Addison on Aliens: On the Origins of the Evolutionary Epic

Abstract

This is a commentary on Addison's essay on 'The Scale of Being' in the Spectator 519 (1712), as a significant instance of the changing world-view in natural history and cosmology in the age of the Enlightement. Addison's notion of a full nature is placed in the history of ideas as a proto-evolutionist notion, a displacement of anthropocentric natural philosophy, and a link between the tradition of theodicy and the earliest forms of the evolutionary epic, antedating Buffon, Diderot, Lamarck or Erasmus Darwin.

Keywords: Addison, English literature, Evolution, Evolutionary epic, Theodicy, Chain of Being, Philosophy, Anthropocentrism, Evolutionism, Creationism