I
Personal Reflections and Mental Qualities
have said that in one respect my mind has changed during
the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond
it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even
as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the
historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me
considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I
cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read
Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I
have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding
general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have
caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher
tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly
organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have
thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule
to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week;
for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been
kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness,
and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the
moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
This document is based on the public domain text of Darwin's autobiography, written for his children and
later published in "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin".
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