In The Descent of Man Darwin illustrates how humans are merely mammals that have developed to have particularly strong social instincts and mental powers and are not separate from other animals.  In their poetry, Constance Naden and Mathilde Blind echo this idea and illustrate how people are driven by motives of sexual reproduction and survival.  In “Natural Selection” the speaker cannot compete with “…the more dandified males” (l.25) that woo women by being physically attractive.  Although the speaker idealizes science and cares about “…the How and the Why” (l.22) of life, he is equally swayed by the desire for sexual reproduction.  Likewise, in “Scientific Wooing” the speaker is distracted from his scientific pursuits by sexual desire and chooses to woo his love by explaining the mechanisms of sexual reproduction in flowers.  While these men may aspire to mental greatness, Naden shows that they are really just animals driven by the desire to propagate the species.

Blind, on the other hand, focuses more on the violent animalistic desires of humans in part III of The Ascent of Man, “The Leading of Sorrow.”  Here she speaks of how humans treat each other badly in their desire to survive and progress, but because of their ability to comprehend what they are doing to each other they are in a worse state:

Better than this masquerade of culture

Hiding strange hyena appetites,

The frank ravening of the raw-necked vulture

As its beak the senseless carrion smites (l.5-8)

Blind claims that the human ideals of culture merely obscure our species’ more violent instincts and yet it is our culture that causes us to call violent acts immoral.  Blind ends the poem on a hopeful note, however, claiming that humans are also capable of using their moral powers to create forces of love and goodness like God (l.120).

            When we studied the Romantics we discussed how humans have a sublime ability to learn and question the world around them.  Do Naden and Blind agree, or are they more cynical about the sublimity of humans?