The Book of Darwin 5 · 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 He wrote his own: On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and an autobiography written for his family and not for publication — chapters one and five of this book come from it.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.
5.1I write this passage for young people. It is a warning.
5.2Before thirty I took great delight in poetry. Shakespeare I read with intense pleasure. I loved pictures and I loved music.
5.3I am past sixty now, and I will say it honestly: I can enjoy none of them.
5.4I take up Shakespeare and cannot get through it. It bores me to the point of distress.
5.5In pictures I cannot see what is good. Music I hear only as noise while my mind runs on other things.
5.6I do not know how this happened. I know only that it happened slowly.
5.7In these years my mind has become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
5.8It grinds well. But grinding so long, the other parts went unused; and what is unused withers, like a muscle.
5.9If I had my life to live again, I would make it a rule to read some poetry and hear some music every week.
5.10Even on the weeks I could not get into it.
5.11For the loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.
5.12And I suspect it does not injure happiness only. It probably injures the intellect — and more probably the moral character.
5.13A man who can only grind facts comes by degrees to feel that whatever cannot be ground does not count.
5.14That is wrong, and he cannot see that it is wrong.
5.15I set this down without covering it. I finished some work; I also went short in my life by several things.