These are perhaps some of the saddest words ever penned, at least on my view.  Here Charles Darwin, in his autobiography, recounts his trajectory from (1) loving literature, poetry, music, beauty, to (2) having no interest in such things, and being simply a "machine" that "grinds facts."  I was originally led to this quote when reading John Piper's Desiring God, I believe.

Charles Darwin on his own development:

Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds . . . gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare. . . .

Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight.

But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music. . . .

I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. . . .

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. . . .

The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

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