Читать книгу The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions онлайн

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Turn we lastly to the influences of the Scientific Spirit on Religion. It is hardly too much to affirm that the advance of that Spirit has been to individuals and classes the signal for a subsidence of religious faith and religious emotion.^[8] Judging from Darwin’s experience, as that of a typical man of science, just as such a one becomes an embodiment of the Scientific Spirit, this religious sentiment flickers and expires, like a candle in an airless vault. Speaking of his old feelings of “wonder, admiration, and devotion” experienced while standing amid the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, he wrote in later years, when Science had made him all her own: “Now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colorblind” (Life, vol. i. p. 311). Nor did the deadening influences stop at his own soul. As one able reviewer of his “Life” in the Spectator wrote: “No sane man can deny Darwin’s influence to have been at least contemporaneous with a general decay of belief in the unseen. Darwin’s Theism faded from his mind without disturbance, without perplexity, without pain. These words describe his influence as well as his experience.”