Sirs—We have this day drawn a check for the sum of £280, which closes our account with your firm. Our reasons for thus closing an account opened so very many years ago are of so exceptional a kind that we are quite prepared to find that they are deemed wholly inadequate to the result.... They are entirely the presence of Mr. R. B. Martin at Westminster Abbey, not merely as giving sanction to the same as an individual, but appearing as one of the deputation from a Society which has especially become the indorser and sustainer of Mr. Darwin’s theories.—— & Co.
The accordance of a resting-place to Darwin’s remains among England’s illustrious dead in that Valhalla, was an irenicon from Theology to one whose theories, pushed to their logical issues, have done more than any other to undermine the supernatural assumptions on which it is built. Not that Darwin was a man of aggressive type. If he speaks on the high matters round which, like planet tethered to sun, the spirit of man revolves by irresistible attraction, it is with hesitating voice and with no deep emotion. A man of placid temper, in whom the 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 contained “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 intense 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 me.”
This curious and lamentable loss of the higher æsthetic 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 read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week, for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
It is often said that a man’s religion concerns himself only. So far as the value of the majority of people’s opinions on such high matters goes, this is true; but it is a shallow saying when applied to men whose words carry weight, or whose discoveries cause us to ask what is their bearing on the larger questions of human relations and destinies to which past ages have given answers that no longer satisfy us, or that are not compatible with the facts discovered. Whatever silence Darwin maintained in his books as to his religious opinions, intelligent readers would see that unaggressive as was the mode of presentments of his theory, it undermined current beliefs in special providence, with its special creations and contrivances, and therefore in the intermittent interference of a deity; thus excluding that supernatural action of which miracles are the decaying stock evidence.
Nor could they fail to ask whether the theory of natural selection by “descent with modification” was to apply to the human species. And when Darwin, already anticipated in this application by his more daring disciples, Professors Huxley and Haeckel, published his Descent of Man, with its outspoken chapter on the origin of conscience and the development of belief in spiritual beings, a belief subject to periodical revision as knowledge increased, it was obvious that the bottom was knocked out of all traditional dogmas of man’s fall and redemption, of human sin and divine forgiveness. Therefore, what Darwin himself believed was a matter of moment. His answers to inquiries which were made public during his lifetime told us that while the varying circumstances and modes of life caused his judgment to often fluctuate, and that while he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God, “I think,” he says, “that generally (and more and more as I grow older) but not always, an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” The chapter on Religion, although a part of the autobiography, is printed separately in the Life and Letters. As the following quotation shows, it is interesting as detailing a few of the steps by which Darwin reached that suspensive stage.
Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused them. But I had gradually come by this time—i. e., 1836 to 1839—to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos. The question, then, continually rose before my mind, and would not be banished—is it credible 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? This appeared to me utterly incredible.
By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported—and that the more we know of the fixed laws of Nature the more incredible do miracles become—that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us, that the Gospels can not be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seems to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses: by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wildfire had some weight with me.
But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.
Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by a man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation of Domesticated Animals and Plants, and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered.
Without doubt, the influence of the conclusions deducible from the theory of Evolution are fatal to belief in the supernatural. When we say the supernatural, we mean that great body of assumptions out of which are constructed all theologies, the essential element in these being the intimate relation between spiritual beings, of whom certain qualities are predicated, and man. These beings have no longer any place in the effective belief of intelligent and unprejudiced men, because they are found to have no correspondence with the ascertained operations of Nature.