In a letter to Hooker, Darwin wrote that “it is a cursed evil to any man to become so absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.” It is an evil because such one-pointedness may result in the more or less total atrophy of all but one side of the mind Darwin himself records that in later life he was unable to take the smallest interest in poetry, art or religion. Professionally, in relation to his chosen specialty, a man may be completely mature. Spiritually and sometimes even ethically, in relation to God and his neighbours, he may be hardly more than a foetus.
