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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2019
Although often presented as an essential, ahistorical or innate psychological entity, the notion of a ‘scientific mind’ is ripe for historical analysis. The growing historical interest in the self-fashioning of masculine identities, and more particularly the self-fashioning of the nineteenth-century scientist, has opened up a space in which to probe what was understood by someone being said to possess a ‘scientific mind’. This task is made all the more urgent by the recently revived interest of some psychologists in the concept and the highly gendered and culturally conditioned understanding of the scientific mind displayed in some contemporary debates. This article contributes to that task, and fills a rare gap in Darwin studies by making the first detailed exploration of Charles Darwin's understanding of the scientific mind, as revealed in the psychological self-analysis he undertook in his ‘Recollections of the development of my mind and character’ (1876), and supplemented in his Life of Erasmus Darwin (1879). Drawing upon a broad range of Darwin's published and unpublished works, this article argues that Darwin's understanding of the scientific mind was rooted in his earliest notebooks, and was far more central to his thought than is usually acknowledged. The article further delineates the differences between Darwin's understanding and that of his half-cousin Francis Galton, situates his understanding in relation to his reading of William Whewell and Auguste Comte, and considers what Darwin's view of the scientific mind tells us about his perspective on questions of religion and gender. Throughout, the article seeks to show that the ‘scientific mind’ is always an agglomeration of historically specific prejudices and presumptions, and concludes that this study of Darwin points to the need for a similarly historical approach to the question of the scientific mind today.
I would like to thank the editor and my two anonymous referees for their comments on a previous draft of this article.
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57 Darwin, op. cit. (13), pp. 69, 85. Babbage also compared his mind to a machine, but without Darwin's apprehension that this might be a negative. Babbage, op. cit. (22), p. 59.
58 Charles Darwin to W.B. Tegetmeier, 20 June 1862, DCP-LETT-3612.
59 Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 66. Late in life Leonard Darwin claimed to remember ‘the visits of Carlyle to Charles Darwin, when the latter awaited none too anxiously “the crotchety old grouch”’. Griggs, L., ‘A scholar goes visiting’, Quarterly Review: A Journal of University Perspectives (1934) 40–41, pp. 408–415, 411Google Scholar.
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64 Although, as Harley, op. cit. (12), p. 31, notes, it is telling that Darwin manages a reference to Erasmus Darwin in the second sentence of the ‘Recollections’.
65 Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 19. Darwin did not reach the same conclusion about any of his daughters, although a similar certainty that untutored childhood traits prefigured adult interests is evident in his heartfelt reminiscence of his ‘favourite daughter’, Annie: ‘one singular habit, which, I presume would ultimately have turned into some pursuit; namely a strong pleasure in looking out words or names in dictionaries, directories, gazeteers, & in this latter case finding out the places in the Map’. Charles Darwin, ‘Our poor child, Annie’ (Darwin's reminiscence of Anne Elizabeth Darwin) (30 April 1851), CUL-DAR 210.13.40.
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69 ‘These two years and three months [2 October 1836–29 January 1839] were the most active ones which I ever spent, though I was occasionally unwell and so lost some time’. Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 47.
70 ‘My theory would give zest to recent & fossil Comparative Anatomy, it would lead to study of instincts, heredity & mind heredity, whole metaphysics’. Charles Darwin, Notebook B (transmutation of species (1837–1838)), CUL-DAR121, p. 228.
71 Even at this early stage he began two books, one on a general theory of evolution and a second on the evolution of man and mental faculties. The latter work would be held in abeyance, pending the success of the first. P.H. Barrett and H.E. Gruber, Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of Mind: Early Writings of Charles Darwin, transcribed and annotated by Paul H. Barrett, with a commentary by Howard E. Gruber, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974, p. xix.
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145 It is interesting to note that later, when he was drafting the ‘Recollections’, Darwin chose to place the ‘Religious belief’ section between a short account of his return from the Beagle voyage in October1836 and his marriage in January 1839, confirming that his encounter with Comte's ideas at the very least coincided with the most crucial period in his loss of religious belief.
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147 Whewell described the three-stage theory as ‘worthless, and, indeed, absolutely puerile’. Whewell, W., ‘Comte and Positivism’, Macmillan's Magazine (1866) 13, pp. 353–362, 355Google Scholar.
148 Charles Darwin to C. Lyell n/d (1 August 1861), DCP-LETT-3223.
149 Schweber, S.S., ‘The origin of the “Origin” revisted’, Journal of the History of Biology (1977) 10, pp. 229–316, 250CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
150 Huxley declared, ‘Comtism is, in spirit, anti-scientific’. Anon. [Huxley, T.H.], ‘The scientific aspects of Positivism’, Fortnightly Review (1869) 5, pp. 653–670, 658Google Scholar.
151 Charles Darwin to J.D. Hooker, 24 July 1869, DCP-LETT-6841.
152 Charles Darwin to T.H. Huxley, 10 March 1869, DCP-LETT-6649. Charles Darwin to T.H. Huxley, 12 March 1869, DCP-LETT-6658.
153 Charles Darwin to J. Fordyce, 7 May 1879, DCP-LETT-12041; Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 54.
154 See Lightman, B., ‘Huxley and scientific agnosticism: the strange history of a failed rhetorical strategy’, Journal of the History of Science (2002) 35, pp. 271–289Google ScholarPubMed.
155 Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 86.
156 Darwin, op. cit. (13), pp. 86–88.
157 Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 55.
158 Clifford, W.K., ‘The ethics of belief’, Contemporary Review (1877) 29, pp. 289–309Google Scholar.
159 Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 86.
160 Clifford, op. cit. (158).
161 Feist, op. cit. (6), p. 224.
162 Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 86.
163 ‘May not the habit in scientific pursuts of believing nothing till it is proved, influence your mind too much on other things which cannot be proved in the same way[?]’. E. Darwin to Charles Darwin, February 1839, DCP-LETT-471.
164 This reluctance to follow without proof is the leitmotif the section on ‘Religious belief’ in the ‘Recollections’, to the extent that Darwin notes how he had initially hoped to counter his own growing disbelief by ‘inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels’, and would allow him to believe. Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 50.
165 Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 55.
166 Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 9.
167 Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 56.
168 See Yeo, E. Janes, ‘Will the real Mary Lovett please stand up? Chartism, gender and autobiography’, in Chase, M. and Dyck, I. (eds.), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison, Aldershot: Routledge, 1996, pp. 163–181Google Scholar.
169 See Francis, Mark, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007 p. 73Google Scholar; Maudsley, Henry, ‘Sex in mind and education’, Fortnightly Review (1874) 15, pp. 469–471Google Scholar.
170 Darwin, op. cit. (41), vol. 2, pp. 327, 402.
171 Darwin, op. cit. (83), vol. 2, pp. 72, 83–84, 29.
172 Darwin, op. cit. (17), p. 16.
173 Galton, op. cit. (104), pp. 206, 197.
174 Galton, op. cit. (104), pp. 148, 206–207, 258–259, 207.
175 Galton, op. cit. (104), p. 141.
176 Darwin, op. cit. (41), vol. 2, p. 328.
177 Unlike Galton, his chief disciple, Karl Pearson, did not reject literature either, arguing that it represented human patterns of feeling and behaviour and that science was ‘utterly dependent on imagination. The great champion of statistics, then, managed very neatly to merge science and literature in a life devoted to fact and suffused by fiction’. Porter, T.M., Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 311Google Scholar.
178 Darwin, op. cit. (13), pp. 69, 85.
179 Darwin, op. cit. (41), vol. 1, p. 35.
180 Galton, op. cit. (104), pp. 84–85.
181 ‘A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not I suppose have thus suffered’. Darwin, op. cit. (13), p. 85.
182 Ellis, op. cit. (9), pp. 12–128.
