iv MODERN EVOLUTION 157 



observing faculties were stronger than the reflective, 

 he was content to collect and co-ordinate facts, 

 leaving to others the work of pointing out their 

 significance, and adjusting them, as best they could, 

 to this or that theory. It would be unjust to say of 

 him what John Morley says of Voltaire, that 'he 

 had no ear for the finer vibrations of the spiritual 

 voice,' but we know from his own confessions, what 

 limitations hemmed in his emotional nature. The 

 Life and Letters tells us that he was glad, after the 

 more serious work and correspondence of the day 

 were over, to listen to novels, for which he had a 

 great love so long as they ended happily, and con- 

 tained 'some person whom one can thoroughly love, 

 if a pretty woman, so much the better.' But 

 strangely enough, he lost all pleasure in music, art, 

 and poetry after thirty. When at school he enjoyed 

 Thomson, Byron, and Scott ; Shelley gave him in- 

 tense delight, and he was fond of Shakespeare, 

 especially the historical plays ; but in his old age 

 he found him ' so intolerably dull that it nauseated 



This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic 

 tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, 

 and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they 

 may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects, interest 

 me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have 

 become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of 

 large collections of facts, but why this should have caused 

 the atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the 

 higher tastes depend I cannot conceive. A man with a 

 mind more highly organised or better constituted than 

 mine would not, I suppose, have thus suffered ; and, if I 

 had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to 



