Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion by Nicholas Spencer

Author:Nicholas Spencer
Format: epub

Bishop ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce and Thomas ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ Huxley. Wilberforce was not called ‘Soapy Sam’ for the reasons people think, and Huxley was not called ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ at all in his lifetime. Only now, with the discovery of an unknown transcript of the event, can we know what they said during their famous clash in Oxford in 1860, and why they said it.

ELEVEN

The Balance

‘Better than a dog anyhow’: Marry. Not Marry.

In the years after he returned to England, having circumnavigated the world on the Beagle and gathered evidence that caused him to doubt the fixity of species, Charles Darwin found himself wrestling with a painful and momentous decision. Should he marry?

Marriage was not inevitable. Nor was it necessarily desirable. Science, to which Darwin was clearly now affianced, could no longer be treated as a clerical naturalist’s biddable handmaid. She demanded commitment. Darwin weighed the pros and cons in one of the notebooks he was filling up post-Beagle. Across the top of two adjoining pages, he scribbled the words ‘This is the Question’, and then drew up two columns, one headed ‘Marry’ and the other ‘Not Marry’:

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