 The earliest set of themes in the manuscript elaboration of natural selection theory can be characterized as those developed through a strong analogy between human art and the workings of nature (Theunissen 2013). As this was expressed in the first coherent draft of the theory, a 39-page manuscript written in 1842, this discussion transferred the concept of selection of forms by human agency in the creation of the varieties of domestic animals and plants, to the active selection in the natural world by an almost conscious agency, a “being more sagacious than man (not an omniscient creator)” (Darwin 1842 [1909: 6] [1996: 91]). This agency selects out those features most beneficial to organisms in relation to conditions of life, analogous in its action to the selection by man on domestic forms in the production of different breeds. Interwoven with these references to an almost Platonic demiurge are appeals to the selecting  power of an active “Nature”: