Abstract

In the nineteenth century cultural milieu in which Darwin lived and worked, it was generally assumed that art and religion enjoyed a close relationship. While differing in their view of religion in many respects, common to all the major proponents of the Naturphilosophie that had infiltrated the cultural milieu of both German and English nineteenth century scientists1 was their tendency to sublate the earlier, eighteenth century, Idealist conceptual thought of the Absolute by what they labeled “the intuition and feeling for the Infinite.”2 Experienced as an organic, all-comprehensive reality, the totality of Nature was said along quasi-pantheistic lines to be a manifestation of the infinite Absolute, God, or...