The Naturalist Detective (Darwin Ch XIII)

I want to think here about Darwin’s ongoing use of imagination which, in Chapter XIII as well as earlier chapters, sanctions the exercise of that faculty only in service of Darwin’s own theories. First, though, I should admit that I’m not sure where to draw the line for what counts as imagination and what doesn’t. It would be possible to look only at passages in which Darwin uses the term “imagination,” but then there all those other instances in which imagination is implied or seems to play at least a supporting role. For example, when Darwin writes about people who attribute animals’ characteristics to “some unknown plan of creation” (369) or, earlier, when he observes that “unless it be specified whether order in time or space, or what else is meant by the plan of the Creator, it seems to me that nothing is thus added to our knowledge” (363). Darwin doesn’t criticize this approach for being imaginative (and here I’m still thinking about his suggestion that readers let reason conquer imagination, in Ch. 6) but rather for beginning to imagine too soon. On 369, the problem with the “plan” is that it’s “unknown,” while on 363 it’s that “nothing is added to our knowledge.” The naturalists get us past this stage of the unknown, and then Darwin swoops in, as it were, to reveal the rest of the “plan”—another plan, one without a Creator—in a final imaginative leap.

Back to the naturalists. How does imagination work here, especially if we’re to consider their work as the impetus for “add[ing] to our knowledge”? Ch XIII is devoted to explaining how they do things—lengthy descriptions of the logic behind the classifications of species within genera, families, etc., with many examples of species I’ve never heard of and so didn’t find terribly helpful. (I wonder if Darwin’s readers would recognize more of these examples?) Darwin’s naturalists are like detectives. Their selection of evidence is obscure to outsiders: “It might have been thought (and was in ancient times thought) that those parts of the structure which determined the habits of life…would be of very high importance in classification. Nothing can be more false” (364). Lesson One: Don’t begin in the obvious place. The general rule is to start with characteristics that don’t relate to the habits of life (364), but even then there’s no guarantee of consistency. Darwin writes, “a classification founded on any single character, however important that may be, has always failed” (366). I am not familiar with the specifics of the detective story genre, but it does seem that this reversal of common-sense logic hints at a detective-like sensibility, finding clues in the least likely of places (the geological record won’t supply them!).

Is this imagination or intuition? Perhaps the difference is that one is more informed by fact but, as with the discussion of the Creator’s plan, the difference seems to be in the degree. Intuition fills in the gaps after we’ve taken the facts as far as we can. Darwin recognizes the imagination / intuition at work here, and gives it a name: “all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking” (369). So all along the naturalists have been intuitively groping toward this principle of genealogical classification. Darwin’s narrative is the naturalists’ detective work on a larger scale, placing him squarely in the realm of imagination according to my model thus far. And in a number of ways he even demolishes the naturalists’ work (their terminology at least), presenting us finally with a sort of utopian vision, asking the reader to imagine that “every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear”(378). He dismisses the possibility of grouping the forms, writing that “all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible” (378, emphasis mine). And here, I can’t help but imagine Darwin’s diagram expanding, emerging from the page and revealing its million/billion branches and forms, the “tree of Life” uprooting itself from the page” to confirm the theories of the Sherlock Holmes of naturalists!