I have also lost in quitting this circle, the privilege of often meeting Mr. Herbert Spencer; though he has never (to his honour be it remembered!) pronounced a word in favour of painful experiments on animals.
With the great naturalist who has revolutionized modern science I had rather frequent intercourse till the same sad barrier of a great difference of moral opinion arose between us. Mr. Charles Darwin’s brother-in-law, Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood, was, for a time tenant here at Hengwrt; and afterwards took a house named Caer-Deon in this neighbourhood, where Mr. and Mrs. Charles Darwin and their boys also spent part of the summer. As it chanced, we also took a cottage that summer close by Caer-deon and naturally saw our neighbours daily. I had known Mr. Darwin previously, in London, and had also met his most amiable brother, Mr. Erasmus Darwin, at the house of my kind old friend Mrs. Reid, the foundress of Bedford Square College. The first thing we heard concerning the illustrious arrivals was the report, that one of the sons had had “a fall off a Philosopher;” word substituted by the ingenious Welsh mind for “velocipede” (as bicycles were then called) under an easily understood confusion between the rider and the machine he rode!
Next,—the Welsh parson of the little church close by, having fondly calculated that Mr. Darwin would certainly hasten to attend his services, prepared for him a sermon which should slay this scientific Goliath and spread dismay through the ranks of the sceptical host. He told his congregation that there were in these days persons, puffed up by science, falsely so called, and deluded by the pride of reason, who had actually been so audacious as to question the story of the six days Creation as detailed in Sacred Scripture. But let them note how idle were these sceptical questionings! Did they not see that the events recorded happened before there was any man existing to record them, and that, therefore, Moses must have learned them from God himself, since there was no one else to tell him?
Alas! the philosopher, I fear, never went to be converted (as he surely must have been) by this ingenious Welsh parson, and we were for a long time merry over his logic. Mr. Darwin was never in good health, I believe, after his Beagle experience of sea sickness, and he was glad to use a peaceful and beautiful old pony of my friend’s, yclept Geraint, which she placed at his disposal. His gentleness to this beast and incessant efforts to keep off the flies from his head, and his fondness for his dog Polly (concerning whose cleverness and breeding he indulged in delusions which Matthew Arnold’s better dog-lore would have swiftly dissipated), were very pleasing traits in his character.
In writing at this time to a friend I said:—
“I am glad you like Mill’s book. Mr. Charles Darwin, with whom I am enchanted, is greatly excited about it, but says that Mill could learn some things from physical science; and that it is in the struggle for existence and (especially) for the possession of women that men acquire their vigour and courage. Also he intensely agrees with what I say in my review of Mill about inherited qualities being more important than education, on which alone Mill insists. All this the philosopher told me yesterday, standing on a path 60 feet above me and carrying on an animated dialogue from our respective standpoints!”
Mr. Darwin was walking on the footpath down from Caer-Deon among the purple heather which clothes our mountains so royally; and impenetrable brambles lay between him above and me on the road below; so we exchanged our remarks at the top of our voices, being too eager to think of the absurdity of the situation, till my friend coming along the road heard with amazement words flying in the air which assuredly those “valleys and rocks never heard” before, or since! When we drive past that spot, as we often do now, we sigh as we look at the “Philosopher’s Path,” and wish (O, how one wishes!) that he could come back and tell us what he has learned since!
At this time Mr. Darwin was writing his Descent of Man, and he told me that he was going to introduce some new view of the nature of the Moral Sense. I said: “Of course you have studied Kant’s Grundlegung der Sitten?” No; he had not read Kant, and did not care to do so. I ventured to urge him to study him, and observed that one could hardly see one’s way in ethical speculation without some understanding of his philosophy. My own knowledge of it was too imperfect to talk of it to him, but I could lend him a very good translation. He declined my book, but I nevertheless packed it up with the next parcel I sent him.
On returning the volume he wrote to me:—
“It was very good of you to send me nolens volens Kant, together with the other book. I have been extremely glad to look through the former. It has interested me much to see how differently two men may look at the same points. Though I fully feel how presumptuous it sounds to put myself even for a moment in the same bracket with Kant—the one man a great philosopher looking exclusively into his own mind, the other a degraded wretch looking from the outside through apes and savages at the moral sense of mankind.”