***

Ruskin's first two published essays – at age fourteen, no less – appeared in Loudon's Magazine of Natural History and concerned the color of the Rhine and the strata of Mont Blanc. Ruskin had, from an early age, been interested in mineralogy and geology (Hewison 19–24). While at Oxford, he regularly attended the geological lectures of William Buckland, who was also a mentor of Lyell's, and it was at Buckland's home that he first met Darwin in 1837 (Burd 299–304). Despite the fact that Ruskin does not explicitly mention having read Lyell in his early-published work, his attendance at Buckland's geological lectures and the meetings of the Geological Society (to which he later belonged) during Lyell's presidency, as well as selected letters from his personal correspondence, suggest an ongoing familiarity with Lyell's work (36: 9–11, 481). Darwin, too, encountered Lyell as a young man, reading Principles aboard the Beagle and subsequently describing himself as a “zealous disciple of Mr. Lyell's views” (“To W. D. Fox”). Darwin was so influenced that in 1844 he wrote to Leonard Horner, “I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell's brains” (“To Leonard”).

Geologists before Lyell, beginning roughly with Saussure at the turn of the century, emphasized firsthand field observation, and this rhetoric – if not diligent practice – carries over in the rhetoric of Principles (Rudwick 74; Gould 99–113).Footnote ⁷ Martin Rudwick argues that emphasis on direct observation led to a problem particular to the geological sciences: how to make that experience “real and convincing to those who had in fact not witnessed what was being described” in geological texts (74). Without communicating that “sense of veracity . . . any conclusions based on fieldwork would be convincing only to the savant who had been in the field, and no wider consensus . . . might ever be formed.” Geological texts like Saussure's enabled readers to become “virtual witnesses” of phenomena through detailed description and visual illustrations (75-84).

From the first, then, geology as we know it was underpinned by both the value of visual evidence and problems particular to seeing. What was at the turn of the century a problem of communicating firsthand observations to those who could not travel to observe for themselves became by the 1830s a different kind of visual problem that rested on the issue of perspective. Not just firsthand observation but a minimally interpretive form of observation became the hallmark of good science in the early nineteenth century. One needs look no farther than Georges Cuvier's work on fossils as they pertained to earth's history. Cuvier postulated that because certain fossils were only found in specific strata of the earth, that these stratigraphic lines marked catastrophic upheavals. He was, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it, a promulgator of “empirical literalism”:

Cuvier, whose views were extremely popular in Britain, offered a “minimally interpretive” assessment of geological strata and the fossils they contained, which meant capitalizing on what appears to be abrupt transitions between strata. Principles contradicts this view, arguing instead for gradual and uniform change over vast stretches of time. This position almost by definition requires a more interpretive assessment of the evidence than that of Cuvier. However, Lyell frames his argument not as an issue of interpretation, but rather of perspective.

The complications of geological observation have everything to do with our human point of view. “The first and greatest difficulty” of geological investigation, writes Lyell, “consists in our habitual unconsciousness that our position as observers is essentially unfavourable, when we endeavor to estimate the magnitude of the changes now in progress” (1: 81; ch. 5). Whereas Saussure and Cuvier had emphasized accurate fieldwork and minimally interpretive observation, Lyell calls attention to the compromised status of human observation itself. As humans, we are restricted temporally to the present and geographically to “about a fourth part of the surface” of the earth, that fourth being the “theatre of decay and not of reproduction” (Lyell 1: 81; ch. 5). Geological change is, effectively, invisible to us; while “we know . . . that new deposits are annually formed in seas and lakes, and that every year some new igneous rocks are produced in the bowels of the earth . . . we cannot watch the progress of their formation” (1: 81; ch. 5). On the contrary, holding these facts up to our consciousness via reflection “requires an effort both of the reason and the imagination” (1: 81; ch. 5).

Principles is an exercise in imaginative vision aimed at lessening the liability of our current point of view, which causes us to “imperfectly estimate the result of observations invisible to us” (1: 82; ch. 5). Lyell encourages readers to imagine alternative points of view of geological phenomena. If, for example, we were sea creatures as opposed to land-dwellers, we would be able to see far more of earth's actions, in turn lessening the philosophical difficulties of geology:

Lyell's suggestion reveals that validity in the context of early nineteenth-century natural history depended primarily on direct visual observation. Because all phenomena with which it dealt were not directly observable, geology faced a philosophical impasse that Lyell here dramatizes with the imagined perspective of amphibious beings with human faculties. This being would presumably overcome the difficulties we humans face simply because he would be able to see what we cannot.

Yet, even if we imagine a race of humanoid sea-dwellers for whom much would be directly observable, still other geological phenomena would remain invisible to them. One of these amphibious beings “would be liable to fall into the greatest error when endeavoring to reason on rocks of subterranean origin. He would seek in vain, within the sphere of his observation, for any direct analogy to the process of their formation” (1: 82; ch. 5). As a result, he would erroneously attribute them to a “primeval state of nature.” Lyell, however, does not stop with amphibious humanoids, but rather posits another alternative perspective that would aid with the problem of subterraneous rock formation:

Whereas the amphibious being falls short in his ability to gather direct observational evidence of rocks formed beneath the surface of the earth, the subterranean sprite also encounters limitations. Though the suggestion of such a creature seems far-fetched (and may explain why Lyell turns to Pope's already-established character from Rape of the Lock), it perfectly encapsulates the core problem of geological investigation: the “limited range of our vision” (1: 83; ch. 5). Perspective is everything: while the subterranean sprites would have access to the earth's inner workings, they would lack visual access to the surface, resulting in theories directly contrary to our own.

Principles is, as James Secord notes, “a book about seeing” (138). Adelene Buckland, too, calls attention to the “dazzling array of perspectives,” though “each is of limited range” (129). Yet, Principles does more than emphasize the difficulties inherent in a method that depends upon directly observable causes. Lyell's method rested on the assumption that observable causes can (or, rather, should) be extended to the causes we cannot observe. Principles, therefore, is not just about the limitations of our vision, but the possibilities of extending it to make the invisible visible.

Lyell often painted critics of uniformitarianism – his two-fold doctrine that earth is a steady-state system and that we can use observable causes in the present to reason about causes of phenomena in the past – as “catastrophists” and “speculators” who ignored field evidence (Secord 146; Gould 99–113). Yet, Lyell differed from his colleagues not because he was a better field geologist – Gould has suggested, in fact, that he was rather worse – but because Principles offered a different method of viewing evidence. Those Lyell labeled catastrophists, when they looked at geological strata, saw breaks and gaps. Principles, on the other hand offered a “distinctive method of probing behind appearances” in direct contrast to the “empirical literalism” of those deemed catastrophists, even if Lyell framed it as being more empirically accurate (Gould 133).Footnote ⁸

Our human perspective allows us to see, in the first place, a world that appears unchanging except through massive upheaval, and in the second place, a fossil record that demonstrates large gaps between organic forms. Principles offers a different way of looking at the same phenomena that assumes knowledge existing beyond, or in contradiction to, visible appearances. Given Ruskin and Darwin's familiarity with Lyell's work, it is not surprising that his rejection of empirical literalism in favor of perspectives extended through the imagination shapes some of the rhetorical strategies they employ in their own texts that encourage readers to look at the natural world in imaginative new ways.Footnote ⁹

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One might get the impression from Modern Painters that all England had rejected the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, but many critics praised him, too. The general criticism did however hold in common a perception of Turner's work as non-representative of the natural world, and this criticism structures Ruskin's defense in Modern Painters I (Ball 60). Like Lyell's vociferous attacks on catastrophists as poor empiricists, Ruskin attacks Turner's critics for failing to see what is before their eyes. In order to shift thinking about Turner, Ruskin spends the majority of Modern Painters I teaching readers how to look at nature by encouraging them to engage in their own visual experiments and explaining what they will observe. Yet, Modern Painters II marks a shift that Ruskin only hints at in the first volume: imitating the natural world does not make for satisfactory art. In order to reach a more essential truth, Ruskin spends the second volume explaining the role of the imagination and the theoretic faculty in the perception of beauty and the creation of art. He cultivates a distrust of surface appearances because they are not comprehensive, and opts for spatial metaphors of depth and breadth to describe the truth he wants readers to find in nature and art.

The premise of Modern Painters I is that Turner's critics and the classical painters alike are blind to nature. Ruskin so persistently maintains Turner's fidelity to nature that the line of argumentation becomes almost comically predictable. Ruskin takes a natural feature – typically water, sky, or mountains – and begins by demonstrating the failures of classical painters to capture these faithfully, due to inadequate observation or a desire to improve nature. He then goes on to demonstrate Turner's absolute superiority in his attempt to capture the same features. Ruskin often relies on the eyes of the reader to judge the similarities and differences between nature and art under his guidance. Visual imperatives pepper the text: “Look at the bars of your window-frame”; “look at Westminster Abbey”; “look at the large Cuyp in the Dulwich gallery”; “Observe your friend's face”; “Observe the shadows on the trunk of the tree”; “Look at the round things about the sun in the bricky Claude” (Ruskin 3: 320, 336, 349–50, 328, 307, 375). Often these imperatives set up extended and detailed visual experiments in which Ruskin expects the reader to engage:

Ruskin posits himself as an experienced observer; he knows what readers will see on a “bright sunny day in winter” because he has performed experiments like these himself. The perspective from which one should look is physically specific, even measurable (“four or five yards”). Not a tree in the mind's eye, Ruskin's is a specific tree on a specific day meant to be observed for a specific effect. He guides readers’ attention to the features we would otherwise miss because we assume we already know what shadows look like. We are, however, poor observers because of just such an assumption, and volume one is a lesson in observation: “The first great mistakes that people make,” writes Ruskin, “is the supposition that they must see a thing if it be before their eyes” (3: 141). Yet, while Ruskin attempts to revise our observational habits, his argument does not rest exclusively on his own authority. Instead, he encourages readers to “go out . . . and look” for ourselves.

In Modern Painters I, Ruskin is not fully enacting what I have described as “looking”; this is still simply “seeing.” There is a difference for Ruskin, however, in seeing nature and looking at (and producing) art that bears on the structure of Modern Painters. For Ruskin, the greatest painter goes directly to nature for his materials, and his notion of the artistic eye is absolutely dependent on habitual, patient observation of the natural world. As with the command to “go out” and look at shadows, Ruskin repeatedly exhorts his audience to go look at nature as he maintains that Turner does, but the classical painters do not. Yet, producing and being a competent judge of great art both require more than just empirical accuracy. Only hinting at this difference in Modern Painters I with his deprecation of imitation, Ruskin does not fully flesh out these ideas until Modern Painters II. There appears to be an attitudinal shift regarding accurate empirical observation as the measurement of good art. Whereas accurate observation appeared to demarcate truth in the first volume, Ruskin spends the second volume advocating for the role of the imagination and the theoretic, or moral, faculty in accessing truth. While these may seem contradictory, Ruskin explains the apparent shift himself: “It is the habit of most observers to regard art as representative of matter, and to look only for the entireness of representation . . . and it was to this view of art that I limited the arguments of the former sections of the present work, wherein having to oppose the conclusions of a criticism entirely based upon the realist system, I was compelled to meet that criticism on its own grounds” (4: 165). Ruskin rejects the “realist system” by the second volume, not because it is wholly wrong, but because it is incomplete, as his discussion of imitation suggests.

“Imitation” for Ruskin is an attempt to perfectly copy the material world, and our pleasure in it rests on an experience of deception: “Whenever anything looks like what it is not, the resemblance being so great as nearly to deceive, we feel a kind of pleasurable surprise, and agreeable excitement of mind” (3: 100). Not the idea of the thing represented, but the dexterity with which the artist renders his image accounts for our satisfaction. Because Ruskin defines the greatest art as that “which conveys to the mind of the spectator . . . the greatest number of the greatest ideas,” artistic dexterity is a necessary skill, but not the end of art (3: 92). Imitation makes dexterity in copying the empirical elements of the natural world the goal of art, but this can never represent truth for Ruskin because it must appear to be what it is not. Truth is founded on, but not fulfilled by, empirical accuracy and artistic dexterity, as Ruskin goes on to explain in the second volume.

Truth depends on an emotional and moral sensitivity in excess of empirical accuracy. Yet because he chooses to meet Turner's critics on their own ground (i.e., upholding a direct correspondence between the real world and the artistic representation), it is easy to misread Ruskin as advocating that same strict empirical accuracy, or a form of what I outlined above as “empirical literalism.” Empirical accuracy is certainly an element of truth, but it is not truth in its entirety, and it is in this sense that Ruskin moves beyond literalism. Ruskin champions a more comprehensive perspective, one that values artists beyond their ability to copy what they see and promotes a style of looking sensitive to the moral nature of things. Truth requires the viewer to transcend surface appearances, and one accomplishes this through the lens of moral feeling.

In Ruskin's estimation, the perception of artistic truth depends on the theoretic faculty. While aesthetic philosophy before him had emphasized sensual experiences of beauty (aesthesis), Ruskin “wholly [denies] that the impressions of beauty are in any way sensual, – they are neither sensual nor intellectual, but moral.” (4: 42). He replaces aesthesia with theoria, the former connoting a capacity for sensation and the latter contemplation. The theoretic faculty “is concerned with the moral perception and appreciation of ideas of beauty,” whereas imagination combines ideas from nature in order to transmit new objects for theoretic perception by the minds of others. The purpose of the second volume, as Ruskin puts it, is to “explain [the] power and define [the] sphere” of the theoretic faculty and the imagination, and “to vindicate . . . their true place for the intellectual lens and moral retina by which and on which our informing thoughts are concentrated and represented” (4: 36). The theoretic faculty offers a better way to look at art and nature than the aesthetic, because it combines accurate observation with moral sensitivity, and only by considering both do we access truth.

In order to enact this epistemological shift, Ruskin cultivates a distrust of surface appearances as a comprehensive representation of the world. To this end, he turns to spatial metaphors. In his discussion of the distinction between imagination and fancy, Ruskin represents the imagination under the rubric of “deep” truth. Similarly, when distinguishing between typical and vital beauty, he frames his discussion of vital beauty under the rubric of breadth. Truth is not a quality of surface appearance alone, but is predicated on a comprehensive vision metaphorically represented as looking into the depths of things.

Ruskin contrasts the imagination, producer of moral truth, with the fancy, the lesser of the faculties that perceive beauty. Fancy is the faculty of the imitator: it enables the reproduction of surface appearances, but remains deceptive because it cannot do more. Imagination, on the other hand, facilitates moral feeling and elucidates a more essential truth than what is visible. “The fancy sees the outside,” writes Ruskin, but “the imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes them felt” (4: 253). Ruskin consistently represents fancy and imagination as surface and depth or outside and inside, and feeling is the key difference:

The truth that Ruskin is after in this volume is moral truth, and while it cannot be divided from material truth, it is of a different type. Moral truth is not strictly visible on the material surfaces of objects, but is rather felt by the viewer, and Ruskin metaphorizes this truth as existing deep within “the heart of everything.” While fancy and imagination may appear to be opposites, Ruskin maintains that looking at things through the lens of moral feeling is different from, but also dependent on, the realism he advocates in the first volume. He is explicit about the functions of the imagination, which reaches “by intuition and intensity of gaze, (not by reasoning. . .) a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things” (4: 284). To capture and represent this truth beyond the empirically visible, Ruskin employs depth as a metaphorical location for truth.

Depth, however, is not the only spatial metaphor Ruskin employs. When discussing imagination, Ruskin consistently speaks of penetrating to the “heart” of things to perceive their moral truth, but he also conceptualizes moral truth – particularly in relation to living things – under the rubric of breadth. Indeed, one of his critiques of fancy is that because it keeps to externals, it “cannot see them all at once, but runs hither and thither . . . bounding merrily from point to point, glittering here and there, but necessarily always settling, if [it] settle at all, on a point only, never embracing the whole” (4: 258). The depths accessed by the imagination give a more comprehensive view, and truth only arises from comprehensiveness, as is evident in the discussion of “vital” beauty.

For Ruskin, “typical” beauty denotes classic aesthetic elements such as unity, symmetry, and purity, and is restricted to the “external quality of bodies” (4: 64). “Vital” beauty he defines as “the appearance of felicitous fulfillment of function in living things,” and it is predicated on a “call for sympathy” between the viewer and the object similar to his assertion that the imagination's ability to plumb the depths of things results in “keenest sympathy” (4: 64, 257). This is not sympathy in the sense of self-identification with the object, which Ruskin later terms the “pathetic fallacy” (see Modern Painters III). Rather, sympathy is a contemplative method of looking predicated on both a “rightly tuned” heart and a “clearly and surely sighted” mind (4: 147).

Ruskin associates breadth of vision with the perception of vital beauty. Seeing living organisms piecemeal, rather than comprehensively, actively prevents us from experiencing vital beauty:

While this passage would seem to suggest a Wordsworthian disdain for scientific knowledge, Ruskin is positing something different. He does not reject dissection outright, but rather sees the knowledge it offers as something inferior to a comprehensive view of the organism characterized by a sensitivity to its life and happiness as well as its status as a living thing. The notion of organic parts as “mechanical contrivance[s]” disables us from sympathetically observing the organism, and as such from being able to make sense of it through the lens of moral feeling. It is not that one method of looking leads to observations that are more or less true in and of themselves, but comparatively, Ruskin sees a more essential truth in a comprehensive, broad view of the organism. Piecemeal sight trades beauty for a lesser experience: wonder.

Modern Painters is preeminently concerned with teaching readers how to look at nature and art and relentlessly emphasizes the importance of comprehensive vision. Turner's critics fail on two fronts: first, they see nature through the veil of habit, seeing what they think they know rather than what is actually there. They fail by their own standard that emphasizes direct correspondence between nature and art because their perception of nature is faulty to begin. Secondly, Ruskin discards this empirical literalism as a valid method of comprehensively understanding art or even nature. Empirical accuracy is important for Ruskin because it is the first step toward the more essential truth he sees extant in both art and nature, but it is only that first step. One can dexterously and perfectly copy the external features of nature and still fail artistically. Moral truth, which is evident in but not completely captured by the surfaces of objects, can only be accessed through sympathetic vision, which Ruskin represents metaphorically with depth and breadth.

Like Ruskin, Darwin attempts to guide readers toward a new way of looking at nature, but rather than positing visual experiments, he begins the first chapter of the Origin with a shared visual experience between author and reader: “When we look to the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us, is, that they generally differ much more from each other than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature” (Darwin 7; ch. 1). Unlike Ruskin's hierarchical construction in which he knowingly guides readers toward a superior observational practice, this opening establishes author and reader on equal intellectual footing and acknowledges that the reader is no amateur observer of nature. “When we look” implies a habitual engagement and a familiarity with this state of affairs on the part of the speaker and his audience. It also implies a shared way of looking: the same features strike “us” both. Thus, unlike Ruskin or even Lyell who both criticize the failures of their critics to see material reality, Darwin implicates himself in failed observational methods. This alignment between author and audience is not an empty rhetorical platitude meant to assuage readers’ egos. Rather, Darwin recognizes that by definition, the human perspective that takes empirical reality literally is inadequate because it only reveals partial truths. While Ruskin defines comprehensive vision through a fuller human feeling for the moral nature of things via the imagination, Darwin sees comprehensive vision as knowledgeable vision or remaining cognizant of what we know while we observe. Yet Darwin, too, sees a place for the imagination, particularly in extending our existing knowledge to new fields.

Natural selection is, for Darwin, a matter of perspective. Its visibility depends on a temporally long-range perspective. In a natural world governed by the struggle for existence and natural selection,

Inadequate human perspective is the source of our blindness to organic developmental changes in the same way that it was the source of our blindness to geologic changes. In both cases, change only becomes evident after long stretches of time. And even then, what is self-evident from our “imperfect . . . view” is only the difference between past and present. We cannot see the process of natural selection at work – only its results. Unlike Lyell and Ruskin who accuse their opponents of missing the (easy-to-see) facts, Darwin freely admits that we all see the same uniformity. He implicates himself in a failed way of looking, thus creating an ethos that posits him as both companion and guide. He criticizes the inability to move beyond the visual – the failure to see causal forces has led a collective “us,” because of “our” narrowness, to reach faulty conclusions.

In order to make his case for a process whose visibility is perspective-dependent, Darwin follows this passage with a slew of shared visual experiences and a lens through which to understand them: “When we see leaf-eating insects green, and bark-feeders mottled grey; the alpine ptarmigan white in winter [he extends the list of examples] . . . we must believe that these tints are of service to these birds and insects in preserving them from danger” (84; ch. 4). In coupling visual experiences (“when we see”) with modal verbs like “must” (in “we must believe”), Darwin advocates a particular method of looking reliant on a knowledgeable subject. “Must” here functions in a deontic modality, implying that the current state of affairs (what I would deem the “way of looking”) does not meet the speaker's expectations or desires. That is, “we must believe” functions not only as an imperative, but also as a projection for how we ought to look in the future because the present way of looking is subpar.

The Origin is dedicated to informing our perspective in order to shift it. Darwin accomplishes this by framing the problem metaphorically as an issue of visibility and surfaces. By framing surfaces as misleading, Darwin interrupts the one-to-one correspondence that underlies empirical literalism. He calls attention to how our perspective may be obscuring our view; a perspective built on ignorance and bounded by the human lifetime necessarily inhibits our vision. Discussing the struggle for existence, Darwin writes, “Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life . . . Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the main, I am convinced that the whole economy of nature . . . will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood” (62; ch. 3). The problem is not with admitting the empirical reality of the struggle for life, but rather with the inability to remain cognizant of it.

The struggle for life functions in the same way uniformitarianism and gradualism function for Lyell: it serves as a lens through which connections take on more certain or even different meanings. Darwin goes on to dramatize the potential blindness or lapse in memory that lets us forget about the struggle for existence:

Darwin again aligns himself with the dim vision of his audience with the communal “we,” and posits a collective tendency to look at the (sur)face of nature, which conceals with the appearance of harmony and fecundity the constant battle between animals, the destruction of creatures by others, and the scarcity of resources. It is not that what we see is not what we get, but rather that we have not been looking the right way. We fail to use our existing knowledge as a lens that rejects the first impression of nature as “bright with gladness.” True knowledge allows us to reject uninformed impressions. Surfaces here are framed as a veneer we can dispel with an educated, but also expansive, perspective. “Bearing in mind” the struggle for existence disrupts the appearance of gladness and would reveal a nature dictated by violence and chaos. Darwin himself recognizes this, ending the chapter with a (perhaps failed) reassurance that “we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply” (79; ch. 3). The discovery of order beneath this perceived chaos goes on to be even more reassuring. Darwin dispels the orderliness of the first layer, the “face of Nature bright with gladness,” and trades it instead for the chaotic struggle for existence. It, in turn, becomes a sort of surface that he rejects as the organizing principle for interactions between organisms. Natural selection offers another layer beneath the struggle for existence that is predicated on, if not gladness, certainly order.

Ruskin praises the imagination's ability to access the deeper truth of things, to extend our vision beyond surface appearances. Darwin, too, uses the imagination in the Origin in this fashion. James G. Lennox and Alan C. Love have both discussed Darwin's use of imaginary illustrations in the Origin, tracing the practice back to Lyell. Darwin's goal was not to use these illustrations as empirical evidence, but rather to test the plausibility, verify the intelligibility, and demonstrate the explanatory potential of the theory of natural selection (Love 86; Lennox 223–24). The following passage is only one of Darwin's imaginary illustrations, but is fairly representative:

These imaginary illustrations posit plausible situations in which natural selection might be at work, and demonstrate the ways in which the theory explains the facts Darwin presents (which I have omitted here in the interest of space). At the same time, imaginary illustrations also demonstrate the kind of educated looking that Darwin has been advocating. Looking while “bearing such facts in mind” leads us to the conclusion, beyond any doubt, that changes so minute that they are “too slight to be appreciated” by humans could occur (and likely are). Darwin links this imaginary reasoning directly to Lyell, admitting that the “same objections” that were once urged against his views could potentially be urged against Darwin's theory, as well. But in the same way that readers had accepted gradualism in geology, he projects, they will accept natural selection in the creation and modification of living things.

The imaginary instances Darwin uses throughout the Origin help extend our vision in the sense that these instances enable us to think beyond the constraints of empirical literalism. As Lennox puts it, “Darwin wants to show people that what they think is impossible is perfectly possible” (238). We might even say that Darwin wants to make what would otherwise be invisible visible by training readers in how to look through imaginary illustrations like this.

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Despite their distance conceptually, Ruskin and Darwin are more like than unlike in the rhetorical strategies they employ. Their use of imagined and often shared visual experiences between author and reader recall the “virtual witnessing” of early nineteenth-century geology, but their post-Lyellian emphasis on the shortcomings of a strictly literal empiricism undergirded by the limits of perspective is distinct, manifesting in a distrust of surfaces in favor of evidence gained through imaginative extension, typically metaphorized in spatial terms. Both reject a brute force empiricism that has become a critical caricature of Victorian thought. Modern Painters and the Origin highlight the ways in which the Victorians could simultaneously value empirical accuracy and view it as an insufficient measure of truth.

Examining Modern Painters and the Origin together does more than provide a better understanding of what we might think of as a range of Victorian empiricisms. These texts also demonstrate the importance of both imagination and feeling (in addition to vision) as sources of empirical truth. Where Ruskin emphasizes sympathy and moral feeling, Darwin offers intellectual interest, satisfaction of curiosity, and even aesthetic pleasure:

Like Ruskin, Darwin emphasizes comprehensive vision as the avenue to a more interesting and fulfilling natural history. Understanding, a sensitivity to temporality, and a sense of objects as composite structures underlie Darwin's notion of comprehensiveness. In particular, his discussion of machines as a “summing up” of the labour, experience, reason, and blunders of individual workmen seems to echo another of Ruskin's works (The Stones of Venice, 1851–53), but also recalls Ruskin's hesitancy to see, for example, the shark's fin in isolation. Whereas previously Darwin had associated himself with the blindness of his audience, here he has passed beyond, “speaking from experience” and inviting us to partake in the new natural history.

The Origin closes with the famous image of the entangled bank. Interdependence, we might say, is the theme. But it is worth noting that we are not seeing but contemplating this entangled bank with its organisms and its laws alike. We have a mental vision of it that accounts both for what we could be able to see and those things that we cannot immediately see but surely know. Thus, along with interdependence, we have comprehensiveness, and as Darwin writes, “there is grandeur in this view of life” (490; ch. 14, emphasis mine).