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My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

Charles Darwin

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Charles Darwin
Age: 73 †
Born: 1809
Born: February 12
Died: 1882
Died: April 19
Beekeeper
Botanist
Carcinologist
Entomologist
Ethologist
Explorer
Geologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Travel Writer
The Mount
Shrewsbury
Charles Robert Darwin
Charles R. Darwin
Darwin
Mind
Large
General
Law
Inspirational
Grinding
Facts
Collections
Become
Machine
Seems
Machines
Kind
Laws

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[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.
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It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.
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A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.
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We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals!
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Even the humblest mammal's strong sexual, parental, and social instincts give rise to 'do unto others as yourself' and 'love thy neighbor as thyself'.
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We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.
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The age-old and noble thought of 'I will lay down my life to save another,' is nothing more than cowardice.
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We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.
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The assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent deity.
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Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.
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The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
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Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
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Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval [tropical] forests, ... temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature. No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
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Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a great deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.
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On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: “An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work'”
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But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.
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It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand and so useful afterwards.
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Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature's cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.
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We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.
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We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.
Charles Darwin