DARWIN. 163 



do to assume that every fool knows what 'intelligent' 

 means." 



Inasmuch as it must necessarily be of great interest to 

 know the attitude which so great a thinker as Darwin 

 adopted towards Christianity, revelation, and other 

 matters of theology, we give unabridged two letters 

 which were written without a view to publication, and 

 were published after his death without the authorisation 

 of his representatives. Having been widely published, 

 however, it is right that they should be given here. 



The first of these was sent in 1873 to N. D. Deedes, 

 a Dutch gentleman, who wrote to ask Darwin his opinion 

 on the existence of a God : 



" It is impossible to answer your question briefly ; I 

 am not sure that I could do so even if I wrote at 

 some length. But I may say that the impossibility of 

 conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with 

 our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me 

 our chief argument for the existence of God ; but whether 

 this is an argument of real value, I have never been able 

 to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the 

 mind still craves to know whence it came and how it 

 arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the 

 immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, 

 also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment 

 of the many able men who have fully believed in God ; 

 but here, again, I see how poor an argument this is. 

 The safest conclusion seems to be that the whole subject 

 is beyond the scope of man's intellect, but man can do 

 his duty." 



