Erasmus Darwin regarded science and technology as expressions of spiritual creativity and power, as aspirations after human dominance over nature. We face a topic, present both in Darwin’s thought and in the wide Romantic tradition: Darwin, Coleridge and Wordsworth shared a strong confidence in human spiritual faculties, which were seen as the mirror of divine creativity in nature. In such an interpretation, nature is simply the “feed tank” or maybe the background against which the restricted human-God drama happens.
But if Darwin’s emphasis fell upon the shaping power of the spirit, this emphasis points out only one aspect of a more complex plan. In the late eighteenth century, nature was not the immovable stage on which the relation hand-to-hand between God and the human spirit takes place. On the contrary, nature was often the leading actor and human beings, notwithstanding their spirituality and their declared similarity to God, are subjected to nature’s power.
Romanticism apart, the idea of the power of nature is a typical Darwinian theme. Hence a question arises: who are the true subjects of the cosmic drama, humans as the most refined product of God’s creation, or nature as a whole? Is the drama a play whose actors are spirits? Is the drama a play involving God and humans exclusively?
There is no hope of a conclusive solution. The cosmic drama could be illustrated from the spirit’s point of view and from nature’s or life’s point of view.
My thesis could be framed as follows: the power working from within and from without the organism, to improve its natural position, is a universal, basic, and extra-spiritual power. Between the last two decades of the eighteenth and the first two of the nineteenth century, an appealing name for a similar power, I believe, was “imagination”. As a cosmic and generative force, as a formative power acting before humans were born, imagination works to realize the perfection of nature as a whole. Hence, 1) a “Romantic” idea of nature (a self-sufficient mother) plays a part in Darwin’s thought; and 2) Darwin’s doctrine of the power of nature reflects this new Romantic notion of the imagination.
It is true that “imagination” was for Darwin synonymous with “reverie”. However, Donald Hassler recognized that “imagination” means something extra-mental and objective: because imagination plays a part in the process of sexual generation, “we can be certain that Darwin considers it a physical force.”
I have said that for Darwin “imagination”, in the first instance, means “reverie”. This is what Darwin would explicitly say about such a topic. Lagging behind several of his contemporaries, Darwin treated imagination as something less than a facultas cognoscitiva. In other words, imagination was for him an involuntary act of mind, deprived of whatsoever gnoseological or ethical value.
Imagination is thus associated with a deceptive power, sometimes producing pleasure, although this is not to say that imagination is a deceptive power. Darwin is arguing against sleeping and dreaming because of their passivity, only secondarily against imagination. In sleep or in waking reverie,
“there is a total suspension of our voluntary power” (Ibid., p. 47). That imagination means a power of dreams and a reverie is what Darwin knew or would have liked to say about imagination. Hence, the faculty of imagination is not worth the study of living substance, since all living beings have as their fundamental quality an “animality” (Zoonomia, I, 509), and animality (not imagination) enables them to act upon their structures, in modifying them. But is it not a similar “inherent activity” that Darwin recognized as pertinent also to imagination?
During the eighteenth century, imagination begins to be associated with pleasure and refinement (Addison) and even with truth and the salvation of the soul (Akenside). If Darwin seems to be totally foreign to such trends, in reality he aided the process of semantic expansion, to which imagination was subjected. He was also trying to identify a physiological significance of imagination. In speaking of imagination, according to Darwin, we find that not only the “internal fabric of our mind” is involved, as happens with reverie. Imagination is not only a process in the mind, lacking any effect in the external world. Darwin ascertained a twofold physiological function to this involuntary power: a cathartic and a sexual function. 1) The involuntary train of ideas (i.e. our dreams) results from “a great accumulation of sensorial power” in our waking hours. This power or “energy” (Darwin’s word) must, however, be discharged. The release may happen either in dreams and reverie (thanks to the imagination), or, worse, in delirium. 2) Like several other contemporaries, Darwin was convinced that what Laurence Sterne writes in the first chapter of Tristram Shandy was a firm truth. (“Pray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?”) To a large extent, this was also William Harvey’s thesis (Anatomical Exercitations concerning the Generation of Living Creatures, 1653): as a psychic energy of the mind, the imagination is transmitted from the father to the womb of the mother, by way of the semen. Because it stimulates the egg and forces it in the process of growth, the imagination is a “plastic power”. According to Darwin, the imagination has a physiological effect, both in the sexual generation of individuals (in Sterne’s sense) and in the development and evolution of individuals within the species. Hence, if the imagination is the organism’s plastic power, it is also a sort of Bildungstrieb, a habitus, a vis fabricatrix of the living substance.
Darwin was interested in nature rather as a heathen or a mystic or a “hierophant” might be fascinated by the myth of the primeval mater generatrix. Darwin underwent his poetical and scientific experiences in a material or maybe “maternal” universe, whose secret life is unfathomable by the human spirit. “Matter” was not for him synonymous with “dead stuff”.
Consider Darwin’s monistic thesis concerning the spontaneous generation of life: the thesis seems to be just another way of saying that material nature holds sufficient energy to produce a synthesis, dynamically connecting dead and living substances, in an endless multiplication of her own images. Similarly, Darwin’s hypothesis of the “single filament” is not a mock-anticipation of a DNA
theory, but a means Darwin chose to state that living nature is like a spontaneous (i.e. God-free) stream of self-representation, a formative drive that exists in things or an “objective imagination”, more straightforwardly.
If “objective imagination” sounds a bewildering concept, bearing in mind some of the doctrines of Wordsworth, we can discover some elucidations. Of course, he was a Romantic, and Darwin was not. But I do not think his suggestions have no kinship at all with some typical “Darwinian” frames of reference.
Like a biological nisus formativus, Wordsworth’s imagination could be defined as a force “penetrated in the object”: “Nature works/ Herself upon the outward face of things/ as if with an imaginative power.” (The Prelude (text of 1850), ed. De Selincourt, Oxford, 1926, 600n.) This “Wordsworthian” idea (that imagination is a force of the object) won high praise at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next. For Wordsworth imagination is nature in her own “productive hour”. It means “growth of organised forms”. Since it is descriptive of a natural process, imagination cannot be referred only to knowledge and to a human way of understanding the world.
But Wordsworth’s idea of imagination was mirroring (maybe unconsciously) new biological trends. In Germany, for example, some physiologists and botanists (Haller, Blumenbach, Koehlreuter) were focusing on how a living and active stuff could grow to a spontaneous and enduring stream, without any supernatural intervention. Blumenbach envisaged a “Trieb”, a specific active power (or impulse) aiming at visibility, directly inside the material organism, as if it were its own power (not an infused force to which the material organism reacts). In German “nisus formativus” is “Bildungstrieb”. In turn, “imagination” is “Einbildungskraft”. Except for the “Ein” (which means “inside”, “in the mind”), the likeness is amazing. If Coleridge, while he was conjecturing about his notion of the creative imagination (1810), could announce “I wish much to investigate the connection of the Imagination with the Bildungstrieb”, it is for the reason that these two terms were seen as reasonably cognates. If imagination is a force that is creative in the mind, it is precisely because imagination is creative outside, and viceversa. Moreover, the Bildungstrieb was not only a speculative notion, to satisfy the weirdness of few German thinkers, like Schelling. Goethe, as a botanist, spoke of Bildungstrieb. And Darwin, in studying sexual generation, refers with praise to Haller, Koehlreuter and Blumenbach.
As I have said, Hassler recognized that, because imagination plays a part in the process of sexual generation “we can be certain that Darwin considers it a physical force.” We face here an intricate doctrine. In the first instance, imagination is for Darwin a mental force acting on the biological substratum. The imagination of the male forms the sex, for example. In Temple, Darwin’s words were really incisive: “The potent wish in the productive hour/ Calls to its aid Imagination’s power” (Temple, Canto II, lines 117-18).
In the second instance, we could also isolate a more basic imagination. I mean a biological or physiological force deeply-rooted in every living being, before the mental or psychological propensities. Darwin (unfaithfully perhaps) follows Blumenbach in believing that the substance of life is filled with a Bildungstrieb, as its secret essence. I believe that imagination, for Darwin, is a mode of a similar endeavour acting in sexual reproduction, as a dynamic force. Imagination cannot be too different in quality from the more general “vis fabricatrix and medicatrix of nature”: animals have a “cause of their organization, originating from a single living filament, [are] endued indeed with different kinds of irritabilities and sensibilities, or of animal appetencies; which exist in every gland, and in every moving organ of the body, and are as essential to living organization as chemical affinities are to certain combinations of inanimate matter.” (Zoonomia., 503.) But imagination, as said before, is exactly a cause of organization.
In a certain sense, every single cell, every part of the living body, is “animal”: “all parts of the body grow if not confined”. The biological force could be found all over. The conclusion is expressed in a query: “would it be too bold to imagine [...] that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!” (Ibid., 509.) Since Darwin admittedly chooses to speak of “transformations”, or “transmutations” (Ibid., 506, 507), or “metamorphosis” (Ibid., 491), instead of new creations, what name could we assign to this “evolutive” process? In the meanwhile Darwin quotes with admiration “Mr. David Hume”, he openly declares the goal of his natural philosophy: a philosophy devoted to emphasise nature’s formative drive, in all its forms. The animal world is thus a dynamic or trans-formative process, not a fact. Darwin’s natural philosophy exalted nature’s power of generation and nature’s animality, everywhere in its parts: “[Hume] concludes that the world itself might have been generated, rather than created; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fire.” (Ibid., 513.) In this way, every form of life (every organism) is just a temporary image of the unique or primeval filament. We keep on discovering the same structure: not only animals, but also vegetables grow thanks to an inner, biological force.
In the end, we face what I consider the most interesting feature of Darwin’s doctrine of imagination: I am hinting at those cosmogonic implications (crossing both the inorganic and the organic realms) that we could find principally in Darwin’s poetical works, in Economy of Vegetation and in Temple. Love is now the name Darwin employs for the “biological force”. Hassler realizes
that love, sex, and hence imagination, work “on the cosmic level of creation” still. And, in point of fact, as a basic cosmic generative force, “immortal love” is what Darwin was trying to portray in all his verses. Love seems to be an autonomous force, the mark for nature’s energy, not only God’s hand. Darwin puts cosmic love as the true substance of every action, and as the issue of his poetic theory. Sexual reproduction, carefully treated by Darwin in Zoonomia, is but an inflection of life’s self-duplication and self-imitation. A similar repetition of life happens in love. Is it too bold to see this repetition as a cosmic imaginative process, overhanging on or governing individuals? It is life, the secret force of a living nature, that is “Another and the same.” Cosmic life is the subject of transformation, transmutation, or metamorphosis, until a final apocatastasis and a reconversion is attained: “Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,/ Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall,/ And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!/ - Till o’er the wreck, emerging from the storm,/ Immortal NATURE lifts her changeful form,/ Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,/ And soars and shines, another and the same.” (Economy of Vegetation, Canto IV, lines 367-380.) Since “Immortal nature lifts her changeful form” (note the verb “to lift”), we catch Darwin as he is stating “a lyric celebration of birth.” More: in believing that nature, until the end of time, becomes endlessly an image of herself, we catch Darwin stating the existence of a natural energy, called “imagination” by Wordsworth, hidden in the whole of nature, aiming at producing forms (a true nisus formativus, not a mechanical force without purpose). This is not a doctrine original to Darwin, of course. Nevertheless, the doctrine reveals Darwin’s faith in a self-sufficient (not a Cartesian or simply mechanical) nature. He gave pictorial and poetical images of such a purposeful nature.
Love is the “saving” force put forth by nature. But nature is, literally, a self-reflecting power, aiming solely at its own happiness, not at humans’ or at any creature’s felicity. It is true that the individuals, for Darwin, are not wheels or passive instruments in God’s hands. But, although they can reach some degree of positive felicity, they are not the true “actors” of reality. Working through creatures, imagination’s power, the power of self-replication, is a principium individuationis (i.e. what forms the individual as individual) at the same time as it is a contrary one, since it acts before individuals were shaped, in order to form them. And, from the individuals’ point of view, nature cannot but show her “dark side”. Nature looks like a sort of meta-individual. Paradoxically, the only human thing to do is to give up the old illusions about an anthropocentric universe and to accept the motions.
Give up illusions and accept the motions: that is the dilemma. Because happiness affects the whole, human kind must give up illusions. Darwin tried to exhibit a comic spirit, a mock-seriousness, to counterbalance the terror in the hypothetical “slaughter-house”: he refused “to acknowledge the awesome and dehumanizing terror implied by his conclusions”. Nevertheless, Darwin’s characteristic playfulness and his search for a “lifestyle” (after the manner of
Buffon) are strictly cognate to a moral (if not mystic) obligation. Such anti-humanistic trends are not clues to a cosmic pessimism, the other side of a disengaged aestheticism or visualism. They are the exact complement (or the gloomy side) of that tender and everlasting sympathetic gaze which Darwin cast on individuals, including humans, that “live but to die”.
It is easy to grasp the kind of moral experience which may be implicit in Darwin’s poetry of nature and, more generally, in his philosophy of nature. He was a provincial man, not only a defender of the idea of progress in the way a philosophe could be. Scholars, besides, have repeatedly stressed that in Darwin’s poems “the cycles of Nature compete with the linear notions of the rising mind and of human perfectibility” (I. Primer). A circular, rhythmic, “heathen” nature (reliant on the cycles of harvests and on the annual seasons) has a great part in the poetical and literary world in which Darwin chose to live. He never opted between being a poet in a bourgeois, developing society and being a poet in a traditional rural society, beyond history, under the total control of nature, potentially static.
Of course, Darwin did not reject every value that human ingenuity could attain. Darwin’s imagination was nourished by a complex poetical experience in which progress and myth, the hope of final redemption and “mystical” acceptance of the present state are joined, like two acts of a drama. The human kind as depicted in Darwin’s poetry is waiting for improvement, has confidence in the future and, at the same time, is centred on “this” world. Opposing sentiments towards an all-powerful, self-representing nature co-exist in Darwin’s worldview. I have not been able to resolve the contradiction between hope and resignation, and this is the incentive to keep reading Darwin’s works. The direct consequence of the fact that nature is powerful and autonomous enough to break the supposedly exclusive society between God and spiritual beings, that nature is much more than raw materials to be exploited, is a mystical resignation. Whiggism apart, an almost “Wordsworthian” nature-worship has to be considered by scholars of Darwin when they approach his philosophy, since in material nature we cannot directly find God’s hands. Nature is autonomous and God is above it. Nevertheless, the autonomy of nature is but the counterpart of nature’s own egoism and of human beings’ loneliness and hence industriousness. Every moral experience of humans on earth has to consider that nature “aims at plenitude and seems remarkably careless of individuals” (Primer), that no final triumph over nature is possible. The vis fabricatrix of nature (imagination and love) overwhelms every human project, albeit human beings are the most refined product of God’s creation.
