The following article investigates the unique epistemic changes in conceptions and representations of chance and causality that begin with the poetry and thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth (and first-generation British Romanticism) and that are elaborated and expressed ultimately in Charles Darwin's theories of organic variation and evolution through natural selection. I argue that both Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1798) and Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805) rely on a shift from describing chance as an ontological concern to chance as a discursive matter. Drawing on Darwin's statistical projects from the 1850s and selections from his correspondence in which he begins to articulate his developmental theory of organic variability, I then reveal that Darwin too makes a similar intellectual leap from characterizing chance as event to theorizing chance as idea. As I propose, chance – as an epistemological or discursive matter – radically reconfigures both literary and scientific representations of causality produced during this period. The essay thus concludes by suggesting that the idea of chance infiltrates Romantic and Victorian depictions of the natural world so thoroughly that these representations are impossible without a reorganization of the clauses and stipulations of causality.

中文翻译：

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达尔文进化论和英国浪漫主义的机会

下一篇文章研究了机会和因果关系的概念和表述的独特认识论变化，这些变化始于塞缪尔·泰勒·科尔里奇和威廉·华兹华斯（以及第一代英国浪漫主义）的诗歌和思想，并在查尔斯·达尔文理论中得到了详细阐述和表达。通过自然选择实现有机变化和进化。我认为，科尔里里奇的《历险记》（1798年）和华兹华斯的《前奏曲》（1805年）都依赖于将机会描述为一种本体论关注点而将机会描述为一种话语问题。借鉴达尔文1850年代的统计项目以及他的书信中的一些选择，在书信中他开始阐明他的有机变异性发展理论，然后，我揭示了达尔文在从将机会描述为事件到理论机会作为想法方面也实现了类似的智力飞跃。正如我所建议的那样，机会作为一种认识论的或话语性的东西，从根本上重新构造了这一时期产生的因果关系的文学和科学表示。因此，本文的结论是，偶然性的思想渗透到了浪漫主义和维多利亚时代对自然世界的描述中，以至于如果不对因果关系的条款和规定进行重新组织，这些表达是不可能的。