Darwin on Mind, Morals, and Emotions

From the beginning of his theorizing about species, Darwin had human beings in view. In the initial pages of his first transmutation notebook, he observed that “even mind & instinct become influenced” as the result of adaptation to new circumstances. Considering matters as a Lyellian geologist, he supposed that such adaptations would require many generations of young, pliable minds being exposed to a changing environment. Captain FitzRoy had attempted to “civilize” the Fuegian Jemmy Button by bringing him to London and instructing him in the Christian religion; but back in South America, Button reverted to his old habits, demonstrating to Darwin that the “child of savage not civilized man”—transmutation of mind was not the work of a day. Darwin, though, had quickly become convinced that over long periods of time human mind, morals, and emotions had progressively developed out of animal origins. As he bluntly expressed it in his first transmutation notebook: “If all men were dead, monkeys make men.— Men make angels.” Presumably the transmutation of human beings into those higher creatures remained far in the future.