Erasmus Darwin’s Poetical Imagination and his Theory of Generation
... “sympathetic” relationship between the body and mind. Whytt had refuted Haller’s theory that the irritability of the body and the sensibility of the mind operate independently of each other. For Whytt, the power of the “sentient soul” or the nervous system enabled various parts of the body to have communication with one another without the intervention of the rational mind or the conscious will. This chain of communication fed into Darwin’s idea of “the chain of animal motions” which allows the extremities of the nerve to give rise to simple ideas, impress them on what he calls the sensorium, which will then enable the sensorium to make associations between different ideas. Darwin locates the spirit of animation at the “nerves”, and this clearly follows the physiological theory put forward by Whytt or William Cullen of Edinburgh. Darwin’s application of this idea onto the personified world of nature is observed in his first poem The Botanic Garden. Darwin believed that some plants possessed the same nervous system as humans. In Canto III, Darwin addresses to the sensitive plants which he calls “Pellucid forms”: “Guard the coy blossom from the pelting shower, And dash the rimy spangles from the bower; From each chill leaf the silvery drops repel, And close the timorous floret’s golden bell.” (Economy of Vegetation in The Botanic Garden. The Scholar Press, 1973. p.p.147-9) Darwin explains that “[t]his action of opening and closing the leaves or flowers does not appear to be produced simply by irritation on the muscles themselves, but by the connection of these muscles with a sensitive sensorium or brain existing in each individual bud or flower.” As Desmond King-Hele has stressed in his recent biography on Erasmus Darwin, his theory of idea was indeed very influential (King-Hele 290) especially to the Romantic imagination. “Our ideas” says Darwin, “are movements of the nerves of sense, as of the optic nerve in recollecting visible ideas” (Zoonomia 519). Ideas are not just present in the mind, but are “visible” according to Darwin. For example, in The Temple of Naure, Darwin gives prominence to the power of vision. For him, the “fallacy” or the illusion such art as metaphorical devices can create is occasioned by an artist’s cautious manipulation of the audience’s somatic response. Here, the nerve becomes the canvas on which the artist paints. The eye’s clear glass the transient beams collects; Bends to their focal point the rays that swerve, And paints the living image on the nerve . . . And the mute language of the touch is sight. “Hence in Life’s portico starts young Surprise With step retreating, and expanded eyes . . . . (The Temple of Nature, 1803, A Scolar Press Facsimile, Canto III. ln.131-146) The ideas will be collected from the senses, especially from the visual sense. This is central to Darwin’s idea of an artist. His notion of “ideas” is embedded in the body’s capacity to stock a pile of sense-impressions. He illustrates this process with four bodily responses, which are “irritation,” “sensation,” “volition” and “association.” “Irritation” is response to external stimuli, and when the sensible nerve is acted upon by internal stimuli, “sensation” arises. The exemplifying case would be the state of dreaming. Zoonomia covers a wide range of biological subjects and it includes the chapters on “Sleep,” “Dreams,” and on “Reverie,” and the definitions of these three conditions call into question the independent operation of the sensibility cut off from external stimuli. It is this power of the sensorium that Darwin developed in his medical treatise and also in his poems. Darwin holds an ambivalent view on the power of imagination. On the one hand, he characterises “reverie,” as a “disease of the epileptic or cataleptic kind” (Zoonomia 225), because this is a condition when one’s sensibility is precluded from the perception of external objects. On the other, he celebrates this capacity to “repeat” in the absence of the external body, by which they were first excited” (Zoonomia, I, 46). This is what I mean by Darwin’s poetical imagination. One would have considered this a paradox, since creativity was often regarded as incompatible with imitative process. Edward Young had defined originality and genius in the following passage. An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; Imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art and labour; out of pre-existent materials not their own. (Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition 1759, 12) Rather than setting the function of “repetition” or “imitation” against the originality of a genius, as Young did, Darwin considered it as a precondition of all organic activity, including, of course, creative acts. He states, “our perceptions themselves are copies” (Zoonomia, I, 254). The propensity to imitation is therefore interwoven with our existence. One of the controversial issues concerning Darwin’s materialist position of “ideas” and “imagination” is the issue of “generation.” If we take the imagination as our point of departure, the most relevant question would be, “to what extent does the power of imagination gain ground in the process of foetus creation?” The answer has to be “as much as the ideas stored in the sensorium of the male parent allows.” Since creativity for Darwin entails literally “re-producing” the ideas and projecting onto his act of creation, his theory of generation may be epitomized by his statement that “The act of generation cannot exist without being accompanied with ideas.” Generation, for Darwin, is a creative act more than a biological necessity. The imagination of the artist with a chissel is used as a metaphor to elaborate on the process of generation. The conclusion he draws runs like this. I conclude, that the imagination of the male at the time of copulation, or at the time of the secretion of the semen, may so affect this secretion by irritative or sensitive association . . . as to cause the production of similarity of form and of features, with the distinction of sex; as the motions of the chissel of the turner imitate or correspond with those of the ideas of the artist. (Zoonomia I, 519) As it is suggested, Darwin believes that the similarity of form, feature, or sex, corresponds to the imagination of the father. In his scheme, through what he calls the chain of animal motion, the rudiment of the foetus consisting of a simple living filament (as muscular fibre) is capable “of being excited into action by certain kinds of stimulus” of the father. Therefore he foregrounds the material changes of the foetus affected by the parent’s imagination. However, the stimulus, Darwin clearly states, is received from the male parent and not from the female (ibid). Darwin elaborates that irritations followed by pleasurable or painful sensations arise to meet the needs of the embryo such as those of hunger and suffocation (ibid). The role of glands in making accretion possible is illustrated by those of the liver which produces bile and also of stomach which secrete gastric acid, and these glands he notes have their secreted fluids affected, in quantity and quality, by the pleasurable or painful sensations of the parent (Zoonomia 518), and again this is the male parent. The theory of nervous system emphasises the sympathy between the ideas and the body, so quite naturally Darwin believes that the parent’s idea will partially explain the forms and figures of his foetus, which he calls “the wonderful effect of imagination” (522). He relates a story of a gentleman that testifies to this belief. A gentleman has one child with dark hair and eyes, and this he thinks odd, because his lady and himself have light hair and eyes, and their other four children are like their parents. This gentleman was positive that it was his own imagination, that produced the difference, because after the lady had the fourth child, he was attached to a dark-eyed girl whose form “dwelt much in his mind for some weeks” (523). But Darwin’s conviction on the power of male imagination runs counter to his fundamental belief that sexual reproduction is central to “change” for improvement as well as mutation, which holds the key to understanding “evolution.” He refutes the preformation theory which held that either the male or female parent has the “prolific fluid” or the generative power to form the embryon. Darwin’s theory of the nervous system enabled him to break through the idea that foetus is “pre-formed,” because the parent and the child is in constant communication. Darwin takes issue with Buffon, the leading naturalist of the eighteenth century, not because he gives...