ABSTRACT
Robert J. Richards has spent most of his career tracing the connections between German Romanticism and Charles Darwin. His research has done much to change people image of the great Victorian naturalist. Where earlier scholarship tended to understand Darwin's theory in the context of natural theology and political economy, both native English traditions, Richards has demonstrated the importance of foreign ideas to the creation and reception of Darwin's treatise On the Origin of Species. Richards maintains that natural selection is neither as simple as Huxley recollected nor as mechanical as scholars described. Richards adduces a few sources of evidence for Darwin's belief in progress. The first German scientist to accept Darwin's teachings was Emil du Bois-Reymond. The interesting thing about du Bois-Reymond's example is that he endorsed Darwin for reasons entirely at odds with the ones that Richards defends. Du Bois-Reymond's commitment to mechanism ran through all his discussions of Darwin.
