Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

The 19th Century
Presentation 6 of 13

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.
Giant Steps into the Permanently Dissolving World.
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 10, 1984

Transcript:
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The date is January the 10th, 1984. This is the sex lecture in a series of lectures by Roger, where on the 19th century, tonight's lecture is entitled Darwin who lived 1809, 1882, the origin of species and the descent of man giant steps in to the permanently desolving world.
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And the population of persons interested in the 19th century is diminutive to say the least, the reason for this is, is that it is in fact, as I characterized a blind spot because of two conditions operative on us. At the same time, we are sandwiched in between a civilization that has become so sophisticated that it's structural origins are hidden. Now this guy's mask where a sandwich in between that complicated civilization and an unconscious whose integrative structure is now in a noumenal level, out of phenomenal sight and not appreciable by consciousness. So the very area that in an integrative sense, went to constitute both the societal conditions and the unconscious mental substrate of our daily awareness. Our consciousness seemed to us to be not interesting. And it's curious, one can talk about almost any era of human history, any culture, and draw a crown. But when you talk about the necessary information that has made us what we are and made the, where, where are we are?
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We find a appalling lack of interest. This is significant. It is not just happenstance. It is predictable. And I predicted it in the first lecture we have seen through the 19th century series, but the popular understanding of the 19th century individuals, yes, totally skewed that there is no real appreciation for their ideas as they presented them. But only in terms of isms developed long after they were dead by individuals who had other purposes in mind, largely purposes of control of other human beings. And so the genius of the 19th century has largely gone to waste. It's become fodder for all kinds of tyrannies, rather than the ground for a better society, for a better perspective of man, that all of the individuals that we are taking in the 19th century course sincerely had in mind, it was the purpose of individuals from the beginning to the end to better man, better his conditions. Increasingly we have seen that the attempt to characterize the world in materialistic terms has run aground every single brave attempt to further man's control and understanding of the world. And that is in itself upon a material basis has ended in making more problems than there were at the beginning because the phenomenal world, the material world has dissolved before his penetrating glance.
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Uh, it as if, as if man able finally to look with a structured, scientific vision, deeper into the world, into the material world and where he thought he was going to touch bottom or find bones or find laws, he found only increasingly a sense of enormous gaps gaps in time gaps in space gaps in comprehension. And his dis ease becomes paramount with the individual that we have tonight. Charles Darwin Darwin is perhaps the most significant voice of the 19th century. He in fact has been compared to Newton and his effect upon world thinking. But whereas Newton has largely been displaced and superseded by Einstein. Darwin has not been superseded has not been displaced is still a matter of controversy even to this day, the difficulty which Darwin faced was one of an interior orientation. Now he faced all kinds of problems as a man, man, he was born into a very notable family, a wealthy family.
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He was as a young boy, somewhat overshadowed by his father. His father was an enormous man about six, three weighing about 330 pounds, and then an enormously, uh, influential and wealthy man. His name was Robert Charles. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin had been a very famous scientist in his own, right? Had in fact been given the epithet by the great poet color edge. It was said that when anyone made up speculative ideas on the grand impossible scale, that they were Darwin icing, this is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of Erasmus Darwin. So when Charles came into the world and he was born incidentally exactly on the same day that Abraham Lincoln was born February 12th, 1809, these two great spirits came into the world at the same day, in the same year, uh, very close to the same time. So that Lincoln and Darwin in effect are like the castor and Pollux.
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They're the twin guiding stars of the middle of the 19th century, the fulcrum of its whole import. And just as the origin of species would come out and begin its great trial. It came out in 1859 and the early 1860s were a battlefield. So to Lincoln faced in the early 1860s, another kind of a battlefield. So in a way there is a vast grand significance to Darwin. He is a protagonist of Epic origins, tragic dimensions upon the scene of history. It is very hard to appreciate the man in this context, but we're going to try when he was eight, his enormous father hope that Charles would go into some career that would make him proud of him.
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We have all faced this condition. Charles, who felt at home as a youngster, playing in the fields, collecting insects and little already having this outlook upon life. Every time the father would bring up the issue of what he should do, he should go into medicine. He should become a doctor. He would be sent to Edinburgh to become a doctor, the university there, one of the best for medicine at the time, it was a family tradition. Charles began to suffer from little anxieties, palpitations of the heart, uh, sweating a sense of bill ease within himself. A sense of, uh, of, um, enormous, uh, nausea in his diary. He uses the word in new way, E N N U I all the time. But whenever he found himself, even later in life without something to do, the annuity would close in on him. Charles, in order to not look at his life too closely did not do well.
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And Edinburgh. In fact, he was totally unprepared to be an academic person. Consequently, he was pulled out of the university of Edinburgh and the family like all large wealthy English families probably held a meeting and it was decided that perhaps Charles with his sensitive nature should go into the ministry. And so Charles was sent to Cambridge and for three years in Darwin's own words, he wasted himself at Cambridge. He was not particularly uninterested in religion. He was in fact a religious man, but he was a man who had no interior integration, no sense of who he was. No sense of viability as a man and as is characteristic in these conditions, he fell in with a drinking shooting, a hunting shooting, bunch of companions of low mind and simply dissipated himself.
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Fortunately for Darwin, one of his professors at Harvard, a man named Henslowe took notice of the young man and generally a talented individual Henslowe as a very great professor. Um, easygoing one, uh, uh, would like to, uh, uh, think that, uh, men like Henslowe are the unsung heroes of history. They are really the individuals who, uh, take the care. And so Henslowe for the next couple of years without becoming a father to him, shaped Darwin's life. He arranged for a very famous naturalist named Sedgwick Adam Sedgwick to take the young Dar one about, uh, 19 years old, 20 years old to take him on a field trip through Northern Wales, collecting specimens and so forth. And when they returned to Cambridge, Darwin found in his room, a letter and hens had made it another contact for him. This letter was from captain Fitzroy of the beagle, inviting Darwin to become a naturalist aboard the bagel.
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It was going on a world voyage. So hens is the man responsible for in a very mature way, the way in which an older man handle somebody of genius like this, without telling him simply prepared, stepped conditions, which if the young boy went through them would provide their own initiatory experience, provide their own structuring. The voyage was to be without pay. But in the conditions of those times, this was nearing 1830. The naturalist aboard these British vessels would be able to sell whatever collections they made. And usually at quite a handsome profit. This was an era where the British control of the open seas around the world was almost paramount. A British ship could go almost anywhere in the world and find protection. And we'll see that, uh, uh, in one great event, uh, it was British might that saved the beagle from an attack in, uh, Argentina.
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So the idea was that since the shipping was going around the world all the time that these ships would take naturalists with them, they would also take artists with them. And these individuals would record the world and bring the world back in terms of specimens and notes and journals back to the new Alexandria, back to London, back to the place where all the world was finding a focus. And in the 19th century, London became increasingly the capital of the world, the intellectual capital of the world. So the young Darwin decided to go on the voyage and yet his father wanted him to become a minister. He had it in mind that my boy is going to succeed is going to be a credit to the family. There was nothing in being a naturalist at all. There was, uh, it was, uh, uh, on the level of a petty adventurer, uh, somewhat on a, uh, on the level of a butterfly collector today who had just simply not, uh, do for the sky and of a famous wealthy family.
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His father said, I will let you go under one condition that you find me one reasonable man who can answer my arguments against you're not going. And he proceeded to write out the arguments for Charles beautiful penmanship on fine paper, folded them very neatly, stuck them in his coat pocket and said, uh, if you can confuse these by finding one reasonable man, then you may go. So Charles had the problem. Where was there in his father's eyes, a reasonable man? Well, he went to the Oasis in his life. He went to his uncle Hosea Wedgwood's place. I hesitate to call such a large establishment of house and the Wedgewood tribe the father had, uh, uh, made, uh, his mint in pottery, famous still to our own day, an extraordinarily intelligent family. The Wedgwood's always have been, uh, very, very much, uh, alert, intelligent as to civilization and culture.
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Uh, in our time, the great English composer, Rafe bond Williams was very close to the Wedgwood's also so young Charles Darwin went to visit his uncle and Hosea Wedgwood out with Charles on one of these hunts, one of these Fox hunts, uh, overheard Charles telling one of his companions about his dilemma. And so Josiah took him back to the house. Immediately sat him down, decided to, instead of writing out the objections and answers, he would go in person, household Charles, back to the family home and debated with his father. Not very long. Jose Wedgwood was a very reasonable man and, uh, Robert Darwin's eyes, he was a self-made businessman experienced man of the world and he answered every point. And so Charles joined the staff of the beagle as the naturalist and in 1831, the beagle set out. Now in these days, it was not just a matter of sailing out the Thames into the sea.
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One had to go around to various ports. And in fact, it took two months in Plymouth simply to, uh, get, uh, certain corrections on the beagle, uh, outfit. It, we can piece together by the kinds of activities surrounding the beagle at this time that evidently the ship was pretty see Warren rotten, as they say. And so most of it had been replaced by solid mahogany. At this time in the 1830s, England was able to bring the best materials into the world, uh, to England to work with. And so Philippine mahogany, which is an exquisite wood for shipbuilding was used in the beagle, totally outfitted was quite a fine vessel. Everything was brought up to date all the equipment that one could imagine at the time it was outfitted much like an astronaut space capsule today. The finest of everything that captain Fitzroy later, a vice Admiral in the British Navy, somewhat a temperamental individual, a fastidious man, not quite an, a Hab, not quite captain Bligh, but fess did.
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He is to almost to a breaking point, as we will see his main concern was with leading the proper life in religious terms. And man must have the world ship shape, uh, after all, uh, this is exactly what God intended for us. And we would, uh, take matters very seriously into the mouse drum where we not to tend to matters with great, uh, diligence. So the good captain fits dry while being a very great captain for a vessel with somewhat brittle and temperamental as a man, but Charles Darwin, who was a young man, just starting out in his twenties, uh, full of enthusiasm, looking up to the older man, uh, decided to go on board. Now, the beagle, which was a 242 ton vessel, about 90 feet long was carrying a compliment of 74 individuals. Uh, many of these individuals were, um, not crew onboard, uh, for instance, uh, were three natives, two young men and one young girl from Tierra Del Waco, captain Fitzroy had picked up and Tierra Del Fuego had actually bought them.
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In fact, one was named, uh, Jemmy button because he'd been bought for a few buttons. Uh, Fitzroy. His idea was that he was going to bring some natives of Chera Delph way, go to London, educate them at his expense. Uh, find a minister from the church of England to go back with these natives and established Christianity and Tierra Del Fuego. This was his pet project. That's something he looked forward to. This was doing his a bit. And if the world were shipshape, why everything would work out. And, uh, one of the little legacies that's Fitzroy I could think about in this with his dying breath was that he had Christianized, Tierra Del Fuego at his own expense. Many of the other crew of the beagle were individuals who were associated with the kinds of activities of information gathering. The beagle ostensibly was to map the coast South America, actually the coast of Patagonia.
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That is the coast of Argentina all the way down to chair Del Fuego and back up around Chile. That coastline is one of the most rugged in the world and was inadequately mapped at this time. In fact, picture in your minds, uh, the shape of South America about halfway down is, uh, the estuary of the Rio Del Plata with Montevideo on the upper part and Buenos Aires on the lower part, about 600 miles South of Buenos Aires was as far as European civilization had gotten the rest of the seven or 800 miles of South America was Terra incognita. Nobody had been there. In fact, Darwin is one of the first of the Europeans to travel, uh, across the Pampas, uh, from, uh, this, uh, I think it's called point Del Carmen to back up to, uh, Buenos Aires. We'll get to that. I think that's the name of it at any rate, right?
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The beagle set out. And finally, when they were able to, uh, leave Harper sailed out into the Bay of dis Kay and very, very soon and countered the heavier Atlantic put in at, uh, several places along the way, but were unable to land at the A's of ours. For instance, there was a great fear of an outbreak of disease from England. And so they were not allowed to shore at a tenor ease. They went to the Cape Verde islands and then further they, um, stopped at the, uh, anchored at the St. Paul rocks, about 600 miles off the coast of Brazil, somewhat, uh, uh, several hundred miles beyond the Cape Verde islands. And there an enormous number of, um, birds, um, turns and galls and so forth. We're just blanketing the rock. And the crew probably I'm bringing about, uh, 30 or 40 sailors on board, went onto the St.
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Paul rocks for meat. They were killing the birds. And since they had never seen human beings, they were unafraid. And they brought this, uh, uh, mess of birds back Darwin, who had been seasick all this time. If you've ever been seasick, you know, what a tremendous, uh, bout of ill confidence, it breeds he had been lying as in his hammock, almost continuously, uh, about the only thing one can do is to maintain absolute silence and immobility. When one is besieged by seasickness, uh, incidentally, the cure is to go on deck and look at the sky because the sky does not move it reinstates an interior orientation, and you're able to eat in a couple of hours if you survive.
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But poor Charles had laid in this hammock now, 74 men on a 90 foot yacht, and we have to call the beagle a yacht, even though it was a ship in those days, it was pretty cramped in order for Darwin to get his feet in his bunk, they had to pull a drawer out of a dresser. That's how crowded it was. These are the intolerable conditions for today's traveler, but these were Intrepid individuals on the steering wheel. As the beagle was engraved, England expects every man to do his duty. So the empire was in full sway. And this was simply something that you did when they reached Brazil. The first port that they put into in Northern Brazil breasts seal on the Atlantic coast about the big bulge of breath seal is the venerable old city of Bahia by here today has close to a million and a half people.
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And this time by HIA was probably a 30 or 40,000 souls had been established for some time by the Portuguese by here was the first place that Charles Darwin went his shore in the new world. And when he went his shore, his diary records, they yeah, explosion of color and life before him. Now, he was used to the tasks that churn British mind, the environs of Cambridge and Edinburgh and the family estates had been taken from that reduced down alchemically to the beagle and placed on the Atlantic with its endless deep blue and plunging and simmered for several months and then suddenly turned loose in the tropics. Well, the young man just, uh, uh, felt that the world had opened up in something and Darwin responded something very deep in Darwin responded to the luxuriance of the world. There was an awakening, there was a, a penetrating quality of the basic fact that the earth is alive and teaming.
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It's a quality, not usually at perceptible in England, where, where you're eating fish and potatoes, but when you're dropped down, but here, all of a sudden they riotous, uh, vegetation, the birds, the, uh, chatter of the people, the people of Bahir are extremely gracious and fluid. One of my very good friends is a businessman and by here and, uh, there are very smooth and generous and, uh, it'll take all day to, uh, have a meal and it'll take all night to digest the meal. And, uh, that's sort of living Darwin spent some time making little excursions and see was the naturalist. Since he hadn't done anything on the voids except line his hammock, he began collecting specimens. And as he wrote through, but here, it seemed to him that, uh, in fact, he was getting interested in his, in his work. Um, the beagle then sailed down to Rio de Janeiro.
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And when they reached Rio at that time, probably a city of 40 or 50,000 people, almost all of what we could see in Rio today was open countryside. Um, Darwin, I was invited by an Irish plantation owner named Patrick Lennon to accompany him inland to his plantation. So Darwin went along with him and it took several days to go up the coast and then to go inland, as soon as they arrived at the plantation, Darwin noticed that his congenial Irish friend Lennon changed from a jovial companion to a tyrannical dictator. He arrived on the plantation conditions were not exactly to his liking. He collected the slaves on the plantation master together, and he threatened to take all the women and children to Y us, uh, to Rio and sell them and, uh, put them in an iron. And all this was given in one fell speech. And Charles found himself nauseated sick at heart. That fellow human beings should be treated this way.
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Now we have to truncate so much in these lectures. I don't get a chance to really fill in all that much for you, but the cause of human freedom in the 19th century was one of the pet peeves of Josiah Wedgewood. Wedgewood had made up a medallion as a matter of fact, showing a Negro, uh, in chains, looking up with the caption, am I not your brother? And so young Charles Darwin had received these ideas in the drawing rooms had entertained them as an English gentleman in his sensibility. And when he ran across the injustice brutally, all of a sudden it was the dark side of the luxurious of the jungle that dawned upon him. It was the way in which man was manhandled by other men. It was the sense that the civilization of the British empire, which stood for everything that Darwin respected and admired and would aspire to Britannia rules the waves, but with such cruelty, how is it possible?
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And is it possible? Is there not some hidden, dark, mysterious truth? Somewhere here, Darwin coming back to Rio, I joined the beagle, which had been mapping the coast all this time. He had spent a month or so in the interior collecting specimens. He was beginning to get into the job of being a naturalist, but ideas were beginning to crowd in, upon his mind Fitzroy, all this time had been reading Genesis over and over again, preachy tone to the crew to Darwin, since he and Darwin were some of the most educated people on board. There were times when there were violent arguments creation had happened in six days. One could compute that the world has been created in 4,004 BC. It was hardly thousand years old. All of the world that we see Fitzroy would say over and over again in terms that were simply the Kant and rant and rave of the early 19th century mind, not just particularly British, but the 19th century mind. What we see is the world that God created. Everything is just as it was from the day of creation. Noah had saved the species of animals and every creature that is alive today is descended from that earth stock. Nothing that was on the arc
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Is missing and anything that was not on the arc is not to be found
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On earth.
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And all of this has happened. So that 3000 years ago was about halfway back to the beginnings of time. Darwin had found when they got to Binus RAs, that conditions there in terms of human society were somewhat upset. There were constant revolts going on at least four or five times in Darwin's diaries. Uh, there are tremendous social upheavals. In fact, he was there when the, uh, great dictator Rojas took over Argentina Savage, man Darvin, uh, had spent some time with him and knew him well, but Darwin also had become an avid collector of natural goods. And he
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Found
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Somewhat South of Venus RAs in a region known as Bahia Blanca, about three, 400 miles to the South. He had found a stretch of exposed hillock, where there were tremendous skeletal remains sticking out of the soil. He had, by this time taken on an assistant named Covington, Sims, Covington, who he never really liked, but at least he wasn't an assistant. He was somebody that could help him out. He had, uh, uh, taught him how to prepare a specimens and he was useful to him. Now, Darwin had taken many books with him, but his three favorite books were the Bible Milton and the first book of Charles Lyles principles of geology, Lyles principles of geology finally came out in four volumes. Darwin bought the first volume in London, just as he was leaving. He bought, he was sent, uh, the second volume. Uh, he was in Buenos Aires and the third volume he would receive when he would get to Valparaiso Santiago in the fourth volume he would get when he would get back.
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Oh, sir, Charles Lyle was the first great geologist. He made geology, the science, which it became. And sir, Charles Lyle was the first man scientifically to produce the idea that rocks take an enormously long time to change, but that they change that there is no way in this world. That 6,000 years is enough time for geologic events to happen. Now, this argument was so profound as not to be perceived. The profoundness arguments are not perceived by the time they, in fact do not occur as conscious integrations, but only the shockwave implications occur in the intuitive levels. This is why prophecy and so forth is actually a misunderstood phenomenon. It's actually the shock ways of the implications that are, are detectable of large integrations that are in reality, uh, happening at the time, be that as it may, Darwin carried Lyle's principles of geology in one pocket.
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And in the other pocket, he carried Milton's paradise lost. And he constantly read out of these two books. He's long sense, but the Bible down, he knew the Bible. He was getting it, read to him every other day, but what he had in his pockets for the principles of geology and paradise lost when he was digging these bones, he was constantly aware that these were species that were no longer extent on the earth. These were large, the species. In fact, he found a ground slot that was so large fed off the tops of trees. And in the mix, Darwin was enough of a naturalist to recognize that the bones and skeletons that he was finding were animals that belong together. That is to say they were a larger versions of animals that still formed to an ecology. As we would say today, that there were certain kinds of birds and the river, certain kinds of mammals and, uh, uh, variations of them that fit together like cows and sheep and goats occur together in one given geological epoch.
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So the idea that he had found a matrix of life that had at time existed and now did not exist, began to seep into his, uh perceptibility. And of course, coming up from inside was the arguments brought up in view of search Lyles geologic time was that there may have been, uh, many creations, but that the Bible only talks about the last creation, the creation, uh, where a man was concerned. And so there was no need to talk about a previous creation so that perhaps, uh, the principles of geology and the principles of Genesis could be folded together in this kind of a false shuffle. But Darwin found in the skeletons by Bahia Blanca, the skeletons of horses. Now there were no horses before the Conquistadora is in the new world. And these skeletons were definitely horses and they were very large. And so Darwin began to theorize and speculate.
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And in his voyage of the beagle diary, he remarked to himself that a grand conception has occurred to him that the enormity of South America, as a continent, must've at one time, then an Island, and that the isthmus of Panama must've been underwater and that the whole population of life on South America must have evolved, must have grown up. Must've come into manifestation in isolation. A very big idea is very difficult to float a conception like this in 1831, 1832. This is very tough. This takes a lot of courage. Consciousness takes courage. You have to be able to face those ideas, especially when you're alone. So he put it down in his diary and his field notes, and he let it go. Darwin was, uh, enjoying himself. In fact, he made, uh, uh, uh, several attempts to, uh, get to know, uh, the Spanish and somewhat the Portuguese language Spanish mainly at this time.
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Well, the beagle continued further South. They were mapping the coast. They got down to [inaudible], [inaudible] the land of fire, fire, and ice temps. She was storms the worst weather in the world. I have several friends from Chile who have been there and they attest to the fact that it's no better now than it was then. And it will be no better in the next century. It's just a terrible place to be. There are storms that continuously generate themselves the great, uh, currents of the Atlantic and Pacific, uh, come together there. And there is, uh, maelstroms and, uh, the inner penetration of weather systems just raises, uh, unholy havoc. The three natives and the missionary were finally disembarked. The ship's crew, went out and dug a nice vegetable garden. The natives were given nice little presence, all the tea, China and porcelain, everything were unloaded for the missionary to show the progress of civilization and the beauty of Christianity.
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And the three wagons were put a shore and they're finding English clothes a month later, it would come back. And it was fine that the two of their flagons had run off into the wilderness, gone native again, the third was hardly recognizable with his Mediterra and his nakedness and his tattooing. It just come back from a warring party, the missionary fearful for his entire life. Everything had been stolen the day that the beagle had sailed away, the vegetable garden had been trampled on, and he was laughed at, by the savages and Tierra Del Fuego. The Fitzroy is poor character just suffered a great blow from this. It was a tremendous blow to him. How ungrateful was life were savages and for Darwin, the glimpse of the decadent levels to which man can descend penetrated again, that there were Savage depths in the world, too horrible, perhaps to really plumb. One had to take, take them in stage by stage that one had to go very carefully. It was like the grand descent of Dante into the Inferno was child's play compared to the descent. That one would really go into if one was facing the primordial depths of creation in this world. So Darwin began, his descent began his conscious sizing up to himself in terms of a courageous Explorer of what the significance was of these primordial masses of possibility.
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It began to occur to him also as a man that he would have to strengthen himself that he was okay too thin, too thin. He needed to be stronger as an individual. So the beagle was going back up North. It had to go all the way back. In fact, to, uh, Buenos Aires and Montevideo for supplies, there were no supplies and Tierra Del Fuego. In fact, they had run into a very, uh, dangerous situation. [inaudible] three of the boats from the beagle had gone out on them, an excursion with Fitzroy and Darwin, and they were about a hundred miles from the beagle. And, uh, they were watching, um, glaciers break off and a plunge into the ocean there in the streets of Magellan. And what of these or bets that, uh, fell on was a huge and enormous. And in fact, it created a whole sequence of waves that came through this narrow channel and Darwin, uh, earned the, uh, undying gratitude of, uh, Fitzroy by being one of the first back to the boats and holding onto them.
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And this wave, uh, swapped the little spit of land that they had been on. And actually it was Darwin who saved the day. It was his courage as a man. It was his ability as a human being to face what could have done a death, one of two ways he's drowning then and there, or being isolated from the beagle, never being here, able to get back, uh, as a consequence, uh, okay. Fitzroy named the large mountain in the background, Mount Darwin. So the largest mountain then, uh, on Tierra Del wig or the Island, the big Island is Mount Darwin in honor, of this act of Charles Darwin. They had made their way back part way, ask if he might not be put ashore so that he could go Overland and explore the 600 miles of terrain between this, uh, point, uh, uh, Carmen and bueno saris that he would live in fact with the gauchos and would go across the landscape there, the Fitzroy, and everybody else thought this was a little dangerous for him, but they agreed that if he could go over land, as far as, uh, um, uh, by he had Blanca that they would then, uh, consent to have him go on alone.
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El Carmen, that's it El Carmen in Patagonia, uh, very near the, um, uh, 300 acres, not the Rio Negro in the Northern part of, um, South America. The Rio Negro in the Northern part goes through, uh, uh, Venezuela into the, uh, Amazon meets the Amazon in Brazil. This is the Argentine Rio Negro and above it about a miles of the Rio, Colorado Darwin was able to handle himself fairly well. He was able to ride a horses. He made his way to, they encampment at Bahiya Blanca that a grade that he should go on the rest of the journey. And it took him several months in fact, to get to Buenos Aires and all the time he lived with the gauchos, he loves on the diet, exclusively of meat, the only, uh, variation where, uh, eggs of a type of a bird, it's like an ostrich, but it's called the area. In fact, one prominent species is called RIA Darwinian.
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He learned to throw a BOLO. He toughened up, he toughened up as a man. His, uh, face became, uh, wind, uh, burnt and tan. He grew a beard again wearing, uh, the poncho and the, uh, hat and, uh, riding the horse. Uh, he often would say that, um, the gauchos could never walk because they were born on horses and rode horses all their lives. So they had spindly both legs. And once in fact, uh, when one of the gauchos horses had to be shot because of a broken hoof, a Darwin walked for about, uh, 15 or 20 miles, the gauchos began to respect Darwin and, uh, um, they had several pet names for them, all of them to do with a, uh, an Intrepid, uh, Englishman all the, while he was keeping his naturalist notes all the while he was writing his paradise lost. And Lyle's second volume of principles of geology and all the, while he was maturing as a man, he was now about 25 years old coming into his own.
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And he began noticing that on the way there large, large stretches of the interior of the Pampas, where there were Marine fossils and the conception came to him slowly over many starlet nights and over many long days, just leading the manly life on the horse. The conception began closing in on him that this had been sea bottom at some time, but he needed a key. He needed a clincher. He needed to see the Andes, that it was the card area of the NDAs. That was to be the linchpin for him in terms of massive understanding of the geology and hence the evolution of South America and hence of life, he fell in with, um, general Rojas, uh, outset, uh, Rojas who became the dictator of Argentina. But before that, he was just a, uh, uh, chief den, uh, uh, Garrison commander out on the edge of nowhere, somewhere in here, I have a, a photograph of him showing, uh, the kind of surly South American, uh, tyrant look that is become familiar for a century and a half.
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I won't go into all the gory details, but they were unsavory people to say the least the genocide against the Indians of Patagonia was horrendous. They were simply rounded up and killed. They were a mess security, except for the pretty young girls who were sent to, um, make the rounds of the infant treatment. It was estimated that there were about 10,000 Indians in Patagonia. And by the time that Darwin would have gotten back to England, they were probably down to several hundreds. And today they're extinct when they got back to Buenos Aires, Darwin records in his, uh, diary, uh, coming into town. And these are the kinds of things that he did. He riding into plaintiff's arteries was a, uh, an uplifting experience for him. It was like, uh, uh, when one goes to a, a football game at the age of five, and it was somehow larger than life.
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It coming out of the wilderness coming out of the wilderness of a young man, um, maturing both as a human being and the team during a great idea in himself, he came into Buenos Aires, somewhat on a triumphant, visionary, keen. This is what he bought. He shopped with the bending, says writing pens, paper, bees, wax resin, mouse, traps, glass, jars, powder, and balls for his pistols, a pair of trousers, stockings, gloves, handkerchiefs, a nightcap cigars, snuff, scissors, French dentist. He had trouble with teeth spurs, the GARS dentist, an animal without a tail. We don't know what that was. And in books, new lenses for the microscope scientific books, the second volume of Lyle's principles of was there. The great force of Lyles arguments were coming home to him. The great force of Milton's vision of man's nature was coming home to him. Darwin's own capacity to experience life in a grand fullness was coming together.
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And right before him, as if showing the mutability of all life Argentine society was just breaking up. There were all kinds of revolts. There were black revolts from the slaves that were engine revolts. There were revolts between arm detachments, Darwin almost missed the beagle. He had a bout of malaria inland. Uh, he had gone North to do some collecting, had gone North because he had heard of some fossil beds. He was awfully glad that he went to these fossil beds because what he found there were petrified, uh, uh, indications in the fossil evidence that in fact, he had been right, that it had been under sea and that the rocks had been under the sea for a very long time. That according to the material in Lyle, that it had been under the sea for millions of years, it had been above C previous to that, and it had life forms for a millions of years.
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All this was boggling to Barwon, and now it was back up again, all of this was boggling. The key was in the ND somewhere, somewhere there, he finally recovered from his bout with malaria. He was nursed by an old Indian woman for about a week. The common misconceptions that Darwin was appalled by natives by primitive man. The fact is as he was appalled by the ill manners of the Chera Delft awakens, but many of the other Indians that he found he sympathized with. And, uh, he was a great, uh, uh, lover of human rights. He found a way to brave the garrisons that were fighting and surrounding binders IRAs. He told, uh, one captain who was about to, uh, uh, take him as a prisoner, that he was a personal friend of general Rojas and that, uh, he would see to it that this man was either rewarded or punished depending on what he did now, that kind of Manliness had come into, uh, Darwin's life. He saved his young companion, uh, Covington. He saved all of his specimens. They were packed up, uh,
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In Montevideo and sent off and the beagle outfitted itself again, and began sailing South finally heading towards the Pacific. A great thing happened as sometimes will happen. I remember once reading and writings of Benjamin Franklin, the first time as a young man, when he was coming back from England in the very middle of the Atlantic was trying to compute where the middle of the Atlantic was. And he was testing the water to try and determine where the Gulf stream was. Franklin was that kind of a man too. And, uh, right at the middle point of the Atlantic ocean, there was a full moon and some odd, uh, uh, celestial happenings. And the young Franklin knew that he was on the right road. It was an indication to him. Same thing happened for Darwin in a larger than life, natural occurrence, but in the context of a man maturing as a human being and maturing a great vision within and bringing together great visions of geology and paradise lost as they sailed out of the Rio Del Plata estuary onto the Atlantic, all of a sudden the sky was covered with butterflies and this rain of butterflies thick, his snowflakes lasted for hour upon hour.
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This shower of blessings from mother nature, for the young visionary on his way. Finally, a stiff see when came up and, uh, the mask was blown away, but Darwin records it, uh, very much we would say as a metaphysical visionary happening, of course, he's a scientist, very famous Victorian. We can't say such things or can't wait to beagle. Continued made its way. Finally against a great storms are always storms around Tierra Del Fuego made its way around the Cape there. They finally made it up to, uh, Val [inaudible]. The Valley of paradise is what it's called. It was a grubby little port. It's the port of Santiago. Uh, OCHIN Cod was visible, uh, on clear days. There are a lot of Smaug there now, but you can still see Aconcagua 22,000 feet high off in the distance and the end days. And Santiago's, uh, uh, just below it and Valparaiso on the Seacoast.
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And as soon as Darwin landed, he beat it to the end. He's now he had tried once when they were, uh, very far South in Patagonia, where they had to put in for landing one time to make a few repairs, he and Fitzroy, and a few other individuals had taken a boat about 150 miles up this river. And they had come within sight of the distant, uh, uh, range. And the Darwin was so anxious to get up there and make his, uh, survey that he, uh, talked Fitzroy into, uh, making a dash for the NDAs. And they went for a whole day as fast as they could with almost no equipment. And, uh, he said that the mountains looked just as far away as ever. So they turned back, actually he got within 30 miles of the Andes at that point, but when he got to Valparaiso, he and his companion and a couple of other higher-ed, uh, natives, one into the endings, and he spent some time there. He was there that Darwin had the confirmation and kind of a confirmation that comes only in poetic visions of great heroes. He found out about the 12 to 13,000 foot level. And one of these giant high passes, he found a Grove of petrified white pine. They were embedded underneath a seabed sedentary level.
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They had grown as a Grove in this region so long ago that the Andes had sunk down beneath the sea and had been under the seabed for untold outbox. And then all that had risen back up and risen to 13,000 feet. It was startling to Darwin because it just simply turned as a key that Lyle was right, that there were enormous distances in creation that the creation of the world has not taken place in 6,000 years or 6,000 million years, but in enormous gaps of time, fast vistas aveces of time. That in fact, the very nature of life itself was constantly in motion in patterns so large that man's microscope perspective simply viewed them as solid Darwin was realizing that there is no solidity in the world. Not even mountains are seeds that they change that are still changing. He came down from the, these from the high clear, pure blue, white visionary capacity, which he had seen in those white pine petrified fossils up in the clear air.
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And it was just like the compliment that continually happened in his life. He would come back with the bright idea, the butterflied angel [inaudible] inspiration of very superior genius. And he would find that the human life around him was just in total disarray. He came back and he found captain Fitzgerald on the point of madness, he'd received communication that all of his expenses that he had laid out, uh, he had bought another ship called the adventurer and outfitted it with the crew, uh, with his own money. He expected to be paid back by the British Navy. This was helping his mapping course. They wrote back that, uh, he had made a mistake. Uh, he would have to bear the expenses, himself, many things crushed him. The idea that the wagon said rejected Christianity and his own overtures. He had argued with Darwin and Darwin was bringing all kinds of evidence. Uh, and he was talking about how Genesis was not true. It was too much for him. He felt that he was going insane. In fact, he appointed some buddy Alice, a man named Wigan as captain of the beagle and, uh, retired to a cabin to fall into depths of mental depression from which he expected never to come out.
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But Darwin came from the Andes and his vision back to that, these kinds of contracts, white and a man's hair. Okay. Some of these old portraits that we see of the age of Darwin looking like Walt Whitman or Tolstoy, um, because he lived long ages, he did have the experiences which produced this, this aging. They finally talked to captain back into sensibility. He sold the adventure for 1400 pounds. A very handsome price, made a lot of money on the deal, decided that he would be captain of the beagle. And they went further North. They went to the Galapagos islands and they got to the Galapagos Darwin. Okay. Keeping his notes meticulously. One of the great characteristics as a man was that he now had long since made the decision that his life's work was not in the ministry, but as a naturalist. So he's was going to be a good naturalist and Darwin's notes are some of the best scientific notes ever taken.
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That is to say they are not pre-digested by any kind of false ideation. They are accurate, um, recordings, the information available at the time in great detail. For instance, when, uh, Darwin, uh, would return to England, he would spend many years decades going back over his notes because he knew that his notes were honest. They were true in the sense that this was exactly what he had found exactly what he'd experienced. He hadn't doctored it up in any way. So it was like a, it's like Dylan Thomas, who wrote all of his poems, uh, from a notebook, which he had written as an adolescent. And he realized that he was truthful as an adolescent. And no matter how degenerate he might be as a grown man, if he wrote his poems based on the adolescent notebook, they were good poems because they, it was true experience. Same thing with Darwin. He knew that his notes, his journal on the beagle were fastidiously, correct. That he would not have to go back to the field that he could refer to as notes. And they were accurately there to mirror exactly what the conditions were. So that Darwin was the first great scientists to prove to himself and to his companions, that a rigorous methodology is indispensable in the quest for vision.
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He was the first, if we can use this kind of language, he was the first Yogi of science. The first to show that you have to have a rigorous methodology and it has to be kept rigorous through the entire circuit of the field experience. And only then in retrospect, do you know what you did? There was, there's no way to write up conclusions beforehand. What passes for science today is, uh, actually, uh, hired mercenaries of corporate technology. Science is something else. Again, science is a phenomenally great discipline Scientia knowledge knowing how do we know? We can only know by inspecting the clear mirroring of what we find in experience. And it's the accuracy of that portrait trail that gives us the outlook. It's almost like the great symbol of our time is the great 200 inch telescope at Mount polymer. The ability of man to grind, to mirror that fine in that true, allowed him to have the visions of the universe, which polymers gave him.
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There's a direct correlation between the rigorousness of a methodology and the penetrative correlation of the vision, impossible, the whole, uh, discipline that's involved. Uh, whenever man looks at anything, Darwin was the first to quantify and make usable a scientific methodology in the scientific area that he chose. And later applied by many others. If you look at the advances in mathematics and physics after Darwin, because of the use of his scientific methodology, the rigor of it, you get some idea of the true influence of the man. It isn't just, but he made the ideas of evolution. It isn't just that he singled out natural selection it's that he showed year after year, decade after decade, over 40 or 50 years of unstinting labor, that man can grind it out and refine that mirror of nature in his experience and know, because through that mirror, he can reflect back to his mind, back to his ability to integrate all the information as it actually is.
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And that accuracy will give him the truth. That's the confidence, that's the vision. We still have it today. That's what makes us go on the Galapagos. Although he did not realize it at the time he was making detailed notes Island after Island, after Island. And later on, he would find out in reviewing his notes that the indications that he thought were there were in fact, they're in great scope that they birds, for instance, the finches varied from Island to Island. But even though they were separated by only 40 or 50 miles of ocean, that the finches could not fly from Island to Island, that they were isolated populations that the Galapagos as a archipelago, where evidence that isolated populations evolve all the time separate from one another. And that evolution is constantly going on in gradual gradiations division. Was this not only was life, not just 6,000 years old, but the movement of life forms is constantly going on.
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But gradually that if we expand our vision to millions of years, tens of millions of years, we are able to appreciate the infinite gradiations of evolving nature. So that reflecting back, integrating back the application of this true movement of life and nature to the very inquiry that is revealing, it leads us to the conclusion that science will only gradually reveal. That's true that it may take a long time. It may take thousands of years for instance, but that this should not daunt an individual who only lives 70 years or 80 years or 90 years, that the accrual of actual graduations of information over a long enough duration, a man will yield man, the truth, a true perspective that there will come a time. There will come a moment as it was because Darwin was acquainted by this time having found those moments in his life already.
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And he would find more, I guess, we're not going to get to too many more, but he knew that eventually the information comes together. That is when you write up your report, that is when you deliver your vision to the world. That is when you make the declaration, because the writing of a book like the origin of species is an event. It's a strata and a large scale process who knows how long this has been going on, that you cannot force a species to manifest because it will then miss manifests Darwin extremely wise, man, not at all, not at all. The kind of Victorian, usually painted a very wise man, that if you rush the evolution of the development of some species that always misfires and one always gets a kind of stunted in fertile phenomenon, hadn't occurred to him yet consciously, but he was thinking about civilizations for sure.
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The first civilization seeks to fudge on our knowing about life and science. We're gonna miscarry it. We're going to have a stunted in fertile vision and it's not going to do anybody. Any good that's lurking. There it's lurking. How am I say lurking? I used that word lurking, uh, circumspectly here, Darwin, when they would get back to England, they would go all the way of course, to Tahiti. And they would go to New Zealand and they would go to the Keeling islands out in the Indian ocean and, uh, over and over again, uh, he would, he would, uh, amass information. Finally, after five years, they got back to England. He went to Oxford immediately. When he got back, they hardly recognized him an observation. At the time someone recorded, one of his relatives recorded. She said of him. The shape of his head is different. Interesting, very interesting.
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Darwin had three older sisters and, uh, they mobbed him with their relations. And after two or three years, he finally were married. Emma Wedgewood, uh, one of the youngest daughter of Hosea, which was his cousin. And, uh, he would eventually inherit, uh, on a state and a, an income of about 5,000 pounds a year in the 1840s, 5,000 British pounds a year was a lot of money. You could, you could do a lot with it, but Darwin retired to, down to his house with his wife, with his book, with his papers and didn't publish anything for about, uh, 15 to 17 years. Why it wasn't just the reluctance of, of a man, uh, Victoria, not wanting to face the scientific world. It was the wisdom of a man not wanting to rush
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A species, his own
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Realization into a miscarriage. Why didn't you let it mature? Let it come up to the point of maturation. And so Darwin, conscientiously like a grand craftsman working on a huge mural, went back again and again, to his notes, to his specimens, to, uh, his thinking through it. Am I understanding this? Am I understanding not only the information am I understanding the, the vision of all of this, the flow and patterning of the idea is this in fact occurring to me in a correct way, am I dealing with science? Because by now Darwin realized that he would never, again, in his life has the comfort of religion. There was no chance for him to go back. There was no solace in Sunday services. There was no solace in any kind of a doctrinaire, a position. Darwin was one of those men who had cut the umbilical cord to his childhood and his adolescence and had stepped off into the wide world.
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Then he received a letter after long years of study alone, a letter from a young man named Alfred Russell Wallace. Very great man, very fine, man. He had lived with the natives for awhile and the jungles of Brasil and the Amazon had loved the health full play of the young native children recorded in his diaries. If only English boys could, could play with the natural freedom that these young so-called savages play, uh, uh, the sort of naked in the sun, uh, kind of healthfulness that they had. And he compared that with the kind of convoluted, uh, uh, social structure that the industrial revolution had drawn on on England, you let her went on to the Malay, archipelago, archipelago, and collecting information. There had come to the same conclusion that natural selection was the method by which evolution produced new species in the world. That in fact, the species that we find today, none of them were around for the original creation that in fact, species change all the time and are mutable that the species of think are floating on a fluid sea of change. And that that change has a pattern. One of gradual evolution, one of the arguments brought against the Darwin was that the fossil record showed no intermediate stages. There were no graduations. There were just reptiles. And then there were birds, 1861. The discovery of the, uh, areola here was a reptile that had feathers and flew probably didn't fly very much, but it probably could glide from branches down to the ground and so forth.
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The letter from Wallace was a company, but an article singling out his arguments about evolution and natural selection. It said nothing about survival of the fittest. We went through that when we talked about Spencer hurt was Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase survival of the fittest, not Darwin, not Russell Wallace, Darwin, realizing that someone else had come to the same conclusion independently took his material, took his arguments to some friends. He said, what must I do as an honorable man? And they said, what you must do in all conscientiousness as for you to write an article, summarizing your view and for you and Russell Wallace to publish them together. So these two articles were published in 1858 and an OBS skier scientific journal, and were totally ignored. Darwin who had wanted to mature his ideas indefinitely. He probably would have gone on for another 10 or 20 years. He might've even died without having brought his work to a fruition, but then the articles had been published. He decided to write a precis of the larger work that he had in mind. And that single volume was called. The origin of species
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Was
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Published in 1859 and it was sold out the day. It was published.
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It caused an immediate starer.
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It has been unending to our present day. It went through four or five additions very quickly. The addition that I have here from the heritage book, uh, edition is from the sixth edition of the origin of species. The last that Darwin himself prepared in his lifetime, but the origin of species is, but a precis is, but a philosophic, prelude it's, but a forward to the work that Darwin had in mind, he imagined to himself, an enormous series of volumes, painstakingly, meticulously tutoring, the reader, tutoring his mind, tutoring, his sensibility, do not look to the conclusions, do not look to the great statements, the shocking statement, look at the evidence, learn to see the differences, learn to follow the gradiations learn to see that, uh, here are all my experiments for 25 years with flowers, he would write a book on, uh, flowers. In fact, uh, the list of Darwin's books is very long.
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They're usually, uh, left out here are some of them, the formation of vegetable mold through the action of worm, the power of movement and plant different forms of flowers and the plants of the same species. These are all books, the effects of cross and self fertilization in the vegetable kingdom. The various contrivances by which orchids are fertilized by insects movement and habits of climbing plants, insectivorous plants, the variations of animals and plants under domestication, the emotional expressions of man and the lower animals journal of researchers into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of the beagle around the world, the descent of man and selection in relation to sex in origin of species by means of natural selection. So you see that Darwin's publications themselves, and these are only the ones published. This is an 1871 edition of the descent of man.
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Um, many
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Of his books came out later. The autobiography of Charles Darwin and selected letters edited by his, uh, a relative, uh, Francis Darwin. The university of Chicago press published these two volumes, the papers of Charles Darwin. And if one simply goes over these again and again, here's a whole essay on the origin of mold. The genius of Darwin was to reproduce inappropriate form the information and the evidence that he had amassed so that the presentation of it would educate the individuals to whom that was being given that they would tune themselves like he had tuned themselves himself over years and years in the field, decade after decade. And the study that if you just give somebody these phrases, it's going to be destructive to them. If you just tell them that man is on a very precarious pinnacle in life, hardly even here at all, he's either not going to believe you or he's going to castigate you, or he's going to take that idea and whip all kinds of fantasies into shape on the basis, that idea he has learned nothing.
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He has learned nothing as a human being. He has not learned how to see and how to tell for himself. And he is not mature to the point to where the idea occurs to him in a natural matrix of science, of knowledge, of information. Darwin's very much a Buddhist. The gradual way is the only way because they integration at the end is about a culmination of all the work that one did. If you didn't mix all the ingredients of the recipe, you don't have a cake, so you have to go through this. So Darren was extraordinarily reluctant to publish. And then when he did published, published a whole sequence of books, which were parts of a large work, the maturation of his audience, to the point to where they could see for themselves that this was not guesswork. It wasn't speculation. These were not ideas that he was particularly inordinately proud and triumphal about as an individual. This was the hard one piecing together all of the specimen bone by bone knuckle, by knuckle and fragment by fragment over 45 or 50 years of life painstaking work given with the notion and the idea and in the spirit that this was, but a mirror beginning of science that we may not know for a thousand or 2000 years, what kind of pattern we have found, we don't know we're still finding it,
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But the difficulties that Darwin had, and he was accused of everything, of trying to destroy the faith in God and trying to destroy the church. And, uh, and, uh, England, every conceivable thing, Darwin would not enter into argumentation. In fact, another individual, are we out of time?
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No, you're good.
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Two individuals took up the cudgel on behalf of Darwin. One of them was Alfred Russell Wallace and his great book Darwinism, an exposition of the theory of natural selection. Russell Wallace said, Darwin. He has a, is an enormously Titanic influence and intellect. And it's not a question of two men finding the same theory. It's a question that he is, has the superior methodology. It is his vision, which is true. And I defer to him in all cases. The second man was T H Huxley Darwin's bulldog who would take on everybody, including Bishop Wilberforce. Uh, I don't have time to read you any of the quotations I singled out, but these books exist. And th Huxley, uh, the great defender of Darwin, this book is called
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Apes
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Angels and Victorian the story of Darwin Huxley and evolution, eight angels and Victorians. This is the kind of material that's constantly around. Uh, Charles Darwin, very interesting in our own time, there've been a number of very good books on Darwin. And I think I should just give you these for the record, the best single book Darwin and the Darwinian revolution by Gertrude Himmelfarb, extraordinarily well written book. And if you have the opportunity to read one book other than Darwin himself, this is it. It's in a Norton paperback for about nine 95. This book Darwin and his critics, the reception of Darwin's theory of evolution by the scientific community is an eye opener, an eye opener, as I said, Darwin's great influence is that he is the first really great world-class scientist to show that a rigorous methodology is the only way to canvas his field of information. And that you do not know what you're going to find. You don't know what you're going to find When Einstein would take his rigorous mathematical thinking and survey the field of information that he singled out for himself. He couldn't believe what he came up with either, but he knew that it was based on rigor and had come up, not through speculation, but through mathematical certainties and science, and as long has man's mind, has those structures in formation. This view is right. This view is true in that it obtains
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And therefore we have to live with it on those terms. This book shows that the scientific community of his day was anything but scientific. This book, Charles Darwin, a man of an large curiosity by Peter Brent is quite excellent and attempts to show what I was doing in the lecture here, that Darwin matured by, uh, clumps of vision and that, uh, like an old Oak finally, just simply it had so many great seasons of growth that, uh, he, by his girth and plunging rotes and branching ideas was magnificent, magnificent, man, Darwin and America, the intellectual response, 1865 to 1912.
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Uh,
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The great debates at Harvard at this time, Lewis August he's on one side and Aisha gray on the other, uh, very, very famous, uh, Darwin incidentally as a contemporary, not only of Abraham Lincoln, but of, uh, Emerson. A lot of the maturation of the human mind in the 19th century is all due to Charles Darwin. That is to say his ability to have matured. The human outlook is one of the most, uh, indelible contribution that he made the generation that came after Darwin, the generation that would have matured and come, uh, to the end of their lives before the first world. War is a generation of genius. You look at the generation that were productive from 1870 to 1910, and that's the generation of genius. Those are the people who actually use the visions that were made by the pioneering giants, who were those pioneering giants. Gee, we have all kinds of books on them. I guess we've talked about them in our lecture series.
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Um, I brought
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One here. I don't know where it is right now called, uh, Darwin
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Marx
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And Wagner by shark Barzani. And they had it someplace in my stack of books, I guess it got drunk. These individuals made a quality of mind, which was based upon a philosophic rigor of rotating through a field of information, a certain pattern methodology of outlook
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[inaudible]
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Marks in terms of economic history, Wagner, in terms of art and music Darwin, in terms of, uh, biology and natural, um, uh, naturalism paleontology, actually in geology, the three of them produced a quality of mine. That was like a Crystalens form, able to reflect multifaceted possibilities in one integration, all of the so-called metaphysical thinking of the late 19th century and early 20th century as an offshoot, a byproduct only of this capacity made by these other individuals. Those few that could take that multi-dimensional world like Einstein and think with it are still out there by themselves, have not been displaced, have no successors have not had successors, but only commentator. And consequently we're in a period of, uh, real, uh, backsliding in our own time, the 1980s, intellectually or travesty, the seventies were a travesty and the sixties and fifties hardly worth it.
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A recent volume published by Cambridge university press evolution from molecules to men. This is the best single volume on a Darwin. And it has of course, a prologue called how far will Darwin take us? And this was published 1983, just came out a couple of months ago from Cambridge university, press and evolution from molecules to men. All of this, as you've seen, constitutes a discovery, a discovery on our part, that is to say, we are involved in this particular series as we have been involved for the last four years and taking a kind of a rigorous methodology that notion that whatever happens in a real listic way centers in the manifestation of human beings and not on some ideational plane and that the study of human beings in some kind of a sequence in some kind of an order, some kind of a collection and pattern for a given time period will give us some basic information about that, uh, time period about that happening.
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If we do this enough, we're going to get some sense of connecting the dots into a pattern. And again, we have found tonight with Darwin, as we have found the previous five lectures that the 19th century has been totally misunderstood has been distorted by those in the 20th century, who would seek to aggrandize their positions. One of the most infamous cases in the 20th century was the fraud perpetrated in the Soviet union by a biologist named [inaudible], who talked about how phony, uh, uh, uh, evolution and so forth was, and, uh, had his pet theories about, uh, uh, the way in which, uh, crop seeds could be, uh, manifested by certain kinds of, uh, uh, tampering. He gained the favor of Stalin and, uh, because of Lysenko is a terrible personality. Stalin had all kinds of, uh, great Russian, um, biologists and geneticists put into prison camps. But Sunco single-handedly was given the reigns of fruit production in the Soviet union and, uh, produced all the catastrophes that are still happening in the Soviet food production. I Senco died in 1976, one of the real characteristic, 20th century villains, somebody who would take a few of the speculations from the Wiseman from before totally distort them for his own purposes and produce an infer tile rushed, miss manifestation.
(01:37:57):
This happens so often in the 20th century, but the only way to characterize the century finally is the century of humbug. I think some American once said that we have to go back and we have to view how we got here. The 19th century is profoundly influencing how we got here and where we are, who we are. And in that century, wherever we're going to look, we're going to have to look at Darwin in depth. We're going to have to look at marks in depth. We're going to have to look at Wagner in depth and Telequah Bentham and all the individuals that we have taken so far. And in fact, we find that with Darwin, we come to a watershed that the enormous outpouring of genius on the organization level on the level of trying to marshal together, the material world, make it fit a pattern, make it be founded in the material world has come increasingly to not increasingly it slips away.
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So now we begin to notice a subtle change we're getting on into the century, and this is a subtle change. The men of genius, the individuals of genius begin to concentrate, not so much on the large structures that could be found, but on the sense of a new way that Darwin found in those awful moments, when he wasn't doing something and we'll find increasingly the kind of intelligence that comes out, that there is something in man that needs to be seen, but there is a quality of man that has been obscured that he must be seen again. And in fact, it can't be seen just individually. One cannot go out and live the contemplative life, live the meditative life. Sure. You could save yourself that way. What about the world? What about other people? What about the conditions that are here?
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So we find after Darwin that the emphasis changes the emphasis now is trying to appreciate man in the broadest possible tapestry. We're going to take a look at man and the rest of the individuals in the course, no longer look to the material world, but they look to man to try and figure out the pattern there. First one that we'll come to as the great writer of comedy him in order to evolve that. And that'll take us all the way through Dickens, his travail [inaudible] Brahms. Finally, we'll come to Tolstoy who as Faulkner once said, when you have written the last word, you can break your pencil because there isn't anything more you could write. You have said it let's help somebody read it. Well, thank you all for coming out and listening to something boring, like the 19th century.
(01:41:26):
Yeah.

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