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  While he was in Shrewsbury, and thinking perhaps of Emma, Charles talked with his father about marriage and religious difficulties that might follow. Dr. Darwin suggested firmly that he should conceal his doubts from a future wife. He had known “extreme misery thus caused with married persons.” “Things went on pretty well until the wife or husband became out of health, and then some women suffered miserably by doubting about the salvation of their husbands, thus making them likewise to suffer.”

  Charles returned to his lodgings in London, and worked hard through the high summer on a problem in Scottish geology. But he kept coming back to his new metaphysical themes. He wrote page after page of notes in a bout of what he called “mental rioting,” free play with guesses and intuitions in which soundness of reasoning counted for little. He got into difficulties, for example, with free will and oysters, but got out of the tangle with disarming ease. Seeing young mammals play, he noted, it could not be doubted that they had free will. If they had, all animals must have. “Then an oyster has.” Charles could imagine that the free will of an oyster was a direct effect of its physical makeup. “If so, free will is to mind what chance is to matter. The free will . . . makes change in bodily organisation of oyster. So may free will make change in man.” He then stopped, writing simply: “Probably some error in argument. Should be grateful if it were pointed out.”

  But Charles was confident about other intuitions. He looked into the sources of the moral sense, which many like Whewell in his speech to the Geological Society saw as an exclusive and defining feature of mankind. Whewell had written that the moral sense was “an impress stamped upon the human mind by the Deity himself; a trace of His nature, an indication of His will, an announcement of His purpose, a promise of His favour.” Charles saw that his own radically different theory of human origins would stand up only if he could show that morality could have been derived by a natural process from animal life. Harriet Martineau, his brother Erasmus’s friend, had suggested in her book How to Observe: Morals and Manners that there were some universal feelings of right and wrong. Charles took up Hume’s idea that the affections we share with other sentient beings, like “tenderness to our offspring,” are fundamental to our nature, and instinctive. They have “no manner of dependence” on self-love, as some philosophers have argued. Charles guessed that they might be linked with the social instincts, and might have arisen because humans, “like deer” and other mammals, had become “social animals” by an evolutionary process.

  Fresh ideas came to Charles day by day. One short string of casual comments has entered the history of ideas. “Origin of man now proved. Metaphysic[s] must flourish. He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” A few jottings later, he sketched out an example of what he meant. Humans have instincts like anger and revenge which experience shows they must restrain if they wish to achieve happiness. Those instincts must at one time have been helpful in preserving the species, but external conditions changed and humans have become more cooperative. The conflict between aggression and restraint is not odd, because the older fierce instincts were once necessary but are now slowly vanishing. The tension is part of the layered history of human instincts and awareness, with elements from past adaptations surviving below other more recent ones, just as every species carries bodily traces of its ancestors in tell-tale features like the remains of a tail or limbs. The human mind has been shaped gradually from our animal past and is no more perfectly designed for current needs than any animal’s body. “Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!!”

  While Charles was exploring these metaphysical issues, he was also looking for possible links between animal and human feelings which could be checked by direct observation. He asked himself whether animals had likes and dislikes like humans. Jenny the orang came to mind, and he wrote in the back of his notebook: “Do the Ourang Outang like smells, peppermint and music?” He went to the Zoological Gardens in early September with a mouth organ, some peppermints and a sprig of verbena. He played the mouth organ to Jenny and she listened with great attention. He gave it to her and she “readily put it when guided to her mouth.” She “seemed to relish the smell of verbena . . . and liked the taste of peppermint.” A mirror was handed to Jenny. Charles noted that she was “astonished beyond measure” at the looking glass, and “looked at it every way, sidelong, and with most steady surprise.” He was also fascinated to see Jenny “take bread from a visitor, and before eating every time, look up to [her] keeper to see whether this was permitted and eat it.” She understood commands. “Jenny understands, when told door open, to give up anything and to do what she is told.” But she would also “often do a thing, which she has been told not to do. When she thinks keeper will not see her, then knows she has done wrong and will hide herself.” Charles did not know whether this was fear or shame. “When she thinks she is going to be whipped, will cover herself with straw or a blanket.” Using objects for a purpose in this way was, he realised, a step in the progression from animal to man.

  He went to see Jenny again a few weeks later. She was “amusing herself by getting out ears of corn with her teeth from the straw, and just like [a] child not knowing what to do with them, came several times and opened my hand, and put them in.” A male orang who had joined her was unwell and Charles observed that he had an “expression of languor and suffering.” He remembered the expression many years later in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. “The appearance of dejection in young orangs and chimpanzees, when out of health, is as plain and almost as pathetic as in the case of our own children. This state of mind and body is shown by their listless movements, fallen countenances, dull eyes, and changed complexions.”

  Charles was intrigued by the likenesses between some of Jenny’s expressions in fear and anger, and the ways in which humans showed those feelings. He decided to examine the link between animal and human nature by looking at emotions and their facial expressions. He would see how the expressions were formed by the facial muscles, and the comparison with humans would be particularly telling if it could be shown that animals shared any of our expressions and might therefore share the feelings that went with them. Charles jotted inside the back cover of his notebook: “Natural history of babies. Do babies start (i.e. useless sudden movement of muscle) very early in life? Do they wink when anything placed before their eyes, very young, before experience can have taught them to avoid danger? Do they frown when they first see it?”

  Charles found the key to the idea of natural selection as the mechanism for adaptation in a flash of insight at the end of September. Reading Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, he realised that the unending need for animals to compete for the means of life provided a continual pressure for selection that might work with the facts of variation and inheritance to create new species as circumstances changed. The three factors could be seen as “laws of life,” and the process might be able to explain the endless diversity of natural forms in the grand and simple way that Herschel had suggested was the aim of scientific achievement.

  Charles had a worry about his new argument, but made almost nothing of it at the time. Natural theology celebrated God’s wisdom in the Creation, seeing every feature of the natural world as part of a Divine contrivance showing evidence of an all-powerful mind working with infinite benevolence. People recognised that animals fought, killed and fed on each other, but found arguments to justify the violence and suffering involved as a factor in the perfect balance of life which God maintained for the good of all. Charles believed he had identified a natural process which could explain the development of all forms of life without Divine intervention; the process was ridden with suffering and death and it seemed to be quite heartless and mechanical. The way in which the endless struggle for existence worked to produce the infinite richness and variety of animal and human life was a riddle to which Charles had no answer. He was clear only
that the arguments of natural theology were no solution. He wrote a few words charged with irony: “Pain and disease in world, and yet talk of perfection.”

  Through September and October 1838 Charles developed his new natural approach to metaphysics, moving back from the feelings of anger and revenge to the roots of the moral sense. His comments were carelessly worded, but he was in no doubt about his underlying aim. Might not our sense of right and wrong stem from reflection with our growing mental powers on our actions as they were bound up with our instinctive feelings of love and concern for others? He recognised that he needed to “analyse this out” and that it was important to bear in mind how the power of speech might have been a factor in the development. If any animal with affections and social instincts developed the power of reflection, it must have a conscience. He commented, “This is capital view,” and applied the idea at once to a familiar animal. “Dog’s conscience would not have been same with man’s, because original instincts different. Man . . . who reasons much on his actions, makes his conscience far more sensitive.” But that difference was one of degree, not of kind. Charles decided that conscience might be “an hereditary compound passion” and believed he had found a way in which the human sense of right and wrong could be shown to have developed gradually and naturally from feelings that were part of the life of social animals.

  One feature of his emerging picture prompted a thought about mental activity that took place below the threshold of awareness. Herschel had emphasised in his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy that man could enter “only very imperfectly” into the “recesses” of his mind, while Abercrombie and Mayo had pointed in their books to aspects of behaviour which suggested that the mind had hidden depths. Charles noted that we assume we have free will but often find it difficult to analyse our motives for action. If our motives were “originally mostly instinctive,” it would make sense that we now had to make “great effort of reason to discover them.” He felt that this was an “important explanation.”

  Charles found support in Wordsworth’s writings for his belief in the primary importance of the affections. The poet had declared in the “Preface” to his Lyrical Ballads that his “principal object” in the poems was to make themes from common life interesting by tracing in them “the primary laws of our nature.” He aimed “to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections.” Poems like “Michael” about the strength and constancy of a man’s love for his son, and “The Ruined Cottage” about a woman’s love for her husband, set a value on the natural feelings of ordinary people which Charles reflected in his scientific ideas. In “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” Wordsworth wrote that “the poorest poor”

  . . . have been kind to such

  as needed kindness, for this single cause,

  That we have all of us one human heart.

  Some years later he suggested to Coleridge that The Excursion was an attempt to treat “the commonplace truths of the human affections.” It did not aim to convey “recondite or refined truths” but “rather to remind men of their knowledge, as it lurks inoperative and unvalued in their own minds.” Wordsworth also emphasised the central importance of sympathy in his view of poetry and the Romantic imagination. It is “the wish of the poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes.” The object of poetry is truth “carried alive into the heart by passion,” and through his writings, the poet “binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society.”

  In November Charles combined his new thinking about human morality with some ideas he was exploring about the role of sexual reproduction in the development of species. He suggested that if animals produced offspring on their own rather than by pairing, inherited traits would never be pooled and species would never be formed with social instincts. The idea was important to him because he now “hoped to show” that the social instincts were “probably the foundation of all that is most beautiful in the moral sentiments of the animated beings.” These tentative conclusions brought him to a staging point in his argument. He had found an answer to the challenge posed by human morality to his theory about mankind as a natural species. The moral sense was founded in the affections, and was a natural development from reflection on them just as they were a natural development for survival in some species. Charles’s ideas were loose and rough, and a few were incoherent, but he now had a clear sense of the power of his species theory to explain central elements in human nature.

  As he explored these themes, Charles thought again about religion. After his engagement to Emma at Maer in November, they had another long talk by the fire in the library. Frank and forthcoming as he was by nature, he went against his father’s advice and told Emma about his “honest and conscientious doubts” about the Christian Revelation. He explained that he fully accepted the Christian morality, and wanted to believe in the afterlife and the promise of salvation, but could not persuade himself with the arguments others found satisfactory.

  Emma’s Christian beliefs differed in one way from Charles’s critical and reasoning approach. They shared the family roots in the eighteenth-century tradition of Rational Dissent which placed a strong emphasis on the believer’s personal responsibility for right conduct, a wide and humane concern for others, common sense and avoidance of doctrinal dispute. Emma combined her liberal Unitarian views with a deep commitment to Christ’s promise of salvation through faith, which was also the message of the Evangelical movement. Unitarians emphasised the value of reason in supporting religious views, but insisted that religion was “an affair of the heart, not the intellect.” Emma did not insist on reasons to justify the promise of salvation, as there might not be any compelling ones. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

  Emma did not mention matters of faith in her diary; she seldom referred to them in her letters, and unlike many pious ladies of the time, she had no wish to make a display of her religion. But traces survive of her quiet and intent concerns in her interleaved Bible, reading lists and notes for prayers. The afterlife was especially important for Unitarians like the Wedgwoods, and the hope of reunion with loved ones after death was a mainstay of their faith. Emma had read A View of the Scripture Revelations Concerning a Future State by an Anglican clergyman, Richard Whately. He argued that the “perfection of friendship” with loved ones would be a great part of “the future happiness of the blest.” When Emma’s beloved elder sister Fanny had died suddenly in 1832, Emma wrote that she was trying to keep her mind “fixed upon the hope of being with her again . . . Such a separation as this seems to make the next world feel such a reality—it seems to bring it so much nearer to one’s mind and gives one such a desire to be found worthy of being with her.”

  Just as Dr. Darwin had feared might happen between a devout wife and a husband with doubts about religion, Emma was unhappy about Charles’s uncertainties about his faith and salvation. She was deeply afraid that she might lose him in the next world which was so important to her. When Whately had tackled the problem in his book, he dealt with it quite ruthlessly. A person who went to heaven might be supposed to feel grief for “the total and final loss of some who may have been dear to him on earth,” but a wise and good man would try as far as possible “to withdraw his thoughts from evil which he cannot lessen.” The eternal suffering of former friends might “often cloud his mind,” but it was reasonable to suppose that in the world to come the blest “will occupy their minds entirely with the thought of things agreeable . . . and will be able, by an effort of the will, completely to banish and exclude every idea that might alloy their happiness.” If that advice was any help to anyone, it was difficult for Emma to accept, loving Charles as she did.

  After Charles had returned to London for the weeks before their marriage, Emma wrote to him that while they were together, “I think all melancholy thoughts keep out
of my head, but since you are gone, some sad ones have forced themselves in, of fear that our opinions on the most important subject should differ widely. My reason tells me that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us.” She offered no arguments to overcome his doubts, but asked him simply to read Christ’s farewell to his disciples in St. John’s Gospel. “It is so full of love to them and devotion and every beautiful feeling. It is the part of the New Testament I love best. This is a whim of mine. It would give me great pleasure.” She ended with painful diffidence, “Though I can hardly tell why, I don’t wish you to give me your opinion about it.”

  Charles read the passage and said what he could to allay Emma’s fears, but could not give her full assurance. She replied: “Thank you, dear Charles, for complying with my fancy. To see you in earnest on the subject will be my greatest comfort and that I am sure you are. I believe I agree with every word you say, and it pleased me that you should have felt inclined to enter a little more on the subject.” In another letter Emma hoped that “though our opinions may not agree upon all points of religion, we may sympathise a good deal in our feelings on the subject.” The two were eager to find a faith to share for their life together, but honest as they were with each other, they could not overcome all their differences.