Abstract
Recent Darwin scholarship has provided grounds for recognising the Origin as a literary as well as a scientific achievement. While Darwin was an acute observer, a gifted experimentalist and indefatigable theorist, this essay argues that it was also crucial to his impact that the Origin transcended the putative divide between the scientific and the literary. Analysis of Darwin’s development as a writer between his journal-keeping on HMS Beagle and his construction of the Origin argues the latter draws on the pattern of the Romantic or Kantian sublime. The Origin repeatedly uses strategies which challenge the natural-theological appeal to the imagination in conceiving nature. Darwin’s sublime coaches the Origin’s readers into a position from which to envision nature that reduces and contains its otherwise overwhelming complexity. As such, it was Darwin’s literary achievement that enabled him to fashion a new ‘habit of looking at things in a given way’ that is the centrepiece of the scientific revolution bearing his name.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Baird, T. 1946. “Darwin and the Tangled Bank.” American Scholar 15(Autumn): 477–486.
Beer, Gillian. 1983. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London:Routledge (2nd edition, 2000).
Beer, Gillian. 1996. Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Clarendon.
Beer, Gillian, Martins, Hermino. 1990. ‘Introduction: Rhetoric and Science.’ History of the Human Sciences 3: 163–175.
Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A theory of Poetry. New York:Oxford University Press.
Bowlby, John. 1990. Charles Darwin: A Biography. London:Hutchinson.
Bradley, Benjamin Sylvester. 1994. ‘Darwin’s Intertextual Baby: Erasmus Darwin as Precursor.’ Human Development 37: 86–102.
Browne, Janet. 2002. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. Vol. II of a Biography. London:Jonathon Cape.
Bulhof, Ilse Nina. 1992. The Language of Science: A Study of the Relationship Between Literature and Science in the Perspective of a Hermeneutical Ontology, with a Case Study of Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’. Leiden:E.J. Brill.
Burke, Edmund. 1756. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Menston: Scolar Press (1970).
Butler, Samuel. 1879. Evolution Old and New: Or Theories of Buffon. Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck as Compared with that of Mr. Charles Darwin. London:Hardwicke and Bogue.
Campbell, John Angus. 1970. ‘Darwin and The Origin of Species. The Rhetorical Ancestry of an Idea.’ Speech Monograph 37: 1–14.
Campbell, John Angus. 1987. ‘Charles Darwin: Rhetorician of Science.’ JS Nelson, A Megill, DN McCloskey (eds.), The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs. Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 69–86.
Cannon, Walter F. 1968. ‘Darwin’s Vision in On the Origin of Species.’ G Levine, W Madden (eds.), The Art of Victorian Prose. New York:Oxford University Press, pp. 154–176.
Cohen, M. 1980. ‘James Thomson and the Prescriptive Sublime.’ South Central Bulletin 40: 138–141.
Culler, A Dwight. 1968. ‘The Darwinian Revolution and Literary from.’ G Levine, W Madden (eds.), The Art of Victorian Prose. New York:Oxford University Press, pp. 224–226.
Darwin, Erasmus. 1803. The Temple of Nature or the Origin of Society. London:Johnson.
Darwin, Charles Robert. 1832. Letter to W.D. Fox, May, 1832. Darwin Correspondence Project (Letter 168). http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-168.html. Downloaded 8th November 2007.
Darwin, Charles Robert. 1839. ‘Old and Useless Notes.’ HE Gruber, PH Barrett (eds.), Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity Together with Darwin’s Early Unpublished Notebooks. New York:Dutton.
Darwin, Francis. 1950. ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ F Darwin (ed.), Charles Darwin’s Autobiography. New York:Collier Books.
Darwin, Charles Robert 1857. “Letter to A.R. Wallace, 22nd December.” F. Darwin (ed.), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter (3 Vols.). London: John Murray. (1877, Vol. II, p. 109).
Darwin, Charles Robert 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: Penguin Books (First edition, Penguin Classics, 1985).
Darwin, Charles Robert 1861. “Letter to J.D. Hooker, 27th March.” F. Darwin (ed.), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter (3 Vols.). London: John Murray. (1877, Vol. 3, p. 36).
Darwin, Charles Robert. 1860. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 2nd ed. London:John Murray.
Darwin, Charles Robert 1882. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882. With the Original Omissions Restored. London: Collins (Edited with appendix and notes by his grand-daughter Nora Barlow, 1958).
Darwin, Charles Robert 1975. Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection: Being the Second Part of his Big Species Book Written from 1856–1858 (R. C. Stauffer, ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Darwin, Charles Robert 1988. Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary (R. W. Keynes, ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Darwin, Francis. 1909. ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ F Darwin (ed.), The Foundations of “The Origin of Species:” Two Essays Written in 1842 and 1844. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
1909. The Foundations of “The Origin of Species”: Two Essays Written in 1842 and 1844. F. Darwin, (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Depew, David J, Weber, Bruce H. 1995. Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.
Desmond, Adrian J. 1989. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.
Desmond, Adrian J, Moore, A James. 1991. Darwin. London:Michael Joseph.
Dixon, Robert. 1986. The Course of Empire: Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales 1788-1860. Melbourne:Oxford University Press.
Eliot, George. 1954. The George Eliot Letters, Vol. III, 1859–1861. New Haven:Yale University Press.
Flint, Kate. 1995. ‘Origins, Species and Great Expectations.’ D Amigoni, J Wallace (eds.), Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Manchester:Manchester University Press, pp. 152–173.
Friday, Jonathan. 2005. ‘Dugald Stewart on Reid, Kant and the Refutation of Idealism.’ British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13: 263–286.
Fry, Paul H. 1995. A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press.
Gaull, Marilyn. 1979. ‘From Wordsworth to Darwin: “On the Fields of Praise”.’ Wordsworth Circle 10: 33–48.
Ghiselin, Michael T. 1969. The Triumph of the Darwinian Method. Berkeley, CA:University of California Press.
Gruber, Howard E, Barrett, Paul H. 1974. Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity Together with Darwin’s Early Unpublished Notebooks. New York:Dutton.
Hertz, Neil. 1977. ‘The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime.’ GH Hartman (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 62–85.
Hodge, M Jonathan S. 1977. ‘The Structure and Strategy of Darwin’s Long Argument.’ British Journal for the History of Science 10: 237–245.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar. 1962. The Tangled Bank: Darwin. Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers. New York:Atheneum.
Jacob, Francis. 1974. The Logic of Living Systems: A History of Heredity. London:Allen Lane.
Kant, Immanuel. 1790. Critique of Judgement (J. H. Bernard, trans., 1914). London: Macmillan.
Kohn, David. 1996. ‘The Aesthetic Construction of Darwin’s Theory.’ AI Tauber (ed.), The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science. Dordrecht:Kluwer, pp. 13–48.
Leask, Nigel. 2003. “Darwin’s ‘Second Sun’: Alexander von Humboldt and the Genesis of The Voyage of the Beagle.” H. Small and T. Tate (eds.), Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 13–36.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1951. “Language and the Analysis of Social Laws.” Claude Levi-Strauss (ed.), Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books (1963).
Longinus c. 100AD. Longinus on the Sublime (W. R. Roberts, trans. and ed., 1899). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1994. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press.
Manier, Edward. 1978. The Young Darwin and his Cultural Circle: A Study of Influences Which Helped Shape the Language and Logic of the First Drafts of the Theory of Natural Selection. Dordrecht:Reidel.
Monk, Samuel Holt. 1960. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann Arbor, MI:University of Michigan Press.
Mortensen, Klaus Peter. 1998. The Time of Unrememberable Being: Wordsworth and the Sublime 1787-1805. Copenhagen:Museum Tusculanum Press.
Myers, Greg. 1990. Writing Biology Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge. Madison:University of Wisconsin Press.
Nagel, Thomas. 1986. The View from Nowhere. New York:Oxford University Press.
Richards, Robert J. 2002. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.
Richards, Robert J. 2005. ‘Darwin’s Metaphysics of Mind.’ V Hoesle, C Illies (eds.), Darwin and Philosophy. Notre Dame, IN:Notre Dame University Press, pp. 166–180.
Ryan, Simon. 1996. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Secord, James A. 2000. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.
Shotter, John. 1993. ‘The ‘Poetry’ Prior to Science.’ New Ideas in Psychology 11: 415–417.
Sprat, Thomas. 1959. The History of the Royal Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (First published, 1663).
Stauffer, Robert C. 1975. ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ RC Stauffer (ed.), Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection: Being the Second Part of his Big Species Book Written from 1856-1858. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Stengers, Isabelle. 1997. Power and Invention: Situating Science (P. Bains, trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stewart, Dugald. 1810. “On the Sublime.” W. Hamilton (ed.), The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart. London: Thoemmes Press (1994).
von Humboldt, Alexander. 1829. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, During the Years 1799-1804 (H. M. Williams, trans.). London: Longman.
von Humboldt, Alexander 1844. Views of Nature or Contemplations on the Sublime Phenomena of Creation with Scientific Illustrations (E. C. Otté and H. G. Bohn, trans., 1884). London: George Bell.
von Humboldt, Alexander 1848. Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 (E. C. Otté, trans.). London: H.G. Bohn.
Weiskel, Thomas. 1976. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wiener, Norbert. 1961. Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine. Cambridge: MIT Press (Second edition. First edition, 1948).
Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford:Oxford University Press.
Wordsworth, William. 1805. The Prelude etc. New York: Holt (1954).
Young, Robert M. 1985. Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgements
This essay has been many years in preparation and, along the way, I have benefited from many useful prompts and conversations. The idea for it arose from work comparing the literary styles of Erasmus and Charles Darwin, work informed by conversations with Joseph Koerner and Desmond King-Hele. Throughout its development, the essay has been sustained by the interest, commentary and insight of Jane Selby. I have also learnt from conversations with John Brooks and Gillian Beer, from Mike Summerfield’s bibliographic support and invitation to work in the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University in 2007, from divers librarians, especially in the University Library, Cambridge, and from the receptive creativity of Ken and Mary Gergen – to whom I first laid out the argument put here. Thanks to Felicia Huppert for facilitating my access to the University Library, Cambridge and my visiting fellowship at Darwin College, Cambridge. Thanks also to Robert Dixon, Hank Stam, Paul Farber and several anonymous reviewers. Finally I acknowledge my introduction when a toddler to Darwin-enthusiasm by my father Peter Sylvester-Bradley as we sought ammonites beneath the cliffs north of Whitby in the 1950s.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bradley, B.S. Darwin’s Sublime: The Contest Between Reason and Imagination in On the Origin of Species . J Hist Biol 44, 205–232 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-009-9210-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-009-9210-3