Charles Darwin

Life and writing

The checked catalogue gives Charles Darwin’s lifetime as 1809–1882 and credits Sue Asscher and David Widger for this electronic text. The book is written in English, and the linked text includes a preface to the second edition. The catalogue HTML ISBN identifies this digital reading. It is a historical scientific work, containing obsolete classifications and racial hierarchies; its catalogue description is not evidence that all its claims represent current science.

In the Introduction, Darwin answers those who assert confidently that science cannot solve the question of human origins. His contrast between ignorance and knowledge addresses that particular claim of impossibility. In Chapter XXI, he acknowledges that some of his own views may be erroneous, then distinguishes persistent false facts from views that can be refuted. The selected second extract stops within a longer source sentence, whose continuation describes correction opening a path toward truth. These passages invite scrutiny of evidence; they do not prove that all confidence is ignorance or that false hypotheses never cause harm.

Reading this voice

Read the Introduction beside the concluding admission of possible error. Follow the second extract into its next clause. Distinguish Darwin’s argument for scientific investigation from the book’s obsolete social and biological assumptions.

Subjects to explore

Words to begin with

• Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
• False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.