Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters
1892
Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters
1892
Here is the most intimate portrait we have of the man who remade our understanding of life on Earth. Darwin wrote this autobiographical chapter in the final years of his life, looking back with remarkable honesty on his childhood in Shrewsbury, his feckless years as a medical student, the transformative voyage of the Beagle, and the slow, agonizing decades of thought that produced The Origin of Species. Francis Darwin enriched this with letters that reveal a man far more complex than the Victorian monument: prone to doubt, devoted to his children, haunted by illness, and capable of sharp humor. We see the naturalist at his desk, the father watching his sons play, the correspondent arguing with allies and critics. What emerges is not the statue in the square but the human being who dared to ask whether we, too, were part of nature's brutal machinery. For anyone who has read The Origin and wondered about the mind behind it, this is the answer.
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“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.””
— Charles Darwin
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.””
— Charles Darwin
“One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.””
— Charles Darwin
“Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.””
— Charles Darwin
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.””
— Charles Darwin
“I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.””
— Charles Darwin
“Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult--at least I have found it so--than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.””
— Charles Darwin
“...for the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.””
— Charles Darwin
“Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!””
— Charles Darwin
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Darwin, Charles. Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters. Lex, lex-books.com/book/charles-darwin-his-life-told-in-an-autobiographical-chapter-and-in-a-selected-se-d5953831-4538-4620-95a1-60d9aed24241.Darwin, C. (1892). Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/charles-darwin-his-life-told-in-an-autobiographical-chapter-and-in-a-selected-se-d5953831-4538-4620-95a1-60d9aed24241Darwin, Charles. Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/charles-darwin-his-life-told-in-an-autobiographical-chapter-and-in-a-selected-se-d5953831-4538-4620-95a1-60d9aed24241.
