The Origin of Species (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Darwin [8]
The Origin of Species, even in this first edition, which is the best for giving a clear sense of Darwin’s major argument, provides evidence of Darwin’s discomfort and of his struggle with language. He knew that the world he was trying to describe was not the world contemporary scientists believed in; he knew that to a more general educated audience the notion of a world in flux, undesigned, driven by events that seemed mere chance, was anathema. Origin, then, had not only to develop a case convincing to scientists, but also to build the sorts of rhetorical defenses that would give it a broader cultural hearing despite its heretical views. When he privately announced his theory to his very good friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, he wrote that it was “like committing a murder.”
The Origin of Species enacts that murder publicly. But there is no anger or aggression in the act. The voice of Origin is gentlemanly and generous, open to the possibility of its own weaknesses, revealing a man willing to listen to opposing views—and indeed much of the book is devoted to “difficulties on theory,” sections in which Darwin, extraordinarily sensitive to the limits of his arguments, anticipates questions his readers might raise. These anticipations were brilliantly effective, for the most part, in gaining credibility for his theory. Nobody knew better than Darwin what he had failed to prove; nobody was more demanding of proof. (And nobody, encountering yet other objections, was more sensitive to their claims.) The rhetoric thus manifests both modesty and honesty, and in its identification of flaws that might be “fatal to my theory,” and in its confessions of possible weakness, suggests remarkable strength.
The relentless concern with detail is another side of the character of the book’s narrator. Darwin believed, good student of Lyell that he was, that small things build to big ones, and he observes small things with loving care. He was convinced, as well, that only someone who had got his hands dirty in the nitty-gritty of natural minutiae could possibly be justified in making large claims about nature’s workings. The argument as a whole thus gives us glimpses of a thoughtful and wonderfully observant squire, puttering in his garden, experimenting with seeds and breeding plants, ingeniously testing the possibilities of germination even after seeds have been afloat for a long time in salt water, talking in a language easily recognizable outside the laboratory and the increasingly specializing world of science. But this putterer knows exactly what he is doing, and his country-squire attachment to his garden makes him yet more reliable as an observer.
Although Origin, in subjecting nature to an entirely rational consciousness and wresting the divine spirit from its roots and heart, is often taken as one of the crucial documents in the gradual disenchanting of the world, the book nevertheless displays little of the detached scientific impersonality that such a development would suggest. Darwin is always there, telling us that “I think we are driven to conclude” such and such, registering surprise and awe at the natural phenomena he describes, slipping into metaphor, as when he claims in the chapter on domestic selection that among certain plants “the whole organization seems to have become plastic.” And he emerges in person often, announcing, for example, that “when I first kept pigeons [and indeed Darwin did keep pigeons as part of his work in understanding ”artificial selection“] and watched the several kinds, knowing well how truly they bred, I felt fully as much difficulty in believing that they could ever have descended from a common parent, as any naturalist could in coming to a similar conclusion in regard to the many species of finches, or other large groups of birds, in nature” (p. 33). Is this the way an authoritative scientist ought to talk? Is this the project