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Darwin’s Sublime: The Contest Between Reason and Imagination in On the Origin of Species

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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.

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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.

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    Benjamin Sylvester Bradley

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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

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