Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Darwin, Charles - Robert M. Young (essay date 1985)

Robert M. Young (essay date 1985)

SOURCE: "Darwin's Metaphor: Does Nature Select?," in Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 79-125.

[In the following essay, originally published in The Monist, Young places Darwin's theory of natural selection in the contexts of intellectual history, analyzing its scientific value, the objections it has elicited, and its philosophical, theological, and social influence.]

I

It is not too great an exaggeration to claim that On the Origin of Species was, along with Das Kapital, one of the two most significant works in the intellectual history of the nineteenth century. As George Henry Lewes wrote in 1868, "No work of our time has been so general in its influence."¹ However, the very generality of the influence of Darwin's work provides the chief problem for the intellectual historian. Most books and...

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