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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)4 CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature4
Yet, the theory of evolution by natural selection
complemented a view of nature in keeping with
Romanticism. As Thoreau (see Reading 27.7) mused, “Am
I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” And
numerous passages from the writings of Wordsworth,
Shelley, Emerson, and Whitman (the Romantics treated in
this chapter) exhibit a similar pantheistic sentiment. At
the same time, Darwin’s ideas encouraged the late nine-
teenth-century movement of “scientism” (the proposition
that the methods of the natural sciences should be applied
in all areas of rational investigation). Darwin’s writing also
stimulated the rise of natural history museums, which,
unlike the random collections of previous centuries, gave
evidence of the common order of living things.
The consequences of Darwin’s monumental theory were
far-reaching, but his ideas were often oversimplified or mis-
interpreted. Among some thinkers, the theory of evolution
provided the rationale for analyzing civilizations as living
organisms with identifiable stages of growth, maturity, and
decline. Then too, Darwin’s use of the phrase “Favored
Races” in the subtitle of his major work contributed to the
theory of social Darwinism, which freely applied some of his
ideas to political, economic, and cultural life.
The term “social Darwinism” did not come into use
until 1879, but the idea that natural selection operated to
determine the superiority of some individuals, groups,
races, and nations over others was effective in justifying
European policies of imperialism (see chapter 30). By
their intelligence and wealth, argued the social
Darwinists, Westerners (and white people in general)
were clearly the “fittest,” and therefore destined to domi-
nate the less fit. Since Darwin meant by “fitness” the
reproductive success of a species, not simply its survival,
most applications of his work to contemporary social con-
ditions represented a distortion of his ideas. Nevertheless,
social Darwinism, expanded on by political theorists,
would provide “scientific” justification for European colo-
nialism. It also anticipated more threatening and extreme
theories, such as eugenics(which focused on the elimina-
tion of society’s “less fit” members) and the racist ideology
of Adolf Hitler.
In the course of the twentieth century, modern biology,
and particularly the science of molecular genetics (the
study of the digital information preserved in DNA), has
provided evidence to support Darwin’s theory of natural
selection. Nevertheless, today’s scientists continue to
probe the origins of life—where and how it first came into
being. In the context of the nineteenth century, however,
Darwin remains a leading figure. Like all Romantics, he
was a keen and curious observer of nature, which he
described as vast, energetic, and unceasingly dynamic. In
The Origin of Species, he exults:
When we no longer look at an organic being as a
savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond
his comprehension; when we regard every production
of nature as one which has had a long history; when
we contemplate every complex structure and instinctkind, and that all creatures were related to one another by
their kinship to lower forms of life. The most likely ancestor
forHomo sapiens, explained Darwin, was “a hairy, tailed
quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits...”(Figure 27.2).
Clearly, Darwin’s conclusions (which nurtured his own
reluctant agnosticism) toppled human beings from their
elevated place in the hierarchy of living creatures. If the
cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo had displaced earth
from the center of the solar system, Darwin’s theory robbed
human beings of their pre-eminence on the planet. At a
single blow, Darwin shattered the harmonious worldviews
of both Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment
philosophes.Figure 27. 2 Spoofing evolution, a cartoon of the day portrays an apelike Charles
Darwin explaining his controversial theory of evolution to an ape with the help of
a mirror. The work appeared in the London Sketch Bookin May 1874, captioned
by two suitable quotations from the plays of Shakespeare: “This is the ape of
form” and “Four or five descents since.”