experiencing evolution 209tually identical events produced in LeConte a lifelong obsession with immor-
tality. Late in life he was still reassuring himself of the impossibility “that the
object of such love [Josie] can be other than immortal?”^14
By the early 1870s, LeConte had passed through the trauma of the Civil
War and relocated at the new University of California. In 1873, in a series of
published lectures on religion and science, he announced that he had become
a “reluctant evolutionist” of the theistic kind. Adopting the age-old argument
that God had revealed himself in“two divine books,”Nature and Scripture,
LeConte repeatedly alluded to the “distress and doubt” he had suffered as “one
who has all his life sought with passionate ardor the truth revealed in the one
book, but who clings no less passionately to the hopes revealed in the other”:
During my whole active life, I have stood just where the current
runs swiftest. I confess to you, that, in my earlier life, I have strug-
gled almost in despair with this swift current. I confess I have some-
times wrestled in an agony with this fearful doubt, with this demon
of materialism, with this cold philosophy whose icy breath withers
all the beautiful flowers and blasts all the growing fruit of humanity.
This dreadful doubt has haunted me like a spectre, which would not
always down at my bidding.He had come to reject the idea of “the creation of speciesdirectlyand
without secondary agencies and processes,” but he believed that “the real cause
of evolution” remained unknown.^15
By the end of the decade he had evolved into a “thorough and enthusiastic,”
if somewhat unorthodox, evolutionist. In what he regarded as “one of the most
important” of his scientific contributions, he proposed in 1877 a theory of
“paroxysmal” evolution, which correlated “rapid changes of physical conditions
and correspondingly rapid movement in evolution.” That same year he gave
the first of many talks sharing his insights into the relationship between evo-
lution and religion. Harmonizing religion and evolution, including the evo-
lution of the human body, quickly became his great mission, his divine calling:
“It is, indeed, glad tidings of great joy which shall be to all peoples. Woe is me,
if I preach not the Gospel.” His efforts along this line culminated in the pub-
lication of his oft-reprintedEvolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought
(1888).^16
To mitigate the “difficulty and distress” of coming to terms with evolution,
LeConte insisted on two conditions: that it not promote godless materialism
and that it not endanger his faith in immortality, “the most dearly cherished
and most universal of all human beliefs.” Thus, he claimed not only that evo-
lution and materialism were entirely distinct but that there was “not a single
philosophical question connected with our highest and dearest religious and
spiritual interests that is fundamentally affected, or even put in any new light,
by the theory of evolution.” On this point LeConte may have protested too