result of “the blindness of preconceived opinion” (Origin 483).
3 He even went on to mention Vestiges in the introduction and distinguished his methodology from Chambers’.
4 Darwin’s private thoughts in this regard are monumental. His intentions to have the theory “guide speculations” reveals that he was very strategic about what he wanted to do with his ideas. To “establish” the paradigm Darwin interpreted all phenomena according to it, which is more a case of circular reasoning than what many call “evidence.” Instead of proving what he said natural selection could do through observation and testing (an impossible task), Darwin described what he believed it could do. He than explained everything in terms of this theory. By substituting explanation for observation, Darwin avoided the limitations of empirical demonstration. And by freeing himself from inductivism, Darwin made his ideas possible as ideas. He then boasted of this methodology since his theory had explanatory power that Baconian science did not. However, Darwin’s method was exactly what Bacon was trying to avoid. In Bacon’s mind, a priori speculation had turned science into science fiction. This is why many in the Victorian scientific community vehemently attacked Darwin. It is also why Darwin felt the need to invoke Baconian induction as much as possible.
5 Those who dispute that Darwin presupposed a foundational worldview (materialism) before he delineated his theory would do well to investigate copies of his early notebooks, for example, his 1838 “M” notebook: “To avoid stating how far I believe, in materialism, say only that emotions, instincts degrees of talent, which are hereditary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock” (qtd. in Gruber 276).
6 One might also object to this methodology on the grounds that no animal breeder has ever been able to change one species of animal into another. In this case, Darwin’s argument is a non sequitur.
7 One wonders how Darwin and Lyell would have reconciled phenomena such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, and other observable cataclysmic natural forces with their “natura non facit saltum” dictum. Was Britain unaware of such realities? If so, did Darwin not encounter at least one display of forceful natural activity during his six-year Beagle voyage around the world? The assertion that nature makes no leaps sounds almost humorous considering the multitudinous examples that could be offered in defense of catastrophism. The first-century AD submergence of Pompeii under Mount Vesuvius’ volcanic ash is one significant case in point. A more recent example could include the 1991 seismic action and eventual eruption of the Phillipines’ Mount Pinatubo. Lyell would have a difficult time convincing residents of Pinatubo’s surrounding villages, 100,000 of whom lost their homes, that nature makes no leaps! According to the U.S. Geological Fact Sheet: “The volume of Pinatubo's lahars [mudslides] staggers the mind. In the first few years following the cataclysmic 1991 eruption, they have deposited more than 0.7 cubic miles (3 cubic kilometers; equivalent to 300 million dump-truck loads) of debris on the lowlands surrounding the volcano, burying hundreds of square miles of land. During heavy rains, lahars at Pinatubo can transport and deposit tens of millions of cubic yards of mud in a single day” (Newhall 2).
8 Some may argue based on Darwin’s theistic friendly language that he was sincere in his struggles with orthodox Christianity and that Christianity can be reconciled with theistic evolution, the idea that the Creator of Genesis started life and then guided speciation. This is the position of many current day mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. But Darwin’s “Creator” is not compatible even with the limited God of theistic evolution. He wrote to Asa Gray, “I can see no reason why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws, and that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event and consequence” (Life and Letters 2.105-106). If this is the “God” Darwin has in mind, than his conception is closer to Aristotle's “Prime Mover” or the unknowable Creator of Deism, not the sovereign and providential God of Christianity. It is important to notice the premium Darwin places on the creative power of “laws” as opposed to the Creator. Darwin relegates God, if He exists, to the status of distant observer and deprives Him of even the first direct creation. What God “may” design for Darwin is a set of laws that do the real creating. To allow the Creator any power beyond designing the laws of nature would deprive nature of the omnipotence that Darwin sought to afford it. Moreover, if Darwin was struggling with orthodox Christianity and God’s role in the cosmos, his struggle was underway at least as early as 1838 when he wrote in his “M” notebook, “Man in his great arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals” (Autobiography 151). This language sounds more like Darwin’s struggle was already over in 1838 and that he was well decided in his rejection of orthodoxy. It would consequently (and sensibly) appear that Darwin was more antagonistic to Christianity and theism than he let on in his public presentation even before his 1876 autobiographical denunciation of Christianity as “a brutal religion” and a “damnable doctrine” (qtd. in Appleman 4). If Darwin had similar sentiments in 1859, his use of “Creator” in Origin stands out even more as having a strategic rhetorical function.
9 Ironically, Darwin argued ad ignoratum in the next lines: “Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound. Not in one case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any reason why this or that part differs, more or less, from the same part in the parents” (167). And for good measure, he added a combination of “guilt by association” and ad hominem attack to the mix: “I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on the sea-shore” (167).
10 These characteristics are most definitely a far cry from those of Darwin’s heirs in the current Neo-Darwinist scientific community. See, for example, rebuttals to anti-Darwinist arguments by Neo-Darwinists like Robert Dorit or Eugenie Scott. Such loyalists to Darwinism have mastered the language of sarcastic and condescending ridicule, especially in the form of ad hominem arguments, guilt by association, red herrings, and other tactics. As such, their rhetoric clearly resembles Thomas Huxley’s much more than Darwin’s; at least on this basis, they should be called “Neo-Huxleans.”
11 Some may argue that Darwin’s extensive use of rhetoric made him no less reliable than any other scientific communicator. But using rhetoric to express and clarify a scientific examination is very different from substituting rhetoric on a grand scale for empirical observation, demonstration, testing, etc. Darwin had no empirical evidence for his speciation idea so he had to rely heavily on rhetoric.
CHAPTER III
Darwin and Romanticism: Evolution and Poetry Meet
Those convinced of Darwin’s effectiveness as a rhetorician may be less receptive to the idea of Darwin as a “Romanticist.” Few, for instance, would initially see a relationship between Darwin the scientist and the great purveyors of romantic philosophy and style like Schelling or Wordsworth. But connections between the approach, disposition and thought of the Romantics and Darwin’s own prose and ideology are actually rather astonishing. A closer look at these associations should therefore allay an understandable skepticism and make quite tangible the image of a romantic Darwin in Origin of Species.
In order to understand Darwin’s connection with Romanticism, we must first apprehend some foundational nineteenth-century romantic ideas and their relationship with science. The wedding of romantic poetry and science in general was a theme to which many of the high English Romantics of the early 1800’s gave considerable attention.
With Wordsworth, for instance, there was a profound relationship between poetry as a gateway to deeper knowledge and science as the essence of that knowledge. This perspective was set forth in his 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads: “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science” (sec. 20).
With regard to Victorian science, Romanticism’s early emphasis on nature and humanity’s relationship with it prefigured naturalism where the biological world is the ultimate reality and definer of humanity. Wordsworth, for example, wrote regarding man’s connection with nature, “To her fair words did Nature link / The Human soul that through me ran” (“Early Spring” 5-6). It is “Nature” and the personal connection with nature that defines and determines the human soul for the Romantic.
Coleridge wrote similarly of nature’s preeminence declaring, “You must master the essence, the natura naturans, which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man” (qtd. in Stevenson 15). Metaphysical overtones notwithstanding, Coleridge saw nature as central to the definition of what was human.
Humanity and nature went hand in hand for the Romantics because of their belief in a fundamental organicism in the phenomenal world. In this organicism, personifying nature highlighted its centrality. With Wordsworth, for instance, “Nature breathes among the hills and groves” (Prelude 1.281). And for Shelley, who contemplated whether the “Sensitive Plant” could feel emotions, nature was brought up to the level of humanity while humanity was unified with the natural order. In this sense, nature, with man included, is an interconnected organism.
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Shelley heightened this concept in Prometheus Unbound as “The Earth” spoke:
Folded in my sustaining arms; all plants,
And creeping forms, and insects rainbow winged,
And birds, and beasts, and fish, and human shapes
Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom,
Draining the poison of despair, shall take
And interchange sweet nutriment; to me
Shall they become like sister-antelopes. (3.3.91-97)
Coleridge’s nature in Rime of the Ancient Mariner was constituted similarly with all of its members interacting together “[b]oth man and bird and beast” (613). Man, as a part of the natural order, could not function independently from it as his actions were intertwined with the environment.
Coleridge elaborated on his organicist views in an 1817 letter declaring, “[T]he man separates from Nature only that Nature may be found again in a higher dignity in the man” (Collected Letters 4.769). In “Tintern Abbey” we find diversity and unity in nature again as every flower, mountain, and stream had individual worth to the poet but were simultaneously part of an organic whole:
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
A motion and spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (98-102)
By placing the mind of man in the scheme, Wordsworth, like Shelley and Coleridge, seemed to be including humanity in the natural organism while at the same time allowing each person to interpret and appreciate nature.
The romantic idea of organicism in the natural world is a concept that Darwin also made use of in Origin. In describing the wonders of nature’s workmanship, he envisioned a phenomenal organic landscape:
I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection. (109)
Like the Romantics, Darwin saw nature bustling with life, its phenomena interconnected “one with another” and overflowing with beauty and “infinite complexity.” Such a scenario is similar to Wordsworth’s “motion and spirit” which “rolls through all things.”
Also like the Romantics, Darwin saw man as a part of the natural scheme, speaking of the “real affinities of all organic beings” (479). He similarly afforded man the power to interpret nature. As the representative human observer, Darwin set himself apart from the surrounding wonders long enough to admire its splendor and even imagine beyond what he could see.
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As one inspired by nature’s organic wonders, Darwin exhibited the quintessence of the creative imagination in action, another strong connection with the Romanticist. He offered his hypothesis or his interpretation of nature based on what he could physically sense. But his impressions were based not only on what he had seen but also what he could “see” as a visionary under nature’s inspiration.
His image of beauty and infinite complexity among the changes that “may be effected” in nature revealed a prolific imagination through which he could see “no limit.” And not unlike a true Romantic, Darwin’s strength as a creative thinker turned out to be a trait that, as he related it, extended back into his childhood.
In Rousseauean fashion, Darwin playfully confessed to some memories in his Autobiography involving his imaginative powers as a youngster:
I told another little boy … that I could produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me. (Life and Letters 1.27)
In another episode, the young Darwin was able to lure his day school headmaster into his imaginative world:
I recollect when I was at Mr. Case's inventing a whole fabric to show how fond I was of speaking the truth! My invention is still so vivid in my mind, that I could almost fancy it was true, did not memory of former shame tell me it was false. (More Letters 1.4)
The humor of these illustrations aside, what took place in them was a harbinger of how Darwin’s mind would work later in life. In the first experience, Darwin’s theory was a “monstrous fable” that “had never been tried” or was, in essence, a speculation without experimental backing.1 And in the second case, his imagining was an “invention” that had been so vividly described that it was convincing not only to Darwin’s audience but also to Darwin himself.
According to Darwin biographer Janet Browne, Darwin’s imaginative powers and penchant to speculate and theorize later in life are indeed traceable to his formative years. In her biography of Darwin, she writes concerning his confessions as a young fantasy maker:
Here, undoubtedly, were the seeds of Darwin’s fertile imagination, the ability when adult to visualize a world teeming with unseen phenomena, to speculate freely, often wildly, about the ways in which nature or nature’s beings might behave. (14) … Natural history, even at such an early age, was for him inseparably linked with the heady power of games and creative speculation. (15)
Browne’s insightful analysis of Darwin’s early experiences and their connection to his eventual scientific methodology is uncannily accurate, for Darwin was obviously gifted in the area of speculation.
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Such a position is confirmed by Francis Darwin’s biographical comments: “Charles Darwin possessed, in the highest degree, that ‘vividness of imagination’ … leading ‘to his overpowering tendency to theorise and generalise’”2 (Life and Letters 1.6). By employing a methodology that George Levine called “scientific imagination” (641), Darwin tapped into a motif that had been elucidated by many a Romanticist thinker.3
Freidrich von Schelling, also known as “Prince of Romanticists,” expressed ideas on natural philosophy that fittingly characterize Darwin’s “scientific” imagination. Soren Lovtrup summarizes Schelling’s understanding thusly: “Nature is not to be understood only from the perspective of empirical observation and scientific theory; it is rather a reality of its own which speculative or intellectual intuition has to interpret” (64). A return to early Wordsworthian typology confirms such a romantic belief in the power of the creative imagination that acts in conjunction with nature to interpret it: “From this green earth; of all the mighty world / Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create / and what perceive” (“Tintern” 105-107).
To the romantic mind, the eye and ear, both instruments of perception, also have the ability to create. And metaphorically, this creative power can attain reality and truth “far more reliably than any other mode of apprehension” (Bloom/Trilling 6). In The Friend, Coleridge concurred with this notion. In an essay concerning the pursuit of truth he wrote, “I have said, that my very system compels me to make every fair appeal to the feelings, the imagination and even the fancy. If these are to be withheld from the service of truth … to what purpose were they given?” (35).
In further agreement with Wordsworth, Coleridge lamented the “unromantic” possibility that the poet would stray too far from the creative imagination in favor of descriptive reality. Speaking of his friend Robert Southey, he wrote, “I am fearful that he will begin to rely too much on story and event in his poems, to the neglect of those lofty imaginings, that are peculiar to, and definitive of, the poet” (Collected Letters 1.302). For the true Romantic, then, “story” and “event” must defer to “lofty imaginings.”
Like Coleridge and the Romantics, Darwin operated according to a similar methodology with his own investigations of the natural world. A solely empirical or an inductive approach, analogous to Coleridge’s story and event, would not suffice since his hypothesis refused to be limited by the phenomenal world, nor could it be. As Gillian Beer reminds us, “Evolutionary theory is first a form of imaginative history. It cannot be experimentally demonstrated4 sufficiently in any present moment” (8).
Consequently, Darwin interpreted the physical world or the world of nature with a creative and romantic imagination. The mind as such has the power to create or to impose on the phenomenal world the interpretation the poet or creative scientist desires to achieve. Beer aptly calls it “Darwin’s romantic materialism” (42).
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Along with the use of creative imagination, the Romantics conceptualized other themes that prefigured Darwinian philosophy. The idea of constant change and process within nature, for example, was common in romantic poetry. George Mead accordingly categorizes Romanticism as “a philosophy of evolution, of process … [and] the background for the theory of evolution” (127). An excerpt from Wordsworth’s Prelude fittingly demonstrates this trend:
From the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty Poets. Visionary power
Attends the motions of the viewless winds,
Embodied in the mystery of words:
There, darkness makes abode, and all the host
Of shadowy things work endless changes,--there,
As in a mansion like their proper home,
Even forms and substances are circumfused. (5.594-601)
The imagery in this setting could easily fit into the evolutionary scheme with “Nature” in conjunction with the poet’s visionary power attending the “motions” of viewless winds and working “endless changes” with “forms and substances circumfused.”
A similar motif appeared in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Throughout the poem, Wordsworth chronicled the transience and impermanence of life and nature and then alluded to how far humanity had come: “Though inland far we be / Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea / Which brought us hither” (163-165). Wordsworth’s imagery is strikingly reminiscent of the evolution motif that has life rising from the sea and over eons of “immortal” time bringing forth mankind.
Shelley echoed a similar theme in “Adonais,” this time with nature represented by a “Spirit.” According to Shelley, “[W]hile the one Spirit’s plastic stress / sweeps through the dull, dense world, compelling there / all new successions to the forms they wear” (380-383). In characteristic evolutionary manner, Shelley portrayed the Spirit of nature shaping and forming life with development, change and “new successions.”
From such examples, a significant relationship between Romanticism and evolutionary science becomes most evident. William Irvine has appropriately noted, “The romantic movement--with its wonder at nature, its nostalgic curiosity about origins, its fascination with change, its exultation in plenitude and diversity--had caused students in every field to think in terms of evolution” (67).
Darwin obviously thought in terms of evolution as a theoretician, seeing nature as a vibrant organic whole and affirming constant process in the natural world. But there was another romantic tendency he often demonstrated. As a naturalist, Darwin was primarily concerned with the classification and analysis of nature in his work and writings. But as a man with refined aesthetic tastes, it is evident that nature meant much more to him; his perspective went well beyond that of the ordinary scientist.
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Because of this reality, Darwin exhibited an emotional connection with nature that could only be described as a romantic one. His earliest autobiographical memories bring to light this profound emotive relationship with nature:
I remember a certain shady green road (where I saw a snake) and a waterfall, with a degree of pleasure, which must be connected with the pleasure from scenery … The memory now flashes across me of the pleasure I had in the evening on a blowy day walking along the beach by myself and seeing the gulls and cormorants wending their way home in a wild and irregular course. Such poetic pleasures, felt so keenly in after years, I should not have expected so early in life. (More Letters 1.5)
Taken by itself, this passage is replete with romantic typology, first as a childhood memory and then with its allusion to “poetic pleasures” and its animated emphasis on natural scenery: “shady, green” roads, “blowy” days, and birds “wending their way home” on a characteristically romantic “wild and irregular course.”
Darwin’s romantic connection with nature showed itself to be even more expressive in his journal from the Beagle voyage. His records as the ship’s naturalist were in fact detailed with episodes of aesthetic contemplation concerning the flora and fauna of distant and exotic lands. One segment written in Brazil exemplifies this ethos:
The day has past delightfully. Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration. (Journal of Researches 11)
As Darwin used ornate language to describe nature’s expressive beauty, he gloried in his emotional connection with the forest and its splendor.5 Romantic experiences as such may be seen as “deeply felt manifestations of a sensuous bond between perceiver and perceived” (Krasner 47). Consequently, nature filled Darwin with “admiration” in an active and personal way.
Darwin’s admiration for nature also manifested in places other than his own written accounts. His son Francis, for instance, recollected impressions of his father’s experience with flowers:
I used to like to hear him admire the beauty of a flower; it was a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and colour. I seem to remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in; it was the same simple admiration that a child might have. He could not help personifying natural things. (Life and Letters 1.95)
Once again the romantic themes speak out rather clearly in Darwin’s penchant to personify nature and slip into childlike admiration of the natural world.
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The image of Darwin’s simple and innocent affinity with nature, along with his autobiographical testimony of “[s]uch poetic pleasures” that he “should not have expected so early in life,” strike an unmistakable parallel with Wordsworth’s “pleasures of my boyish days” (73) from “Tintern Abbey.” And as in Wordsworth’s case, whose latter relationship with nature was marked by “something far more deeply interfused” (154), Darwin’s boyhood poetic pleasures were “felt so keenly in after years.” His early experiences with nature led “to some more profound reality and truth” (Krasner 47).
Darwin carried a romantic enthusiasm about his studies of nature into Origin of Species as well. His abundant descriptions of natural phenomena throughout Origin were in fact often accompanied by expressive and laudatory adjectives. Reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “beauteous forms” from “Tintern Abbey,” Darwin spoke of “exquisite adaptations” and “beautiful co-adaptations” (60) and wrote of an insect “with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, [and] a pair of magnificent compound eyes” (440).
Darwin used other similar descriptors throughout, often mixing evocative discourse with ostensibly factual observation: “It is a truly wonderful fact--the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity--that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other” (128). In effusive language, Darwin again reminded his audience of the same romantic organicism that Wordsworth celebrated.
As one able linguistically and conceptually to bring the worlds of science and poetry together, Darwin’s clever amalgamation of the technical and the expressive could have been classified as a genre in and of itself.6 It would be safe to assume, after all, that “wonderful” facts or “beautiful co-adaptations” are not concepts that ordinarily coalesce. As such, emotion and the language of adoration infused Origin’s scientific discourse with an unusual but powerful element. As John Campbell puts it,
[H]is language expresses, evokes, or manifests feeling … Darwin was not content with mere scientific description, but … betrays a manifestly poetic temperament … [A]t any moment the language of technical description will burst forth into the language of praise. (“Nature” 161-162)
Darwin’s emotional investment in Origin’s prose was indeed an indication of its romantic tendencies.
Darwin at times did not stop in Origin with his personal praise of nature but also sought to call his audience up into a similar understanding. In his observations of a honeycomb, for instance, Darwin chided those who were not as profoundly affected by nature’s wonders as he was: “He must be a dull man who can examine the structure of a [honey] comb, so beautifully adapted to its end, without enthusiastic admiration” (Origin 224). For Darwin, close observation of such intricacies in nature should have naturally resulted in what Campbell calls an “affective response.”
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In this sense, Darwin’s nature worked similarly to Wordsworth’s as a “guide” that elevates the thoughts (“Tintern” 109-110). And in pointing to such phenomena, those who would not normally respond with “enthusiastic admiration” became the prime targets of Origin’s romantic tenor. As Emerson argued of Romanticism, Darwin’s enthusiasm “would represent one’s experience in language in a way that will duplicate or generate that experience in the audience” (qtd. in Bizzell/Herzberg 666). In using a medium and a language familiar to his readers, Darwin called his audience up with him into his understanding of nature's essence and workings.
Darwin’s enthusiasm for nature in Origin, however, was one side of a double-edged sword, for he romantically described nature’s harsher realities as well. His treatment of what he called “the struggle for existence” is a fitting case in point. For Darwin, the struggle for existence involved competition in the natural world for survival and propagation of the species.7
To accentuate the centrality of this phenomenon, Darwin gave his readers a series of dramatic vignettes almost as a warning for those who only saw nature as benign. In one example he wrote,
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see super-abundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey. (62)
Darwin’s poetic temperament is noticeable in this segment with an opening line, “We behold the face of nature bright with gladness,” that could easily have been lifted from one of Wordsworth’s sonnets. At this point, he continued to expressively paint the familiar positive image of nature in joy and “superabundance.”
But amongst the happiness in nature and the ostensible innocence of “idly singing” birds and their “nestlings” was the unpleasant reality: the very same “songsters” were “constantly destroying life” while other birds and “beasts of prey” carried on further destruction. By poetically juxtaposing such positive and negative imagery, Darwin intensified the threat of nature’s ominous potential.
Thematically, Darwin’s initial presentation on the struggle for existence also struck a chord with romantic sentiments. Darwin’s cautions about the hardships in nature, for instance, echoed Wordsworth’s struggle from “Elegiac Stanzas.” In the beginning of the poem, Wordsworth’s initial faith in nature’s continual beneficence was strong: “So pure the sky, so quiet was the air! / So like, so very like, was day to day!” (5-6). Like Darwin’s beholding of nature with “gladness,” this is the nature “we often see” or would like to see for Wordsworth: “if mine had been the painter’s hand” (13).
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But there also is a nature “we do not see” or “forget,” one that Wordsworth was rudely awakened to: “This sea in anger, and that dismal shore / (44) … This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!” (48). Darwin went on in Origin to similarly portray that darker side of nature with stirring language:
The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force. (67)
As the melodramatic tone deepened, Darwin again confronted his readers with the other “face of Nature,” opposite the face “bright with gladness.” This version of nature works like “sharp wedges” ruthlessly driving incessant blows with greater and “greater force” and carving a fearful path of destruction.
Darwin’s arresting depiction of the more disturbing elements in nature was also prefigured by Wordsworth’s successor as poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson. Tennyson did in fact show apprehensions about nature not unlike Wordsworth’s in his masterpiece, In Memoriam A.H.H. As one lamenting the death of his friend, the poet reflected upon the “pangs of nature” (54.3), imagery that bears a striking resemblance to Darwin’s “ten thousand sharp wedges.”
Tennyson then went on to depict a war between the benevolent forces of creation and “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (56.15), a parallel that becomes even more remarkable with a look at Darwin’s continued discourse on the struggle for existence:
What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must here have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect--between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey--all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees! (Origin 74-75)
This passage, perhaps like no other, eloquently captures the essence of Tennyson’s “Nature red in tooth and claw” with a “war” that has gone on among animals and plants throughout natural history. As each participant in the struggle is “striving to increase,” the natural process remains indifferent to the loss of life that it inflicts.
“Idly singing songsters” and birds of prey alike from the tiniest insect to the greatest beast and from the smallest seed to the tallest tree, all members of the animal and plant kingdoms are caught up in the cycle of death. For Tennyson, such a scenario where “Nature lends such evil dreams? / So careful of the type she seems, / So careless of the single life” (In Memoriam 55.6-8) was an unnerving one in which the destines of man and beast alike were at the whim of impersonal and indifferent natural forces.
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While recognizing the unpleasant realities of nature's destructive forces, Romantics and their descendants were able to see something ultimately positive that came out of the struggle. Like Shelley’s apt personification of nature in “West Wind,” natural forces presented a powerful “Destroyer” but also a “Preserver” at work (14). For Tennyson, it was the positive, preserving force in nature that in due course would develop something greater out of the struggle:
And grew to seeming random forms
The seeming prey of cyclic storms
Till at last arose the man;
Who throve and branched from clime to clime
The herald of a higher race
And of himself in higher place
If so he type this work of time. (118.10-16)
Tennyson clearly had in mind a progress and a development that began with earth’s natural forces or “cyclic storms” that in turn brought forth “random forms” and culminated with man, “a higher race.” Yet this very same man once “throve and branched from clime to clime” and eventually, in the “work of time,” moved “upward, working out the beast” (118.27) at the hands of nature's shaping power. Not surprisingly, Darwin endorsed a similar view on the powers of the natural world in Origin.8
For all of its cruelty, nature presented a greater, more positive force in Darwin’s vision embodied by his grand natural selection metaphor. Where his Romantic predecessors had drawn out general guidelines for the idea of nature's creative power, Darwin worked its details into language no less poetic:
How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that nature’s productions should be far “truer” in character than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship? It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. (Origin 84)
As the “cosmic judge” of the natural world, Darwin’s natural selection scrutinizes “every variation” and rejects the “bad.” Nature in this scheme still retains its calculating austerity in disposing of the weak and inefficient,
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but all is for positive ends. Out of the crucible of nature’s harsh judgments comes something better, like Tennyson’s nature that
...dug from central gloom
And heated hot with burning fears
And dipped in baths of hissing tears
And battered with the shocks of doom
(In Memoriam 118.21-24)
all in order to “shape and use” (118.25). Darwin’s natural selection likewise produces something far “truer” and “better adapted” with productions bearing the “stamp of far higher workmanship.” Darwin later called this silent and insensible masterwork of natural selection one of limitless “beauty” and “infinite complexity … between all organic beings” (Origin 109).
In personifying the process of natural selection, Darwin's prose accomplished more than simply beautifying his scientific concepts. It rather galvanized his metaphor and interpreted the natural process as a constant, absolute, and sovereign creative power. Schelling’s related comments are relevant:
What is prior in time is not a most perfect actual being (like a transcendent God), but a gnawing potency, which strains toward realization. Things have not been settled; ultimate reality is in the making and we are in on the creative process with all its struggles. (qtd. in Wilshire 127)
A “gnawing potency,” straining toward “realization,” “creative process,” and “struggles” are all ideas very similar to what Darwin worked into Origin. Moreover, Schelling was emphatic in contrasting his view with the traditional outlook of “a transcendent God.”
We have, then, a most interesting deeper connection between romantic thought and Darwin’s science. Romanticism had, to a considerable degree, elevated nature to the status of deity by replacing or diminishing the conventional emphasis on the Creator. Joseph Beach identifies this ethos found so often in nature-centered romantic poetry in its desire to “substitute the natural for the supernatural, or to identify the two, or to lay the main stress on the natural.” The divine works “invariably through the laws of nature so that everything in the universe … is explainable in terms of nature” (116). Wordsworth spoke precisely in these terms in The Prelude when he declared, “I had been taught to reverence a Power / (13.20) … Her processes by steadfast laws; gives birth / To no impatient or fallacious hopes” (23-24).
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For the Romantics, nature increasingly took on characteristics that were formerly attributed to God. Jerome McGann appropriately identified this tendency in the writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge who both translated “ecological forms into theological realities: nature as Nature, the Active Universe and manifest form of the One Life.” (qtd. in Bate). As such, the cult of “Nature” as the new deity became a substituting mythology for what the omnipotent, personal God once stood for.
Wordsworth captured this spirit in The Excursion: “I now affirm of Nature and of Truth, / Whom I have served, that their DIVINITY / Revolts, offended at the ways of men” (4.983-985). He alluded to nature’s supremacy in The Prelude as well: “To presences of God's mysterious power / Made manifest in Nature's sovereignty” (9.233-234). Earlier in the same work, Wordsworth described the submission of the spiritual to natural forces: “To Nature's laws, and by what process led / Those immaterial agents bowed their heads” (6.124-125).
Coleridge also saw divinity in nature. In extolling Britain’s natural beauty in “Fears of Solitude,” he spoke of “Religious meanings in the forms of nature” (24) and “[a]ll adoration of the God in Nature” (192). And in The Friend, he pronounced his belief in nature’s creative power: “[Y]ea nature itself disclosed to us, GEMINAM istam naturam, quae fit et facit, et creat, et creatur [the divine nature, which made and is making, both creates and is created]” (471).
Shelley, meanwhile, made the transfer from the supernatural to the natural complete by turning the conventional view of God on its head, speaking of “Nature's law divine” (Revolt 6.40.1), and “all-sufficing nature [who] can chastise / those who transgress her law” (Queen Mab 3.82-83). By subsuming the entire phenomenal world under the sovereign and godlike power of nature, the Romantics utilized a typological model with which Darwin’s worldview would resonate.
Darwin’s glowing descriptions of nature’s timeless productions and magnificent “workmanship” that are “far truer” than those of man clearly gush with the praise of the most dedicated Romantic. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, Darwin bestowed reverence upon nature’s forces, declaring natural selection to be “a power incessantly ready for action, and … immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art” (61).
As a power incessantly ready and immeasurably superior to man, nature according to Darwin, possessed a sense of omnipotence tantamount to deity. One of Darwin’s contemporary ecclesiastic critics recognized such a relationship, viewing Darwin's metaphoric constructions as romantic and mythological subversions of natural theology:
In place of the one true God, he puts, first, the Goddess Natural Selection, whose divine powers extend only to the selection … she is beholden to another Deity, called “Chance.” And to explain “exquisite adaptations” without referring them to God, Darwin deifies the “Struggle for Life.” (qtd. in Willey 50)
Despite a hint of sarcasm, this observation is largely accurate.
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John Greene adds his own insight concerning Darwin’s reverential overtones toward nature:
Darwin’s metaphor had taken on a life of its own. Natural selection had become a being with many of the attributes of deity. Its works were manifold, like those of the Biblical Jehovah. Its power was awesome, conferring life and death, creating new and ever more complex organic forms, separating the wheat from the tares, rewarding the efficient and punishing the ineffectual, giving hope of ultimate progress to those who believed in its power and kept its commandments. (38)
In displacing the conventional deity, however, Darwin’s nature incurred an additional burden along with explaining changes in the phenomenal world. The power of natural selection also had to embody a comprehensive vision, one capable of taking on the full function and responsibility of the romantic myth.
According to R.J. Rushdoony, myth is “the illusion of an age or a culture whereby life and its origins are interpreted” (5), a pertinent definition when we consider the role of the romantic poet. As the Romantics reintroduced the ancient pagan myth of Coleridge’s natura naturans, or the “Great Mother,” life and humanity were reinterpreted as well. And in order to do so, Romantics often sought out ultimate knowledge. Thus, according to Beach, “[T]here was no difficulty [for Romantics like Wordsworth] in seeking within nature herself for clues to the ultimate motive-power of the universe” (125). Coleridge wrote accordingly: “I am endeavoring to trace the Genesis … the Natura rerum, the Birth of things” (Collected Letters 1.769).
Coleridge’s mythic quest involved a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenal world and man as a member of that realm. His aspirations to write an epic poem on man and his place in nature were the outworking of that quest:
I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem. Ten years to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science…. I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine--then the mind of man--then the minds of men--in all Travels, Voyages and Histories. (1.320)
Similar to his organic picture of nature, Coleridge had an organic and poetic view of human inquiry including origins, “universal science,” and the mind of man. Coleridge’s ambitious project to wed physical science and poetry was therefore an attempt to construct a paradigm or a way of interpreting the world. As such, it had a highly mythical aim.
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Coleridge’s interpretive ideals were also characteristic of the romantic goal of conceptual unity, what he called a “striving after connected insight” (Opus 23). This concept is further related in function to a unifying paradigm as Coleridge later clarified:
My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt I know ever made to reduce all knowledges into harmony … I have endeavored to unite the insulated fragments of truth … under another light and with different relations;--so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged but explained. (lxxvi)
The goal of uniting fragments of knowledge and truth "under another light" through the romantic spirit was ambitious indeed.
For Darwin, the scientific became inextricably tied in with the romantic and mythic as well. Darwin’s choice of the name “The Origin of Species” for his abstract instead of “Natural Selection,” for example, looms significantly. As a treatise on beginnings, Origin’s quest moved into the mythological, for it is a mythological quest that is concerned with not only knowledge of the phenomenal world but also the deepest knowledge that underlies all phenomena, the knowledge of origins.
Hence, to define, or redefine, the origin of man and the place of man in nature was a revolutionary metaphysical task. Darwin’s early comments from his pre-Origin notes are worth repeating:
My theory would give zest to recent and fossil comparative anatomy; it would lead to the study of instincts, heredity, and mind-heredity, whole [of] metaphysics, it would lead to closest examination of hybridity & generation, causes of change in order to know what we have come from & to what we tend, to what circumstances favour crossing & what prevents it, this & direct examination of direct passages of structure in species, might lead to laws of change, which would then be main object of study, to guide our speculations. (Autobiography 122)
Darwin exemplified the paradigmatic impulse to reinterpret the world as Coleridge sought to “under another light and with different relations.” And like Coleridge’s “system,” which sought to “reduce all knowledges into harmony,” Darwin’s theory had similar comprehensive aims as a unifying principle.
In attempting to interpret fossils, anatomy, instincts, heredity, hybridity, and the “whole [of] metaphysics,” according to his guiding idea, Darwin strove after connecting insight similar to the Coleridgean “universal science.” Darwin later spoke of his theory’s ability to “explain so many classes of facts” (Online Calendar 2555), as Coleridge’s system would explain and unify fragments of truth. Moreover, Darwin’s statement about knowing “what we have come from” contains the foundational element of the myth, an endeavor, like Coleridge’s, to “trace the Genesis.”
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Darwin’s introductory claim in Origin that his evolutionary thesis would “throw some light on the origin of species--that mystery of mysteries” (1) also substantiates the mythical intentions he had stated much earlier in his notes. One of Darwin’s early, unnamed critics perceptively recognized the all-inclusive and therefore mythological explanatory ambitions of Origin. Darwin disclosed his reaction to the critic in a letter to Charles Lyell: “He [the critic] added another objection, that the book was too teres atque rotundus--that it explained everything, and that it was improbable in the highest degree that I should succeed in this” (Life and Letters 1.37).
In hindsight, it is apparent that Darwin and his thesis (met over time by an increasingly receptive audience) were ultimately successful with comprehensive explanatory power, successful to the degree that all of life’s “mysteries” were eventually interpreted according to the myth. Elizabeth Sewell’s definition of myth is thusly appropriate: “Myth is at the heart of the living world, explaining or unwinding its mysteries” (198).9
Aside from his famous allusion to the “mystery of mysteries,” Darwin did specifically work the mystery angle in many portions of Origin’s scientific discourse. He spoke, for instance, of the “mysterious laws of the correlation of growth” (12) and “what slight and mysterious causes the lesser or greater fertility of species … sometimes depends” (251). Darwin later mentioned how the “whole subject of the extinction of species had been involved in the most gratuitous mystery” (318) and how “sub-genera, genera, and families” were “in so mysterious a manner linked together by affinity” (408).
Things that were “unknown” were also being probed for the first time, according to Darwin, like “various, quite unknown, or dimly seen laws of variation [which are] infinitely complex and diversified” (12), “one species of a still more ancient and unknown genus” (125), and how “each species [is] descended from some other unknown form” (172). And naturally, Darwin touched upon the ultimate unknown, “the unknown element of a distinct act of creation” (44). Much of Origin’s discourse, in essence, reflects the romantic pursuit of unveiling and interpreting the mysterious origin of man and the mysterious works of nature. In laying hold of the mystery, Darwin imaginatively redefined nature and man’s role in the cosmos.
As Darwin hinted in his early notes, Origin’s romantic mythology did more than provide a saga of origins; it also deciphered nature’s teleological mystery. For Darwin, examining causes of change causes us to know “to what we tend” or in what direction humanity and the natural order are heading. And as all of nature’s laws are subsumed under natural selection or “one general law” (244), Darwin’s nature moves the phenomenal world toward its goal.
As the new creator, Nature commands, “multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die” (244), reminiscent of Jehovah’s famous Genesis mandate to “be fruitful and multiply.” Meoreover, according to Origin, the process goes in a particular and inevitable direction “leading to the advancement of all organic beings” (244). Natural selection, then, is nature’s providence and teleology.
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As with so many other archetypal evolutionary patterns, themes in romantic poetry also prefigured Darwin’s concept of natural history’s “providential” direction. With Wordsworth, for example, nature’s predestination would eventually result in a glorious new world ruled by nature’s law:
I seemed about this time to gain clear sight
Of a new world--a world, too, that was fit
To be transmitted, and to other eyes
Made visible; as ruled by those fixed laws.
(Prelude 13.369-372)
Shelley, meanwhile, envisioned a future golden age for the earth in Queen Mab where man would live in harmony with the benevolent order of nature that had fathered him:
How sweet a scene will earth become!
Of purest spirits a pure dwelling-place,
Symphonious with the planetary spheres;
When man, with changeless Nature coalescing,
Will undertake regeneration's work. (6.39-43)
And Tennyson, who had struggled with apprehensions about nature throughout In Memoriam, also finally saw the natural order progressing towards glory: “And one far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves” (Epilogue 143-145).
Following in the footsteps of his Romantic forebears, Darwin portrayed all-sufficient nature, which had brought forth all organic life up from oblivion, moving everything, including humanity, through the struggle for existence towards perfection:
Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection. (489)
As with the Romantics, Darwin’s teleology was a message of hope and faith. Natural selection would establish a “secure future” where its omnipotent but benevolent power worked “for the good of each being.” Darwin then continued with his vision:
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (490)
This, Darwin’s concluding passage, is also perhaps his greatest romantic one, encapsulating the entire mythical evolutionary vision in one poetic vignette. From the “war of nature,” “famine,” and “death,” Darwin ushered his readers into a magnificent world of activity and new life, yielding the “most exalted object” conceivable with a view of “grandeur.” In so doing, Darwin concluded his romantic drama, one that started in unknown darkness and “mystery” and, though not completed, has manifested nature’s “most beautiful” and “wonderful” forms in ever-increasing manner.
Besides its teleological vision, this climactic scene also envelops so many romantic ideals as Origin does throughout, including nature’s preeminence, horrors, and glories, its organic essence and man’s place within, the poet’s vivid imagery and expressive feeling, the creative imagination and affective response, and the mysterious and sublime. Darwin’s grand finale, as the epitome of his romantic spirit, most certainly ended The Origin of Species in a fitting style and argues convincingly of its lucid relationship with Romanticism.
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NOTES
1 Darwin’s retrospective autobiographical confession implicitly hints of a man who knows he has changed the face of biological science ideologically and philosophically, from one with an experimental emphasis to a theoretical one. Darwin alluded to this methodology in an 1861 letter to Joseph Hooker: “He [geologist Frederick Hutton] is one of the very few who see that the change of species cannot be directly proved, and that the doctrine must sink or swim according as it groups and explains phenomena” (Life and Letters 2.155). Furthermore, according to his son, Darwin started writing the Autobiography in May of 1876 and completed it in August of the same year. As a result, the claim that the philosophy of science had changed considerably in 17 years (since 1859) is not necessarily far-fetched, especially considering the relatively rapid and successful reception of Origin.
2 Naturally, to protect his father’s reputation, Francis was careful to immediately add the following disclaimer lest readers get the impression that his “overpowering tendency to theorize” caused him to stray from the truly scientific path: “This tendency, in the case of Charles Darwin, was fully kept in check by the determination to test his theories to the utmost.” What Francis did not mention is that the determination to test theories is not the same as the ability to do so. Among many other speculations, natural selection as leading to speciation certainly could not be tested. Moreover, Darwin’s ostensible alacrity to verify the truthfulness of his ideas objectively and experimentally regardless of the results becomes more doubtful upon perusal of his once private correspondence. In an 1855 letter to William Fox, for example, he lamented how his experiments were not turning out favorably: “[A]ll nature is perverse and will not do as I wish it” (Online Calendar 1678).
3 As such, Darwin’s technique may have been closer to the romantic than the “scientific.”
4 To substantiate Beer’s assertion that Darwin’s theory stood firmly on metaphorical grounds over and against empirical, consider Jacques Barzun’s assessment of Huxley’s stance: “Yet from the very first, he [Huxley] had held against the completeness of the theory the fact that it lacked experimental proof” (64). August Weismann’s confessions about Darwin’s natural selection are also revealing: “Even one who, like myself, has been for many years a convinced adherent of the theory of selection, can only reply: ‘We assume so, but cannot prove it in any case.’ It is not upon demonstrative evidence that we rely when we champion the doctrine of selection as a scientific truth; we base our arguments on quite other grounds” (qtd. in Barzun 68).
5 Darwin’s sister Caroline interestingly recognized his poetic temperament in the Journal and commented on it thusly: “I have been reading with the greatest interest your journal & I found it very entertaining & interesting, your writing at the time gives such reality to your descriptions & brings every little incident before one with a force that no after account could do…. You had, probably from reading so much of Humboldt [Alexander (1769-1859), scientist & world-traveler], got his phraseology & occasionally made use of the kind of flowery French expressions which he uses … I have no doubt you have without perceiving it got to embody your ideas in his poetical language” (Correspondence 1.345). Caroline identified an aptitude that Darwin would put to good use in the future.
6 Concerning Darwin’s ability to fuse the poetic and the scientific, his autobiographical reflections are worth repeating: “Especial attention was paid to verse-making, and this I could never do well. I had many friends, and got together a good collection of old verses, which by patching together, sometimes aided by other boys, I could work into any subject” (Life and Letters 1.29). Darwin had obviously become more independent with this skill as Origin’s prose testifies.
7 Darwin borrowed the “struggle for existence” concept from contemporaries. The term itself is a variation of “survival of the fittest,” coined by Herbert Spencer, while Thomas Malthus had formulated the struggle in nature concept. Darwin gave credit to both men in Origin.
8 Beach argues that passages ostensibly reminiscent of evolutionary thought like those found in Tennyson’s In Memoriam are not evidence that the idea of evolution/species transmutation was in the minds of writers before Origin. He claims, rather, that Romantics and Victorian poets had in mind “merely the concept of a ‘graduated scale of being’ in the organic world” (330). Unfortunately for Beach, there is simply too much primary source documentation that demonstrates how influential evolutionary thought, including speciation, was on the high Romantics and the Victorians. Erasmus Darwin’s influence on the major high Romantics, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, was obvious. Wordsworth wrote, “[M]y taste and natural tendencies were under an injurious influence from the dazzling manner of Darwin” (qtd. in King-Hele 68). Moreover, it does not take a wild imagination to see Tennyson’s man, “herald of a higher race” who “throve and branched from clime to clime,” as a product of evolutionary development from lower animals.
9 Was this due to the inherent need in humanity, scientists included, for explanatory myth? It is most likely. Huxley perhaps best summed up the function of Origin to provide an alternative explanatory myth to creationism: “The Origin provided us with the working hypothesis we sought. Moreover, it did the immense service of freeing us forever from the dilemma--refuse to accept the creation hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner?” (Life and Letters 1.552). Huxley’s “cautious reasoner” comment ought not be taken too literally, however, as evidenced by another of his quotes: “The publication of the Origin of Species marks the Hegira of Science from the idolatries of special creation to the purer faith of evolution” (qtd. in Barzun 56). If only scientists were as honest today as Huxley was then.
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CONCLUSION
Scientists have recognized the contribution of Origin of Species to the fields of biology and botany. This study has provided a look into other realms that Darwin worked in and to which he made contributions. In retrospect, Darwin’s application of rhetoric and romantic prose undoubtedly accentuates the cross-disciplinary nature of his scientific discourse. In the mind of this writer, it has become evident how, left to Origin’s manner of discourse alone, an insightful investigator can learn a great deal about fundamental and even advanced aspects of effective rhetoric. Likewise, the romantic themes and styles in Origin speak for themselves as a guide to many of Romanticism’s characteristics.
With regard to rhetoric, there is much we can learn from Origin’s effective modes of argumentation. Creating a persona geared to persuade a particular audience is one of those lessons. Darwin understood his scientific audience, first and foremost, and created the necessary Baconian self-portrait of the objective and conscientious fact-finder as a result. He also appealed to the scientific authorities of his day quite frequently throughout Origin, further intimating a noble deference to his colleagues along with their methodology.
At the same time, Origin’s discourse resonated with his general audience as well, as evidenced by the metaphorical allusions that most Victorians would have been well familiar with. In so doing, Darwin portrayed himself as a fellow Victorian, a believer in a Creator, contrivances, and even a “Tree of Life,” well known imagery from natural theology, Milton, and the Book of Genesis. Darwin’s clever appropriation of the conventional in lieu of the more technical put him in good standing with his cultural peers while simultaneously undermining the worldview behind the imagery.
The paradoxical nature of Origin’s rhetorical discourse also lends credence to Darwin’s complexity and cunning as a writer. Where he seemingly was the most undecided and hesitant quite often is where his argument sounds most convincing and authoritative. For when Darwin doubted himself publicly and frequently, his arguments portrayed genuineness and a touch of humility that even the most hardened opponent had to consider. And just when it seemed he was going too far down the path of abnegation for his argument to work, Darwin, the wily rhetorician, declared that his findings had incontrovertible power.
In crafting this entire setting, Darwin deftly juxtaposed language to embody both ends of the argumentative spectrum. In his arguments, he started in the darkness of doubt and mystery with words like “perhaps,” “may,” and “would.” But eventually, he moved into the light of confidence and scientific truth: “of course,” “it is certain,” and “undoubtedly.” All of this certainly helped convince his readers that his argument about origins and the future was most certain.
Darwin’s willingness to consider his opponents’ arguments also worked to bolster his own credibility. With such a picture, Darwin advertised that he understood his discipline thoroughly. He also shrewdly took on the pose of having contemplated both sides and having gone, even reluctantly, where he believed the stronger arguments had led him despite the ostensibly uncomfortable realities that came with that acceptance.
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Darwin’s Romanticism, meanwhile, dovetailed nicely with his rhetoric since his arguments based strictly on the “facts” in the natural world led humanity into some psychological quagmires. If what his “unbiased” findings suggested were true, what did this mean for man and the entire phenomenal world? If humanity and nature alike were at the whim of mysterious natural forces and not under the guidance and protection of a beneficent Creator, how would Darwin’s audience reconcile this difficulty emotionally?
Darwin gave his readers the answer romantically. Just as the high Romantics sought to rescue their generation from the cold, calculating world of reason and fact, Darwin’s romantic sensitivity and creative imagination sought to rescue his contemporaries. Although nature has its harsh realities, the ruthlessness of the struggle, according to Darwin, is acceptable when we understand what it will produce: ever increasing improvements, beauty, and ultimately, perfection.
Nature’s beauty is all around us, more so as the struggle marches on, and its work, according to Darwin, will guide humanity into higher natural glory. As Victorians once had faith and took comfort in God’s creative power and providence, Darwin worked to transfer those attributes over to nature. As a result, he romantically provided his own version of a hopeful teleology.
Darwin also postulated an alternate understanding of man’s place in the world by offering a type of romantic mythology. Nature’s preeminence was the presuppositional foundation upon which he interpreted humanity and the created order. With such a vision, Darwin sought to provide a view of life with “grandeur” to ameliorate the logical implications of his theory--the hopelessness and meaninglessness of a randomly operating cosmos. Darwin’s romantic deference for nature also added a special emotive touch to a complex natural world and a complex discourse about nature, a type of literary syncretism that appealed to the emotions as well as the intellect.
Finally, Darwin’s romanticism mirrored the themes that his generation was nurtured on. In taking advantage of the literary and cultural trends that were already in existence, Darwin was able to further wed his science with the romanticist tenor that Victorians were so familiar with. In this sense, Darwin’s romanticism was not only a compliment to but also an extension of his rhetoric, perhaps better termed a “Rhetoric of Romanticism.”
That Origin of Species reflects Darwin’s status as a classic Victorian, able rhetorician, and quasi-Romanticist is in reality only a small sampling of what could be said about the work. Because of its versatility as a piece of literature, Origin as an insight into historical trends or philosophy, for example, could become a field of inquiry.
Also, work that has already been started like the study of Darwin’s narrative strategies may possibly expand. Another look at Origin’s discourse may pose an insightful survey into the psychology of man: “Darwin and Psychology.” Suffice it to say, Origin of Species as literature has much to tell us about themes outside of natural science. One need only ask the Victorians, rhetoricians, and Romantics for confirmation.
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