Lughnasa Honey Moon
Darwin has a clear, strong voice in On the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man. After reading three chapters of his work, I came away with my jaws far apart in amazement at this guy’s mind. He looks at things to which we all have access, but he sees them. In this quote he does fall prey to a bias of his British Imperial time, but the point is brilliant: “He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation.” (Chapter xxi, p.1, Descent of Man)
(Punch, 1882)
Also, I loved this from a couple of pages further along: “I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to shew why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance.”
(Editorial Cartoon, 1871)
When on the voyage around South America, I read some of Darwin’s journal entries from the voyage of the Beagle. The more I learn about him the more he seems to belong to the category of inexplicable genius, a quantum step forward in human understanding: Newton, Einstein, Aristotle, Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama, the early Vedic thinkers, those sorts of folks.
