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How far is it possible to avoid turning Darwinism into myths? The scientists and literary authors in this study did not possess fully objective minds. Modern studies of cognitive biases suggest that 160 years have not produced radical psychological transformations in the human species. Most of us have to contend with tendencies to see nature and culture as opposing forces, to form past and future into narrative structures featuring human characters, and to ascribe human meaning to the cosmos. These tendencies are reflected in modern fiction and popular science. But those tendencies do not condemn us to live entirely in our imaginations. Humans might be poised in a balancing act between difficult truths and soothing fictions, but the fictions sometimes help us see the truth.

Joseph Conrad is by far the most critically acclaimed turn-of-the-century novelist to engage with naturalistic cosmology. His moral perspective has been much debated by scholars. This chapter analyzes his self-narrative, and its expression in Heart of Darkness, as a response to the psychological pressures of Darwinism. Conrad envisioned an essentially amoral naturalistic world in conflict with moral ideals, saw the human mind divided between contradictory instincts, agonized over the relationship between human nature and political idealism, and depicted Western civilization encountering its deep past in tropical locales. His puzzling combination of irony and simple morality can be understood as a personal post-Darwinian mythology: a simultaneous recognition of human social dispositions and the amorality of nature, united by the idea of nature as spectacle.

If the late Victorian literati were allowed only one “evolutionary myth-maker,” the title would go to H. G. Wells. Wells had an immensely prolific and visible career. Though he had ambitions as a scientist, a realist novelist, a satirist, a journalist, a global political reformer, and a historian, he is now remembered mainly for his early science fiction stories. Those stories helped transform Victorian adventure genres into scientific mythology, introducing enduring tropes like the time machine. But the stories were also shaped by Wells’s self-narrative: a fundamentally Darwinian worldview, made tolerable through a mythic split between nature and mind, with himself as the savior of mind. This chapter analyzes the psychology of Wells’s evolutionary myth-making and its imaginative expression in two of his most famous novels.

Evolution, which has challenged the human imagination more than any other scientific discovery, can also be used to explain the human imagination. This chapter explains why Darwinian evolution is a particular challenge to human psychology. Unlike previous accounts of humanity’s origin, Darwin’s theory expands far beyond the time scale of human generations, demands an understanding of statistics, and lacks human moral purpose. The chapter also argues that human imaginative worlds help guide our flexible behavior. Our mythologies and artistic visions imbue human concerns with cosmic significance so that those concerns seem valuable despite their smallness on the cosmic scale. In the wake of Darwin’s theory, there was a particular need for new mythologies. Darwin’s conclusions clashed with the human imagination, but also stimulated it profoundly.

To understand how Darwinism affected the literary imagination, one needs to understand how Darwinism was processed imaginatively by the scientists, philosophers, and social reformers who disseminated it. This chapter analyzes early evolutionary thinkers like Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Ernst Haeckel. No early evolutionary thinker could transform Darwinism into untroubled mythology. But they followed universal features of myth-making: turning evolution into something more comprehensible, orderly, spectacular, and purposeful; translating natural selection into human social terms, as an evil to fight or a struggle toward good; putting humanity back at the center of nature; and devising strategies for circumventing materialism and randomness. These universal features were modulated by cultural ideas, values, and personality differences. Keen minds reached opposite conclusions about nature, shaping enduring myths.