Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/344

creation; the Old Testament, from which Pearson started, seemed "no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos."^[1] "Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress."^[2] One of his difficulties is worth noticing as showing how little he had brought religious truth under that great conception of growth which dominated 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 painting. 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 Shakespeare, 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 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 can not conceive. . . . If I had to live my life 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.^[3]. . . 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.^[4]

We 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 Specûs," the tendency to draw everything round to the predominant pursuit, shows itself in as many forms as there are absorbing studies. A theologian or moralist rarely appreciates the strength of scientific 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 materiâ 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 theologian will pooh-pooh scientific discoveries which do not readily and at once fall under his own categories of thought; and the sc-

1. i, p. 277.
2. i, p. 278.
3. i, pp. 81, 82.
4. i, p. 495.