Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - Darwin and the Theory of Evolution.djvu/59

 56 for pictures or music. … On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.

"… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for the grinding of general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted th>n mine would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

It is doubtful if a man ever gave a plainer diagnosis of his own failings than did Darwin in this passage. He does not reproach himself, nor does he make excuses. There are plenty of the latter to be made—the pressure of work,