Nature and Consciousness

The roots of Modernism could be traced as far back as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but provisionally we will consider the very specific displacements of traditional concepts of nature and identity in the mid-19th Century in the figures of Darwin and Baudelaire. Part of the context for this period would include also the technological and scientific practical achievements that had already begun to change the map of the world: steam power in shipping and trains, the invention of the telegraph and early discoveries in geology. Charles Darwin published his most famous and influential work, On The Origin of Species, in 1859, 105 years ago. The prevailing religious and usually scientific views of the physical world were that nature was created and immutable. Clearly the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition of The Creation as partly embodied in Genesis, held sway both over concepts of human nature and the manifestations of physical nature, but for Darwin, as well as others, a growing attentiveness to and documentation of biological and geological evidence led to new, powerful and for some, still controversial views of the human place in physical nature. Darwin himself began life as a privileged son of money and largely conservative values, but a two-year long voyage as consulting naturalist on the sea voyage of the ship The Beagle, exposed the young Darwin both to the immense variety of species of animals and plants, and to striking anomalies and paradoxes in his observations. For twenty years, Darwin carried out minute studies of animal population, in particular pigeons and mollusks. Along with his minute study of subtle species variations, Darwin gradually became convinced that biological nature was not stable but mutable. He was wary of the implications of his thinking, because he understood that a changeable biological nature would ultimately entail a mutable history of human development. While Darwin started as a conventional Church of England Christian, he became more skeptical in a private way of the current theological explanations of the origins of the world and human beings. Fearing strong public reaction to his thinking, Darwin planned a large intensely documented work on the evidence of variety in nature and its changes, but he kept his theories and his large conclusions to a small circle of scientific peers for nearly twenty years. When in 1858 he received a paper from an English naturalist, Alfred Wallace, then resident in Malaysia, he was startled and shocked to see that Wallace had independently come to almost the same conclusions as Darwin had in his unpublished manuscripts. His anxiety at being preempted came all too true, and Darwin courageously presented both, his own work on the mutability of species along with Wallace’s paper. Spurred by the powerful coincidence of his thinking with Wallace’s less substantiated theory, Darwin set out to write what he called “An Abstract” of his work on variation in species.

Few works in human history have had the impact from the scientific world that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species attained almost instantly. The impact of Darwin’s work is twofold. First, he put forth in an extensively argued and supported theory of the changeability of species, evolution, which challenged the theological assumptions of his day and a great many of the scientific and political beliefs of his time. While setting aside at first the question of human origins, Darwin clearly understands and communicates that if his conception of change in nature is correct, then over very long periods of time, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, human beings would have developed from earlier natural species. Both the conception that human beings were not created as they are today, by a transcendent source, and that time in biological nature reaches back in immensely longer ways than science and religion had anticipated challenged the most deeply held beliefs of his era.