Charles Darwin: A New Life.

• Author: Bethell, Tom

Charles Darwin: A New Life

John Bowlby. Norton, $24.95. Bowlby's 500-page biography is not the first book to probe Charles Darwin's mysterious illness, which endured for 30 years or more. Authors and scholars have long speculated on the great man's "shivering, dying sensations, ringing in the ears" (to use Darwin's words), his heart palpitations, blurred vision, and hysterical crying fits. Nonetheless, there is something odd about Bowlby's posthumous work. He argues that Darwin's malady was psychological in origin. What, then, was its cause? That's where the oddness lies.

Darwin's malady began when he was 30 years old, shortly after he married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a devoutly religious woman. At almost exactly the same time, Darwin began to read the theories of Lamarck and to speculate upon the "mutability of species," as the idea of evolution was then known.

On learning this, many people reasonably ask: Was Darwin's illness brought on by a conflict between religion and science? Or, perhaps, between his marriage and his work? Or between his own upbringing (he was expected to enter the church at one point) and the implications of the theory of evolution?

Darwin's notebooks reveal that at the very time his illness appeared, he was, as Bowlby writes, "keenly aware that the religious and political implications of his theories could prove dangerous--especially if his philosophical position turned out to be materialist, as he strongly suspected it would." In one notebook Darwin wrote: "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of the deity. More humble and I believe truer to consider him created from animals." In another revealing entry, Darwin recorded the need "to avoid stating how far I believe in Materialism."

Surprisingly enough, however, Bowlby relegates to an appendix the possibility that this may have caused Darwin's illness. He duly notes the "conflict between what were seen in Darwin's day to be the adverse religious consequences of evolution theory and Emma's religious beliefs," only to dismiss it in a paragraph. Bowlby does not even address the strong possibility that conflict within Darwin's own soul may have been the root of the problem.

As to the allegedly "scant evidence that [Emma] was troubled" by her husband's beliefs, here is what Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her book, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, published in 1959: "It was only in his autobiography that Darwin gave free...