The Magic in Nature
Darwin, Dickinson, and Whitehead
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one meaning of magic is that which is enchanting and delightful. Nature is magical in this sense for many scientists, and for many poets as well. In Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science, Renée Bergland explores precisely this sense of enchantment, showing how Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin, in different but related ways, refused a strict separation between science and wonder. For Bergland, the natural world did not cease to be magical when it became the subject of scientific study. Rather, science could deepen the sense of astonishment, revealing a world of surprising vitality, creativity, and beauty. Bergland presents Dickinson and Darwin as participants in a nineteenth-century moment when poetry and science still shared a common delight in the living world and in its inexhaustible mystery.
Interestingly, in Science and the Modern World, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead developed a philosophical outlook—now called process philosophy—that sought in its own way to affirm vitality, creativity, beauty, and wonder as intrinsic features of the natural world. Whitehead’s literary ally was not Dickinson but the poet William Wordsworth, whose writings celebrated the living presence of nature and the deep responsiveness of the human mind to it. Yet the point is much the same. Both Bergland’s account of Dickinson and Darwin and Whitehead’s philosophical reflections point toward a world that is not merely a collection of inert objects but a dynamic and expressive process.
There is something enchanted about the natural world—not because it can be governed by magical spells (who knows?), but because its ordinary processes continually disclose unexpected patterns, relationships, and possibilities. The growth of a plant, the formation of a crystal, the migration of birds, the unfolding of a galaxy: all are instances of a creativity at work in nature itself. To perceive this creativity is to experience what might rightly be called natural magic—the enchantment that arises when we recognize that the world is alive with becoming.
Interestingly, in Science and the Modern World, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead developed a philosophical outlook—now called process philosophy—that sought in its own way to affirm vitality, creativity, beauty, and wonder as intrinsic features of the natural world. Whitehead’s literary ally was not Dickinson but the poet William Wordsworth, whose writings celebrated the living presence of nature and the deep responsiveness of the human mind to it. Yet the point is much the same. Both Bergland’s account of Dickinson and Darwin and Whitehead’s philosophical reflections point toward a world that is not merely a collection of inert objects but a dynamic and expressive process.
There is something enchanted about the natural world—not because it can be governed by magical spells (who knows?), but because its ordinary processes continually disclose unexpected patterns, relationships, and possibilities. The growth of a plant, the formation of a crystal, the migration of birds, the unfolding of a galaxy: all are instances of a creativity at work in nature itself. To perceive this creativity is to experience what might rightly be called natural magic—the enchantment that arises when we recognize that the world is alive with becoming.
There is a Grandeur
in this View of Life
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), Final Paragraph
“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
This is the Land the Sunset Washes
Emily Dickinson
This is the land the sunset washes,
These are the banks of the Yellow Sea;
Where it rose, or whither it rushes,
These are the western mystery!
Night after night her purple traffic
Strews the landing with opal bales;
Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.
The Radiance of the Sunset
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
What is wanted is an appreciation of the infinite variety of vivid values achieved by an organism in its proper environment. When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality. We want concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness.
Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin,
and the Dawn of Modern Science
by Renée Bergland
"Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls. The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, Massachusetts. Poetry and science started to grow apart, and modern thinkers challenged the old orthodoxies, offering thrilling new perspectives that suddenly felt radical--and too dangerous for women.
Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science (Princeton UP, 2024) intertwines the stories of these two luminary nineteenth-century minds whose thought and writings captured the awesome possibilities of the new sciences and at the same time strove to preserve the magic of nature. Just as Darwin's work was informed by his roots in natural philosophy and his belief in the interconnectedness of all life, Dickinson's poetry was shaped by her education in botany, astronomy, and chemistry, and by her fascination with the enchanting possibilities of Darwinian science. Casting their two very different careers in an entirely fresh light, Renée Bergland brings to life a time when ideas about science were rapidly evolving, reshaped by poets, scientists, philosophers, and theologians alike. She paints a colorful portrait of a remarkable century that transformed how we see the natural world.
Illuminating and insightful, Natural Magic explores how Dickinson and Darwin refused to accept the separation of art and science. Today, more than ever, we need to reclaim their shared sense of ecological wonder."
Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science (Princeton UP, 2024) intertwines the stories of these two luminary nineteenth-century minds whose thought and writings captured the awesome possibilities of the new sciences and at the same time strove to preserve the magic of nature. Just as Darwin's work was informed by his roots in natural philosophy and his belief in the interconnectedness of all life, Dickinson's poetry was shaped by her education in botany, astronomy, and chemistry, and by her fascination with the enchanting possibilities of Darwinian science. Casting their two very different careers in an entirely fresh light, Renée Bergland brings to life a time when ideas about science were rapidly evolving, reshaped by poets, scientists, philosophers, and theologians alike. She paints a colorful portrait of a remarkable century that transformed how we see the natural world.
Illuminating and insightful, Natural Magic explores how Dickinson and Darwin refused to accept the separation of art and science. Today, more than ever, we need to reclaim their shared sense of ecological wonder."
Natural Magic and the Modern World
There was once a time when what we now call science had not yet fully separated itself from what was called natural magic.
To study nature was to explore its hidden powers, subtle sympathies, and surprising transformations. Scholars and experimenters alike believed that the world was filled with active forces waiting to be understood and, in some cases, carefully harnessed. Herbs healed, magnets attracted, stars influenced earthly events, and chemical substances transformed one another in mysterious ways. None of this was thought to violate nature; rather, it revealed the deeper workings of nature itself.
A well-known example of this tradition is Magia Naturalis (Natural Magic), written by the Italian polymath Giambattista della Porta and first published in Naples in 1558. The book quickly became popular across Europe and was republished in multiple Latin editions and translated into several languages. In its expanded twenty-book version (1589), it gathered observations on subjects as varied as geology, optics, medicines, poisons, cooking, metallurgy, magnetism, cosmetics, perfumes, gunpowder, and invisible writing.
Drawing on ancient authorities such as Pliny the Elder and Theophrastus, as well as his own observations and experiments, della Porta described natural magic as the “perfection of natural philosophy.” By this he did not mean sorcery, which he rejected, but rather the disciplined effort to discover the hidden workings and possibilities of nature.
Over time, especially with the rise of mechanistic philosophy in the seventeenth century, the language of magic fell into disrepute. The world came to be described less in terms of hidden sympathies and more in terms of laws, mechanisms, and measurable causes. What earlier thinkers had explored under the heading of natural magic gradually became the modern sciences of chemistry, physics, biology, and astronomy. At the same time, scientific descriptions increasingly aspired to emotional neutrality, under the assumption that feelings such as wonder or a sense of beauty revealed nothing about the nature of nature.
Yet the older phrase carries an important insight. It reminds us that the study of nature is animated not only by a desire for explanation but also by a sense of wonder: a sense of the beauty and strangeness of nature. Even today, science deals with numerous “forces” and processes that are invisible to the eye yet can be inferred from their effects. Gravity cannot be seen, but we observe its influence in the falling of objects and the motion of planets. Magnetic fields are invisible, yet iron filings trace their elegant patterns around a magnet. Electromagnetic waves carry voices and images across the globe through radio, television, and wireless networks. Quantum fields and subatomic particles cannot be perceived directly, yet their presence is revealed through delicate instruments and carefully designed experiments.
When scientists study such phenomena, they are not abandoning explanation for mystery; they are uncovering the subtle and often astonishing ways in which nature works. And when scientific discoveries reveal unexpected complexity, creativity, and transformation in the natural world—from the self-organizing patterns of crystals to the intricate architecture of DNA or the vast evolutionary history of life—something of that older spirit of natural magic can still be felt. The world continues to disclose powers and processes that are unseen yet real, inviting both careful explanation and a renewed sense of wonder. My point is that science, at its best, does not eliminate enchantment; it deepens it. This can be true even within mechanistic science, whose discoveries often evoke astonishment at the intricate patterns and processes of the natural world.
The older phrase also invites us to consider the possibility that emotions such as a sense of beauty may indeed reveal something about nature itself, as Alfred North Whitehead argued in Science and the Modern World. For Whitehead, feelings of beauty, harmony, and intensity are not merely subjective reactions imposed upon a value-neutral universe; they are responses to features of reality itself. In this sense, wonder and aesthetic feeling may be modes of insight—ways in which the living world discloses something of its own character to those who attend to it carefully.
Is nature, therefore, magical? If by magic we mean the action of supernatural forces that violate the "laws of nature," the answer for most scientists will be no. Science itself rests on the conviction that natural events arise from natural causes that can be studied, tested, and understood. They do not appeal to what they call "supernatural" forces.
But if by magical we mean enchanting, surprising, creative, and filled with novelty, the answer is yes. People may or may not go as far as Whitehead and say that the drive toward beauty is the telos of the universe, but they will say that nature is beautiful and in is own way mysterious. The world contains hidden powers, subtle relations, and creative processes that are not immediately visible to the eye yet become intelligible through careful observation and experiment, and are amazing in their own right.
Moreover, we ourselves are within nature, not apart from it. Our own minds, our own consciousness, arise within the natural world and participate in its unfolding creativity. The capacity to feel, imagine, remember, and understand is itself one of nature’s most remarkable achievements. In this sense, the human mind may be seen as one of the ways in which nature becomes aware of itself, and one the most magical features of an already magical universe.
Whitehead argued that the capacity for feeling and remembering goes all the way down into the depths of matter and all the way out into the far reaches of the cosmos. For him, this means that not only human beings, but all actualities are expressions of something like subjectivity or mind. The universe is composed not of inert bits of matter but of events of experience, each responding in its own way to the world around it.
Many people may hesitate to go as far as Whitehead in this regard. Even so, they often sense a kind of self-creative spontaneity, a vitality, even in what we call inorganic objects: crystals forming their structures, rivers carving landscapes, stars forging new elements in their cores. There is, in these processes, a creativity and dynamism that resists the idea of a completely lifeless world. For them, as for Whitehead, there is no absolutely “dead” matter—only varying degrees of activity, responsiveness, and becoming within the unfolding life of the cosmos.
To study nature was to explore its hidden powers, subtle sympathies, and surprising transformations. Scholars and experimenters alike believed that the world was filled with active forces waiting to be understood and, in some cases, carefully harnessed. Herbs healed, magnets attracted, stars influenced earthly events, and chemical substances transformed one another in mysterious ways. None of this was thought to violate nature; rather, it revealed the deeper workings of nature itself.
A well-known example of this tradition is Magia Naturalis (Natural Magic), written by the Italian polymath Giambattista della Porta and first published in Naples in 1558. The book quickly became popular across Europe and was republished in multiple Latin editions and translated into several languages. In its expanded twenty-book version (1589), it gathered observations on subjects as varied as geology, optics, medicines, poisons, cooking, metallurgy, magnetism, cosmetics, perfumes, gunpowder, and invisible writing.
Drawing on ancient authorities such as Pliny the Elder and Theophrastus, as well as his own observations and experiments, della Porta described natural magic as the “perfection of natural philosophy.” By this he did not mean sorcery, which he rejected, but rather the disciplined effort to discover the hidden workings and possibilities of nature.
Over time, especially with the rise of mechanistic philosophy in the seventeenth century, the language of magic fell into disrepute. The world came to be described less in terms of hidden sympathies and more in terms of laws, mechanisms, and measurable causes. What earlier thinkers had explored under the heading of natural magic gradually became the modern sciences of chemistry, physics, biology, and astronomy. At the same time, scientific descriptions increasingly aspired to emotional neutrality, under the assumption that feelings such as wonder or a sense of beauty revealed nothing about the nature of nature.
Yet the older phrase carries an important insight. It reminds us that the study of nature is animated not only by a desire for explanation but also by a sense of wonder: a sense of the beauty and strangeness of nature. Even today, science deals with numerous “forces” and processes that are invisible to the eye yet can be inferred from their effects. Gravity cannot be seen, but we observe its influence in the falling of objects and the motion of planets. Magnetic fields are invisible, yet iron filings trace their elegant patterns around a magnet. Electromagnetic waves carry voices and images across the globe through radio, television, and wireless networks. Quantum fields and subatomic particles cannot be perceived directly, yet their presence is revealed through delicate instruments and carefully designed experiments.
When scientists study such phenomena, they are not abandoning explanation for mystery; they are uncovering the subtle and often astonishing ways in which nature works. And when scientific discoveries reveal unexpected complexity, creativity, and transformation in the natural world—from the self-organizing patterns of crystals to the intricate architecture of DNA or the vast evolutionary history of life—something of that older spirit of natural magic can still be felt. The world continues to disclose powers and processes that are unseen yet real, inviting both careful explanation and a renewed sense of wonder. My point is that science, at its best, does not eliminate enchantment; it deepens it. This can be true even within mechanistic science, whose discoveries often evoke astonishment at the intricate patterns and processes of the natural world.
The older phrase also invites us to consider the possibility that emotions such as a sense of beauty may indeed reveal something about nature itself, as Alfred North Whitehead argued in Science and the Modern World. For Whitehead, feelings of beauty, harmony, and intensity are not merely subjective reactions imposed upon a value-neutral universe; they are responses to features of reality itself. In this sense, wonder and aesthetic feeling may be modes of insight—ways in which the living world discloses something of its own character to those who attend to it carefully.
Is nature, therefore, magical? If by magic we mean the action of supernatural forces that violate the "laws of nature," the answer for most scientists will be no. Science itself rests on the conviction that natural events arise from natural causes that can be studied, tested, and understood. They do not appeal to what they call "supernatural" forces.
But if by magical we mean enchanting, surprising, creative, and filled with novelty, the answer is yes. People may or may not go as far as Whitehead and say that the drive toward beauty is the telos of the universe, but they will say that nature is beautiful and in is own way mysterious. The world contains hidden powers, subtle relations, and creative processes that are not immediately visible to the eye yet become intelligible through careful observation and experiment, and are amazing in their own right.
Moreover, we ourselves are within nature, not apart from it. Our own minds, our own consciousness, arise within the natural world and participate in its unfolding creativity. The capacity to feel, imagine, remember, and understand is itself one of nature’s most remarkable achievements. In this sense, the human mind may be seen as one of the ways in which nature becomes aware of itself, and one the most magical features of an already magical universe.
Whitehead argued that the capacity for feeling and remembering goes all the way down into the depths of matter and all the way out into the far reaches of the cosmos. For him, this means that not only human beings, but all actualities are expressions of something like subjectivity or mind. The universe is composed not of inert bits of matter but of events of experience, each responding in its own way to the world around it.
Many people may hesitate to go as far as Whitehead in this regard. Even so, they often sense a kind of self-creative spontaneity, a vitality, even in what we call inorganic objects: crystals forming their structures, rivers carving landscapes, stars forging new elements in their cores. There is, in these processes, a creativity and dynamism that resists the idea of a completely lifeless world. For them, as for Whitehead, there is no absolutely “dead” matter—only varying degrees of activity, responsiveness, and becoming within the unfolding life of the cosmos.