Canto III
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ORIGIN OF SOCIETY.
CANTO III.
PROGRESS OF THE MIND.
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CONTENTS.I. Urania and the Muse converse 1. Progress of the Mind 42. II. The Four sensorial powers of Irritation, Sensation, Volition, and Association 55. Some finer senses given to Brutes 93. And Armour 108. Finer Organ of Touch given to Man 121. Whence clear ideas of Form 125. Vision is the Language of the Touch 131. Magic Lantern 139. Surprise, Novelty, Curiosity 145. Passions, Vices 149. Philanthropy 159. Shrine of Virtue 160. III. Ideal Beauty from the Female Bosom 163. Eros the God of Sentimental Love 177. Young Dione idolized by Eros 186. Third chain of Society 206. IV. Ideal Beauty from curved Lines 207. Taste for the Beautiful 222. Taste for the Sublime 223. For poetic Melancholy 231. For Tragedy 241. For artless Nature 247. The Genius of Taste 259. V. The Senses easily form and repeat ideas 269. Imitation from clear ideas 279. The Senses imitate each other 293. In dancing 295. In drawing naked Nymphs 279. In Architecture, as at St. Peter's at Rome 303. Mimickry 319. VI. Natural Language from imitation 335. Language of Quails, Cocks, Lions, Boxers 343. Pantomime Action 357. Verbal Language from Imitation and Association 363. Symbols of ideas 371. Gigantic form of Time 385. Wings of Hermes 391. VII. Recollection from clear ideas 395. Reason and Volition 401. Arts of the Wasp, Bee, Spider, Wren, Silk-Worm 411. Volition concerned about Means or Causes 435. Man distinguished by Language, by using Tools, labouring for Money, praying to the Deity 438. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil 445. VIII. Emotions from Imitation 461. The Seraph; Sympathy 467. Christian Morality the great bond of Society 483-496. |
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CANTO III.PROGRESS OF THE MIND.
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Or mark how Oxygen with Azote-Gas Next with illumined hands through prisms bright* How Oxygen, 1. 13. The atmosphere which surrounds us, is composed of twenty-seven parts of oxygen gas and seventy-three of azote or nitrogen gas, which are simply diffused together, but which, when combined, become nitrous acid. Water consists of eighty-six parts oxygen, and fourteen parts of hydrogen or inflammable air, in a state of combination. It is also probable, that much oxygen enters the composition of glass; as those materials which promote vitrification, contain so much of it, as minium and manganese; and that glass is hence a solid acid in the temperature of our atmosphere, as water is a fluid one. |
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Beneath the waves the fierce Gymnotus arm, and by the gymnotus, are supposed to be similar to those of the Galvanic pile, as they are produced in water. Which water is decomposed by the Galvanic pile and converted into oxygen and hydrogen gas; see Additional Note XII. |
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Now in sweet tones the inquiring Muse express'd The indulgent Beauty hears the grateful Muse, |
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Pleased Fawns and Naiads crowd in silent rings, And Irritation moves, l. 64. Irritation is an exertion or change of some extreme part of the sensorium residing in the muscles or organs of sense in consequence of the appulses of external bodies. The word perception includes both the action of the organ of sense in consequence of the impact of external objects and our attention to that action; that is, it expresses both the motion of the organ of sense, or idea, and the pain or pleasure that succeeds or accompanies it. Irritative ideas are those which are preceded by irritation, which is excited by objects external to the organs of sense: as the idea of that tree, which either I attend to, or which I shun in walking near it without attention. In the former case it is termed perception, in the latter it is termed simply an irritative idea. |
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"These acts repeated rise from joys or pains,* "Oft from sensation quick VOLITION springs,* And young Sensation, 1. 72. Sensation is an exertion or change of the central parts of the sensorium or of the whole of it, beginning at some of those extreme parts of it which reside in the muscles or organs of sense. Sensitive ideas are those which are preceded by the sensation of pleasure or pain, are termed Imagination, and constitute our dreams and reveries. |
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p. 89 |
Hence Recollection calls with voice sublime alphabet in the usual order; when by habits previously acquired B is suggested by A, and C by B, without any effort of deliberation. Reasoning is that operation of the sensorium by which we excite two or many tribes of ideas, and then reexcite the ideas in which they differ or correspond. If we determine this difference, it is called judgment; if we in vain endeavour to determine it, it is called doubting. |
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"And last Suggestion's mystic power describes* "ON rapid feet o'er hills, and plains, and rocks,* Association steers, 1. 91. Association is an exertion or change of some extreme part of the sensorium residing in the muscles and organs of sense in consequence of some antecedent or attendant fibrous contractions. Associate ideas, therefore, are those which are preceded by other ideas or muscular motions, without the intervention of irritation, sensation, or volition between them; these are also termed ideas of suggestion. |
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Converge reflected light with nicer eye "The branching forehead with diverging horns The branching forehead, 1. 103. The peculiarities of the shapes of animals which distinguish. them from each other, are enumerated in Zoonomia, Sect. XXXIX. 4. 8. on Generation, and are believed to have been gradually formed from similar living fibres, and are varied by reproduction. Many of these parts of animals are there shown to have arisen from their three great desires of lust, hunger, and security. |
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The fly of night illumes his airy way, "Proud Man alone in wailing weakness born,* The fly of night, 1. 113. Lampyris noctiluca. Fire-fly. |
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Untipt with claws the circling fingers close, Trace the nice lines of form, l. 125. When the idea of solidity is excited a part of the extensive organ of touch is compressed by some external body, and this part of the sensorium so compressed exactly resembles in figure the figure of the body that compressed it. Hence when we acquire the idea of solidity, we acquire at the same time the idea of figure; and this idea of figure, or motion of a part of the organ of touch, exactly resembles in its figure the figure of the body that occasions it; and thus exactly acquaints us with this property of the external world. |
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"Slow could the tangent organ wander o'er* The mute language of the touch, 1. 144. Our eyes observe a difference of colour, or of shade, in the prominences and depressions of objects, and that those shades uniformly vary when the sense of touch observes any variation. Hence when the retina becomes stimulated by colours or shades of light in a certain form, as in a circular spot, we know by experience that this is a sign that a tangible body is before us; and that its figure is resembled by the miniature figure of the part of the organ of vision that is thus stimulated. |
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"HENCE in Life's portico starts young Surprise* the visible figure of the whole in miniature, the various kinds of stimuli from different colours mark the visible figures of the minuter parts; and by habit we instantly recall the tangible figures. |
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The virgin, Novelty, whose radiant train of objects, hoping to find novelty, and the pleasure consequent to this degree of surprise; see Additional Note VII. 3. |
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Who with raised eye and pointing finger leads III. "As the pure language of the Sight commands* Seeks with spread hands, 1. 169. These eight beautiful lines are copied from Mr. Bilsborrow's Address prefixed to Zoonomia, and are translated from that work; Sect. XVI. 6. |
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"Now on swift wheels descending like a star animal passion of that name, with which it is frequently accompanied, consists in the desire or sensation of beholding, embracing, and saluting a beautiful object. |
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Earth at his feet extends her flowery bed,* "Warm as the sun-beam, pure as driven snows,* Earth at his feet, 1. 181.
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Or if the dewy hands of Sleep, unbid, IV. "IF the wide eye the wavy lawns explores, The wavy lawns, l. 207. When the babe, soon after it is born into this cold world, is applied to its mother's bosom; its sense of perceiving warmth is first agreeably affected; next its sense of smell is delighted with the odour of her milk; then its taste is gratified by the flavour of it; afterwards the appetites of hunger and of thirst afford pleasure by the possession of their objects, and by the subsequent digestion of the aliment; and lastly, the sense of touch is delighted by the softness and smoothness of the milky fountain, the source of such variety of happiness. |
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Hills, whose green sides with soft protuberance rise, its hands, presses with its lips, and watches with its eyes; and thus acquires more accurate ideas of the form of its mother's bosom, than of the odour and flavour or warmth, which it perceives by its other senses. And hence at our maturer years, when any object of vision is presented to us, which by its waving or spiral lines bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom, whether it be found in a landscape with soft gradations of rising and descending surface, or in the forms of some antique vases, or in other works of the pencil or the chisel, we feel a general glow of delight, which seems to influence all our senses; and if the object be not too large, we experience an attraction to embrace it with our arms, and to salute it with our lips, as we did in our early infancy the bosom of our mother. And thus [cont. below] |
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Fond Fancy's eye recalls the form divine, "Where Egypt's pyramids gigantic stand, we find, according to the ingenious idea of Hogarth, that the waving lines of beauty were originally taken from the temple of Venus. |
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"Where mouldering columns mark the lingering wreck* "When Beauty's streaming eyes her woes express, terrific, tragic, melancholic, artless, &c. while novelty superinduces a charm upon them all. See Additional Note XIII. |
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Love sighs in sympathy, with pain combined, "The rush-thatch'd cottage on the purple moor, The tragic Muse, 1. 246. Why we are delighted with the scenical representations of Tragedy, which draw tears from our eyes, has been variously explained by different writers. The same distressful circumstance attending an ugly or wicked person affects us with grief or disgust; but when distress occurs to a beauteous or virtuous person, the pleasurable idea of beauty or of virtue becomes mixed with the painful one of sorrow and the passion of Pity is produced, which is a combination of love or esteem with sorrow; and becomes highly interesting to us by fixing our attention more intensely on the beauteous or virtuous person. |
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The bearded goat with nimble eyes, that glare "The GENIUS-FORM, on silver slippers born,* Nature unchastised, 1. 258. In cities or their vicinity, and even in the cultivated parts of the country we rarely see undisguised nature; the fields are ploughed, the meadows mown, the shrubs planted in rows for hedges, the trees deprived of their lower branches, and the animals, as horses, dogs, and sheep, are mutilated in respect to their tails or ears; such is the useful or ill employed activity of mankind! all which alterations add to the formality of the soil, plants, trees, or animals; whence when natural objects are occasionally presented to us, as an uncultivated forest and its wild inhabitants, we are not only amused with greater variety of form, but are at the same time enchanted by the charm of novelty, which is a less degree of Surprise, already spoken of in note on 1. 145 of this Canto. |
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With finer blush the vernal blossom glows, V. "Alive, each moment of the transient hour,* When Rest accumulates, 1. 270. The accumulation of the spirit of animation, when those parts of the system rest, which are usually in motion, produces a disagreeable sensation. Whence the pain of cold and of hunger, and the irksomeness of a continued attitude, and of an indolent life: and hence the propensity to action in those confined animals, which have been accustomed to activity, as is seen in the motions of a squirrel in a cage; which uses perpetual exertion to exhaust a part of its accumulated sensorial power. This is one source of our general propensity to action; another perhaps arises from our curiosity or expectation of novelty mentioned in the note on 1. 145. of this canto. |
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The impatient Senses, goaded to contract, "Hence when the inquiring hands with contact fine* All moral virtues, 1. 288. See the sequel of this canto 1. 453. on [cont. below] |
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First the charm'd Mind mechanic powers collects,* "What one fine stimulated Sense discerns,* sympathy; and 1. 331 on language; and the subsequent lines on the arts of painting and architecture. |
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He justly copies with enamour'd sigh "Thus when great ANGELO in wondering Rome* Thus when great Angelo, 1. 303. The origin of this propensity to imitation has not been deduced from any known principle; when any action presents itself to the view of a child, as of whetting a knife, or threading a needle; the parts of this action in respect of time, motion, figure, are imitated by parts of the retina of his eye; to perform this action therefore with his hands is easier to him than to invent any new action; because it consists in repeating with another set of fibres, viz. with the moving muscles, what he had just performed by some parts of the retina; just as in dancing we transfer the times of the motions from the actions of the auditory nerves to the muscles of the limbs. Imitation therefore consists of repetition, which is the easiest kind of animal action; as the ideas or motions become presently associated together; which adds to the facility of their production; as shown in Zoonomia, Vol. I. Sect. XXII. 2. |
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Ailes, whose broad curves gigantic ribs sustain, "The Muse of MIMICRY in every age* The Muse of Mimicry, l. 319. Much of the pleasure received from the drawings of flowers finely finished, or of portraits, is derived from their imitation or resemblance of the objects or persons which they represent. The same occurs in the pleasure we receive from mimicry on the stage; we are surprised at the accuracy of its enacted resemblance. Some part of the pleasure received from architecture, as when we contemplate the internal structure of gothic temples, as of King's College chapel in Cambridge, or of Lincoln Cathedral, may arise also from their imitation or resemblance of those superb avenues of large trees, which were formerly appropriated to religious ceremonies. |
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The Monarch's stately step, and tragic pause, "Hence to clear images of form belong Imitation marks, 1. 334. Many other curious instances of one part of the animal system imitating another part of it, as in some contagious diseases; and also of some animals imitating each other, are given in Zoonomia, Vol. I. Sect. XXII. 3. To which may be added, that this propensity to imitation not only appears in the actions of children, but in all the customs and fashions of the world; many thousands tread in the beaten paths of others, who precede or accompany them, for one who traverses regions of his own discovery. |
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VI. "WHEN strong desires or soft sensations move* And the first Language, 1. 342. * There are two ways by which we become acquainted with the passions of others: first, by having observed the effects of them, as of fear or anger, on our own bodies, we know at sight when others are under the influence of these affections. So children long before they can speak, or understand the language of their parents, may be frightened by an angry countenance, or soothed by smiles and blandishments. |
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"Thus jealous quails or village-cocks inspect* "From these dumb gestures first the exchange began |
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And hence the enthusiast orator affords "Thus the first LANGUAGE, when we frown'd or smiled,* "Hence the first accents bear in airy rings* [The tongue, the lips articulate, l. 367. See Additional Note XV.]* |
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Name each nice change appulsive powers supply by one word by changing its termination; as amor, love; amare, to love; amari, to be loved. |
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The next the fleeting images select "The GIANT FORM on Nature's centre stands,* "Last steps Abbreviation, bold and strong, 390 VII. "As the soft lips and pliant tongue are taught* |
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And sound, the symbol of the sense, explains "Whence REASON'S empire o'er the world presides,* In parted links, 1. 398. As our ideas consist of successive trains of the motions, or changes of figure, of the extremities of the nerves of one or more of our senses, as of the optic or auditory nerves; these successive trains of motion, or configuration, are in common life divided into many links, to each of which a word or name is given, and it is called an idea. This chain of ideas may be broken into more or fewer links, or divided in different parts of it, by the customs of different people. Whence the meanings of the words of one language cannot always be exactly expressed by those of another; and hence the acquirement of different languages in their infancy may affect the modes of thinking and reasoning of whole nations, or of different classes of society; as the words of them do not accurately suggest the same ideas, or parts of ideal trains; a circumstance which has not been sufficiently analysed. |
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Compares and measures by imagined lines "The Wasp, fine architect, surrounds his domes* called judgment; if we in vain endeavour to determine it, it is called doubting. |
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Secured from frost the Bee industrious dwells, many insects seems to have given them wonderful ingenuity so as to equal or even excel mankind in some of their arts and discoveries; many of which may have been acquired in situations previous to their present ones, as the great globe itself, and all that it inhabit, appear to be in a perpetual state of mutation and improvement; see Additional Note IX. |
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p. 120 | And with instructive foresight still await On each vicissitude of insect-state? 430 Wise to the present, nor to future blind, They link the reasoning reptile to mankind! —Stoop, selfish Pride! survey thy kindred forms, Thy brother Emmets, and thy sister Worms! "Thy potent acts, VOLITION, still attend* Thy potent acts, Volition, 1. 435. It was before observed, how much the superior accuracy of our sense of touch contributes to increase our knowledge; but it is the greater energy and activity of the power of volition, that marks mankind, and has given them the empire of the world. |
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p. 121 | To express his wishes and his wants design'd Language, the means, distinguishes Mankind; For future works in Art's ingenious schools His hands unwearied form and finish tools; 440 He toils for money future bliss to share, And shouts to Heaven his mercenary prayer. Sweet Hope delights him, frowning Fear alarms, And Vice and Virtue court him to their arms. "Unenvied eminence, in Nature's plan* |
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p. 122 | Till our deluded Parents pluck'd, erelong, The tempting fruit, and gather'd Right and Wrong; Whence Good and Evil, as in trains they pass, Reflection imaged on her polish'd glass; And Conscience felt, for blood by Hunger spilt, The pains of shame, of sympathy, and guilt! 460 VIII. "LAST, as observant Imitation stands,* And gather'd Right and Wrong, 1. 456. Some philosophers have believed that the acquisition of knowledge diminishes the happiness of the possessor; an opinion which seems to have been inculcated by the history of our first parents, who are said to have become miserable from eating of the tree of knowledge. But as the foresight and the power of mankind are much increased by their voluntary exertions in the acquirement of knowledge, they may undoubtedly avoid many sources of evil, and procure many sources of good; and yet possess the pleasures of sense, or of imagination, as extensively as the brute or the savage. |
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p. 123 | "The Seraph, SYMPATHY, from Heaven descends,* And bright o'er earth his beamy forehead bends; On Man's cold heart celestial ardor flings, And showers affection from his sparkling wings; 470 Rolls o'er the world his mild benignant eye, Hears the lone murmur, drinks the whisper'd sigh; Lifts the closed latch of pale Misfortune's door, Opes the clench'd hand of Avarice to the poor, Unbars the prison, liberates the slave, Sheds his soft sorrows o'er the untimely grave, Points with uplifted hand to realms above, And charms the world with universal love.* what is generally understood by the word sympathy, so well explained by Dr. Smith of Glasgow. Thus the appearance of a cheerful countenance gives us pleasure, and of a melancholy one makes us sorrowful. Yawning, and sometimes vomiting, are thus propagated by sympathy; and some people of delicate fibres, at the presence of a spectacle of misery, have felt pain in the same parts of their bodies, that were diseased or mangled in the object they saw. |
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p. 124 | "O'er the thrill'd frame his words assuasive steal, And teach the selfish heart what others feel; 480 With sacred truth each erring thought control, Bind sex to sex, and mingle soul with soul; From heaven, He cried, descends the moral plan, And gives Society to savage man. "High on yon scroll, inscribed o'er Nature's shrine,* High on yon scroll, 1. 485. The famous sentence of Socrates "Know thyself," so celebrated by writers of antiquity, and said by them to have descended from Heaven, however wise it may be, seems to be rather of a selfish nature; and the author of it might have added "Know also other people." But the sacred maxims of the author of Christianity, "Do as you would be done by," and "Love your neighbour as yourself," include all our duties of benevolence and morality; and, if sincerely obeyed by all nations, would a thousandfold multiply the present happiness of mankind. |
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p. 126 | "Unbreathing wonder hush'd the adoring throng,* Froze the broad eye, and chain'd the silent tongue; Mute was the wail of Want, and Misery's cry, And grateful Pity wiped her lucid eye; Peace with sweet voice the Seraph-form address'd, And Virtue clasp'd him to her throbbing breast." END OF CANTO III. |
Notes
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 4. "Laqueated ailes" are aisles with panelled ceilings. We are back with the image of the temple as a vast, explorable space.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 7. The image of Nature as a maze or labyrinth into which others are to be led—reversing the legend of Theseus's penetration of the Cretan labyrinth while unravelling a thread to find his way back—nicely combines the intricate temple-image with that of Urania's and the Muse's lifting of the taboo on knowledge at the end of the previous canto (II, 439-46).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 9. From here to line 34 we are given a crash-course in modern science. "First" (9-16) Urania and the Muse look at the big picture, with occasional "or's" indicating successive aspects rather than strict alternatives. A glance at the sky, sea, equator ("burning line," 11), poles and earth's crust is followed by more cutting-edge observations on the gaseous formation of air and water. "Oxygen," "azote" (i.e. nitrogen) and "hydrogen" were terms coined by Lavoisier but (according to the OED) first used in English by Darwin in Economy of Vegetation—the first term in preference to his friend Priestley's "dephlogisticated air" (which, though Priestley discovered oxygen, tied it to an outmoded chemical theory). See Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, p. 246; and also p. 176 for the possibility that Darwin prompted the Priestley/Lavoisier discovery that water consisted of oxygen and hydrogen, in a letter written as early as 1781.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 17. "Next" (17-34) they explore light, electricity, magnetism, gravity and heat, returning finally to Canto I's theme of the creation of life. Their hands are "illumined" by the light shining on the prisms they are holding, but also perhaps because the two Muses are "Illuminati" or teachers of enlightenment. The "sevenfold threads" are the colours of the spectrum into which light is broken up by a triangular prism; the hairs of day become pencils as the rays surrounding the sun's face are focussed by a convex lens to inscribe a single bright dot.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 21. Unlike the previous light experiments, which go back to Newton, the discovery of continuous electric current was brand new. "Resinous and vitreous fire" are negative and positive electricity—known as such because resin and glass were thought to produce different kinds of static electricity when rubbed. The power of electric shocks was long known about from such sources, from Benjamin Franklin's experiments with lightning and from certain fish—the gymnotus or electric eel and torpedo or electric ray (23-4)—but Darwin's picture, here and in 21n, of electricity as a combination of positive and negative "streams" points to the single bipolar force first produced artificially by Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) in 1800. "Galvanic chain-work" (25) denotes the interleaving of different metals in a conductive fluid—some of which becomes converted into gas (26)—which made up Volta's ur-battery or "pile," known for a while as the "Galvanic pile" after Luigi Galvani (1737-98), who anticipated some of Volta's results. For more on this period's electrical discoveries, see Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment.
Additional Note XII, "Chemical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism" is, at thirty-two pages, by far the longest of the Additional Notes. It ambitiously tries to synthesize the groundbreaking electrical findings of the scientists named above, and others including the young Humphry Davy (a protegé of Darwin's Bristol-based friend Thomas Beddoes), and to unify these in turn with magnetism, gravitation and chemical combination in a wider theory of attractive and repulsive "ethers" (i.e. forces) operating almost universally. Darwin's tentative final renaming of these as "masculine" and "feminine" (p. 76) fills out the opening invocation's promise to show how Immortal Love works to "Press drop to drop, to atom atom bind, / Link sex to sex, or rivet mind to mind" (I, 25-6). The theory of attractive and repulsive ethers also underlies the account of the production of life in I, 235-42 and 239n, and is briefly hinted at at the very start of Zoonomia (vol. I, p.1). For a discussion of Ruggiero Boscovich's influence on Darwin 's theory of atomic repulsion, see my note on I, 235.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 27. As throughout, "ether" is virtually equivalent to the modern term "force." The "How's" from here to 24 are dependent on line 21's "Then [they] mark." The "Or" of line 25 relates to the activities of the "electric streams" or currents, not of the two Muses, who now "mark" or observe how compass-needles show the bipolarity of the earth's magnetic field. 21n links this bipolarity of electricity and magnetism to the interplay between gravity (attractive ether) and heat (repulsive ether), in a brief reprise of the notes to I, 235 and 239. Lines 33-4 bring us back to the production of life from these two forces, as described in I, 235-50.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 38. The image of Urania's vision piercing Chaos, Night and unmeasured space carries faintly blasphemous echoes of the victorious shout from Hell which "Frighted the Reign of Chaos and old Night" and Satan's ensuing journey through these regions in Paradise Lost (I, 540; II, 960-7), and continues the imagery of spreading light ushered in by Hymen's torch at the end of Canto II.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 42. "The progress of the mind" is of course the topic of this canto. Having considered some of the most important recent advances in knowledge—the "now no longer interdicted" fruit of II, 442—the Poet's Muse asks Urania how we became able to know such things in the first place. She stresses the apparently unpromising starting-points of the "piles immense" of human knowledge (46): the transient sense-data on which our finer feelings are based (43-4), the soft skin and unfixed gaze which distinguish us from other animals, and also perhaps evoke the childhood in which the foundations of knowledge are laid. "Elf" (47), i.e. "small being," continues this double meaning: the baby already has a potentially gigantic mind when born, but even adults are "puny" compared to other species. Line 48 carries an echo of Pope's "The proper study of Mankind is Man" (Essay on Man, II, 2): without accepting Pope's implication that other knowledge is pointless, the Muse rounds off the poem's information-packed first half with the suggestion that the real mystery we need to understand is ourselves.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 55. Urania's answer returns us to the first canto's tracing of rudimentary psychological development (I, 269-80) in terms of irritation, sensation, volition and association (see my notes to I, 270 and 273 for discussion of the relevant passages in Zoonomia, IV-V, copied as Additional Note II). Human psychology starts from the excitation (55) or irritation (63) of the senses by external forces ("appulses," 56): these give either pain or pleasure, which become ingrained in our perceptions of them.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 59. As an illustration, a sunlit landscape sends out rays which converge to a point on the retina ("moving tablet," 62) of the eye; the visual nerves are irritated and the mind responds to this fact. We might expect lines 63-4 to be in the reverse order, but 64n seems concerned to stress the difference between full perception, where the mind is engaged, and the unthinking awareness which is "simply an irritative idea."
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 65. A somewhat difficult line. "Acts" here are the mental perceptions just discussed, which only begin with ("rise from") the pleasurable or painful contact between sensory nerve and outside world. Through repetition, these habitual perceptions fill our imaginations and either give us nightmares or beautiful dreams, each attached to painful or pleasant images.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 72. "Sensation" is not just the initial contact between sensory nerve and outside world but its impact on the whole "sensorium" which consists of mind and nerves together. 72n quotes again the definition from Additional Note II and Zoonomia, but emphasizes that the initial contact is only the start of the process. It now seems that only some mental impressions, i.e. "sensitive ideas," arise from pleasure or pain and constitute our imaginations. Darwin's thinking here is clearly influenced by the special valuing of such ideas known as "Sensibility."
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 73. As the note explains, "Volition" covers a series of responses to our sensations, some of which we might normally consider involuntary. "Recollection" is deliberate remembering for a purpose (such as saying the alphabet backwards, or the more poetic and/or useful purposes evoked 75-8), while "Reason" involves summoning up two trains of thought and comparing their similarities and differences. When able to relate new ideas to "the known system of nature" successfully (81n), it becomes the "judgment" needed to restrain uncontrolled Fancy (81-2), but cannot do so in dreams or poetic reverie (83-4).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 85. "Suggestion" is the third ("And last" ) aspect of Volition. "Ideal hosts" are groups of ideas, comprising "trains" or linear sequences whereby one automatically triggers another, and "tribes," or collections of logically similar ideas. However, though this may sound much like the Lockeian "association of ideas," explored to comic effect in Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Darwin's idea of "association" starts with the firmly physical. As 91n indicates, its basic application is to muscles so used to working together that they do so automatically, in response to each other or to given physical stimuli. The application of this to a singer accompanying herself on the harp without consciously thinking about each note ("unwill'd," 90) echoes Zoonomia (vol. I, pp. 63-4): "In learning any mechanic art, as music, dancing, or the use of the sword, we teach many of our muscles to act together or in succession by repeated voluntary efforts; which by habit become formed into trains or tribes of association." As in 91n, the purely mental association of ideas is seen as closely modelled on this physical process. For these ideas, Darwin is strongly indebted to Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749) by David Hartley, whose psychosomatic theory of the movement of "tribes" of ideas around the mind-body continuum caused the young Coleridge to eulogize him as: "he of mortal kind / Wisest, he first who mark'd the ideal tribes / Down the fine fibres from the sentient brain / Roll subtly-surging" (Religious Musings [1796], ll. 391-4). See also Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, pp. 378-84.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 93. With an apparently complete switch of subject, Urania lists some animal powers of self-preservation which man lacks. Predatory foxes and hawks have speed on their side, as do the hares and doves on which they prey; vultures and dogs have a keen sense of smell, owls and flies of sight, and lions and horses of hearing. 103-16 lists various weapon-like appurtenances from the large to the minute.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 117. For "Proud Man," see too I, 309-14. He is "born" both through evolution and as a helpless baby: the same ambiguity appears in "young Reasoner" (120).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 122. Man's secret weapon is the naked hand, whose accurate sense of touch and opposable thumb enable it to feel, hold and hence understand the objects surrounding it. The note's reference to Buffon may remind us that II, 122n credits Buffon and others with the suggestion that humans arose from a single family of apes which had learned to use their opposable thumbs and hence "acquired clear ideas." The accurate ideas produced by our grasp of "form" in objects then enable us to consider changes of form and hence measure movement, time, number, weather-shifts, etc. (129-30; 125n).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 131. The hand or "tangent (i.e. touching) organ" cannot gauge very large or small objects: it would take too long to feel a mountain, and it cannot distinguish the contours of mites or baby ants. However, touch is supplemented by sight: the eye's lens ("clear glass," 136) projects the light reflected from objects onto the retina, as a magic-lantern projects moving images onto a sheet in an itinerant entertainment travelling from village to village (139-42). As 144n stresses, we constantly relate visual stimuli to our tactile knowledge of objects (of which sight is thus "the mute language," 144): presumably this compensates us for the keener vision of other animals such as the owl and fly described earlier (100). The Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) by George Berkeley, later Bishop of Cloyne (1685-1753) radically questions the received idea that sight conveys an accurate, unmediated awareness of the physical world to the brain, asserting that "our judging objects perceived by sight to be at any distance, or without the mind, is entirely the effect of experience" (A New Theory of Vision and Other Select Philosophical Writings, Section XLI) and concluding "the proper objects of vision constitute a universal language of the Author of nature. . . . And the manner wherein they signify, and mark unto us the objects which are at a distance, is the same with that of languages and signs of human appointment, which do not suggest the things signified, by any likeness or identity of nature, but only by an habitual connexion, that experience has made us to observe between them" (Section CXLVII).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 145. "Life's portico" is birth: literally the mouth of the womb but perhaps with overtones of the Stoic Portico as a place of education (see I, 424). The retreating step and expanded eyes belong to the personification of Surprise, possibly based on conventional actors' mannerisms, rather than physically to the baby, whose shock at such a complete change of environment is vividly described in 145n. As the note goes on to explain, Surprise is the first stage of a continuum: as the sense of shock decreases, it is replaced by the pleasant sense of Novelty, leading to Curiosity, the conscious desire to repeat it. We do not experience these in dreams, either because the outside world cannot impinge on our senses, or because we have no voluntary power to compare dream-events with reality.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 152. Whereas Novelty was personified as a seductive object of desire (148-52), Curiosity is given the traits of the child she inspires: the use of mouth as well as hands to determine shapes, and the "restless eye" recalling the "rolling eye" mentioned in the Muse's account of the human "elf's" apparent weakness (45).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 155. 155-8 seem like a somewhat hasty attempt to cover the other forces which may determine the child's development, in an echo of Thomas Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" (1747), 51-70. Whereas all the melancholic Gray's schoolboys succumb to one or other of the "murth'rous band" of "vulture Passions" which stand "in ambush" for them, however, the optimistic Darwin makes half his passions positive and offsets the "nameless Vices" of 158 with the more fully described prospects offered by Philanthropy.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 163. The "pure language of the sight" refers us back to 144, where sight is the "language of the touch" or, as 144n puts it, "a language, which by acquired associations introduce the tangible ideas of bodies": i.e. we only understand what we learn from touch by reference to visual ideas.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 167. The way we move from tactile sensations to the visual sense of beauty is explored in terms of Darwin's relationship with the mother's breast. Initially attracted by its warmth, after the shock of losing that of the womb, the baby progresses from tactile to oral to visual enjoyment. As 169n indicates, 169-76 are taken directly from Dewhurst Bilsborow's "To Erasmus Darwin, on his Work entitled Zoonomia," prefaced to Zoonomia (1794), and based on a passage from it (vol. I, pp. 200-202)—which in turn is partly copied in Additional Note XIII). Bilsborow (1776-?), a young devotee of Darwin's, was at Cambridge with William Wordsworth's brother Christopher and, according to Desmond King-Hele, told him that Darwin admired William's work (Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, p. 288; see too H.W. Garrod, Wordsworth [1927], pp. 55-6): since this was in 1793, this probably referred to the heroic-couplet, politically radical and Darwin-influenced Descriptive Sketches of that year. Despite Wordsworth's repudiation of this style in the Lyrical Ballads Preface and his own later practice, the important passage in The Prelude (1805, II, 237-80), describing the child's transferral of love from its mother to Nature as a whole, arguably owes much either to Bilsborow's poem or to the passage from Zoonomia which it versifies. We know Wordsworth read (or re-read) Zoonomia in 1798 when working on Lyrical Ballads, using it as the source for "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" (Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, 318); he wrote the "Blessed the infant babe" passage in 1798-9, as part of what is now known as the "Two-Part Prelude" (II, 267-310 in William Wordsworth, The Prelude).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 176. "Ideal Beauty" here means the mental idea underlying all beauty. Though "Paphian" (174) refers to the home of Venus, 176n distinguishes the sense of "Ideal Beauty" to which the mother's breast gives rise from the "animal passion" of sexual love with which, however, "it is frequently accompanied." (Darwin may stress the distinction because "Paphian" is Bilsborow's word, not his.)
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 178. 178n continues to distinguish the two kinds of love, identifying "Sentimental Love" with the Greek Eros, who is also the "Immortal Love" of Canto I (15-32). "Sentimental" here means to do with "mental feelings" (OED) rather than sexual passion, which is represented by the more recent god, Cupid, who dominated Canto II (221-50, 361-410). The "Graces" who attend him symbolize Beauty.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 181. Indeed, his birth makes the whole natural world appear more beautiful. 181n quotes from Lucretius's De Rerum Natura: "Before you the winds flee, and at your coming the clouds forsake the sky. For you the inventive earth flings up sweet flowers. For you the ocean levels laugh, the sky is calmed and glows with diffused radiance" (I, 6-9). Interestingly, this passage comes from the same opening invocation to Venus quoted in II, 261n. The fact that Dione (Darwin's usual name for Venus) appears in 189 as Eros's beloved makes for something of a confusion of love deities, especially when we remember that in most versions of their relationship Venus (or Aphrodite) is the mother of Cupid—not usually so firmly distinguished from Eros as here. The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology does, however, mention a variant in which he predates her and welcomes her to Cyprus (149). Along with Robert Graves (The Greek Myths p. 49), Larousse identifies Dione as of an older generation than Aphrodite/Venus, and in some stories as her mother (which would make her Eros's grandmother).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 187. In this passage, Dione seems to represent beauty in general, perhaps with a memory that in I, 372 her sea-birth made her represent "the beauty of organic nature" in particular. It is hard to be certain how far Darwin is playing with the ambiguity of her relationship with Eros—as mother or beloved—to continue the link between the mother's breast and "ideal beauty" (175).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 196. This "Platonic" embrace reinforces the distinction between sexual and sentimental love (though the whole description uses similar erotic triggers to those of Cupid and Psyche, or Adam and Eve).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 205. The oxymoron "chaste seduction" is apt, but the overall application of the myth is somewhat ambiguous. Either a display of "sentimental love" is a good way for men to win women over, or we should forget Eros's gender and consider sentimental love as the particular province of women themselves. Either way (or perhaps both), it is the basis for social harmony.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 207. Though this begins a new section, it really continues the argument about the mother's breast as the source of our ideas of beauty: for possible links with similar passages in Wordsworth, see my note to l. 167. Likewise, 207n simply continues to quote from Zoonomia (vol. I, pp. 200-202) where 176n left off.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 222. The whole idea that "good taste" is objectively verifiable depends on the universality of our idea of beauty, as derived from the breast. Having established this, Darwin now goes on to consider other aspects of taste (i.e. aesthetic response): the sublime (223-30); poetic melancholy (231-40); tragedy (241-6); the picturesque (247-58).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 224. The occasional sublimely awesome "shuddering" of Egypt's and other desert sands is caused by the Simoom, a deadly desert wind described in a passage from James Bruce's Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768-73 (1790), IV, p. 557, quoted in Economy of Vegetation, IV, 65n.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 230n. The Additional Note XIII referred to at the end of 230n constitutes a major essay on "The Analysis of Taste" (which in fact refers itself to 221-2, where Darwin has omitted his usual note guiding us to it). Partly derived from Zoonomia, and sometimes actually overlapping with borrowings therefrom in the footnotes, Additional Note XIII leans heavily on William Hogarth's The Analysis of Beauty (1753). Like Hogarth's, Darwin's aesthetic theory starts with a high valuation of novelty or variety (pp. 81-4; see Hogarth, ch. II, pp. 27-8), which can be linked to his medical interest in the pleasurable disruption of habit as a defence against old age (see Additional Note VII). Also like Hogarth (ch. III, pp. 28-30) he next turns with more puzzlement to repetitive and regular forms, which allow him to include musical and verse metres (p. 85) in an aesthetic which is primarily and overwhelmingly visual. Noting that the pleasures of novelty and repetition can easily tip over into the displeasures of mere surprise and tedium, he stresses the new aesthetic category of the Picturesque as a successful balance of the two, only then moving into the more familiar Burkeian categories (see note on 342n) of the Sublime and Beautiful, with the "Romantic" as an interesting halfway point between the two. The next section, on "Melody of Colours," draws on his son Robert Darwin's research into "ocular spectra" or after-images, which Darwin also incorporated into Zoonomia (II, pp. 328-74) as evidence that the eye actively seeks to counter visual exertions with their opposites, thus (once again) prioritizing change and novelty as primary aesthetic motives. The proposal for a "luminous music" of shifting colour-projections (p. 89) anticipates the disco light-show while also again indicating Darwin's preference for visual over aural pleasures. It is only after these demonstrations of natural, "irritative" pleasures that he moves to those based on that bedrock of eighteenth-century psychology, the association of ideas, of which his primary example is so deeply embedded and universally shared as to be quasi-natural: the mental association of the Hogarthian "line of beauty" (see Hogarth, ch. IX, pp. 48-9) with the memory of the mother's breast.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 231. Lines 231-4 echo the opening of the notorious radical-atheist treatise Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791) by Constantin François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney (1757-1820), which moves from a similarly musing meditation on the ruins of Palmyra, Babylon and Balbec in the Middle East, and Thebes in Egypt, to a contemplation of the "ever-changing" nature of all supposedly eternal theocracies.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 246. In 246n's reference to Lucretius, "L.3" means "Book 3": a mistake since the famous comparison of the pleasures of Epicurean freedom from common illusions to those of someone safe on land enjoying the sight of someone else's shipwreck occurs at the opening of De Rerum Natura II (1-13).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 259. "The Genius-Form" is Taste, a "genius" being "the tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to every person at his birth" (OED), though this meaning may overlap with the sense of special artistic talent which began to appear in the later C18th. 259-68 show how Taste makes the natural world beautiful. "Meridian" (261) means noon; "vernal" (263) means at springtime; "zephyr" (264) means the wind; and "watery glass" (266) means mirror made of water, pool or lake.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 269. A new section begins, focusing on active rather than passive uses of the mind. During physical rest, the senses (i.e., more or less, the mind) accumulate energy which needs to be used (in "contraction," 271) to avoid the unpleasant consequences detailed in 270n. They thus drive us to original thought (though whether the senses get the "change" they need as the ideas "act" (272), or the latter are constantly being changed by the activity of the former, is not quite clear). Darwin's view of both physical and mental health as dependent on the correct balance between under- and over-stimulation derived from William Cullen (1710-90) and John Brown (1735-88), whose theories were particularly prevalent at Edinburgh University, where Darwin studied Medicine. See Maureen McNeil, Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and his Age, pp. 148-53.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 274. The full-stop should be a comma: the senses replay ideas produced by Volition (see 73-92), either following up separate "long" trains of thought or considering them together ("concrete," 273) grouped into their proper "tribes" or classes. Alternatively, they link separate ideas ("sparkling rings," 276) fancifully together into chains, or simply follow the association of ideas wherever it leads, like a stream bubbling up from a well ("translucent source," 277).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 279. For this reason, when we feel the outlines ("circumscribing line[s]," 280) of objects and supplement ("suppl[y]," 282) this information with that gleaned at greater distances by the eye, the pain or pleasure this produces (particularly the latter?) leads us to want to imitate them. In 270n, somewhat out of place, Darwin has already related this idea to Aristotle's emphasis on a natural instinct for Imitation (or Mimesis) as the basis of art, at the opening of The Poetics. 288's claim that Imitation is the source of virtue, language and all the arts will be demonstrated later in the canto, as 288n indicates.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 289. We first use imitation to enable us to do physical things (such as walking); then we copy or "learn" feelings from others.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 293. Our senses can imitate from each other, as when music gives us the rhythm to dance to; or when an artist paints Titian-like nudes, evoking their tactile qualities through copying his visual impressions of them. Titian was particularly prized for his ability to convey the "feel" of flesh: see William Hazlitt's 1817 essay "On Gusto": "Not only do his heads seem to think, his bodies seem to feel . . . not merely to have the look and texture of flesh, but the feeling itself" (Selected Writings 266.)
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 303. Thus Michelangelo produced the massively solid edifice of St Peter's from imaginary visual images which he then transferred to paper. The Pantheon (306) is the ancient Roman temple on which the idea of the dome was based. The columns are perhaps unafraid of time (314) because their spiral form "escapes" upwards from the clock-like completion of the circle. 303n is largely copied from Zoonomia, vol. I, pp. 376-7.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 319. The mimicry used in acting is another form of imitation. "Punch" (327) probably denotes "Punchinello," like Harlequin a stock figure in Italian commedia dell'arte, though the puppet version was also known in Darwin's time.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 334. To summarise: all the arts which make us distinctively human are based on imitation. The conclusion of 334n may be somewhat pointed, given Darwin's traversal of "regions of his own discovery" in contrast to the thousands who tread in others' beaten paths.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 335. The next section concerns the acquisition of language: when we feel something strongly, muscular "association" effects changes in our appearance, which then evoke a kind of imitation of those feelings in the observer, also through association. The first language, or communication of our thoughts and feelings, is thus visual.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 342n. This is taken from Zoonomia, vol. I, pp. 202-4. In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke (1728-97) remarks that "I have often observed, that on mimicking the looks and gestures of angry, or placid, or frighted, or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that passion whose appearance I endeavoured to imitate. . . . Our minds and bodies are so closely and intimately connected, that one is incapable of pain or pleasure without the other." (Part IV, section 4, p. 178). Darwin also refers to ch. IV, section II of Thomas Reid's An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), the founding text of the Scottish "Common Sense" school which attempted to refute Hume's radical scepticism by insisting on a natural, intuitive basis for language and, ultimately, our beliefs in consistent causality and external reality itself.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 343. The aggressive displays of animals, from the jealous cocks and quails of II, 313-20, to primitive man. The lions' manes are "mail" (349) in the sense that they protect the neck. Association's power is mysterious ("mystic," 355), because despite Darwin's best efforts it remains hard to explain exactly how feelings produce such clear external signals.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 360. Traces of this ancient ("historic," 360) means of "dumb" communication appear in modern stage-mimes, and the gestures by which orators reinforce their words.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 363. From body-language we move to speech. Through imitating others, we associate particular sounds with particular ideas: the vibration of the larynx produces the basic volume or pitch of the voice, which the tongue and lips turn into distinct sounds. Though Darwin forgot to direct us by a footnote, lines 367-8 give rise to Additional Note XV, "Analysis of Articulate Sounds." The last Additional Note in the book, this analyses all European speech-sounds into groups which it then boils down to thirteen basic sounds. Darwin rounds off with a description of a speech-machine he himself constructed some time after 1771 with the ability to say "m," "p," "b" and "a" (see Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, pp. 102-4), and with a plea for the creation of an accurately phonetic alphabet. Acknowledging that this would make it harder to trace the etymologies of words, he concludes this will not matter "as metaphors will cease to be necessary in conversation, and only be used as the ornaments of poetry." As arguably his last published words, these are a somewhat sad indication of the growing separation of poetic and rational functions against which Darwin in many ways stood.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 367n. This necessary reference is omitted in the original, presumably by oversight.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 369. This line suggests a fundamentally emotional, expressive function for language: one can imagine a baby, or primal man or woman, conveying or performing all these things without much precisely-learned articulation. The "quick concussions of elastic air" accurately describe how all sound works, but seem particularly appropriate to primal, passion-driven cries. But this only becomes language when we relate our feelings to external objects.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 371. 371-94 emphasize the idea of John Horne Tooke, in his linguistic treatise ΕΠΕΑΠΤΕΡΟΕΝΤΑ, or The Diversions of Purley (London, 1786), that nouns are the basis of all language. Our first speech produces symbolic representations (borne on "airy rings" because each sound spreads in circles from its starting-point) of concrete objects we are thinking about ("ideal things"), which we wish to name when they impinge (i.e. are "appulsive") on our senses. "Abstracted" and "reflex" ideas are also types of noun, as explained in 371n, paragraph 2. The adjectives ("sounds adjunctive" ) of 379-80 are themselves originally derived from nouns (as in "musky," stormy," etc.), and so are the verbs of 381-2, as in 371n's discussion of "to whip" in its first paragraph, and generally in its third. 383-4 convey, highly elliptically, the idea that the verb "to be" really refers to the nounal idea "existence," and that verb tenses refer to the division of the noun "time" into past, present and future. These complex (and somewhat barmy) ideas are more fully laid out in Additional Note XIV, "The Theory and Structure of Language," to which 371n directs us for the first time, though the Additional Note itself refers us back to 365—which explains why it precedes Additional Note XV, discussed above.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 385. Though introduced by way of discussing verb-tenses, 385-90 constitute a digression on "the Giant Form" Time, whose coming apocalyptic destruction strikes a rather bleak note in this canto's account of successive human developments, and can be related to accounts Darwin gives elsewhere of the inevitable future implosion of the universe (see, e.g., Economy of Vegetation, IV, 371-6).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 391. We return to the theory of language with Tooke's idea that conjunctions and prepositions—the little, easily ignored connectors which make sentences hang together—are "abbreviations" of now forgotten nouns. Because they enable speech to move faster than if spelled out in full, Tooke called these abbreviations "the wings of Hermes," after the god of eloquence (see Additional Note XIV).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 394. Section 7 turns to the uses of language. As 398n explains, the "parted links" of trains of thought ("ideal trains") are individual words, which only have meaning when connected together; the different vocabularies of different languages mean that the actual trains of thought they can convey also differ. "Recollection" (400) means conscious recalling for a purpose (see 73n); "facile" means "easy."
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 401. The note's definition of Reason is quoted verbatim from 73n. The passage itself is reasonably clear.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 411. 411-22 describe the incredible skill with which some animals build homes or nests. 411n quotes in part from 122n, which compares the link between the human hand and intelligence with a similar link in some other animals, but now develops the idea further in those animals' favour. (The reference to Additional Note IX, on Storge or parental affection, is somewhat tangential, though broadly relevant to the topic of nest-building.)
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 423. The "Say" puts a challenge directly to the reader: were these skills produced by the "clear ideas" which (as 411n argues) a good sense of touch can produce, then either imitated by the next generation or even taught to them through some "dumb language"; or, alternatively, are they instincts, implanted in each creature from birth and waiting for their moment to be activated? Either way (and Darwin seems unsure himself), they constitute a form of "reason" which links "reptiles" (i.e. "creeping things," including insects) to mankind, whose pride in his essential difference from such humble creatures is lambasted in a couplet pithily conveying Darwin's evolutionist conviction of the fundamental unity of life (433-4). "Emmets" are ants, and "worms" here probably the silkworms of 419-2.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 435. The crucial difference between humans and animals is that of conscious volition, aiming to secure a future benefit rather than simply reacting to immediate stimuli. The inversions of 436-7 are somewhat impenetrable, but broadly: "Mankind is distinguished by language, which gives him the means to express his wishes and what he has decided are his needs." "Art" (439) includes craft or anything requiring tools; "mercenary" (442) probably means "in hope of reward" rather than simply "money-grubbing," but still conveys Darwin's usual scepticism about religious practices; hope and fear both relate to future rather than present events; vice and virtue "court" us by promising benefits rather than through their intrinsic merits (443-4).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 445. Such reflective powers may lift us highest in the scheme of things, but do not make us happiest. They drive the thinking few to prefer work to rest, alert us to inevitable future sorrows, and often lead us astray.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 449. We return to the Garden of Eden: this time, however, Darwin finds more human significance in the myth than in Canto I's wholesale deconstruction of the story, Canto II's reading of it as an Egyptian allegory for the emergence from hermaphroditism, or the subsequent happy picnic on its "no longer interdicted" fruit. The word "mystic" (450) is usually a sign that Darwin believes a real truth is being allegorized: here that the knowledge of good and evil is, precisely, the power of "Reflection" (458). De-inverted, 453 means that the hours flowed with sweet innocence; "gather'd" (456) involves a nice play on the ideas of physical fruit-collecting (the fruit was "right and wrong") and mental "gathering," or understanding of these concepts. This is followed by another play on "Reflection," literalized as a mental mirror which shows us the true moral nature of our trains of thought. "Blood by Hunger spilt" (459) seems to refer to the necessity to hunt animals for survival, but it might also include the first human warfare over scant resources. Very elliptically, the "shame" might even include the vegetarian Cain's reasons for killing his animal-sacrificing brother Abel. The suggestion that "sympathy" accompanies guilt suggests that the "Fall" into self-knowledge has a positive as well as negative side. 456n. takes a more cynical line on the myth as "inculcating" the valuing of ignorance, and argues that "knowing" good and evil helps us maximize the former and minimize the latter.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 461. The canto's last section completes the demonstration that Imitation is the source of "All moral virtues, languages, and arts" (288): 288n points us to earlier passages for language and art, and to the present account of sympathy (though the stated starting-point of l. 453 is somewhat arbitrary) for the moral virtues. Through visual observation or even physical imitation ("brandishes her hands," 462) of others' emotional signals, we come to feel the same things, thanks to the association between these signs and the feelings they denote. 466n refers us to the very start (I.I.1, pp. 10-13) of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) by Adam Smith (1723-90), now better known as the father of modern economics.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 467. The canto builds to its climax with the personification of Sympathy as a Seraph, or angel of light. His shining ("beamy") forehead, heavenly warmth ("ardour") and "sparkling wings" ally him with the torches appropriate to the Eleusinian Mysteries" third stage (also adumbrated earlier by the torch of Hymen). From 471, his power to observe hidden suffering and bring it out of confinement is especially stressed: the imagery of unbarring prisons (475) looks forward to the next canto's account of the prison reformers Howard, Moira and Burdett, whose way is lit by "Pity's torch" (IV, 205-222).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 478. The "universal love" brought about by sympathy takes us back to the "immortal love" of I, 15-32; 482 closely echoes I, 26: "Link sex to sex, or rivet mind to mind." The many references to heaven in this whole passage (e.g. 467, 477, 483) are probably sincere: for Darwin, the divine is the first cause, as expressed in the natural "laws" or principles which enabled the universe to come about. As I, 15-32 demonstrated, Love is such a principle, extending from gravity and chemical attraction to the mental sympathy which, here, becomes "the origin of society" (the poem's original title) itself (484).
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 485. As 485n makes clear, "the author of Christianity" is to be prized for his "maxims" about loving our neighbour: apart from this, Christ makes no appearance in Darwin's work.
EDITOR'S NOTE: l. 491. The "throng" is that of the nations and kings invoked in 490.