Darwin the Writer Quotes

“the way Darwin teaches us how to see, in part by making us recognize that one must see beyond the visible, and that every instant of perception is charged with assumptions, and that every perception should lead us to questions, and that every question makes the world both more interesting, and richer. Everything is exciting and valuable in this world of phenomena, questions, analogies, and connections. That such seeing, and telling what is seen in a plain way, emerged so significantly some years later in the The Origin of Species is not surprising. There the refusal to take anything for granted, together with Darwin’s determination to attend to the minutest organisms, structures, pebbles, fissures, and colors, manifests itself in the grand synthetic argument we all know. One consequence of a close engagement with the prose of The Journal of Researches is a recognition that the world, flattened into a generalization about nature red in tooth and claw (I know it’s not Darwin’s phrase), is utterly inadequate to the experience of the world Darwin offers us through his language. The Journal does, however, help explain how, from the smallest of details, Darwin could have moved to his world-historical generalization. For he had already moved us from the brine-dwelling organisms to the regions of perpetual snow, to the upper atmosphere, and to a recognition that life will find its way anywhere. And in so doing, his meticulous and yet imaginative prose presents a world that is too beautiful, too complex, too laden with meaning to justify the usual bleak inferences from the theory to which it would give birth twenty years later.”
― George Lewis Levine, Darwin the Writer

“Thus, although his rhetoric and his working style demanded the strictest observance of what the world presented to him, he did not see innocently. “His pleasure came less,” Gertrude Himmelfarb argues, “from the passive, sensual act of seeing than from the effort of comprehending and analyzing.”13 He could not, he admits, “resist forming [an hypothesis] on every subject” (Autobiography, 141). Himmelfarb errs here only in that “the sensual act of seeing,” if not often passive, was intensely pleasurable for Darwin, as passage after passage of The Voyage of the Beagle and even of the Origin make plain. The sensual pleasure was enwound with the intellectual pleasure of the hypothesis. Direct engagement with the natural world—the exotic tropics and spiders at sea and the weeds in his garden—carried him through his virtually lifelong painful illness and beyond his loss of feeling for the poetry that had inspired and taught him in his early Beagle years. “The”
― George Lewis Levine, Darwin the Writer