ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a central issue of nineteenth-century science and philosophy in light of its influence on Portuguese poetry in the modernist period. The crux of the problem faced by modernist writers who wanted to embrace contemporary advances in evolutionary science were the metaphysical implications of this essentially blind and directionless mechanism whose benefit to the human race was only a chance side effect of its effects on individual members of the species. Fernando Pessoa's interest in the psychological, aesthetic, and moral implications of evolutionism was typical of Charles Darwin's reception in Portugal generally. The orthonym-heteronym scheme is imperfect, in other words, but it is at least a step toward describing Pessoa's position in the materialism–spiritualism debate. The heteronyms are capable of adding their voices to this chorus, as we can appreciate from an attack on Haeckel by one of Pessoa's creations, Alexander Search.
