The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. ![]() It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick we institute poor-laws and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82 ![]() I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.īut I was very unwilling to give up my belief. ![]() The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, (and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become), that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost uncomprehensible by us, that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eyewitnesses by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. But I had gradually come by this time, i.e., 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. ![]() for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. “.Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers.
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