Charles and Emma: Chapters 25–33

The joint paper of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace was read in a stately room on Piccadilly Street in London.

The members of the society present, sitting in wooden churchlike pews, heard Charles’s theory spelled out in a short but painstaking manner.

Seeing the contented face of nature, this may at first be well doubted; but reflection will inevitably prove it to be true.

What happens, instead, is a struggle for existence, with slight variations in the birds giving some advantages over others.

Now, can it be doubted, from the struggle each individual has to obtain subsistence, that any minute variation in structure, habits, or instincts, adapting that individual better to the new conditions, would tell upon its vigour and health?

The most vigorous and healthy males, implying perfect adaptation, must generally gain the victory in their contests.”

No one seemed to understand the import of what the two men were saying.

He respected Emma’s mind and trusted her implicitly.

Charles wanted The Origin of Species to be simple enough for a nonscientist to read and understand, as well as accurate and cogently argued enough to convince a scientist.

In the book, Charles was trying to make a strong, coherent, cogent argument for creation by natural selection.

And Charles’s book was, after all, an argument against the concept of God as creator that Paley had espoused.

For Emma death was bearable because there was an afterlife.

Emma rewrote awkward sentences, and if she didn’t understand what he was trying to say, they talked it through so that he could write it in a more lucid fashion.

He wrote, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Had he spent more time with free-thinking, liberal intellectuals and less time sitting on the sofa with Emma, who rubbed his stomach when he was ill and put a cool hand on his feverish head, perhaps then he would not have been quite so conciliatory and conservative in his writing of the book.

And they knew his lack of enmity against them and their beliefs.

He felt that Charles had ignored morality, and that to accept the argument of creation by natural selection would “sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history."

Although Charles guided the offense and defense from his sanctuary at Down, it was Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, Asa Gray, and especially a man named Thomas Henry Huxley who fought his battles in person.

Darwin was fortunate that the regular reviewer for the London Times passed off the book to Huxley to review, which meant The Origin got a rave review in that most important of papers.

Huxley began with a well-reasoned argument about anatomical structure and how Charles had compiled his theory using such data as had never been used before.

Charles was always one to anthropomorphize creatures, seeds, rocks even, and could be overheard talking to them as if they understood.

He could not persuade himself that a “beneficent & omnipotent God” would have created parasites and would have cats play with and torture mice.

Although Charles discussed religion and science with Gray and other close friends, he demurred when strangers wrote to him asking what he believed about God.

She assured him that she minded his sufferings almost as much as her own and that the only way she could get through either was “to take it as from God’s hand, and to try to believe that all suffering and illness is meant to help us to exalt our minds and look forward with hope to a future state.”

Once again, she reassured Charles—and herself—that he was a good man, a moral man, and should get into heaven.

And to the scientist she knew so well, she once again implored him to stop thinking of faith the same way he thought about science: “It is feeling and not reasoning that drives one to prayer."

An English gentleman would not himself give a moment's unnecessary pain to any living creature, and would instinctively exert himself to put an end to any suffering before his eyes; yet it is a fact that every game preserver in this country sanctions a system which consigns thousands of animals to acute agony, probably of eight or ten hours duration, before it is ended by death.

While his theory was being challenged and extolled, Charles’s health continued to plague him.

Charles’s motto was “It’s dogged as does it,” and while it may not have been a reflection of his love of dogs, it was a reflection of his work ethic.

But other people vouched for him, including Erasmus, whose opinion they always valued.

For his part, Charles admitted that Emma had been right when she said that his looking at the world in a scientific way probably precluded him from looking at it in a religious way.

He coined the term agnostic to mean one who believes you cannot know whether God exists because you cannot prove God’s existence.

Once again, he thought that tiny actions brought about cumulative effects and great change.

Charles is probably the only tourist (adult, anyway) ever to pay more attention to the ground at Stonehenge than to the huge stone monoliths.

But it does seem as though with age came acceptance of his own ignorance.

A quick campaign began, and within a day or two, twenty members of Parliament signed an edict that Charles should be buried in Westminster Abbey.

Frank was working to publish his father’s letters, as well as reminiscences he culled from the autobiography Charles had written.

She asked Frank to take out certain passages, writing to him, “There is one sentence in the Autobiography which I very much wish to omit, no doubt partly because your father's opinion that all morality has grown up by evolution is painful to me; but also because where this sentence comes in, it gives one a sort of shock....”

She left in “I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation” but took out “Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can hardly be denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.”

“I marvel at my good fortune, that she, so infinitely my superior in every single moral quality consented to be my wife; she has been my wise
adviser and cheerful comforter....