Ch. III.] RELIGION. 61 



my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath 

 of his body ; but now the grandest scenes would not cause any 

 such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be 

 truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind, 

 and the universal belief by men of the existence of redness 

 makes my present loss of perception of not the least value 

 as evidence. This argument would be a valid one if all men of 

 all races had the same inward conviction of the existence of one 

 God ; but we know that this is very far from being the case. 

 Therefore I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings 

 are of any weight as evidence of what really exists. The state 

 of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and which 

 was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not essentially 

 differ from that which is often called the sense of sublimity ; 

 and however difficult it may be to explain the genesis of this 

 sense, it can hardly be advanced as an argument for the 

 existence of God, any more than the powerful though vague 

 and similar feelings excited by music. 



" With respect to immortality, nothing, shows me [so clearly] 

 how strong and almost instinctive a belief it is as the considera- 

 tion of the view now held by most physicists, namely, that the 

 sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, 

 unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus 

 gives it fresh life. Believing as I do that man in the distant 

 future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is 

 an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are 

 doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued 

 slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of 

 the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so 

 dreadful. 



" Another source of conviction in the existence of God, con- 

 nected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me 

 as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme 

 difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense 

 and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of 

 looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of 

 blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel com- 

 pelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in 

 some degree analogous to that of man ; and I deserve to be 

 called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my mind 

 about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the 

 Origin of Species, and it is since that time that it has very 

 gradually, with many fluctuations, become weaker. But then 

 arises the doubt — can the mind of man, which has, as I fully 

 believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed 



