RELIGION. 283 



C. Darwin to Miss Julia Wedgwood. 



July ii [1861]. 



Some one has sent us * Macmillan ' ; and I must tell you 

 how much I admire your Article ; though at the same time I 

 must confess that I could not clearly follow you in some 

 parts, which probably is in main part due to my not being at 

 all accustomed to metaphysical trains of thought. I think 

 that you understand my book * perfectly, and that I find a 

 very, rare event with my critics. The ideas in the last page 

 have several times vaguely crossed my mind. Owing to sev- 

 eral correspondents I have been led lately to think, or rather 

 to try to think over some of the chief points discussed by 

 you. But the result has been with me a maze something 

 like thinking on the origin of evil, to which you allude. The 

 mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, with- 

 out having been designed ; yet, where one would most ex- 

 pect design, viz. in the structure of a sentient being, the more 

 I think on the subject, the less I can see proof of design. 

 Asa Gray and some others look at each variation, or at least 

 at each beneficial variation (which A. Gray would compare 

 with the rain drops f which do not fall on the sea, but on to 

 the land to fertilize it) as having been providentially designed. 

 Yet when I ask him whether he looks at each variation in 

 the rock-pigeon, by which man has made by accumulation a 

 pouter or fantail pigeon, as providentially designed for man's 



* The ' Origin of Species.' 



f Dr. Gray's rain-drop metaphor occurs in the Essay ' Darwin and his 

 'Reviewers' (' Darwiniana,' p. 157): "The whole animate life of a country 

 depends absolutely upon the vegetation, the vegetation upon the rain. 

 The moisture is furnished by the ocean, is raised by the sun's heat from 

 the ocean's surface, and is wafted inland by the winds. But what multi- 

 tudes of rain-drops fall back into the ocean are as much without a final 

 cause as the incipient varieties which come to nothing ! Does it therefore 

 follow that the rains which are bestowed upon the soil with such rule and 

 average regularity were not designed to support vegetable and animal 

 life ? " 



