Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/269

Rh sensation; on the sides of his nature where an appeal could be made, never was a man more responsive; but there were parts in which he was blind and dull. Just as the boy failed to be interested in many things, the man failed too; and he disregarded what did not interest him with the same ease at sixty as at twenty. What did interest him was the immediately present, and he dealt with it admirably, both in the intellectual and the moral world; but what was remote was as if it were not. The spiritual element in life is not remote, but it is not matter of sensation, and Darwin lived as if there were no such thing; it belongs to the region of emotion and imagination, and those perceptions which deal with the nature of man in its contrast with the material world. Poetry, art, music, the emotional influences of nature, the idealizations of moral life, are the means by which men take possession of this inner world of man; to which, for man at least, nature in all its immensity is subsidiary. Darwin's insensibility to the higher life—for so men agree to call it—was partly, if not wholly, induced by his absorption in scientific pursuits in the spirit of materialism. We praise him for his