Vol 25, no 3, October - The Linnean Society of London

22
THE LINNEAN 2009 VOLUME 25(3)
poetic imagination of William Wordsworth, who was a student at Cambridge University,
like Darwin, though roughly fifty years earlier. To the Romantic mind forests, like all
‘wild’ nature, offered excitement, adventure, and challenge to the over-ordered, onesidedly
rational character of modern man: they mirrored the strange and unfathomable
depths of the human mind and soul, as otherwise only art, poetry or music could, or
the emotions of love, or the realm of dreams. ‘Wild’, ‘chaotic’, ‘raw’ nature was
something awesome and sublime, as Emanuel Kant had it, because it was ‘infinite’
and beyond any narrow usefulness. It displayed ‘final form’ as art did, precisely through
its apparent chaos. To use Ehrenzweig’s phrase, ‘untamed’ nature expressed ‘the higher
order of chaos’.
Once again, we are amazed that the young Darwin, who would later give the
world the Theory of Evolution, thought thus in 1832. For Evolution was to provide a
most powerful impetus to the second great wave of Romanticism in the second half of
the Nineteenth Century, and in the Twentieth Century up until the First World War.
Friedrich Nieztsche, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont are among those who were thrilled
and enthralled by the subversiveness, the struggle and challenge forced upon the human
mind by Darwin; the complete decentering of man that his theory entailed – far more
even than the Galilean-Newtonian revolution had, and the final defeat of theology
that it appeared to them to represent.
As for the influence of these last upon subsequent artists, poets, composers, and
philosophers the list would be almost impossible to complete. Among them Otto Dix,
Scriabin, Mahler, Richard Strauss, and the Surrealists stand out. But the influence of
Nietzsche especially on art and culture was and is immeasurable.
These remarks pertain to the worlds of literature, art, and philosophy: how equally
much did Evolution transform all science itself, and none less than the human sciences.
In his influence upon, and the admiration he induced in Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, and in the emergence of Sociology and Anthropology as disciplines, Darwin
was the Copernicus of the modern mind.
But of course, the whole nature of the Beagle’s voyage must be borne in mind, as
this is well summarized here by Gillian Beer (in an essay called Travelling The Other
Way):
“(Such) voyages......were those whose prize was represented as knowledge rather than
treasure. The categories are, however, not altogether separate. Although the nineteenthcentury
journeys that set out from Britain to survey the sea and coasts around the world
were not piratical, not part of that unconcerned predation that earlier centuries justified
as exploration or discovery, they were nevertheless an expression of the will to control,
categorise, occupy and bring home the prize of samples and of strategic information.
Natural history and national future were closely interlocked. And natural history was
usually a sub-genre in the programme of the enterprize, subordinate to the search for
sea-passages or the mapping of feasible routes and harbours.”
Indeed, in their historical study Tierra del Fuego, Luiz and Schillat show that the
Beagle voyages under Captain Fitzroy’s command were largely concerned with
garnering information for the British Admiralty, as part of a widely-embracing concern
in regard of strategies for British conquest, colonization, and control of trade in the
Southern Atlantic.