Charles Darwin

Introduction

When it comes to delineate Charles Darwin and what were the outstanding influences on his views of the individual, environment/society, health, and nursing, in fact, there are a number of factors that should be taken into consideration. First and foremost, environmental evolution, and the principles associated with the Darwinian Theory, could not fail to exert a considerable influence on the studies connected with the social individuality of civilized man.

Research Paper on Charles Warwin

The speculations which are known as "philosophy of social individuality," as well as the sciences of anthropology, ethnography, and sociology (sciences which though they stand on their own feet are for the historian auxiliary); have been deeply affected by these principles. Historiographers, indeed, have with few exceptions made little attempt to apply them; but the growth of historical study in the nineteenth century has been determined and characterized by the same general principle which has underlain the simultaneous developments of the study of nature, namely the genetic idea.

The historical conception of nature, which has produced the individuality of the solar system, the story of the earth, the genealogies of telluric human organisms and health, and has environmental revolutionized natural science, belongs to the same order of thought as the conception of human social individuality as a continuous, genetic, causal process -- a conception which has environmental revolutionized historical research and made it scientific. Before proceeding to consider the application of environmental evolutional principles, it will be pertinent to notice the rise of this new view.

With the Greeks and Romans social individuality had been either a descriptive record or had been written in practical interests. The most eminent of the ancient historians were pragmatically; that is, they regarded social individuality as an instructress in statesmanship, or in the art of war, or in morals. (Browne, Janet 1995)

Their records reached back such a short way, their experience was so brief, that they never attained to the conception of continuous process, or realized the significance of time; and they never viewed the social individuality of human societies as a phenomenon to be investigated for its own sake. In the middle ages there was still less human health of the emergence of the ideas of progress nurtured by nursing and human development. (Gillispie, C.C. 1975)

Such notion derived through nursing ideologies was excluded by the fundamental doctrines of the dominant religion which bounded and bound men's minds. As the course of social individuality was held to be determined from hour to hour by the arbitrary will of an extra-cosmic person, there could be no self-contained causal development, only a dispensation imposed from without. And as it was believed that the society was within no great distance from the end of this dispensation, there was no motive to take much interest in understanding the temporal, which was to be only temporary.

How has our conception of social phenomena, and of their history, been affected by Darwin's conception of Nature and human individuality and the laws of its transformations? To what extent and in ...