Darwin read the Dialogues while still formulating his theory of evolution by natural selection. And one might suspect that he would have found there much to please and put to use. But he had already encountered Humean critiques of the argument from design, together with quite effective responses in the work of William Paley. Moreover, in the wake of his reading of Dialogues, Darwin placed greater and greater weight on the on the very sort of analogy that Hume had targeted in Dialogues, that is, drawing similarities between the natural world and products of human design, in service of the inference that the natural world was also designed. Darwin came to reject the conclusion of the argument from design, but his alternative, evolution by natural selection, also relied, heavily, on an analogy between nature and human artifice, the breeder’s art. But an important passage in the conclusion to the Origin suggests an important influence of the Dialogues, especially when taken together with Darwin’s quite wide-ranging reading of Hume.

This chapter introduces the central ideas in Darwin’s Expression, poses the main interpretive questions that scholars have raised, and outlines my answers to those questions. Why does Darwin analyze expressions in terms of heritable habits, recalling Lamarck’s debunked theory of evolution, when his own theory of natural selection provides a superior alternative? My answer is that Darwin embraces Hartley’s associationist theory of mind, which posits habit as the basis of thought. I claim that multiple puzzling features of Expression are resolved once we view Darwin as an associationist philosopher.

This chapter examines Darwin’s taxonomy of emotions. I show that nineteenth-century associationists were divided on whether emotion categories exist in nature or are conventional. Herbert Spencer argues that emotion categories exist in nature, anticipating modern basic emotions theory. Thomas Brown argues that emotion categories are conventional, anticipating modern psychological constructionism. I show that Darwin sides with Brown and regards emotion categories as conventional. This finding is surprising, since Darwin is often viewed as a precursor to modern basic emotions theory, which adopts the opposite view.

This chapter argues that Darwin’s philosophical theory of emotion has been forgotten due to paradigm shifts in biology, psychology, and philosophy. These shifts have caused researchers to neglect associationist theories of emotions, including Darwin’s contributions to this school of thought. Having explained why Darwin’s philosophy was forgotten, I conclude by explaining why it should be remembered, given its relevance for contemporary emotions research.

This chapter traces the development of Darwin’s theory of emotion and expression from 1838 to 1872, emphasizing his many engagements with associationist philosophers. I demonstrate that all three of Darwin’s principles of expression are derived from the works of associationist philosophers, especially David Hartley, Erasmus Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Alexander Bain.

The Introduction presents the main theses of this book: that Charles Darwin developed a philosophical theory of emotion, inspired by his reading of several associationist philosophers; that Darwin denied that emotional expressions evolved as social signals, designed to reveal emotions to others; and that Darwin’s theory of emotion has more in common with modern constructionist theories than with modern basic emotions theories, which often claim Darwin as their inspiration.

This chapter surveys associationist theories of emotion leading up to Darwin’s Expression. These theories analyze emotions as sequences of thoughts, feelings, and actions, linked together by principles of association. Thomas Hobbes contributes to this tradition the idea that emotions can be analyzed as “trains of thoughts.” John Locke contributes the idea that these trains are connected by the “association of ideas.” David Hume contributes the idea that association can occur via contiguity, resemblance, or cause and effect. David Hartley puts these ideas together to present the first full-fledged associationist theory of mind and emotion. Harley’s ideas are developed further by Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather), Thomas Brown, James Mill, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer, among others. This tradition in the philosophy of emotion has never before been described or analyzed.

This chapter examines Darwin’s analysis of emotional expression. It is widely accepted that Darwin wrote Expression to refute Sir Charles Bell’s theory that God created humans with special muscles to express their emotions. However, scholars have overlooked the fact that Bell developed his theory to refute Erasmus Darwin’s associationist analysis of emotional expression, inspired by David Hartley, and that Charles Darwin defends his grandfather’s analysis against Bell’s objections. I demonstrate that Charles’s defense of Erasmus’s associationist theory, which denies that expressions occur for the sake of communicating emotions, explains Charles’s puzzling reluctance to claim that expressions evolved to serve as signals in communication.

Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, while useful for moving past the ecological limitations of the standard reading, is limited insofar as it focuses on individual actors—consumers, citizens, and politicians in particular. Kant’s ethical thought emphasizes individual humans rather than economic and political systems, and his teleological thought appears scientifically outdated. This chapter asks whether these aspects of Kant’s thought need revision. It begins by placing Kant in dialogue with Darwin and Marx, pursuing a critical discussion on the human species and political systems in the context of the Anthropocene. The Kantian reply, I suggest, encourages us to reconsider Kant’s philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology. Kant’s ideas are significant for the climate crisis insofar as they enjoin normative reflection on the human species globally and in the long term. I conclude with critical reflections on Kant’s racism and sexism as obstacles to reading Kant in the Anthropocene.

The first chapter traces the notion of “art for art’s sake” to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, who first engaged with questions of aesthetics in the early 1850s. In their attempts to account for the evolution of the sense of beauty – an adaptation with no obvious survival value – both writers exempted a wide swath of aesthetic activities from the natural laws of scarcity and struggle that governed other areas of biological life. This chapter argues that their evolutionary explanations for beauty (the theories of sexual selection and “play," respectively) thus laid the scientific groundwork for later conceptions of aesthetic experience as escapist, salutary, and therefore beneficial for the species. The chapter concludes with an analysis of selected literary works by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith, whose respective corpuses illustrate the diffuse impact of these ideas on literary evocations of the beautiful.

The image of Darwin as a lone thinker, a theoretician who worked largely in isolation rather than a hands-on scientist, has no single origin but is stubbornly persistent. Modern accounts that do feature him as a practical researcher tend to emphasize the domestic setting of his work, focusing on experiments that can be replicated in a modern house, garden, or school. But contemporary evidence, in particular from Darwin’s extensive correspondence, demonstrates that he was an ingenious and innovative experimenter, keenly aware of advances in science, and often at the cutting edge both in the nature of his investigations and in the technologies he employed. Far from working alone on gathering facts and grinding out his theories, Darwin was expert at cultivating and exploiting contacts. He actively sought collaboration with all sorts of people around the world, both asking for their help and encouraging their own investigations. Although he rarely travelled after settling in the village of Down in Kent as a young married man, Darwin’s version of ‘working from home’ was far from solitary: he was surrounded not only by a large and happy family but by governesses, gardeners, friends, neighbors, and visitors, who acted as critics, assistants, editors, and even as research subjects.

Charles Darwin publicly denied being influenced by the evolutionary ideas of his grandfather Erasmus, yet he took the trouble to write the biography of this ancestor he never met and praised him for possessing “the true spirit of the philosopher”. Although Charles’s natural selection was formulated within the context of Victorian capitalism, their theories show some striking similarities; moreover, there is clear evidence – such as annotations – that Charles closely studied Erasmus’s writings on evolution. Erasmus’s behavior and beliefs were inevitably conveyed down to following generations, including his warnings about hereditary alcoholism and the family abhorrence of slavery. It was in Charles’s interests to distance himself from a discredited relative and present natural selection as the only viable alternative to repeated miraculous creation. The extent of Erasmus’s effect on his grandson must remain speculative, but it cannot be dismissed.

Social scientists recently claimed Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) is a racist text; that Darwin’s racism blinded him, impacting his science. Biologists and philosophers countered that Darwin’s work should be championed because it undercut slavery-justifying polygenism (independent origins for human races). Others extol Darwin for his emotional condemnation of slavery when he first encountered it on the Beagle voyage. This essay systematically explores Darwin’s views on human race expressed in Descent and then digs through a half-century of Darwin’s correspondence with prominent scientists to answer the question: what were Darwin’s views not just on the human torture involved in the enslavement process but on human race more broadly?

Conventional wisdom has it that Darwin’s theory of natural selection needed Mendel’s theory of inheritance to become workable, and relatedly, that had Darwin read Mendel’s 1866 paper on his experiments with crossbred peas, the necessary fix would have come around 1870 rather than decades later. This chapter shows that, on closer inspection, neither of these propositions should be accepted. From Darwin’s perspective, when it came to inheritance, his theory depended only on an undoubted fact: that offspring on the whole inherit their parents’ characters. Even when a character gets transmitted in a diluted form, due to blending, the struggle for existence ensures, as Darwin saw it, that such dilution is minimal, since only organisms that vary in similarly advantageous directions will live long enough to reproduce. Against the idea that Darwin would have instantly embraced Mendel’s paper as putting inheritance on a new, theory-saving basis, thus saving evolutionary biology from decades of sterile debate, the chapter emphasizes three points: first, the similarity between Mendel’s results and ones that Darwin was already familiar with from his own snapdragon crosses; second, the differences between Mendel’s results and ones reported in 1866 by Darwin’s pea expert, Thomas Laxton; and third, Mendel’s criticisms of Darwin on whether, as Darwin believed, variation under domestication is much greater in extent than variation in the wild.

For decades it was widely believed that Darwin avoided publishing his theory of evolution for many years. Many explanations were proposed to identify Darwin’s reasons or motives for doing so. This chapter demonstrates that Darwin’s delay is a recent historiographical theme for which there is no clear evidence, and indeed is overwhelmingly contradicted by the historical evidence. It is also shown that Darwin’s belief in evolution was not a secret before publication. Instead of a man afraid of his secret theory being revealed to his prejudiced contemporaries, it is demonstrated that Darwin was understandably very busy and began his species book when he had completed work in hand, just as he had intended all along.

This chapter discusses Darwin’s lifelong interest in unconscious agency and instinct. Darwin typically treats instinct as a rational action that has become habitual and thus heritable; instinct embodies a cognitive process that does not know itself as such. His discussion of instinct is thus connected to other moments in his work where he uses the term ‘unconscious’; his treatment of previous taxonomists of species as unconsciously providing evidence for species transmutation, and his discussion of unconscious selection as an analogy for the effect of aesthetic preference in sexual selection. Darwin’s unconscious anticipates Freud’s as the embodiment of human agency in biological history.

This chapter develops the concerns of Chapter 4 by discussing the relation between Freud’s concept of the symptom and Darwin’s reading of defunctioned and residual structures as evidence of species identity and affinity. Freud’s unconscious emerges in this analysis as emerging from the nineteenth century crisis of the species concept.

This chapter is the first of two on blood as a figure for kinship and species identity in the nineteenth century. It begins with the history of bloodletting and blood transfusion in the period, and documents the emergence in the second half of the century of an imaginary species body, whose individual members are characterized by their propensity to save or waste blood from the common supply. The idea of a collective body sharing a common blood is traced in a series of texts on bloodshed and blushing, including Alfred Tennyson’s “Maud,” William Morris’s “The Defense of Guinevere,” Christina Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold,” D. G. Rossetti’s “Jenny,” and Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

The making new that is generally seen as definitive of modernist practice covers a range of different ambitions and dispositions. The same mindset is also evident in literary-modernist treatments of animals, despite claims that the "modernist animal" does not really exist. This chapter examines a range of modernist works that advance their own singular zoopoetic insights, through two principal approaches to modernist animal studies. The first, characterized by "invention," comprises the fantastic beasts of Herman Melville (the White Whale), W. B. Yeats (mythological, eschatological, and mechanical creatures), and Djuna Barnes (human-animal becomings), which turn on the notion of hybridity and its multivalent effects. The second, the domestic, is centered on cats and dogs in the works of Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, Flush), T. S. Eliot (“Prufrock,” Old Possum’s), and James Joyce (Ulysses). Yet these domestic animals are anything but commonplace or pedestrian, in that they reveal the otherness at the heart of companion species. Literary-modernist animals are thus legion, and it is in the dialectic between the fantastic and the domestic that their distinctive particularities can best be understood.