A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if it be a pretty woman all the better (ibid., p. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily – against which a law ought to be passed. novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists.
However, he was less disinclined towards novels, although he’s probably not quite serious in the following, rather self-mocking passage: 84).ĭarwin felt pretty much the same about painting and music strangely enough, as he grew older and ever more absorbed in his scientific work, he eventually lost the capacity for experiencing pure aesthetic delight: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive” (ibid., p. 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, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me (Darwin 2002, p. I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last 20 or 30 years.
What was Darwin’s relation to literature? In a memoir written toward the end of his life, Darwin confessed to a gradual dissatisfaction with poetry and drama, which he had enjoyed so much as a young man: Now, emotions are the stuff that imaginative writing is made of. In his books The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin himself provided early accounts of the evolutionary origins of morality and emotions, and the current research builds upon this foundational work. Yet this is precisely the claim pressed by the current offshoots of Darwinism: evolutionary psychology, Darwinian anthropology, and other such research programs. However, even these enlightened minds balk at the further idea that what makes us truly human – our minds and morals – could be the result of a blind evolutionary process. They grant to Darwin that our species has evolved from more primitive life forms over billions of years. Most humanists of today reject that ancient myth. That was surely a tremendous achievement, but compare that to Darwin’s unification of the realm of matter with the realm of spirit (or, as we would say today, culture)! For millennia, people considered themselves to be the special creations of God, and the ones particularly favored by Him. For example, Newton united the earth and the heavens by demonstrating that the same physics applied to both. Like other great scientists, Darwin was a unifier of the hitherto unrelated phenomena. This year we are celebrating a double anniversary for Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), the founding father of evolutionary biology: the bicentenary of his birth and a hundred and fifty years since the publication of his most important work, On the Origin of Species (1859).
0 kommentar(er)
