The year the young Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) boarded The Beagle, Mary Shelley contemplated the nature of the imagination in her preface to the most famous edition of Frankenstein, concluding that creativity “does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos” — the chaos, she meant, of ideas and impressions and memories seething in the cauldron of the mind, out of which we half-consciously select and combine fragments to have the thoughts and ideas we call our own.

The chaos of ideas Darwin was about to absorb on the Galapagos would lead him to devote his life to understanding the astonishing imagination of nature, the way it selects and combines traits to create different species of dazzling diversity, each exquisitely adapted to its environment.

Unlike his contemporaries, he did not consider the human animal the pinnacle of nature’s imagination. “Never say higher or lower,” he scribbled in the margin of a book, arguing with the author. “Say more complicated.” Darwin knew that we are complicated by our imagination, although other animals — and this, he knew, was a “highly irreligious” view — “possess the same faculties of imitation, attention, deliberation, choice, memory, imagination, the association of ideas, and reason, though in very different degrees.” (He was especially awed by the creativity of the bowerbird.) He knew that our triumphs of invention — fire and language he held above all others — are the fruits of our ability to reason, to question, and to make observations, but he believed that nothing has been more crucial, more fertile, more responsible for our evolutionary success than our “powers of the imagination, wonder, curiosity, [and] an undefined sense of beauty.” (Darwin himself relished the “chaos of delight” afforded by nature’s beauty, by the sense of wonder that so stirs the imagination when beholding a primeval forest or a shimmering mountain peak.)

Toward the end of his life, Darwin took up the question of the imagination on the pages of The Descent of Man (free ebook). This “highest prerogative” of the human animal, he wrote, “unites former images and ideas, independently of the will, and thus creates brilliant and novel results.” (A century later, Einstein — who believed that “imagination is more important than knowledge” — would place this unifying work at the heart of creativity, terming it “combinatory play.”)

By making the imagination the crux of our humanity, Darwin argued — in an era when women and people were barred from higher education, barred from the professional institutions of art and science, barred from general citizenship in humanity — that true equality between human beings could only be achieved when all have their “reason and imagination exercised to the highest point” from a young age. But he placed the imagination above reason in the development of “the moral faculties” — empathy, after all, is always a creative act of unselfing, a way of imagining what it is like to be someone else. A century and a half before Jane Goodall insisted that evolving our empathy is the key to reaching our highest evolutionary potential, Darwin wrote:

This affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being. No doubt a man with a torpid mind, if his social affections and sympathies are well developed, will be led to good actions, and may have a fairly sensitive conscience. But whatever renders the imagination more vivid and strengthens the habit of recalling and comparing past impressions, will make the conscience more sensitive.

Because he understood the statistical distribution by which natural selection develops, tests, and improves traits, he understood that minds too exist along a vast continuum “from absolute imbecility to high excellence,” and that different individuals within the same species fall at different points on it. But he believed that we can propel ourselves along the continuum and cultivate high excellence of the imagination by being vigilant over what we feed the chaos out of which we create — an evolutionary case for the “garbage in, garbage out” model of the mind:

The value of the products of our imagination depends of course on the number, accuracy, and clearness of our impressions, on our judgment and taste in selecting or rejecting the involuntary combinations, and to a certain extent on our power of voluntarily combining them.

It is worth questioning how much of our evolutionary inheritance we are squandering by bathing in confirmation bias that only narrows the pool of ideas at our disposal in the combinatorial work of creativity, by feeding our minds divisive narratives that fray our empathy for what is other than ourselves and thus diminish the sensitivity essential for a creative conscience.

On his deathbed, Darwin himself lamented having failed to keep feeding his mind those greatest nourishments of the empathic imagination — none mightier, he believed, than poetry and music — turning it instead into “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.” He saw, from the wistful vantage of nearing the void, how “the loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.”

The most creative mind, in the end, as well as the most felicitous, may be the mind that never loses its appetite for wonder and its largehearted curiosity about what it is like to be another.