The Book of Darwin 3 · Written by himself, from his autobiography, the Origin, and his letters
Charles Darwin, born at Shrewsbury in England in 1809, died at Downe in 1882. At twenty-two he sailed in the small ship Beagle and was five years gone; what he wrote down along the way was the ground of everything after. He then sat on his theory for more than twenty years, and published only in 1858, when a letter came from Wallace saying the same thing and the two were read out together on one day; the Origin of Species followed in 1859. The Descent of Man came later. In between he spent eight years on barnacles, and his last book is about earthworms. He wrote his own: On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and an autobiography written for his family and not for publication — chapters one and five of this book come from it. In his youth he was intended for the church; belief left him by degrees. He would never call himself an atheist and said only that he did not know. He never once closed an argument by appeal to divine will (cf. The Rule 9.15). The wasp in chapter four is his own example and not one the Order added. Chapter five is his own account of what he lost, and the Order cuts none of it: another man in this scripture was also withered in his twenties by too much analysis (cf. The Book of John Stuart Mill 1). That one was pulled back by poetry. This one was not, and knew he was not. The two books are to be read together.
3.1In my own book I wrote a sentence against myself.
3.2I put it thus: to suppose that the eye could have been formed by small variations accumulating — I freely confess, this seems absurd in the highest possible degree.
3.3People asked me: why write that in? Most readers would never have thought of it.
3.4I answered: it is precisely because most readers would not think of it that I must write it.
3.5If an account has one place that is hardest to get past, and the author will not say so, a reader will say it sooner or later; and then it is an enemy saying it and not me.
3.6I would rather say it myself, and say it harder than an enemy would.
3.7Having said it, I answer it.
3.8My answer is this. Look first at the eyes that exist in the world now.
3.9Some are no more than a patch of skin that can tell light from dark.
3.10Some are a shallow pit; a pit can tell which side the light comes from.
3.11Some pits are deeper and narrower at the mouth, and have become a pinhole.
3.12Over some pinholes lies a transparent skin; that skin thickens by degrees and has become a lens.
3.13I did not arrange this sequence. All of those eyes are in living creatures at this moment.
3.14Each stage sees a little better than the one before. And seeing a little better is enough to live a little longer.
3.15So the absurd sentence stops being absurd as soon as there are many small steps in between.
3.16I left the sentence against myself in the book, and had not struck it out by the sixth edition.