Abstract The greatest contrast between Darwin’s and today’s psychologies concerns method. A century of the idealization of controlled experiments in the behavioural sciences has led many to discount without due consideration the highly refined discipline of observation and description at which Darwin excelled. Darwin’s lifelong labours as a naturalist grounded both his evolutionary theory and his psychology. The august tradition of natural history provided him with many of the concepts, practices, and attitudes that, in his own eyes, made his approach to psychological matters incompatible with that of more widely celebrated Victorian psychologists. This chapter outlines and contextualizes the practices which framed Darwin’s scientific investigations, whether of plants, animals, or human beings. These challenge some of the modernist truisms which circulate in contemporary psychology, forcing a reconsideration of the places of observation and description therein.
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