There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery. - Charles Darwin

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one.

This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.

Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if it be a pretty woman all the better.