experiencing evolution 213he, like LeConte, had become a pantheist, believing that “God is Nature, and
Nature is God.” He remained deeply spiritual, but skeptical of, if not hostile
to, virtually all theology and organized religion. For him, the ideal religion was
“simply Morality and Philanthropy.” Again like LeConte, he clung to the pros-
pect of immortality.^27
Late in life Lesley described evolution as “the prevalent epidemic scientific
superstition of the day” and insisted in a letter to the editor ofSciencethat he
was “not a Darwinist, and [had] never accepted the Darwinian hypothesis so
called.” Yet his early advocacy of the evolution of humans from apes—to say
nothing of his scorn for traditional religion—left even those close to him con-
fused about his true views. His nephew found it ironic that during the 1860s
and early 1870s, before the scientific community had reached a consensus,
Lesley had seemed inclined toward Darwinism but never fully embraced it.
“Twenty years later, when the theory had gained almost universal acceptance
even among theologians, he was fully decided, and would at times express
complete disapproval of it.” Some friends attributed his late-life denunciations
of evolution to “senile decay.” But Lesley had never found the evidence for
Darwinism sufficiently convincing to join the evolutionist camp.^28
Lesley’s precarious mental health and his idiosyncratic response to evo-
lution make it hazardous to venture any generalization based on his experience.
Because he lost his faith in traditional Christianity long before his encounter
with evolution, it seems unlikely that his religious beliefs had much influence
on his negative attitude toward Darwinism. And because his bouts of depres-
sion antedated theOrigin of Species, his mental illness can hardly be blamed
on the disturbing effects of evolution. The most that can be claimed in his case
is that Darwinism sometimes irritated his sensitive psyche.
George Frederick Wright (1838–1921)
George Frederick Wright, a seminary-trained Congregational minister and am-
ateur geologist, emerged in the 1870s as a leader of the so-called Christian
Darwinists and a recognized expert on the ice age in North America. As a
young minister he read Darwin’sOrigin of Speciesand Charles Lyell’sGeological
Evidences of the Antiquity of Man(1863), which clashed with the views he had
been taught as a youth, but his autobiographical writings do not reveal the ex-
tent to which these books may have precipitated a crisis of faith. They do indi-
cate, however, that he found in Asa Gray’s theistic interpretation of Darwinism
a compromise that allowed him simultaneously to embrace organic evolution
and to retain his belief in a divinely designed and controlled universe.^29
Wright especially appreciated a passage in which Gray described “the pop-
ular conception” of efficient cause: “Events and operations in general go on in
virtue simply of forces communicated at the first, but that now and then, and