done before, even by his own
grandfather, to whom he was accused of being unjust. Besides, he was
not really carrying on the family business. He was an entirely original
worker; and he was on a new tack, as we shall see presently. And he
would not in any case have thought much, as a practical naturalist, of
the more or less mystical intellectual speculations of the Deists of
1790-1830. Scientific workers were very tired of Deism just then. They
had given up the riddle of the Great First Cause as insoluble, and were
calling themselves, accordingly, Agnostics. They had turned from the
inscrutable question of Why things existed, to the spade work of
discovering What was really occurring in the world and How it really
occurred.

With all his attention bent in this new direction, Darwin soon noticed
that a good deal was occurring in an entirely unmystical and even
unmeaning way of which the older speculative Deist-Evolutionists had
taken little or no account. Nowadays, when we are turning in weary
disgust and disillusion from Neo-Darwinism and Mechanism to Vitalism and
Creative Evolution, it is difficult to imagine how this new departure of
Darwin's could possibly have appealed to his contemporaries as exciting,
agreeable, above all as hopeful. Let me therefore try to bring back
something of the atmosphere of that time by describing a scene, very
characteristic of its superstitions, in which I took what was then
considered an unspeakably shocking part.

DEFYING THE LIGHTNING: A FRUSTRATED EXPERIMENT

One evening in 1878 or thereabouts, I, being then in my earliest
twenties, was at a bachelor party of young men of the professional class
in the house of a doctor in the Kensingtonian quarter of London. They
fell to talking about religious revivals; and an anecdote was related of
a man who, having incautiously scoffed at the mission of Messrs Moody
and Sankey, a then famous firm of American evangelists, was subsequently
carried home on a shutter, slain by divine vengeance as a blasphemer.
A timid minority, without quite venturing to question the truth of the
incident--for they naturally did not care to run the risk of going home
on shutters themselves--nevertheless shewed a certain disposition to
cavil at those who exulted in it; and something approaching to an
argument began. At last it was alleged by the most evangelical of the
disputants that Charles Bradlaugh, the most formidable atheist on the
Secularist platform, had