When Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, many readers were prepared to accept what they thought to be a better-documented iteration of the ancient philosophy of Lucretianism. For despite Darwinism’s glaring empirical and evidential gaps1, the Origin did at least come stamped with the imprimatur of science.
Atomism — It’s All Down to Chance
That the Origin appeared in its philosophical aspect to borrow from Lucretian thought was not something ever adverted to by Darwin himself since his natural bent did not incline him towards protracted philosophical speculation. On numerous occasions he confessed that he felt “confused” when confronted by the subject of life’s most intractable enigmas. The dots connecting Darwin and ancient Epicureanism/Lucretianism were to be filled in by others, in this case, by members of the classically educated British elite such as educator and poet Matthew Arnold. Surely anybody with knowledge of the classical world must know, Arnold objected, that the Greek Epicurus and his later Roman follower, Lucretius, taught that the answer to the world’s wondrous complexity was to be sought not in a once-and-for-all divine creation but in different shapes and objects generated at random by the chance interaction of atoms. Plants and animals had simply “evolved” via an extended process of trial and error.2
Placing Darwin in apposition with Lucretius was of course Arnold’s learned interpretation of Darwin’s work. It should by contrast be reiterated that when Darwin sat down to write his magnum opus he probably had only hearsay knowledge about Lucretius’ ancient speculations. He will of course have known that Lucretianism bore a pejorative sense because it was (not unnaturally) associated with atheism and unbelief and was out of kilter with the logic of the times (that is, prior to 1859-60).3 A widespread feeling in the 17th century and beyond was that “ No one could really believe that chance explains the world, for the chance hypothesis is intrinsically absurd.”4 To many 17th- and 18th-century people, the atheistic position simply did not represent a logically coherent argument.5 However, a theistic /atheistic dispute was what Darwin dreaded more than anything else upon the publication of Origin and he conspicuously avoided getting embroiled in any contention (even when he was wooed by atheist Member of Parliament Charles Bradlaugh to join Bradlaugh’s cause).
History Repeating Itself
David Berman was surely correct in his observation that intellectual history repeats itself many times over the centuries, old arguments simply acquiring new advocates as the centuries and even millennia roll on.6 But similarities can be the result of coincidence rather than conscious intellectual allegiance, this phenomenon being what anthropologists term polygenesis. Such appears to have been the case with Darwin and Lucretius. Hence it is only with the benefit of hindsight that we could come up with the claim that Darwin’s Origin of Species was framed as a vindication of Lucretianism. The fact that some of Darwin’s classically educated posterity have been tempted to view the Origin as such a philosophical coup for atheism does not alter the fact that it played no active part in in Darwin’s own thinking (although of course he was not blind to some of the implications which readers might discern on reading the Origin).
Hence it was Darwin’s unpremeditated falling upon the Lucretian explanatory model which led to that progressive erosion of the Aristotelian/Christiam conception of ultimate reality which was to gradually set in. The atomistic conception that Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, the early physician Galen, and a host of further distinguished thinkers had denounced for what they regarded as its manifest absurdity had now, Phoenix-like, arisen from the ashes to which it had been relegated by the leading thinkers of the early Western tradition for well over a thousand years. But Darwin himself had no such programmatic attack in mind. In fact, three years before his death in 1882 he still termed himself a theist. The tendency to insist that Darwin was an atheist (as opposed to an agnostic) has largely been a later 1970s reinterpretation of Darwin’s frame of mind, as is now too well known to require further elaboration here.7
The Beagle Voyage: Romance and Reality
The tendency to interpret Darwin subjectively on our own terms rather than adjudging his contribution more dispassionately has been further witnessed in responses to the significance of his long voyage of exploration aboard the Beagle. His first published account of what he titled his Journal of Researches (1839; it has been known as The Voyage of the Beagle since a later edition was published under that title in 1905) conferred on him something of the aura of a Victorian Indiana Jones. Less fancifully it at the very least established his credentials in terms of bravery and fortitude as an explorer on a quest to search out Nature’s secrets in an exotic terra incognita. This would certainly have been much admired in the context of the colonizing aspirations of imperial Britain which unleashed many maritime searches for uncharted continents.
In the interests of constructing a compelling narrative, however, the Darwin legend (by which I mean the way that many people appropriated, responded to, and perhaps even partially reimagined his account) has it that his South American experiences were responsible for the formulation of a host of evolutionary discoveries — but this is an anachronistic interpretation. According to the conventional, partly fictionalized reception of his account, the intrepid explorer returned from having garnered the secrets of Nature in the far-off realms of the South Seas to share his secrets with his fellow men and women. For those whose education at the time involved as its staple the study of ancient Greece and Rome, such a reading would have fitted neatly with the mythic archetype of Prometheus who in Greek mythology brought down fire to earth from the abode of the gods (against their will) in order to share it with his fellows here on earth. Resonating with people at a subconscious level, it is the kind of stirring story audiences like to hear, and reporters and other storytellers often have eager recourse to such archetypal narrative patterns because such patterns seem to be all but hard-wired into audience expectations of what a “proper” hero tale should consist in. A bit of fictionalization helps to sell newspapers.
In point of fact, however, it is necessary to sound a note of caution if one is tempted to regard that formative voyage as having provided the foundation for Darwin’s later views on evolution. The timeline is simply not accurate since it conflates conclusions which Darwin reached in the later 1830s with his time aboard the Beagle in the early to mid 1830s. Janet Browne and Michael Neve in their study and edition of Darwin’s account of his sea journeying and researches are firm on the point that Darwin’s ideas did not come to him from his experiences in the field and that “the received image of Darwin voyaging alone through vast turbulent seas of thought as he paced the deck of the Beagle is a fantasy.”8 Darwin’s evolutionary ideas did not derive from his empirical observations on islands of the equatorial Pacific or from any other region of the world. Rather, they emerged after his Beagle voyage was over in a series of ad hoc, serendipitous instalments, the result of his ability to weave together ideas culled from others, as I document elsewhere.9
Misia Landau once made an important contribution to the subject of people’s interpretations (and misperceptions) of scientific and other data through her careful delineation of some surprising interferences in scientific papers from folklore and myth.10 She recommended that scientists and the general public should be aware of age-old narrative structures since they can exert a subconscious influence on the presentation of unvarnished data. Rather like the way we are tempted to embellish stories in everyday life to amuse interlocutors, she argued, the choice and substance of narrative mode used to explain evidence can predispose the reader towards traditional and readily intelligible patterns of understanding to the detriment of the true and unique particularities of the evidence or true narrative being presented.
The Darwin seafaring legend certainly makes for a good story. But denuded of fictional and mythic accretions, one finds that the true story of the formation of Darwin’s ideas of biological origins had little to do with romantic discoveries in exotic locales. Real life, as is all too often the case in human affairs, was more prosaic, with little resemblance to the finely honed romance narrative that was developed around Darwin.
Mythologization
Such “mythologizing” tendencies might also have drawn strength from older cultural archetypes because Darwin’s eventual success in cracking life’s mysteries could have been interpreted as the consummation of a scientific endeavor that had had its imaginative origins two and a half centuries previously. Those many acquainted with any of the repeated stagings in England of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist or Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (both plays composed in the 1590s) will have been acquainted with the proto-scientist status of the major characters of both plays. They may even have been involuntarily tempted to compare the 19th-century pioneer in wresting Nature’s secrets from her with the Renaissance magus figure whose fictional representations also purported to be able to perform acts leading to astounding discoveries for mankind. Furthermore, because Darwin claimed to have revealed the true mechanism or vera causa of evolution, there will have been some perhaps not fully conscious understanding of Darwin as having provided a satisfying consummation to the seemingly perennial quest for knowledge dramatized by Jonson and Marlowe.
The Quest for a Theory of Everything
Prometheus in Greek mythology seems in some sense to represent a fitting fictional analogue to Darwin because of the heady mix of audacity and impiety which surrounds both the mythical and the historical figure. Where Prometheus outwits his gods, Darwin (supposedly) snuffs out the life of the God of the Christian tradition. It is therefore likely that people’s responses to both figures might have had a frisson of ambivalence: admiration for audacity being tempered by some measure of nervous reserve. Even for those with scant knowledge of Greek mythology however, there were, as mentioned above, closer, indigenous templates for Darwin — both conceived in the Shakespearean era but continually staged in Britain over the last four centuries.
The Renaissance period which gave birth to the plays about Faust and the Alchemist was one which was particularly enthusiastic about acquiring new knowledge. It may even be imagined as a kind of way station to the Enlightenment itself.11 Faust’s tragedy may be seen as a comparable exemplar of hubris to that of Prometheus. In their search for life’s meaning, both step beyond the natural limitations of humanity, seeking for more than it is given to mankind to know or experience. Faust’s career thus becomes a long succession of crimes and illusions, and he is ultimately condemned (although rather intriguingly, it is known that that the 18th-century German dramatist Lessing, planned an (unfinished) drama of his own exonerating Faust as a bona fide but misguided seeker after the truth).12
Two centuries before Goethe and more familiar to an English-speaking public, the Faust legend had been rendered into English from a German source by Marlowe in his Doctor Faustus (circa 1592). A closely related analogue in the matter of “forbidden exploration” was Jonson’s The Alchemist (circa 1590 but printed only in 1604). Both plays had a wide circulation. Both abound in diverting subplots focusing on hocus pocus and even introduce the devil himself as one of the dramatis personae. Both texts, then, were perfectly accessible with an extensive outreach into the popular imagination. The German original on which Marlowe based his drama has been termed “un best-seller de son époque”13 and Marlowe’s drama contains much satirical slapstick (Marlowe did not believe in the claims made by those who styled themselves alchemists) and the leading character is clearly played for satirical laughs. Nevertheless, a serious theme lies at the foundation of both plays because both Faustus and the Alchemist had what might be termed (according to the standards of their time) academic backgrounds and essentially defined themselves as researchers seeking to understand the hidden secrets of Nature.
Alchemists in their own estimation were pursuing a serious scientific program in their experiments to turn base metal into gold. The theoretical idea underlying what now seems a perverse quest was that a transformation from less perfect to more perfect bodies or substances could be induced by the right mixing of elements in the laboratory. But there was an additional ideal behind alchemy and that was to find a perfect medicine or elixir which would confer health and even immortality. Alchemy was thought to be an early form of science in its attempts to fathom and harness the principles of Nature for the benefit of mankind. Indeed, under its aegis the modern disciplines of chemistry and pharmacology were later to take shape. Peter Bement adds that “in its widest sense, because of its association with religion, the occult and philosophy, it sought to explain man’s relation to the cosmos.”14 Likewise H. J. Shephard commented that in its serious adepts “we can discern the acceptance of alchemy as a form of revealed wisdom — a gnosis — concerned with the redemption of man.”15 No less a person than Sir Isaac Newton is known to have been carrying out alchemical experiments in the later 17th century, and in the 18th century Erasmus Darwin chose the alchemical term “transmutation” to refer to what we now term evolution.
The ambitious, one might say proto-Darwinian quest to see into and understand Nature links The Alchemist thematically with Marlowe’s version of the Faust legend, a drama recently characterized as “a tragedy that explores the very limits of human ambition.”16 What that ambition was is most eloquently encapsulated in Goethe’s version of the Faust legend. In his very first soliloquy, Faust, a disillusioned university professor, complains,
I have — much to my chagrin — studied philosophy, law and also, alas, theology — and all with equally tireless application. But here I stand, poor fool that I am, no wiser than I was before. I am called master and even doctor and in this way I have been drilling my students these last ten years — only to conclude that we can know nothing! (…) I am not tormented by scruples or doubts and have no fear of hell or the devil — yet I feel robbed of all joy. I have no sense of knowing the right things and don’t imagine I could profitably teach anything that might improve my charges and change their hearts and minds (…) For that reason I have given myself up to magic to see if unseen forces might reveal to me what so far has been shrouded in mystery (…) so that at last I may gain true insight into what holds the world together at its profoundest levels — actually seeing its creative and seminal operations.17
Despite its abundance of subplots (Goethe even introduces a “love interest”!), such soaring ambition appears to have represented the kernel of the Faust theme ab initio since it is echoed in the English translation of a German original published in 1592. Here Faust is described in these terms,
You have heard before that all Faustus’ mind was set to study the arts of necromancy and conjuration, the which exercise he followed day and night; and taking to himself the wings of an eagle thought to fly over the whole earth and to know the secrets of heaven and hell.18
Such hyperbolic ambitions are doubtless a good part of the reason why David Luke suggested that after the Enlightenment “Faust was to become something like a myth of European man.”19
Take-Away
Today we would of course brand both Faust and the Alchemist fantasists or “mad scientists” of the first order. Was Charles Darwin himself prone to such wishful thinking? The late Tom Wolfe appeared to have thought so when he arraigned Darwin for what Goethe had called titanism and what Wolfe termed the fault of “cosmogonism,” which he defines as:
the compulsion to find the ever-elusive theory of everything, an idea or narrative that reveals everything in the world to be part of a single and suddenly clear pattern.20
On the seemingly irresistible temptation to such a theory-of-everything way of thinking, which Darwin shared with the fictional anti-hero of the Faust legend, I shall cite some words written by the one-time consort of the mid 19th-century novelist George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, in one of the first book-length studies of Goethe written in English in 1855:
Even in the present day, since human nature does not change — forms only change, the [Faustian] spirit remains, nothing perishes — it only manifests itself differently.21
As is so frequently the case in human affairs, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” This is perceptible in the attitude of mind shared by the Alchemist, Faust, and Darwin. What had started off as an inspiration of the Renaissance period expressed fictionally by Jonson, Marlowe, then later by Goethe, had become a reality for those persuaded by Darwinian theory. The proverbial Victorian “mystery of mysteries” (referring to the origin and development of life itself) had been solved. Or had it? Many would say not.
Notes
- Not least because, as Sir Charles Lyell pointed out to Darwin as early as 1860, there is not nor could there ever be such a thing as natural selection, only natural preservation (which of course has no progressive momentum or independent agency and could not possibly have driven evolution). Darwin grudgingly agreed with Lyell.
- See John W. Judd, The Coming of Evolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 3.
- Referencing David Berman’s study of atheism in the period from about 1650 to the present day, Julian Baggini writes, “One of the most fascinating features of Berman’s account is how writers in the 17th century often denied even the possibility that anyone could ever be a genuine atheist — someone who really believed that there was no God as opposed to someone who just acted as if God did not exist. Religion was just assumed to be universal. One could no more believe someone who denied the existence of God than one could deny the existence of the sun or stars” (Julian Baggini, Atheism: A Very short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2003), p. 80).
- David Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain from Hobbes to Russell (London: Croom Helm, 1988) p. 27.
- Such an anti-atheist position was held by respected intellectuals like Lord Herbert of Cherbury in his De Veritate (1624) and by Bishop Martin Fotherby in his Atheomastix (1622).
- Berman, A History of Atheism.
- I am of course referring to the tendentious series of books written by Richard Dawkins since 1976.
- Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches, eds. Janet Browne and Michael Neve (London: Penguin, 1989), Introduction, p. 2.
- Darwin’s form of self-education-by-instalments is a topic I shall go into in more detail in a forthcoming book, False Messiah. Darwinism as the God that Failed (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, October 2025).
- Misia Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993).
- “The sixteenth century was an age of forbidden exploration: old dogmas were being challenged, a new humanism was being developed, the sciences were emancipating themselves from their magical antecedents, and all this could in the popular imagination be easily invested with an aura of dread and a savour of blasphemy. The legend of the daring magus who sells himself to the Devil for new knowledge and new powers was one that flourished in this atmosphere” (David Luke, Goethe, Faust (Oxford: OUP, 1987), Introduction, p. xiii).
- See Robert Petsch, Lessings Faustdichtung mit Erläuternden Beigaben (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1911).
- Wolfgang Spiewok, “Le Volksbuch du Docteur Faustus du XVI Siècle” in Zauberer und Hexen in der Kultur des Mittelalters, edited by Danielle Buschinger and Wolfgang Spiewok (Greifswald: Reinicke Verlag, 1994), pp. 191-201, citation 191.
- Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, edited with Introduction by Peter Bement (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), Introduction, p. 14.
- See Shephard’s new Introduction to H. S. Redgrave’s Alchemy, Ancient and Modern (London: EP Publishing, 1973), p. xiii.
- Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, edited with Introduction and Appendices by David S. Kastan and Matthew Hunter, second edition (New York: Norton, 2023), Introduction, p. ix.
- My own translation from Faust’s first soliloquy in the German original of Goethe’s Faust, Part 1. For the full text in English translation see Goethe, Faust, Part I, translated with Introduction by David Luke (Oxford: OUP, 1987), citation p. 16. I have chosen a slightly higher linguistic register than Luke in order to do justice to the sheer grandiosity of Faust’s hubris.
- Doctor Faustus, translated from the German by P. F. Gent (London; Thomas Orwin, 1592). The text is reproduced by Kastan and Hunter in their Norton critical edition of Marlowe’s version, pp. 155-182, citation p. 157.
- David Luke, Faust, Introduction, p. ix.
- Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016), p. 20.
- G. H. Lewes, The Life and Works of Goethe (London: David Nutt, 1855), pp. 319-20. The relevant section is also included by Kastan and Hunter in their Norton critical edition of Marlowe’s version, pp. 225-6.