This paper examines the relation between the verse stanzas and the prose notes (both the extensive footnotes and the even more extensive “additional notes”) of Erasmus Darwin's The Temple of Nature or The Origin of Society: A Poem. With Philosophic Notes (1803) in an effort to engage with the complex interweaving of science and literature that forms Darwin's work and increasingly informs Romantic Studies. Beginning with the simple assertion that the notes are far more integral to the text than the subordination implied in the titular “with” might suggest – in fact, that the notes are, in some important ways, the point of the text – I argue that what critics often refer to as Darwin's “masterwork” interrogates the very notion of “mastery” itself by working at once to perform and to foster a critical sense of what we might call “interdisciplinarity”: an effort neither to erect nor to erode disciplinary boundaries at points of intersection but an interest in engaging with the “space” of the boundary itself. As Darwin notes in the preface, “The Poem, which is here offered to the Public, does not pretend to instruct by deep researches of reasoning; its aim is simply to amuse by bringing distinctly to the imagination the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature in the order, as the Author believes, in which the progressive course of time presented them.” On the one hand, this claim clearly conveys Darwin's concern with instruction, with “bringing distinctly to the imagination” and the “deep researches of reasoning,” even as it downplays; perhaps, more “traditional” modes of teaching and even, by extension, works to revise our understanding of what is worth teaching. On the other hand, it suggests that a Romantic concern with the beautiful and sublime is as at home in the “deep researches of reasoning” and the “operations of Nature” as it is in any poem. And, however, we may choose to inflect that claim; the text is more than simply a didactic poem teaching a proto-evolutionary, clearly medicalized version of biological, sociological and cultural development. It is an extensive commentary on the interrelation of the medical and the social, the biological and the poetic and, not least, on the nature of didacticism itself, on the hows and whys of instructing and learning in an environment and at a time when the limits of the known and the knowable and the sense of promise and anxiety fostered by changing disciplinary boundaries were under constant scrutiny. By examining the interaction between the “main” text and the paratext, I explore how one of the period's most diverse thinkers and writers negotiated the diversity of knowledge and modes of knowing that made his work so popular and influential and, most importantly, how he taught and can still teach ways for readers to manage the critical if contentious interdisciplinarity that will continue to dominate our own deep researches.

中文翻译：

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达尔文，超文本和认识方式

本文研究了诗节与伊拉斯mus斯·达尔文的《自然之庙》或《社会的起源：一首诗》的散文注释之间的关系（包括广泛的脚注和更为广泛的“附加注释”）。与哲学笔记（1803）一起致力于科学和文学的复杂交织，该交织形成了达尔文的作品，并越来越多地为浪漫研究提供信息。从简单的断言开始，即注释比起标题中的“ with”所暗示的从属关系，更是文本的组成部分，这可能表明–实际上，注释在某些重要方面是文本的重点–我认为评论家通常称其为“达尔文” 的“杰作”通过立即工作来表现和培养对我们所谓的“跨学科性”的批判意识，从而质疑“掌握”本身的概念：既不努力建立也不侵蚀交叉点处的学科界限，而是与边界本身的“空间”互动的兴趣。正如达尔文在序言中所指出的：“这里提供给公众的那首诗，并不假装是通过对推理的深入研究来指导的。它的目的仅仅是通过使想象中的自然和美好的图像清晰地带入想象中来使人有趣，就像作者相信的那样，其中渐进的时间过程向它们呈现。一方面，这一主张清楚地表达了达尔文对教学的关注，甚至淡化了“明显地带给想象力”和“深入的推理研究”；也许，更多的“传统”教学模式，甚至可以扩展我们对有价值教学的理解。另一方面，它暗示着对美丽和崇高的浪漫关怀在任何诗中都像在“对推理的深入研究”和“自然的操作”中一样。但是，我们可以选择更改该主张；本书的文字不仅仅是一首教学诗，它是生物学，社会学和文化发展的原始进化的，明确医学的版本。这是对医学与社会，生物学与诗意之间相互关系的广泛评论，尤其是关于教学论本身的性质，关于如何在环境中以及在不断审查学科界限而引起的已知和可知范围以及希望和焦虑感的环境下进行指导和学习的方式和原因。通过研究“主要”文本和副文本之间的相互作用，我探索了那个时期最多样化的思想家和作家是如何协商知识和认识方式的多样性的，从而使他的作品如此受欢迎和具有影响力，最重要的是，他如何教授并且仍然可以教读者如何管理关键的，有争议的跨学科性，这些将继续主导我们自己的深入研究。