Going The Limit: Toward the Construction of Darwin's Theory (1832-1839)

Howard E. Gruber

As a cognitive psychologist, my forays into the history of science have as their ultimate aim to contribute something to the psychology of thinking and the psychology of creativity. I hoped to learn from historical studies, and enrich my own rather crabbed, often Philistine field. In the course of this effort, my students and I found ourselves developing what we now call, quite provisionally, an "evolving systems approach to creative work" (Gruber 1980a, b).

In this view, creative work is seen as a purposeful growth process. Much work on the psychology of creativity reveals a certain tropism toward monolithicity. In such diverse ideas as: one great insight, one ruling passion, one overarching metaphor — there is a common term, one. In contrast, our work has persistently revealed a striking pluralism of events and processes. For Darwin there were many insights, each with a complex inner structure; rather than representing a break with his own past, they reflect the ongoing function of the evolving system of thought (Gruber 1981a). Similarly, there are many influences, several candidates for his "father figure", many metaphors (Gruber 1978), and many enterprises.

In addition to this emphasis on growth and pluralism, we stress the idea of creativity as purposeful work. Since it always seems to take a long time, the creative individual must go to some lengths to organize the conditions of life that make possible such continued work. If it were easier, faster, and more straightforward than experience shows to be the case, spontaneity might be enough. But if it were so easy, fast and straightforward, many would accomplish the same thing, and we would not deem it so creative. In the real world, then, purpose is indispensable for creativity.

The person doing creative work exhibits the continuous interplay of three loosely coupled sub-systems: the organizations of knowledge, of purpose, and of feeling. This interplay is displayed with particular clarity when the thinker undertakes to push ideas to their extremes, to abandon cautious middle-of-the-road strategies and instead to test the limits of his innovations. Sailing to the edge of one's intellectual world does not happen by accident: it requires deep knowledge and a sense of direction. It is, moreover, so taxing an effort that it requires intellectual courage and, if not the ability to enjoy life at the edge, at least the resolve to endure it.

The current status of Darwin studies provides an object lesson in the density and complexity of a creative thought process. Instead of being apologetic that we, the collectivity of Darwin scholars, have written so much, we ought to brace ourselves for the probable future. The history and philosophy of science, cognitive science and developmental psychology have reached a promising confluence. The idea that the work of hermeneutic interpretation is a legitimate part of our enterprise has at least taken hold, and description is becoming thicker and thicker. We are, I think, growing more skilled in relating the internal history of science to wider issues in personal psychology and social history. Out of all this will emerge a new generation of Darwin studies, and during its gestation we should all be very patient. Newell and Simon, in their book Human Problem Solving, analyze the thinking of one subject solving one problem, thinking aloud while he did it. The subject took twenty minutes. The analysis covers 100 pages (Newell and Simon 1972).

The study of Darwin's thinking is many orders of magnitude more complex. He was solving not one problem but many. The problems were not chosen for him but by him as part of a broader effort to construct a new point of view. He faced a double task. On the one hand, he had to make the best possible use of a wide array of professionally accepted, normalized scientific knowledge. On the other hand, he had to organize his efforts so as to raise and answer questions hardly dreamt of within that conventional framework. To understand Darwin's thinking, we must study the connections between...