The name and work of George Romanes relate strongly to my chosen topic and he will have a place in my argument. George Romanes was one of the most creative inheritors of Darwin's insights concerning consciousness and instinct. In Animal Intelligence (1882), Mental Evolution in Animals (1883) and Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty (1888) Romanes sought by means of example and anecdote to build a secure argument for the growth and continuity, as well as the variety, of emotion and awareness among all sentient creatures, including the human. But it was not only Darwin's theories that inspired Romanes, it was the man. He loved Darwin, his older friend, and grieved poignantly when Darwin died. In the long poem he wrote as a memorial there are passages that speak powerfully to the absolute experience of loss endured at the death of a friend, as well as offering a particular tribute to Darwin:

Daniel Deronda is a novel haunted by the future, that purest and most taxing realm of fiction. For the first time in George Eliot's work the dependence of the future on the past is brought into question. Earlier in her career she had found a meta-religious security in the ‘great concept of universal sequence’, ‘the gradual reduction of all phenomena within the sphere of established law, which carries as a consequence the rejection of the miraculous’. Causal sequence had been the organising principle both of her morality and of her practice as a novelist.

In Daniel Deronda causal sequence is disturbed and pressed upon by resurgence, synchronicity, the miraculous, the hermeneutic, and by unassuageable human need. In the uniformitarian ordering of Middlemarch events, however seemingly catastrophic, are prepared for by the slight incipient movements, crumblings, pressures, erosions, and siltages observable to an immeasurably patient eye, whether it be that of Uriel in the sun ‘watching the progress of planetary history’ (as she writes in Middlemarch) or that of the novelist exempted from the partiality and subjectivity of her personages. The outcome, though melancholy in tone, is reassuring to the reader in that it creates an infinitely knowable world. Our discoveries keep pace with the increasing insight into relations and connections that the work offers us – though the sequences of Middlemarch do not share that optimistic sense of a development preparing for man's betterment which we remember from her earliest essays: ‘Every past phase of human development is part of that education of the race in which we are sharing; every mistake, every absurdity into which poor human nature has fallen, may be looked on as an experiment of which we may reap the benefit.’

In March 1837, five months after returning from the Beagle voyage, Darwin settled in London. He was to live in the capital for five years. They were by far his most productive years intellectually. During them, he formulated almost all the main theories later published in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s: his theory of the origin of species - natural selection; his theory of generation or reproduction and heredity - pangenesis; his theory of the origin of the moral sense in man from ancestral animal social instincts; and his interpretation of the expression of the emotions in man and animals. Of his prominent intellectual productions only two - the theory of sexual selection and the principle of divergence of varieties and species - came later, and they were conceived as elaborations of the theory of natural selection. In these five London years, two periods were quite exceptionally consequential: the spring and early summer of 1837, immediately after his move to London, and the summer and early autumn of the following year, 1838. At each of these times Darwin made vast escalating moves in his thinking and his theoretical ambitions. By mid-September 1838, indeed, his ambitions had reached a peak never later to be surpassed. One can therefore read the rest of his life as so many sequels to the brainwork of these months.

How does Darwin's Darwinism relate to social Darwinism and eugenics? Like many foes of Darwinism, past and present, the American populist and creationist William Jennings Bryan thought a straight line ran from Darwin's theory ('a dogma of darkness and death') to beliefs that it is right for the strong to crowd out the weak, and that the only hope for human improvement lay in selective breeding. Darwin's defenders, on the other hand, have typically viewed social Darwinism and eugenics as perversions of his theory. Daniel Dennett speaks for many biologists and philosophers of science when he characterises social Darwinism as 'an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking'. That perspective is also reflected in the 2005-6 blockbuster Darwin show curated by the American Museum of Natural History, where the section on 'Social Darwinism', subtitled 'Misusing Darwin's Theory', claims that all uses of Darwin's theory to justify particular social, political, or economic principles 'have one fundamental flaw: they use a purely scientific theory for a completely unscientific purpose. In doing so they misrepresent and misappropriate Darwin's original ideas'. Few professional historians believe either that Darwin's theory leads directly to these doctrines or that they are entirely unrelated. But both the nature and significance of the link are passionately disputed.

Soon after the publication of the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin sent out over a hundred complimentary copies to a variety of contemporaries, including his former geology teacher, Adam Sedgwick. Darwin was prepared for attacks on the content of his theory. What he had not expected were attacks on his methods. Sedgwick, for example, writing in the Spectator in March 1860, complained that 'Darwin's theory is not inductive, - not based on a series of acknowledged facts pointing to a general conclusion, - not a proposition evolved out of the facts, logically, and of course including them. To use an old figure, I look on the theory as a vast pyramid resting on its apex, and that apex a mathematical point.' In other words, for Sedgwick, the problem with the theory of natural selection was that Darwin had not supported it in the right way. The right way was to show that the theory was a generalisation from a wide range of particular facts. That was induction. The wrong way was to invent the theory as a hypothesis and then deduce from it particular facts. That was the method of hypothesis. In Sedgwick's estimation, the theory of natural selection was not an inductive generalisation, but an invented hypothesis, and as such could claim no support from the facts. His image of the pyramid is telling.

A major task for philosophy is to adjudicate conflicts between our ordinary way of understanding persons and the world - what Wilfrid Sellars called the 'manifest image' - and scientific accounts of persons and the world - the 'scientific image'. Sometimes, of course, it is possible to blend the two images so as to produce a genuinely stereoscopic or synthetic picture. But this is not always possible. In the case of Darwin's theory of natural selection, we seem to have a scientific theory that cannot be comfortably assimilated into the extant manifest image by adding, in Sellars' phrase, a 'needle point of detail' to that image. As traditionally understood, we humans are made in God's image and sit beneath God and the angels and above the animals on the 'Great Chain of Being'. There is a tripartite ontology of Pure Spirit(s) (God and angels), pure matter (rocks, plants and animals), and dualistic beings who, while on earth, partake of both the immaterial realm and the material realm (us). We humans know the material realm through our senses and reason, and the immaterial realm - theological and moral truths in particular - through illumination, grace or other non-empirical and nonrational or arational means. God sets out the moral law, and if we obey it, thereby using our free will properly, we will gain eternal salvation.

Darwinism has long been in the thick of science-religion debates, and never more so than today. Among the latest of a series of American states to legislate in a manner unfriendly to Darwinism is Oklahoma, insisting that science textbooks carry an explicit statement that 'human life was created by one God of the Universe'. Not all religious believers feel so threatened by evolutionary ideas, of course. Pope John Paul II - hardly a man to take doctrine lightly - has sent out a letter endorsing not just evolution per se, but modern theories of organic change. In the same spirit, Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, speaks of natural selection as a 'simple and extremely fruitful theory', and goes on to say that there is 'every reason to think that a scientific evolutionary account and a religious belief in a guiding creative force are not just compatible, but mutually reinforcing'. Nevertheless, even liberal Christians often feel the need to supplement the theory of evolution through natural selection with other special mechanisms. For their part, many of those on the science side of these debates think that Darwinism sounds the death knell for Christianity and other theistic systems. Writing with the passion of Savonarola, the well-known Darwinian Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene) regrets that a 'cowardly flabbiness of the intellect afflicts otherwise rational people confronted with long-established religions'.

In the summer of 1838, Charles Darwin considered marriage. The disadvantages included losing the 'freedom to go where one liked', while staying single would mean avoiding 'the expense & anxiety of children'. But then, he reflected, 'only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps'. Not to mention an 'object to be beloved and played with. better than a dog anyhow'. Wedlock won; within months he was engaged and then married to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. The pairing brought anxieties, however, especially over whether marriage between such close relatives would issue in unhealthy children. As a philosophical naturalist, Darwin had long been interested in reproduction or 'generation', to use the term of the day. Generational issues would eventually lead him to study subjects as diverse as barnacles, flowers, pigeons and domestic animal and plant breeding. His hypothesis of pangenesis, probably first formulated in 1841 but only published in 1868, was an attempt to give a unified account of all kinds of generation, from the healing of wounds in trees, to propagation by buds and grafting, to sexual pairings and fertilisation. Moreover, in Darwin's view, since sexual pairings - whether decided by male combat or female choice - were selective, they enabled a selectional evolutionary process separate from, and sometimes in tension with, natural selection.

Darwin's major books are available in a wide range of formats, from free online editions to inexpensive paperback facsimiles to multi-volume comprehensive sets. The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online, a website maintained by John van Wyhe, presently offers the most authoritative and scholarly online editions. This indispensable website includes also extensive unpublished Darwin texts and general bibliographic resources, and will provide invaluable coverage of the flood of Darwiniana provoked and promoted by the bicentennial of Darwin's birth. Invaluable also is the website maintained by David Kohn, The Darwin Digital Library. There are several useful anthologies, notably Ridley 1994, Glick and Kohn 1996, and Secord 2008. For bibliographic details of books written by Darwin and published either in his lifetime or since, see Freeman 1977. Of the multivolume editions, only one, in 29 volumes, approaches completeness: Barrett and Freeman 1986. Almost all of the papers published by Darwin in his lifetime are in Barrett 1977, a volume soon to be superseded by one edited by John van Wyhe collecting Darwin's shorter writings. Of posthumously published books that have appeared more recently, the most important is C. Darwin 1975. Changes in the text of the Origin of Species through its several editions can be studied in C. Darwin 1959.

“Parfois je pense; et parfois, je suis.” Paul Valéery / Valéry's 'Variation sur Descartes' excellently evokes the vanishing act that has haunted philosophy ever since Darwin overturned the Cartesian tradition. If my body is composed of nothing but a team of a few trillion robotic cells, mindlessly interacting to produce all the large-scale patterns that tradition would attribute to the non-mechanical workings of my mind, there seems to be nothing left over to be me. Lurking in Darwin's shadow there is a bugbear: the incredible Disappearing Self. One of Darwin's earliest critics, Robert MacKenzie, saw what was coming and could scarcely contain his outrage: In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill. This 'strange inversion of reasoning' promises - or threatens - to dissolve the Cartesian res cogitans as the wellspring of creativity, and then where will we be? Nowhere, it seems.

During his Cambridge years, Darwin was preparing to become a priest in the Anglican Church. Later in life he saw the irony: 'Considering how fiercely I have been attacked by the orthodox it seems ludicrous that I once intended to be a clergyman.' Why he was attacked by the orthodox has never been difficult to explain. Offering a naturalistic account of the emergence of human beings from ape-like ancestors, Darwin offended religious sensibilities as well as common sentiment. His theory of evolution by natural selection reinforced doubts about biblical authority at a particularly sensitive time. It could easily be interpreted as an affront to human dignity and it called for a serious re-thinking - not necessarily a rejection - of traditional Christian doctrines. Despite friction between competing Christian traditions, and despite political tensions in England between the established Anglican Church and socially disadvantaged dissenters, there were features of a Christian creed that transcended party lines. These were belief in an all-powerful, merciful God on whom the world depended for its creation and continued existence. Humankind had been made in God's image and had been granted the privilege of free will. The privilege extended to dominion over, and responsibility for, the rest of creation. The Christian God was an active, living God, to whom prayers were directed and whose providence was not confined to an original creative act.

From the beginning of his theorising about species, Darwin had human beings in view. In the initial pages of his first transmutation notebook (Notebook B), he observed that 'even mind & instinct become influenced' as the result of adaptation to new circumstances. Considering matters as a Lyellian geologist, he supposed that such adaptations would require many generations of young, pliable minds being exposed to a changing environment. After all, Captain FitzRoy had attempted to 'civilise' the Fuegian Jemmy Button by bringing him to London and instructing him in the Christian religion; but back in South America, Button reverted to his old habits, demonstrating, in Darwin's words, that the 'child of savage not civilized man' - transmutation of mind was not the work of a day. Darwin had nonetheless quickly become convinced that over long periods of time human mind, morals and emotions had progressively developed out of animal origins. As he bluntly expressed it in his first transmutation notebook: 'If all men were dead, monkeys make men. - Men make angels.' Presumably the transmutation of human beings into those higher creatures remained far in the future.

Human beings are part of nature. We are primates, mammals, animals. Animals, in turn, are nothing but very complex biochemical systems. So humans are biochemical machines, though extraordinarily complex ones. That complexity ensures that it will rarely be practically possible to predict future human behaviour, or explain past human behaviour, through a fine-grained molecular understanding of human bodies. But, in principle, a detailed enough understanding of the physical and chemical processes internal to an agent would suffice to predict and explain all of that agent's behaviour. A full list of the complete physical, natural facts about an agent is all the facts there are. The natural story is the whole story. So, at least, the sciences of physiology, morphology, neuropsychology and the like suppose. But humans are also conscious agents. We are aware of ourselves and our world. In Thomas Nagel's famous phrase, there is 'something that it is like' to be a person. What is more, we are rational agents. We are not, of course, perfectly rational. We make errors of reason and judgement. Most of the time, however, our beliefs about our immediate environment are sound, and our actions are rational in the light of those beliefs and our goals. My belief that good coffee is available in the student union may be false, perhaps even unreasonable.