RUSKIN, DARWIN, AND LOOKING BENEATH SURFACES

Abstract

John Ruskin and Charles Darwinshared a desire to change the way their readers looked at both nature and art. However, when considering them together, we typically remember their failure to see eye to eye on man's place in nature. Examining Ruskin's responses to Darwin's work, sexual selection in particular, or Ruskin's late dissatisfaction with Victorian science more generally, scholars have emphasized their conflicting worldviews. Yet this tendency to focus on conceptual disagreement fails to consider a shared intellectual background between the two men: the science of geology.