Word: darwins
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...become daily breath) some of the strange poetry of war: "I was suddenly close to the smallest and lowest creatures, the insects and worms, everything that crawled and writhed humbly and flatly on the ground." The worms went on about their business while the shells exploded (they are, as Darwin learned, quite deaf), the bees hummed, and now and then, between explosions, a bird sang. "It sometimes seemed that we were already in our graves, half alive and half dead: and most curiously, the whistling shells meant life and the buzzing bees and singing birds meant death...
Herbert Morrison, Minister of Home Security and Home Secretary. "Herbert is a Cockney." He was born in Lambeth, "son of a policeman and a housemaid." There he studied "Marx, Engels, Darwin and Vandervelde...
...Darwin's discovery was "evolution by natural selection from accidental variations." The dynamite, says Author Barzun, was in the phrase "from accidental variations." Reason: it denied the role of God in the universe, ruled out a purpose in existence, made men mere puppets of mechanical forces. Author Barzun confesses that his mind is still "paralyzed with enchantment" when he considers Darwin's theory...
...Darwin. "Darwinism yielded its basic law, and its name, when viewed historically, was Progress. . . Fatalism and Progress are as closely linked as the Heavenly Twins. . . . Mind . . . must be driven from the field, first in the form of God or Teleology, then in the form of consciousness or purpose. These were called illusions, superstitions, metaphysics. "The blind play of forces known as struggle replaced purpose. The vast arena of nature was pictured as a scene of 'desperate' conflict. . . . History was a sieve that worked. Man was the residue...
...Marx took up the theme in the next higher register. History - man's history -was the record of dialectically competing classes whose motives were as simply biological as those found in Darwin. Earning a living and fighting those who make it hard were the two forces that explained the past and propelled history. Environment, as in Darwin, was made up of things . . . man responded like a machine, and out of this same physical necessity ... a perfected society was produced. History was a sieve that worked. The proletarian Utopia was the residue...