A Faithless World, reprinted by permission form The Contemporary Review; with additions and a preface by Cobbe, Frances Power - 1885

London: Williams and Norgate, 1885. First edition thus.

1885 CONDEMNATION OF LOSS OF RELIGION IN CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE (INCLUDING DARWINISM) BY PROMINENT BRITISH ANTIVIVISECTIONIST, INSCRIBED TO COLLEAGUE.

8 1/2 inches tall hardcover, olive green cloth binding, gilt title to cover and spine, Author's inscription front flyleaf, "For Benjamin Bryan, With her very kind regards from his Friend & Colleague Frances Power Cobbe, June, 1885", institutional library handstamps to title page and last page, 41 pp, list of recent works by the author. Wear to cover edges, small library call numbers lower corner of cover, front flyleaf detached, hinges cracked but binding tight and text block unmarked and clean, residue from library pocket removed from back paste-down. Good.

CONTENTS include, "I cannot but think that something is already lost to it when the reverent, tender, modest, and yet lofty spirit of a Kepler, a Newton, a Herschel, a Lyell, is exchanged for the arrogant one which we find pervading the newer school of physicists and physiologists."--p 19; "Repentance as well as aspiration will disappear under the snows of atheism. I have written before on this subject * and will now briefly say that Mr. Darwin's almost ludicrously false definition of Repentance is an illustration of the inability of the modern scientific mind to comprehend spiritual phenomena; much less to be the subject of them. In his Descent of Man, this great thinker and most amiable person describes Repentance as a natural return, after the satisfaction of selfish passions, to 'the instinct of sympathy and goodwill to his fellows which is still present and ever in some degree active' in a man's mind. ... 'And then, a sense of dissatisfaction will inevitably be felt' (Descent of Man, p 90).

FRANCES POWER COBBE (1822 - 1904) was an Irish writer, social reformer, anti-vivisection activist, and leading women's suffrage campaigner. She founded a number of animal advocacy groups, including the National Anti-Vivisection Society in 1875, and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898, and was a member of the executive council of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage. Cobbe was a member of the prominent Cobbe family, descended from Archbishop Charles Cobbe, Primate of Ireland. Cobbe met the Darwin family during 1868. Emma Darwin liked her, "Miss Cobbe was very agreeable." Cobbe persuaded Charles Darwin to read Immanuel Kant's Metaphysics of Ethics. She met him again during 1869 in Wales, and apparently interrupted him when he was quite ill, and tried to persuade him to read John Stuart Mill—and indeed Darwin had read Cobbe's review of Mill's book, The Subjection of Women. She then lost his trust when without permission she edited and published a letter he'd written to her. Her critique of Darwin's Descent of Man, Darwinism in Morals, was published in The Theological Review in April 1871.

PROVENANCE: The copy of A Faithless World offered here is inscibed to Benjamin Bryan (born 1840), an anti-vivisectionist who co-authored with Cobbe on Vivisection in America (1889).