174 life
many minds. Add to this Darwin’s realization that one could lead an exemplary
moral life as a freethinker or an atheist and foundations might crumble. As
Fiona Erskine has argued, this realization came to him vividly during his Lon-
don years through contact with Harriet Martineau and her circle.^45
Darwin would even authenticate his dissent through the family lineage.
James Moore has noted the hereditary linkage he saw between his grandfa-
ther’s attitudes and his own. The grandson put it this way: “a man who has no
assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future
existence with retribution and reward” can find a basis for morality apart from
religion in the cultivation of hereditary “social instincts.”^46
Moore’s answer to the question of why Darwin gave up Christianity is the
most sensitive yet because it highlights not merely the physical pain and suf-
fering that Charles found so difficult to square with a beneficent God, but the
mental pain and anguish that accompanied the cruel loss of his daughter,
Annie, at the tender age of 10. That was early 1851, later than the dates routinely
given for his renunciation of a Christian faith. Annie’s death, with its crucifix-
ion of hope, looks like the last straw.^47 This was an event that tore him apart,
but it was also part of a wider pattern of events that I have always felt disposed
him against a caring Providence. That pattern was the absence of a pattern. It
was the sheer contingency, the fortuitousness of the accidental in human lives
and in the rest of nature. He once asked Asa Gray to consider the case of an
“innocent and good man” who, standing under a tree, is killed by lightning.
“Do you believe,” he asked Gray, pointing up the question by adding that he
really would like to hear, “Do you believe that Goddesignedlykilled this man?
Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t and don’t.”^48 The case was surely
no different from that of the luckless gnat swallowed by a swallow. Random
events that refused to be part of a coherent story undoubtedly weighed
upon him.
In what sense then was Darwin’s agnosticism scientific? There was an
ulterior respect in which his theory did bear on his own convictions. Curiously,
he often spoke of one conviction, an “inward conviction” that this wonderful
universe could not be the product of chance. The details of an orchid or even
the human eye, he could not believe were designed. But what of the wonderful
whole? Might there be designed laws, with the details left to chance? He was
never satisfied, even with that formulation. And this was the reason he re-
peatedly gave in his agnostic years: if the human mind is itself the product of
evolution, if it is only that little more refined than the mind of a dog, what
grounds have we for supposing it capable of solving the metaphysical riddles?
Darwin was not above holding convictions. For some that did make him dis-
tinctive among the agnostics. But he was distinctive, too, because it was he
above all, who had supplied the scientific reasons for mistrusting his own
convictions: “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s
mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of