ABSTRACT
As befits a Victorian, Darwin’s political views do not fit easily into the categories we use today. Take the example of race. As we have seen, Darwin believed that all human races were very closely related to each other, and he supported his case by arguing that only the finest of gradations could be observed between them. He was passionately opposed to slavery. He dismissed exceptionless generalisations about the makeup of different races. But he was no racial egalitarian. He believed that there were good rules of thumb about racial psychology: ‘Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct . . . Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the lighthearted, talkative negroes’ (Descent: 198).
