Child psychology is widely held to have been set in motion by Charles Darwin – by his spirit, his ideas, or even his findings. By drawing out parallels and contrasts between the work of Erasmus Darwin on infancy and that of his grandson, it is shown that the junior Darwin’s observations on babies are not to be seen as examples of data gathered to test modern-sounding hypotheses. Rather, they were an extension of and variations upon already existing modes of discourse. These discourses had primarily to do with debates about the place of instinct in the acquisition of language, traceable to Erasmus Darwin’s argument with Reid in the chapter ‘Of Instinct’ in Zoonomia. It is argued that the significance of Charles Darwin’s remarks on infancy are, as in his grandfather’s texts, primarily allegorical.

Keywords:
Allegory, Charles Darwin, Dialogue, Erasmus Darwin, History, Infancy, Natural science, Poetics, Rhetoric, Text
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© 1994 S. Karger AG, Basel
1994
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