330 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



creation ; the Old Testament, from wliicli Pearson started, seemed 

 " no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos." * 

 '' Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last com- 

 plete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress." f One of his 

 difficulties is worth noticing as showing how little he had brought 

 religious truth under that great conception of growth which domi- 

 nated all his physical inquiries. It seemed to him " incredible " 

 that, if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos, he 

 would permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva, 

 etc., as Christianity is connected with the Old Testament. Why ? 

 except for the very reason that makes it " incredible " that man 

 should be evolved directly from a fish, and not " incredible " that 

 he should be evolved from the higher vertebrates. He has organic 

 relations with both, but these relations are not such as to make it 

 indifferent from which he is derived. 



It was not religion alone, however, that " died a natural death " 

 in Darwin's case. It is almost pathetic to read his account of the 

 way in which he fell out of correspondence with poetry and paint- 

 ing. Up to thirty or beyond he delighted in both. Gradually 

 they ceased to interest him, and finally they became 'positively 

 distasteful ; 



I can not endure to read a line of poetry : I have tried lately to read Shake- 

 speare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have almost lost 

 my taste for pictures or music. . . . My mind seems to have become a kind of ma- 

 chine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. But why this 

 should have caused the atrophy of that part of the hrain alone on which the 

 higher tastes depend, I can not conceive. ... If I had to live my hfe again, I 

 would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least 

 once a week ; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have 

 been kept active through use. J ... It is an accursed evil to a man [he writes to 

 Hooker in 1858] to become so absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.* 



"VVe shall not, we trust, be accused either of want of sympathy 

 or want of charity, if, in the light of what Darwin has told us of 

 his religious history, we sum it up in the words the atrophy of 

 faith. That which Bacon sets first among the ""'Idola Specus," 

 the tendency to draw everything round to the predominant pur- 

 suit, shows itself in as many forms as there are absorbing studies. 

 A theologian or moralist rarely appreciates the strength of scien- 

 tific evidence : a scientific man underrates the value of moral and 

 spiritual forces. It is unfortunately always easy to discredit or 

 ignore facts which are not in pari materid with those which lie 

 nearest to our heart, or to offer, in terms of our own special study, 

 an explanation which only explains the facts away. So the theo- 

 logian will pooh-pooh scientific discoveries which do not readily 

 and at once fall under his own categories of thought ; and the sci- 



* i, p. 277. t i, p. 278. J i, pp. 81, 82. # i, p. 495. 



