Charles Darwin

Darwin Correspondence Project

To Asa Gray 22 May [1860]

Down Bromley Kent

May 22d

My dear Gray.

Again I have to thank you for one of your very pleasant letters (of May 7th), enclosing a very pleasant remittance of 22£.— I am in simple truth astonished at all the kind trouble you have taken for me. I return Appleton’s account.— For the chance of your wishing for a formal acknowledgment, I send one.— If you have any further communication to the Appletons pray express my acknowledgment for his generosity; for it is generosity in my opinion. I am not at all surprised at sale diminishing: my extreme surprise is at greatness of sale. No doubt the public has been shamefully imposed on! for they bought the book, thinking that it would be nice easy reading. I expect the sale to stop soon in England: yet Lyell wrote to me the other day that calling at Murrays he heard that 50 copies had gone in previous 48 hours.— I am extremely glad that you will notice in Silliman additions in the Origin. Judging from letters (& I have just seen one from Thwaites to Hooker) & from remarks, the most serious omission in my book was not explaining how it is, as I believe, that all forms do not necessarily advance,—how there can now be simple organisms still existing.— The article in Med. & Chirurg. Review is by Carpenter. I would send Pictet’s, if you cannot see it, but I shd. require it back.— Sedgwick has been firing broadsides into me, but exclusively on geological grounds.— Prof. Clarke of Cambridge says publickly that the chief characteristic of such books as mine is their “consummate impudence”.

I hear there is very severe review on me in North British by a Revd. Mr Dunns, a free-Kirk minister & dabbler in Nat. Hist. I sh. be very glad to see any good American Reviews,—as they are all more or less useful.— You say that you shall touch on other Reviews.— Huxley told me some time ago that after a time he would write review on all Reviews, whether he will I know not.— If you allude to Edinburgh, pray notice some of the points which I will point out on separate slip. In “Saturday Review” (one of our cleverest periodicals) of May 5th. p. 573 there is a nice article on Owen’s Review, defending Huxley, but not Hooker; & the latter I think Owen treats most ungenerously.— But surely you will get sick unto death of me & my Reviewers.—

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.—

Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical. The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws,—a child (who may turn out an idiot) is born by action of even more complex laws,—and I can see no reason, why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws; & that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event & consequence. But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.

Most deeply do I feel your generous kindness & interest.—

Yours sincerely & cordially | Charles Darwin