Through all of nature there was a thrust toward life, something moving in opposition to the drag of entropy. Yet the animal energies which seemed to push life along were themselves sucked back into the great whirlpool of physical energy, into ultimate nothingness. Only ideas endured, and the forms of nature remained as ideas when particular instances had passed away.

Mrs. Patterson at this time or later read what Louis Agassiz was saying about some of these things. “A species is a thought of the Creator,” he [said], and again, “Natural History must, in good time, become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator.” The capacity of the human intellect to comprehend the facts of creation was, he thought, “the most conclusive proof of our affinity with the Divine Mind.”⁵³ But Agassiz, who was captivating Boston audiences with his transcendental interpretations of nature, was soon to be rendered obsolete by Darwin, and, in any case, brute nature transcendentalized left one with a beautiful but brutal pageant of thoughts in the mind of a creator who seemed largely indifferent to the particular individual.

It was in 1859, while the Pattersons were at North Groton, that The Origin of Species made its stunning impact on the world. All order and design seemed to slip out of the universe, although many of Darwin’s champions refused to admit this. Darwin himself was more tough-minded. A species, like anything else in the physical world, was the chance product of blind material forces, without permanence or logical necessity; and if this was true of the lower species, then it was true of man as the physical senses knew him.

An English Darwinian two decades later would write, “That man is an animal is the great and special discovery of natural science in our generation.”⁵⁴ It would take a still later generation to reduce the human animal to a collocation of electrical impulses, but he was well on  ● ● ●