The Science of Sympathy - 9780252040580

The Science of SympathyMorality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization\nAuthor(s): Rob Boddice\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Illinois Press, United States\nImprint: University of Illinois Press\nISBN-13: 9780252040580, 978-0252040580\nSynopsis\nIn his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in a civilized human society. His idea buttressed the belief that white, upper-class, educated men deserved their sense of superiority by virtue of good breeding. It also implied that societal progress could be steered by envisioning a new blueprint for sympathy that redefined moral actions carried out in sympathy's name. Rob Boddice joins a daring intellectual history of sympathy to a portrait of how the first Darwinists defined and employed it. As Boddice shows, their interpretations of Darwin's ideas sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy. Scientific and medical progress demanded that \""cruel\"" practices lik.