Jefferson to Darwin II
Dear Sir:
I have been informed that you have been ill but that you are currently on the recovery. I sincerely rejoice that you are so. Yours is one of the lives precious to mankind, and for the continuance of which every thinking man is solicitous. Bigots may be exceptions. What an effort, my dear sir, of bigotry in science and religion I can imagine you have been through. All advances in science are proscribed as innovations. While continuing to encourage and praise education, there are those who wish it to be only the education of our ancestors. They prefer to look backward, not forward, for improvement.
I have read your last letter with great interest and satisfaction and I have found in it a great deal with which I agree. I can imagine the outrage with which your findings and conclusions were greeted by many of the stalwart members of the established religions. To many, the belief in the literal words of Genesis, with respect to creation, is the foundation of all knowledge about Nature. If one stone is removed from that
foundation, the entire structure must topple. There are those Deists, however, with which your findings are entirely compatible. And of course, the Atheists are happy to have an alternative theory to the beginning of life on this planet. I am most interested, not only in the effect your theory has upon the religions of the world regarding Nature and its beginnings, but how it may also affect the principles by which they have guided themselves, morally.
Some have made the love of God the foundation of morality. If we did a good act merely from the love of God and the belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? I have observed, indeed, generally, while in Protestant countries the defections from Platonic Christianity of the Priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism.
Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis for morality. But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality. To ourselves, in strict language, we can owe no duties since obligation requires two parties. Self-love is indeed the counterpart of morality. It is the antagonist of virtue, leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others. Egoism, in a broader sense, has been presented as the source of morality: that we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, bind up the wounds of the man beaten by thieves, pour oil and wine into them, set him upon our own beast and bring him to the inn, because we receive pleasure from these acts. But how happens it that they give us pleasure? Because Nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses.
It is true that such social dispositions are not planted in every man, because there is no rule without exceptions; but it is false reasoning which converts exceptions into the general rule. Some men are born without the organs of sight, or of hearing, or without hands. Yet it would be wrong to say that man is born without these faculties, and sight, hearing, and hands may with truth enter into the general definition of man. The want or imperfection of the moral sense in some men, like the want or imperfection of the senses of sight and hearing in others, is no proof that it is a general characteristic of the species. When it is wanting, we try to supply the defect by education, by appeals to reason and calculation, by presenting to the being so unhappily conformed, other motives to do good and to eschew evil, such as the love, or the hatred, or rejection of those among whom he lives, and whose society is necessary to his happiness and even existence.
We may find, in fact, that the same actions are deemed virtuous in one country and vicious in another. The answer is that nature has constituted utility to man the standard and best of virtue. Men living in different countries, under different circumstances, different habits and regimens, may have different utilities; the same
act, therefore, may be useful, and consequently, virtuous in one country which is injurious and vicious in another differently circumstanced. I think the moral sense is the brightest gem with which the human character is studded, and the want of it is more degrading than the most hideous of bodily deformities.
The leisure and solitude of my situation here has led me to the indiscretion of taxing you with a long letter on a subject whereon nothing new may be offered. But your findings with respect to transmutation of species, and the attendant rethinking of the role of the Creator, have opened a great number of issues, which were thought to be firmly closed. I will now indulge myself no further than to repeat the assurances of my continued esteem and respect.
Thos. J
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