Sympathy , Empathy , and the Evolution of Darwin ’ S Moral Sense

Dark portents of civil war were looming at the very time Walt Whitman celebrated the transformative song of empathy. “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels,” he wrote in his 1855 book Leaves of Grass, “I myself become the wounded person.” The ensuing battle over slavery, an institution that Charles Darwin called “the greatest curse on Earth,” would seem an unlikely place to find hope in human potential. And yet, as Whitman wrote during his volunteer service with wounded Union soldiers, “I’ll pour the verse with streams of blood, full of volition, full of joy.” Whitman’s quotation is relevant to the natural history of the moral sense for two reasons. The first is because his line represents a clear definition of empathy as it is known today, or what the Oxford English dictionary states as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another,” as opposed to sympathy, which is defined as “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.” As a poet, Whitman is an exemplar of the notion that words are imperfect representations of meaning and that focusing merely on the words themselves, rather than the intention behind them, represents a poverty of understanding. But this “poet of science,” as Joseph Beaver memorably called him, also saw the precise study of the natural world—particularly the insights of Darwin—as a source of inspiration to find meaning in our lives. His poems utilize an almost scientific precision