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flash of li ghtn ing in the clouds," and , Marlow refl ects, "We live in the
fl icker."
Like atom ic physics in our day, however, it was bio logy which had
the most important moral and political implica tions for the la ter
nin eteenth century. That some of these implications found their way
into
H eart of Darkness
is not surprising, for Conrad grew up in the
heyday o f evo lutionary theory, and Alfred Wallace was one of his
favorite authors.
The main plot of
H eart of Darkness
is provided , in effect, by that
aspect of the evolutionary process to which Marlow is exposed in hi s
voyage further up-river. Marlow stumbles onto a grim historical
variant of the law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; th e case of
Kurtz demonstrates the process in reverse. His atavistic regression is
brought on by the wilderness which, Marlow says, "whi spered to him
things about himself which he did no t know, things of which h e had
no concep tion till he took counsel with this great solitude." At home
everything con spired to keep Kurtz in ignorance of his true sel[; the
police stopped him from devouring others or being devoured ; but in
the solitude hi s "forgotten and brutal instincts " revealed themselves as
potent forces in his biological inheritance, and therefore as powerful
arguments against the widespread di stortion of evolutionary theory to
support the Victorian faith in economi c, social, political and na tional
progress, the faith which origina ll y anima ted Kurtz.
The strongest single support for the Victorian faith in progress
was economic expansion, to which bo th Bentham and na tural science
had lent a theoretical rationale and an immense public prestige.
Conrad, however, rejected the materia l and quantitative values of a
commercial and industrial society: he saw only danger in " the blind
trust in mere material and app liances"; he warned aga inst "carrying
humility towards tha t uni versal provider, Science, too far," and he
viewed the Victorian hope that progress would automatically result
from " the peaceful nature of industri al and commercial competition"
as an " incred ible infa tua tion. "
Kurtz, of course, stands not only for the civilizing ben efi cence o f
economi c progress, but for the other more spiritual compon ents of the
Victorian religion of progress. Evolution had replaced the traditional
view of man's supremacy in the Divine plan with the idea tha t an
equiva lentl y spendid status could be attained through the working out
o f humanity'S secu lar destiny. In Arthur Lovejoy's phrase, the " tem–
poralisation of the Chain of Being" had substituted the law of
hi storical progress for the lost belief in the p erfection of God's
providential design.
