e, in any higher
degree." He adds humbly that perhaps he was "superior to the common run
of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in
observing them carefully."

Writing in the last year of his life, he expressed the opinion that in
two or three respects his mind had changed during the preceding twenty
or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty or beyond it poetry of many
kinds gave him great pleasure. Formerly, too, pictures had given him
considerable, and music very great, delight. In 1881, however, he said:
"Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have
tried lately to read Shakspeare, and found it so intolerably dull that
it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.
Music generally sets me thinking too energetically of what I have been
at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine
scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it
formerly did." Darwin was convinced that the loss of these tastes was
not only a loss of happiness, but might possibly be injurious to the
intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the
emotional side of one's nature. So far as he could judge, his mind had
become in his later years a kind of machine for grinding general laws
out of large collections of facts, and that atrophy had taken place in
that part of the brain on which the higher aesthetic tastes depend.
Curiously enough, however, he retained his relish for novels, and for
books on history, biography, and travels.

It is well known that Darwin was extremely reticent with regard to his
religious views. He believed that a man's religion was essentially a
private matter. Repeated attempts were made to draw him out upon the
subject, and some of these were partially successful. Writing to a Dutch
student in 1873, he said: "I may say that the impossibility of
conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious
selves, arose through chance seems to me the chief argument for the
existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value I have
never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a First Cause,
the mind still craves to know whence it came and how it arose. Nor can I
overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the
world. I am also induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of
the many able men who have fully believed in God; but here agai