Darwin's Conversion

As I mentioned in my presentation last week, I found it interesting that Darwin uses the word “doubtful” throughout Chapter 2 (Variation Under Nature) to describe not the human response to the species and varieties observed, but more often the phenomena itself. We see “doubtful” modifying species, forms, and varieties throughout the chapter, along with “indefinite” (61) and “perplexing” (57), as if doubtfulness were a trait that species, forms, and varieties inherently possessed. Darwin underscores this subjectivity when he discusses the various ways naturalists classify the same data: “Many years ago, when comparing, and seeing others compare, the birds from the separate islands of the Galapagos Archipelago… I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties” (53). So varieties and forms are doubtful, I think, because they cannot be distinguished from species except by the scientists’ arbitrary (and subjective) distinctions.

On the one hand, Darwin’s emphasis on the arbitrariness of classification serves his overall goal of calling into question the very idea of species as individual and definite categories, an idea built upon the creationist model, which sees each species as the result of a separate act of creation. Darwin’s deliberate repetition of the word “doubt” as a modifier of forms, species, and varieties highlights the interconnectedness of species and suggests that any certainty about a single form as an individual, definite category is a human construction and the result of human pride. It almost seems as if Darwin is trying to make us comfortable with doubt.

Nevertheless, as the writer of what would likely be a highly controversial theory, Darwin puts forward an image of confidence in his own assertions that almost seems to counteract the sense of doubtfulness he has been working so hard to get his reader to embrace. Once removed from the realm of classification, the naturalist experiences anything but doubt. As he moves away from the description of varieties and forms towards his own theories about them, his words carry that confidence. His theories allow him to anticipate (58) and expect (58) what will happen, and to retrospectively attribute (56) his observations to a scientific theory that explains what has been observed. Furthermore, Darwin constantly assures us that he has arrived at a place of conviction, which allows him to become something of an evangelist to his reader: he is convinced (50), and has reason to believe (51, 61) what he is urging us to accept in turn.

In fact, Darwin borrows the language of evangelical religious conviction all the way back in the first sentence of his introduction to Origin, where he identifies a precise and sudden moment of conviction regarding the facts he has spent a journey observing. “When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts,” he writes (11). The passive syntax (“I was much struck”) suggests that he is acted upon by a force (“certain facts”) outside himself. The use of the word “certain” here not only suggests that Darwin was struck by particular facts but also emphasizes the certainty of those facts, leaving little room for doubt. As he continues in this paragraph, he again uses a trope of religious conversion: seeing the light. “These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries” (11). Like the most famous conversion hymn in all of Christendom, written a century earlier by Britain’s most famous evangelical convert, Darwin characterizes his moment of certainty as a movement from darkness to light. (Newton’s words: “I once was lost but now am found / Was blind but now I see.”) And like the hymn’s author, whose famous conversion took place on a ship, Darwin experiences his moment of conviction while on board the Beagle. The light-giving facts presented in Origin are so much more than facts; they have the power to explain everything. Origin of Species is, I would suggest, Darwin’s tract—distributed, as it were, for the conversion of the world.

--Beth