The place of man in Darwin's development of a theory of transmutation has been obscured by his manner of disclosure. Comparing the 1837–1839 period to his entire career as a theorist suggests that it was Darwin's practice to present himself and his work only before the most select scientific audiences, and then in accordance with their expectations. The negative implications of this rule for his publication on man are clear enough: finding no general invitation in science to publish as a (...) theorist and no contemporary scientific audience for the sorts of inquiries he was making on man, he was silent, at least until such time as he could publish on the strength of reputation alone. Now, with the availability of manuscripts from the early period, what was once hidden stands revealed. It is clear from Darwin's notebooks that man played a dual role in the formation of his theory: as a zoological species to be incorporated into the theory and as the primary vehicle for the study of behavior. On the first score, integrating man into the theory provoked Darwin to break with the traditional view of man's place in nature and to reject a major element in the scientific notion of progressive development. On the second score, the study of behavior led Darwin outside natural history and thence, unexpectedly, to Malthus and natural selection.One is left with the certainty that the subject of man was a central element in Darwin's formulation of his species theory. To an extent, then, the public judgment of Darwin was right all along, for the public had always sensed that Darwin spoke to a larger audience than that formed around science. On the basis of new evidence, we can add that Darwin drew from that larger audience as well. There are of course ironies to this conclusion: that Darwin the professional drew so heavily from fields where he was the amateur, that as a transparent man his inner life should prove so at odds with the manner in which he presented himself, and that his arrival at a strong sense of himself—the revolutionary “I” of his notebooks—should occur just as he stepped beyond science to engage the general culture. But when one considers the inherent difficulties of Darwin's subject and the magnitude of his claims respecting man, these ironies are perhaps not surprising at all but those of a kind which might be anticipated. (shrink)

This body of work is motivated by an apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, Darwin’s testimony in his autobiographical text about a supposed perceptual colour blindness before the aesthetic magnificence of natural landscapes, and, on the other hand, the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species, where he claims to perceive the forms of nature as beautiful and wonderful. My aim is to delve into the essence of the Darwinian perception of beauty in the context of the Weberian (...) concept of “disenchantment of the world”, assumed as a possible conceptual axis that enables the unravelling of the core of this contrast of perceptions. In acknowledging the theory of evolution as one of the most prominent scientific theories likely to have contributed to disenchantment, a number of questions arise: Is disenchantment compatible with aesthetic experience and sensibility before natural beauty? Was it Darwin’s disenchanted conception of the world that led him to believe he was colour blind? To answer these questions, a computer-assisted semantic analysis of lexical frequency and variability, most especially focused on aesthetic-emotional and religious or spiritual adverbs and adjectives, has been undertaken across the six editions of The Origin. The semantic analysis demonstrates that, although disenchanted, Darwin’s descriptions of, mainly, the adaptational excellence of living beings, reflect an aesthetically enriched perception of nature. It is concluded that Darwin’s perceptual colour blindness, then, might be based on a confusion rooted in the equation of equality between aesthetic sensibility in nature and the perception of its beauty as part of the vestigia Dei. (shrink)