Journey from Enchantment to Disenchantment?A Study on Darwin’s Descriptions of Nature from the Journal to the Origin

Abstract

Taking into accountthe disputed ques-tion about enchantment or disenchantment of the world caused by modern science, this paper com-paratively examines the semantics of the lexicon of Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches and The Origin of Species using computational text-mining strategies. The aim is to show that there is a direct semantic path, starting with the Journaland culminating in the Origin, which confirms a tendency towards a disenchanted type of language used by Darwin in his descriptions of nature. This is demonstrated by the lexical and semantic analysis of both texts.