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[277] Darwin tells us, he took intense delight in poetry — Milton, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Shelley-while he read Shakespeare with supreme enjoyment. Pictures and music also gave him much pleasure. But at sixtyseven he writes that “for many years he cannot endure to read a line of poetry ;” that he has lately tried Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated him; and that he has lost almost all taste for pictures and music. This he records, not with satisfaction, but with “great regret;” 1 he would gladly have it otherwise, but cannot. It is simply that one whole side of his intellectual being was paralyzed; a loss which all the healthy enjoyment of the other side of nature could scarcely repay. Yet it is possible that the lesson of Darwin's limitations may be scarcely less valuable than that of his achievements. By his strength he revolutionized the world of science. By his weakness he gave evidence that there is a world outside of science. It is easy to cite the testimony of other high scientific authorities to the essential onesidedness of the exclusively scientific mind.
1 Life, by his son. Am. ed. pp. 30, 81.
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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