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Tratando del lenguaje de OSMNS y refiri\u00e9ndose a expresiones como selecci\u00f3n natural, lucha por la vida y otras semejantes, Stanley Edgar Hyman escribe:<\/p>\n
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In fact, these terms are much more than metaphors. They people the world of nature with protagonists and antagonists where previously we had seen only a solitary cactus or a growing seed. Moreover, the dramatic action they summon up is tragic. In Gilbert Murray’s terms, the basic ritual stages of tragedy are agon or contest, sparagmos or tearing apart, then anagnorisis or discovery and epiphany or joyous showing forth of the resurrected protagonist. Darwin’s struggle for existence is clearly Murray’s agon and sparagmos, and his natural selection or survival of the fittest, anagnorisis and epiphany. For the final exultation that the Greeks felt at the affirmation of Reliving Dionysus, Darwin substitutes a quieter tragic satisfaction.He writes:<\/em><\/p>\n When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.\u00bb The Origin concludes: \u00abThus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life….<\/p>\n De hecho, estos t\u00e9rminos son mucho m\u00e1s que met\u00e1foras. Ellos llenan a la naturaleza de protagonistas y antagonistas donde antes hab\u00edamos visto solamente un cactus solitario o una semilla que crece. Por otra parte, la acci\u00f3n dram\u00e1tica que convocan es tr\u00e1gica. En t\u00e9rminos de Gilbert Murray, las etapas rituales b\u00e1sicas de la tragedia son agon<\/em> o confrontaci\u00f3n, sparagmos<\/em> o lucha, anagn\u00f3risis<\/em> o descubrimiento y la epifan\u00eda o final feliz, mostrando finalmente al protagonista resucitado. La lucha por la existencia de Darwin\u00a0 es claramente agon<\/em> y sparagmos <\/em>de Murray, y su selecci\u00f3n natural o supervivencia de los m\u00e1s aptos, son respectivamente anagn\u00f3risis<\/em> y epifan\u00eda. Para la exaltaci\u00f3n final que los griegos sent\u00edan en la afirmaci\u00f3n de revivir a Dionisio, Darwin sustituye una m\u00e1s tranquila tr\u00e1gica satisfacci\u00f3n. \u00c9l escribe:<\/p>\n Cuando reflexionamos sobre esta lucha nos podemos consolar con la completa seguridad de que la guerra en la naturaleza no es incesante, que no se siente ning\u00fan miedo, que la muerte es generalmente r\u00e1pida y que el vigoroso, el sano, el feliz, sobrevive y se multiplica.<\/em><\/p>\n Y OSMNS termina:<\/p>\n Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life,<\/em><\/p>\n DARWIN THE DRAMATIST <\/strong>[1]<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Stanley Edgar Hyman [2]<\/a><\/p>\n The Centennial Review of Arts & Science<\/em><\/p>\n Vol. 3, No. 4, 1859-1959: Darwin-Marx Centennial (FALL 1959), pp. 364-375<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life appeared in 1859, and immediately caught the imagination of the world.<\/p>\n The first edition sold out on the day of publication, and the second shortly after. Within a few years most of the thinking world was convinced[3]<\/a> of the evolution of species, as it had not been by Buffon, Lamarck, Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation, or anyone else. It has rarely been doubted that this enormous effect was achieved by the power of scientific argument, that is, by the book’s rhetorical organization[4]<\/a>. This was certainly Darwin’s view[5]<\/a>. He begins the book’s final chapter: \u00abAs this whole volume is one long argument.\u00bb One of Darwin’s latest biographers, Sir Arthur Keith, in Darwin Revalued<\/em>, best states the prevailing view: \u00abIn the Origin he had assembled such a solid mass of observation\u00bb that conviction followed inescapably. There can be no doubt that the book’s rhetorical effectiveness is great.<\/p>\n Darwin states his theories simply and plausibly[6]<\/a>, bolsters them with a great deal of convincing evidence (beginning close to home with domestic animals) and scrupulously notes the difficulties and puzzles remaining. Yet the problem remains. The evidence to establish the idea of evolution by natural selection inductively was not really available in 1859[7]<\/a>, and many of Darwin’s processes[8]<\/a> turn out on closer examination to be plausible hypotheses[9]<\/a>, and his causes tautologies[10]<\/a>. Nor does the vehemence of the reaction pro and con suggest the characteristic effect of a scientific demonstration.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I would submit that The Origin of Species caught the imagination of its time as a dramatic poem, and a dramatic poem of a very special sort. This view would certainly have surprised Darwin. He was under no illusions about his literary powers, and although he worked quite hard at the writing and rewriting of this book, he saw its prose as \u00abincredibly bad.\u00bb [11]<\/a> His effort was to produce the straightest possible piece of factual writing, and he was only dissuaded by the publisher, John Murray, from calling the book An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species<\/em>. It is the judgment of a popular textbook that Darwin’s work \u00abcannot be said to belong to literature, if in the definition of literary work is presupposed an effort toward artistic expression.\u00bb<\/p>\n Theodore Baird, whose \u00abDarwin and the Tangled Bank\u00bb is one of the few efforts I know to correct this conventional estimate, boldly claims that the Origin is not only a work of literature, but \u00abthe complicated literary expression known as tragedy.\u00bb It is here that any literary consideration should begin. The Origin is much less overtly dramatistic than the Journal of Researches<\/em>, with the act-scene fitnesses of the earlier book here confined mostly to the great historical pageant of palaeontology, as when Darwin notes that the geological strata mark \u00abonly an occasional scene, taken almost at hazard, in an ever slowly changing drama.\u00bb The key term in the Origin is \u00abthe struggle for existence.\u00bb Darwin explains:<\/p>\n In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind\u2014never to forget that every single organic being may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life; that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals.<\/p>\n All through the book, he refers to \u00aba constant struggle going on,\u00bb \u00abthe constantly-recurring Struggle for Existence,\u00bb \u00abvictory in the battle for life,\u00bb and so on. From this struggle comes \u00abnatural selection,\u00bb or, in Herbert Spencer’s more vivid phrase that Darwin adopted, \u00abthe survival of the fittest.\u00bb Darwin was quite aware that all these terms were ‘metaphoric, a heightening of much less dramatic processes. He writes of \u00abstruggle for existence\u00bb:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I should premise that I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture. A plant which annually produces a thousand seeds, of which only one of an average comes to maturity, may be more truly said to struggle with the plants of the same and other kinds which already clothe the ground. The mistletoe is dependent on the apple and a few other trees, but can only in a far-fetched sense be said to struggle with these trees, for, if too many of these parasites grow on the same tree, it languishes and dies. But several seedling mistletoes, growing close together on the same branch, may more truly be said to struggle with each other. As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on then, and it may methodically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in tempting the birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds. In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience’ sake the general tetra of Struggle for Existence.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n He writes similarly of \u00abnatural selection\u00bb:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term; but whoever objected to chemists speaking of the elective affinities of the various elements?\u2014and yet an acid cannot strictly be said to elect the base with which it in preference combines. It has been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or Deity; but who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets? Everyone knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions; and they are almost necessary for brevity.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In fact, these terms are much more than metaphors. They people the world of nature with protagonists and antagonists where previously we had seen only a solitary cactus or a growing seed. Moreover, the dramatic action they summon up is tragic. In Gilbert Murray’s terms, the basic ritual stages of tragedy are agon<\/em> or contest, sparagmos<\/em> or tearing apart, then anagnorisis<\/em> or discovery and epiphany<\/em> or joyous showing forth of the resurrected protagonist. Darwin’s struggle for existence is clearly Murray’s agon<\/em> and sparagmos<\/em>, and his natural selection or survival of the fittest, anagnorisis<\/em> and epiphany<\/em>. For the final exultation that the Greeks felt at the affirmation of Reliving Dionysus, Darwin substitutes a quieter tragic satisfaction. He writes:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.\u00bb The Origin concludes: \u00abThus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life….<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We realize that this dramatic and tragic vision of life comes from Darwin, rather than from his subject matter, when we see how undramatic most contemporary formulations of natural selection are. A typical one is that of George Gaylord Simpson in The Meaning of Evolution in 1949: \u00abIn the modern theory natural selection is differential reproduction, plus the complex interplay in such reproduction of heredity, genetic variation, and all the other factors that affect selection and determine its results.\u00bb Darwin was aware of differential reproduction as early as his draft for the Origin in 1844, but always within a larger context of struggle: a fleeter fox would survive better and \u00abrear more young,\u00bb but \u00abthe less fleet ones would be rigidly destroyed.\u00bb<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The archetypal image of the Origin is the war of nature, an image Darwin at first believed he had borrowed from Alphonse de Candolle. The 1841 outline for the book begins the section on \u00abNatural Selection\u00bb: \u00abDe Candolle’s war of nature.\u2014seeing contented face of nature,\u2014may be well at first doubted.\u00bb<\/p>\n <\/p>\n These notes are amplified in the 1844 essay into: \u00abDe Candolle, in an eloquent passage, has declared that all nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature. Seeing the contented face of nature, this may at first be well doubted; but reflection will inevitably prove it is too true.\u00bb<\/p>\n When Darwin had to choose a few pages from his manuscript to accompany Wallace’s paper in the historic presentation of the new theory to the Linnean Society in 1858, he began with that passage which he clearly recognized as the heart of his message. By the time the passage appeared in the Origin the next year, Darwin had recognized that De Candolle had no patent on the war of nature, and lumped him in with others. The important thing now was tearing off the pacific mask that life wears, and Darwin writes of the illusion concealing the tragic reality like a Melville narrator:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, toe often see superabundance of food; we do not see or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on in-sects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nest-lings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not al-ways been in mind, that, though food may be now super-abundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The flatness at the end is almost deliberate; Darwin’s vision is tragic, but it is not hysterical. It never rises in pitch to melodrama, as in the \u00abNature, red in tooth and claw\u00bb of Tennyson’s \u00abIn Memoriam,\u00bb or the Grand Guignol vision of some of Darwin’s followers. After millions of years of evolution, Romanes writes typically in 1892:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We find that more than half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment\u2014everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, and sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limb, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of brutal torture!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Darwin is aware of the tragic ambivalence of life and death, that for use thousand years \u00abpigeons have been watched and tended with the utmost care, and loved by many people,\u00bb and for just as long have been as considerately raised and tended for the pot. In the Journal of Researches<\/em>, Darwin was moved to horror and revulsion by the fact that the natives of Tierra del Fuego, in times of hunger, kill and eat the old women of the tribe sooner than their dogs[12]<\/a>, because \u00abDoggies catch otters, old women no.\u00bb By the time of the Origin, this is accepted with calm objectivity:<\/p>\n We see the value set on animals even by the barbarians of Tierra del Fuego, by their killing and devouring their old women, in times of dearth, as of less value than their dogs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n II<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When the Origin appeared, it was reviewed in the American Journal of Science and Arts by Asa Gray, perhaps the shrewdest (as Huxley was the most brilliant) of the Darwinians. Gray noted that Darwin’s frankness about objections and unsolved problems gave the book the character of a mythic quest. He writes: \u00abThe interest for the general reader heightens as the author advances on his perilous way and grapples manfully with the most formidable difficulties.\u00bb In the Origin, Darwin tends to make the imperilled knight not himself but his theory: a difficulty would be \u00abfatal to the whole theory,\u00bb an argument is \u00aba fatal objection,\u00bb \u00abSuch objections as the above would be fatal to my views,\u00bb and so on endlessly. But Darwin’s imagery in correspondence makes it clear that the life at stake is Darwin’s own. Sending an advance copy of the book to Hugh Falconer in 1859, he wrote: \u00abLord, how savage you will be if you read it, and how you will long to crucify me alive!\u00bb He wrote to H. G. Bronn in 186o: \u00abThe objections and difficulties which may be urged against my view are indeed heavy enough almost to break my back, but it is not yet broken!\u00bb When Lyell refused to come out in support of the theory publicly, Darwin wrote to him: \u00abYou cut my throat, and your own throat; and I believe will live to be sorry for it.\u00bb In later years Darwin’s correspondence is full of \u00abIt is clear to me that I ought to be exterminated,\u00bb \u00abI know well that I deserve many a good slap on the face,\u00bb \u00abIf I am wrong, the sooner I am knocked on the head and annihilated so much the better.\u00bb He seems to have seen himself as the scapegoat, the sacrificial victim, sometimes the Judaeo-Christian blameless victim without blemish, but sometimes the guilty pagan slayer who must himself be slain. When the theory of evolution first took publishable form, in 1844, Darwin wrote to Hooker \u00abI am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion that I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.\u00bb<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If Darwin’s tragic vision embraced bloodshed and murder, it also embraced beauty and joy. The Origin is as full of the word \u00abbeauty\u00bb as the Journal of Researches<\/em>, but now it is a utilitarian beauty. Sometimes it is a \u00abbeautiful adaptation\u00bb to function, like that of the woodpecker, the mistletoe, or the giraffe; sometimes it has a visual loveliness too, as in \u00abthe beautifully plumed seed of the dandelion\u00bb; sometimes it is an abstraction, like the power engaged \u00abin slowly and beautifully adapting each form to the most complex relations of \u00a0\u00a0life\u00bb; sometimes it is pure exultant generalization, \u00abthere is so much beauty throughout nature.\u00bb The last sentence of the book, beginning \u00abThere is grandeur in this view of life,\u00bb concludes \u00abfrom so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.\u00bb The \u00abwonderful\u00bb means, of course, \u00abwonderfully adapted to survive.\u00bb In 1863, Darwin wrote to Huxley: \u00abWith a book, as with a fine day, one likes it to end with a glorious sunset.\u00bb<\/p>\n The Origin, although it resolutely postpones consideration of human origins for a later work, is oddly anthropocentric. One reason is that Darwin constantly humanizes animals in what used to be called the \u00abpathetic fallacy\u00bb: male alligators have courtship rites \u00ablike Indians in a war dance\u00bb; frightened ants \u00abtook heart\u00bb and a single ant stood \u00aban image of despair over its ravaged home\u00bb; in the consolatory statement quoted above, the surviving animals are not only vigorous and healthy, but \u00abhappy.\u00bb Man is always on Darwin’s mind as he talks of the lower orders. The criteria for an \u00abadvance in organization\u00bb among the vertebrate are \u00abthe degree of intellect and an approach in structure to mats.\u00bb When the Origin announces the descent of man, he is not named, simply lumped in: \u00abAccording to this view it may be inferred that all vertebrate animals with true lungs are descended by ordinary generation from an ancient and unknown prototype, which was furnished with a floating apparatus or swimbladder.\u00bb Later in the Origin Darwin concludes in more detail that the higher vertebrates \u00abare the modified descendants of some ancient progenitor, which was furnished in its adult state with branchiae, a swim-bladder, four fin-like limbs, and a long tail, all fitted for an aquatic life.\u00bb (More explicitly, Darwin wrote to Lyell in 186o: \u00abOur ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.\u00bb).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n III<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The chief thematic metaphor in The Origin of Species, constituting the book’s principal imaginative design, is a visual figure that develops in richness and complexity as it goes through a series of metamorphoses. It begins as the ladderlike polity of life, a form of the medieval Great Chain of Being (so exhaustively studied by A. 0. Lovejoy in his book of that title). Early in the book, Darwin writes of \u00abplaces in the polity\u00bb of nature, \u00abplaces which are either unoccupied or not perfectly occupied by other beings,\u00bb \u00aba place in the natural polity of the country,\u00bb \u00abnew places in the polity of nature.\u00bb Eventually this progresses from simple to complex, and becomes a vision of \u00abone long and branching chain of life,\u00bb of which we know from the past only a few links (the nonsense of the \u00abMissing Link\u00bb apeman seems to be based on this passage). As the book goes on, the figure modifies from the chain, either simple or complex, to that of a living tree, in a remarkable extended metaphor (earlier used in a letter to Gray that was one of the documents presented to the Linnean Society):<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The affinities of all the beings of the some class have some-times been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during former years may represent the long succession of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branch., in the some manner as species and groups of species have at all times overmastered other species in the great battle for life. The limbs divided into great branch, and these into lesser and lesser branches, were themselves once, when the tree was young, budding twigs, and this connection of the former and present buds by ramifying branches may well represent the classification of all extinct and living species in groups subordinate to groups. Of the many twigs which flourished when the tree was a mere bush, only two or three, now grown into great branches, yet survive and bear the other branches; so with the species which lived during long-past geological periods, very few have left living and modified descendants. From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these fallen branches of various sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no living representatives, and which are known to as only in a fossil state. As we here and there see a thin straggling branch springing from a fork low down in a tree, and which by some chance has been favoured and is still alive on its summit, so we occasionally see an animal like the Ornithorhynchus or Lepidosiren, which in some small degree connects by its affinities two large branches of life, and which has apparently been saved from fatal competition by having inhabited a protected station. As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken brandies the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Darwin continues to use the tree figure, later referring to the variety of species as \u00ablike the branching of a great tree from a single stem.\u00bb Even this image, however, ultimately will not contain the infinite richness of ecological relationships in nature, which he describes as progressing \u00abonwards in ever-increasing circles of complexity.\u00bb The book’s final paragraph achieves the ultimate transformation. It begins:<\/p>\n It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With the image of the tangled bank, so reminiscent of Shakespearean lyric, Darwin embraces all the rich complexity of life. The image of the great Chain of Life is ordered, hierarchic, and static, essentially medieval; the great Tree of Life is ordered, hierarchic, but dynamic and competitive, a Renaissance vision; but the great Tangled Bank of Life is disordered, democratic, and subtly interdependent as well as competitive, essentially a modern vision.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The minor metaphors in the work fall into place within this great organizing metaphor. \u00abStruggle for existence\u00bb and \u00absurvival of the fittest,\u00bb noted above, are other ways of looking at the tangled bank. The metaphors are epiphanies or showings forth; for the most part they image process in dramatic action, provide scenes \u00abin an ever slowly changing drama\u00bb: \u00abas with mariners shipwrecked near a coast\u00bb; \u00abto feel no surprise at sickness, but, when the sick man dies, to wonder and to suspect that he died by some deed of violence\u00bb; \u00abwhen we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship.\u00bb A constant metaphor is language itself: \u00aba breed, like a dialect of a language\u00bb; \u00abIt may be worthwhile to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages\u00bb; \u00abRudimentary organs may be compared with the letters in a word\u00bb; and so on. J. Arthur Thomson, in Dar-win and Modern Science, praises Darwin’s \u00abclear visions\u00bb and they are all metaphors: \u00abvisions of the web of life, of the fountain of change within the organism, of the struggle for existence and of its winnowing, and of the spreading genealogical tree.\u00bb Darwin says of morphology, defined in the Origin’s Glossary as \u00abThe law of form or structure independent of function\u00bb: \u00abThis is one of the most interesting departments of natural history, and may almost be said to be its very soul.\u00bb Similarly, Aristotle says in the Poetics (in By-water’s translation): \u00abBut the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.\u00bb By this criterion Darwin displayed genius as morphologist and metaphorist alike.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Perhaps the most surprising thing in The Origin of Species, to those who think of Darwin as the type of the prosaic scientist, is that it repeatedly calls not for an act of understanding but for an act of the imagination. Darwin writes: \u00abIt is good thus to try in imagination,\u00bb \u00abHow strange are these facts!\u00bb \u00abno one with the most vivid imagination would ever have thought,\u00bb \u00abno one can have marvelled more than I have done,\u00bb \u00abthe fact is a marvelous one,\u00bb \u00abBut these cases are so wonderful,\u00bb \u00abGlancing et instincts, marvellous as some are,\u00bb \u00abWe see the full meaning of the wonderful fact,\u00bb and so on. The call is not only for imagination, marvel, wonder, but for the sort of immersion in nature that led Emerson to say \u00abBooks are for the scholars’s idle hours.\u00bb Darwin writes:<\/p>\n It is hardly possible for me to recall to the reader who is not a practical geologist, the facts leading the mind to comprehend the lapse of time…. Not that it suffices to study the Principles of Geology, or to read special treatises by different observers on separate formations, and to mark how each author at-tempts to give an inadequate idea of the duration of each formation, or even of each stratum. We can best gain some idea of past time by knowing the agencies at work, and learning how deeply the surface of the land has been denuded, and how much sediment has been deposited…. Therefore a man should examine for himself the great piles of superimposed strata, and watch the rivulets bringing down mud, and the waves wearing away the sea-cliffs, in order to comprehend something about the duration of past time, the monuments of which we see all around us. It is good to wander along the coast, when formed of moderately hard rocks, and mark the process of degradation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Perhaps not to far as it might seem from Proust’s comparable venture in comprehending the duration of past time.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> The article entitled Darwin the dramatist<\/em>, was written by Stanley Edgar Hyman and published in The Centennial Review of Arts & Science<\/em> in 1959. The annotations contain my commentaries to it. Information about the author is taken from Wikipedia (Newspeak dictionary).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [2]<\/a> Stanley Edgar Hyman (1919\u20131970) was a literary critic who wrote primarily about critical methods: the distinct strategies critics use in approaching literary texts.\u00a0 He was influential for the development of literary theory in the 1940s and 1950s. Equally skeptical of every major critical methodology of his time, he worked out an early instance of a critical theory, exploring ways that critics can be foiled by their own methods. \u00abEach critic,\u00bb Hyman wrote in The Armed Vision, \u00abtends to have a master metaphor or series of metaphors in terms of which he sees the critical function. This metaphor then shapes, informs, and sometimes limits his work.\u00bb Hyman saw it as his own critical task to point out these overriding themes by which, tacitly, other critics organized their work and their thinking.<\/p>\n Hyman was born in Brooklyn, New York and graduated from Syracuse University in 1940. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker for much of his life, and although he did not possess a graduate degree, taught at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. From 1961 to 1965, Hyman was the literary critic of The New Leader.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [3]<\/a> A rather curious sentence: most of the thinking world was convinced of the evolution of species. It shows:\u00a0 1) how little evidence is required to convince so many people, 2) How scarcely thinking is the thinking world. Perhaps the non-thinking world may be clever.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [4]<\/a> Confusion between scientific argument and rhetorical organization. These are here shown as equivalent, but indeed these are quite different things. OSMNS is very weak in the first, but strong in the second.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [5]<\/a> Please see footnote number 11.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [6]<\/a> In a strict sense there is not a scientific theory that may be attributed to Darwin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [7]<\/a> Establish an idea? Is this a scientific objective?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [8]<\/a> What are those Darwin\u2019s processes?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [9]<\/a> Is it possible to confuse processes with hypotheses?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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