“One long argument”?

Supposedly, the Origin is not only an “abstract”, but also “one long argument”. However, the book is actually “a difficult book to read,” as T.H. Huxley confessed during his argument with G. Romanes. Of course, when Huxley emphasised the book’s complexity, he intended to explain away alternative readings of the book, and to push his own interpretation to the fore as superior, more accurate than any other. However, Darwin’s book does have a complex structure, in spite of several attempts to reconstruct it (especially by Jon Hodge). Although Darwin proclaimed on several occasions the unity of his “argument,” it is nevertheless quite difficult to identify just what the author really means when he refers to “my view,” since he himself fluctuates in his use of the phrase, as Samuel Butler emphasized. These fluctuations blur the meaning of the Origin: looking at what Darwin refers to when he says “me”, is a useful prism in order to diffract the white light of the Origin.