Does Respect for Reality Make a Mans Life Important?
The world Charles Darwin saw, was, as Eli Siegel put it, “a world…that man can truly like” (The Aesthetic Nature of the World, p. 151). It is a world of wonderful similarity and change among all living things; where the tiniest flea is directly, organically related to the most massive elephant; where struggle and even death make for progressive evolution in which good, useful characteristics develop to benefit every species. Seeing this way made him large. He had the passion which made him a discoverer. “The way Darwin saw,” Mr. Siegel wrote, “made him feel or have emotion. The way he had emotion made him want to see more and more clearly” (p. 117). When The Origin of Species was published it was 1859, 24 years after Darwin set foot on the Galapagos Islands. The storm of objection from the academic world and the conservative clergy was horrific. There was a “savage onslaught” against Origin at the Philosophical Society of Cambridge (note, pp. 247-8, Autobiography of Charles Darwin, F
