Sir Charles Lyell realised to my mind the Man of Science as he was of old; devout, and yet entirely free-thinking in the true sense; filled with admiring, almost adoring love for Nature, and also (all the more for that enthusiasm), simple and fresh-hearted as a child. When a good story had tickled him he would come and tell it to us with infinite relish. I recollect especially his delight in an American boy (I think somehow connected with our friend Mr. Herman Merivale), who, being directed to say his prayers night and morning, replied that he had no objection to do so at night, but thought that “a boy who is worth anything can take care of himself by day.”[[21]] Another time we had been discussing Evolution, and some of us had betrayed the impression that the doctrine, (which he had then recently adopted), involved always the survival of the best, as well as of the “fittest.” Sir Charles left the room and went downstairs, but suddenly rushed back into the drawing-room, and said to me all in a breath, standing on the rug: “I’ll explain it to you in one minute! Suppose you had been living in Spain three hundred years ago, and had had a sister who was a perfectly common-place person, and believed everything she was told. Well! your sister would have been happily married and had a numerous progeny, and that would have been the survival of the fittest; but you would have been burnt at an auto-da-fè, and there would have been an end of you. You would have been unsuited to your environment. There! that’s Evolution! Good-bye!” On went his hat, and we heard the hall door close after him before we had done laughing.
Sir Charles’ interest in his own particular science was eager as that of a boy. One day I had a long conversation with him at his brother, Colonel Lyell’s hospitable house, on the subject of the Glacial period. He told me that he was employing regular calculators at Greenwich to make out the results of the ice-cap and how it would affect land and sea; whether it would cause double tides, &c. He said he had pointed out (what no one else had noticed) that the water to form this ice-cap did not come from another planet, but must have been deducted from the rest of the water on the globe. Another day I met him at a very imposing private concert in Regent’s Park. The following is my description of our conversation in a letter to my friend, Miss Elliot:—
“Sir Charles sat beside me yesterday at a great musical party at the D.’s, and I asked him, ‘Did he like music?’ He said, ‘Yes! for it allowed him to go on thinking his own thoughts.’ And so he evidently did, while they were singing Mendelssohn and Handel! At every interval he turned to me. ‘Agassiz has made a discovery. I can’t sleep for thinking of it. He finds traces of the Glaciers in tropical America.’ (Here intervened a sacred song.) ‘Well, as I was saying, you know 230,000 years ago the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit was at one of its maximum periods; and we were 11,000,000 miles further from the sun in winter, and the cold of those winters must have been intense; because heat varies, not according to direct ratio, but the squares of the distances.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘but then the summers were as much hotter?’ (Sacred song.) ‘No, the summers wern’t! They could not have conquered the cold.’ ‘Then you think that the astronomical 230,000 years corresponded with the glacial period? Is that time enough for all the strata since?’ (Handel.) ‘I don’t know. Perhaps we must go back to the still greater period of the eccentricity of the orbit three million years ago. Then we were 14 millions of miles out of the circular path.’ (Mendelssohn.) ‘Good-bye, dear Sir Charles—I must be off.’
“Another day last week, he came and sat with me for two hours. I would not light candles, and we got very deep into talk. I was greatly comforted and instructed by all he said. I asked him how the modern attacks on the argument from Design in Nature, and Darwin’s views, touched him religiously? He replied, ‘Not at all.’ He thought the proofs in Nature of the Divine Goodness quite triumphant; and that he watched with secret pleasure even sceptical men of science whenever they forget their theories, instinctively using phrases, all implying designing wisdom.”
I remember on another occasion Sir Charles telling me with much glee of two eminent Agnostic friends of ours who had been discussing some question for a long time, when one said to the other, “You are getting very teleological!” To which the friend responded, “I can’t help it!”
At another of his much prized visits to me (April 19th, 1866) he spoke earnestly of the future life, and made this memorable remark of which I took a note: “The further I advance in science, the less the mere physical difficulties in believing in immortality disturb me. I have learned to think nothing too amazing to be within the order of Nature.”
The great inequalities in the conditions of men and the sufferings of many seemed to be his strongest reasons for believing in another life. He added: “Aristotle says that every creature has its instincts given by its Creator, and each instinct leads to its good. Now the belief in immortality is an instinct tending to good.”
After the death of his beloved wife—the truest “helpmeet” ever man possessed—he became even more absorbed in the problem of a future existence, and very frequently came and talked with me on the subject. The last time I had a real conversation with him was not long before his death, when we met one sweet autumn day by chance in Regent’s Park, not far from the Zoological Gardens. We sat down under a tree and had a long discussion of the validity of religious faith. I think his argument culminated in this position:—
“The presumption is enormous that all our faculties, though liable to err, are true in the main, and point to real objects. The religious faculty in man is one of the strongest of all. It existed in the earliest ages, and instead of wearing out before advancing civilization, it grows stronger and stronger; and is, to-day, more developed among the highest races than ever it was before. I think we may safely trust that it points to a great truth.”
Here is another glimpse of him from a letter:—