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& to a certain extent how the theory of descent explains certain large classes of facts” (The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 8, p. 39). Darwin wanted to argue that species are not permanent, that they have not been each created by independent divine fiat, and that new species are formed out of earlier ones. Others had made part of the argument, but nobody could work out convincingly how transformations in nature might take place. In fact, Darwin’s extraordinary and convincing arguments were at first more successful in making evolution itself credible than in convincing everyone that natural selection was the way it worked. The power of his theory was ultimately to be seen (though the argument took longer to become scientific orthodoxy) in what is called “the modern synthesis,” but evolution, whatever the mechanism, seemed to Darwin to be natural fact. It was taken as heresy.

The last thing Darwin wanted, as he undertook his great work, was head-on encounters with religion and traditional religious beliefs. He of course had long recognized the potential cultural consequences of publishing such an argument, and he hesitated for many years to publish. He had observed the reaction to an important book of 1844, Robert Chambers’s anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, in which Chambers, careful always still to invoke God, had argued for an evolutionary explanation of the natural world.4 The rhetorical violence of the reaction against the book (which was, however, enormously popular) frightened Darwin, and he wanted none of that kind of response. Thus, while it is true that as he grew older Darwin grew progressively away from Christian belief (though not really at all from the Christian ethos of his culture), The Origin of Species never directly engages religious questions but rather repeatedly claims that a scientific explanation of natural processes by secondary causes is superior to explanations of natural processes by special creation. He is careful, to the end, to allow for a “Creator,” even as he disallows using the Creator as a way to explain natural phenomena: While he recognizes that “authors of the highest eminence” believe that species are “independently created,” “to my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes” (p. 383).

The famous last paragraph of The Origin of Species speaks of the “several powers” that have “been originally breathed into a few forms or into one” (p. 384). That re-evokes the breathing, animating God of Genesis; but in its passive form it leaves some ambiguity about Who is doing the breathing, or whether this is only a metaphor, after all. In the second edition, after “breathed,” Darwin added the words “by the Creator.” But even in the first edition, the “Creator” is a presence, although often invoked as a figure misguidedly used for other types of explanation of the natural world.

Darwin at that point did not mind talk of the Creator as long as it did not interfere with explanation through “secondary causes.” It may be that “In the beginning was the Word,” but after the Word—if such it was—in Darwin’s world there was a self-generating nature that he loved. He was fascinated much less by language than by bugs and rocks and sea creatures and birds. Language, in fact, made him very uneasy, and he thought of himself as a clumsy writer. That very sense of inadequacy led him to be extraordinarily careful in his writing, particularly in revising, and the six editions of The Origin of Species are each heavily revised. In the course of revisions, as Morse Peckham has shown, Darwin revised 75 percent of the book’s 3,000 sentences, “from one to five times.” It matters what edition one uses because, as Peckham also points out, in the course of revisions, Darwin added more than 1,500 sentences and dropped 325 of the original ones.5 All of this reflects Darwin’s strenuous, sometimes agonizing efforts to