![]() ![]() was singularly absent." Philip Gosse held on to his faith in God above all else-so much so, in fact, that when evolutionary theory was announced to the world, he dismissed it entirely because it discounted the book of Genesis. When Edmund was 8, his mother died of cancer, leaving him the care of a man in whom "sympathetic imagination. ![]() "Here was perfect purity," Gosse writes, "perfect intrepidity, perfect abnegation yet there was also narrowness, isolation, and absence of perspective, let it boldly be admitted, an absence of humanity." Despite all of this, the child maintained his sense of humor, which adds much levity to a tale of such potentially grim proportions. His parents were Christian fundamentalists and as a result, young Edmund was denied interaction with other children as well as all variety of fictional tales. The only Puritanism that dies here, however, is the author's. His story is, as he declares, "The diagnosis of a dying Puritanism." Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) traces his own reckoning-as well as that of his father, the eminent British zoologist Philip Gosse-with the clash. But this is hard-won ease, born of a conflict that began with the Victorians. At the very least, we've learned that the two need not be mutually exclusive. ![]() Most of us take for granted our right to choose the life of the mind over that of the spirit without feeling remorse. The era in which faith and reason conflicted in a profound manner seems far away, and perhaps even a bit incomprehensible, to citizens of the modern world. ![]()
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