Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 36

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, November 5, 1892.

Dear Sir,

I well remember the interview to which you refer, and I should have replied to your letter sooner, but during the last few weeks I have been very busy.

Moral duty consists in the observance of those rules of conduct which contribute to the welfare of society, and by implication, of the individuals who compose it.

The end of society is peace and mutual protection, so that the individual may reach the fullest and highest life attainable by man.

The rules of conduct by which this end is to be attained are discoverable--like the other so-called laws of Nature--by observation and experiment, and only in that way.

Some thousands of years of such experience have led to the generalisations, that stealing and murder, for example, are inconsistent with the ends of society. There is no more doubt that they are so than that unsupported stones tend to fall. The man who steals or murders, breaks his implied contract with society, and forfeits all protection. He becomes an outlaw, to be dealt with as any other feral creature. Criminal law indicates the ways which have proved most convenient for dealing with him.

All this would be true if men had no "moral sense" at all, just as there are rules of perspective which must be strictly observed by a draughtsman, and are quite independent of his having any artistic sense.

The moral sense is a very complex affair--dependent in part upon a.s.sociations of pleasure and pain, approbation and disapprobation formed by education in early youth, but in part also on an innate sense of moral beauty and ugliness (how originated need not be discussed), which is possessed by some people in great strength, while some are totally devoid of it--just as some children draw, or are enchanted by music while mere infants, while others do not know "Cherry Ripe" from "Rule Britannia," nor can represent the form of the simplest thing to the end of their lives.

Now for this last sort of people there is no reason why they should discharge any moral duty, except from fear of punishment in all its grades, from mere disapprobation to hanging, and the duty of society is to see that they live under wholesome fear of such punishment short, sharp, and decisive.

For the people with a keen innate sense of moral beauty there is no need of any other motive. What they want is knowledge of the things they may do and must leave undone, if the welfare of society is to be attained. Good people so often forget this that some of them occasionally require hanging almost as much as the bad.

If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be (under due limitations) obeyed; why the few who are steered by it move the ma.s.s in whom it is weak? I can only reply by putting another question--Why do the few in whom the sense of beauty is strong--Shakespere, Raffaele, Beethoven, carry the less endowed mult.i.tude away? But they do, and always will.

People who overlook that fact attend neither to history nor to what goes on about them.

Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, kindly man. I have a great respect for him. The force of genial common-sense respectability could no further go. George Fox was the very antipodes of all this, and yet one understands how he came to move the world of his day, and Franklin did not.

As to whether we can all fulfil the moral law, I should say hardly any of us. Some of us are utterly incapable of fulfilling its plainest dictates. As there are men born physically cripples, and intellectually idiots, so there are some who are moral cripples and idiots, and can be kept straight not even by punishment. For these people there is nothing but shutting up, or extirpation.

I am, yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The peaceful aspect of the "Irenicon" seems to have veiled to most readers the unbroken nature of his defence, and he writes to his son-in-law, the Hon. John Collier, suggesting an alteration in the t.i.tle of the essay:--]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, November 8, 1892.

My dear Jack,

It is delightful to find a reader who "twigs" every point as acutely as your brother has done. I told somebody--was it you?--I rather wished the printer would subst.i.tute o for e in Irenicon. So far as I have seen any notices, the British critic (what a dull a.s.s he is) appears to have been seriously struck by my sweetness of temper.

I sent you the article yesterday, so you will judge for yourself.

With love, ever yours affectionately,

T.H. Huxley.

You should see the place I am claiming for Art in the University. I do believe something will grow out of my plan, which has made all the dry bones rattle. It is coming on for discussion in the Senate, and I shall be coming to you to have my wounds dressed after the fight. Don't know the day yet.

[This allusion to the place of Art in the University refers to the proposed reorganisation of the London University.

Since the year 1887 the question of establishing a Teaching University for London had become more and more pressing. London contained many isolated teaching bodies of various kinds--University College, King's College, the Royal College of Science, the Medical Schools, Bedford College, and so forth, while the London University was only an examining body. Clearly these scattered bodies needed organising; the educational forces of the metropolis were disintegrated; much teaching--and this was especially true of the medical schools--that could have been better done and better paid in a single inst.i.tution, was split up among several, none of which, perhaps, could offer sufficient inducement to keep the best men permanently.

The most burning question was, whether these bodies should be united into a new university, with power to grant degrees of its own, or should combine with the existing University of London, so that the latter would become a teaching as well as an examining body. And if so, there was the additional question as to the form which this combination should take--whether federation, for example, or absorption.

The whole question had been referred to a Royal Commission by the Government of Lord Salisbury. The results were seen in the charter for a Gresham University, embodying the former alternative, and in the introduction into Parliament of a Bill to carry this scheme into effect. But this action had only been promoted by some of the bodies interested, and was strongly opposed by other bodies, as well as by many teachers who were interested in university reform.

Thus at the end of February, Huxley was invited, as a Governor of University College, to sign a protest against the provisions of the Charter for a Teaching University then before Parliament, especially in so far as it was proposed to establish a second examining body in London. The signatories also begged the Government to grant further inquiry before legislating on the subject

The protest, which received over 100 signatures of weight, contributed something towards the rejection of the Bill in the House of Commons. It became possible to hope that there might be established in London a University which should be something more than a mere collection of teachers, having as their only bond of union the preparation of students for a common examination. It was proposed to form an a.s.sociation to a.s.sist in the promotion of a teaching university for the metropolis; but the first draft of a scheme to reconcile the complication of interests and ideals involved led Huxley to express himself as follows:--]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, March 27, 1892.

Dear Professor Weldon [Then at University College, London; now Linacre Professor of Physiology at Oxford.],

I am sorry to have kept you waiting so long for an answer to your letter of the 17th: but your proposal required a good deal of consideration, and I have had a variety of distractions.

So long as I am a member of the Senate of the University of London, I do not think I can with propriety join any a.s.sociation which proposes to meddle with it. Moreover, though I have a good deal of sympathy with the ends of the a.s.sociation, I have my doubts about many propositions set forth in your draft.

I took part in the discussions preliminary to Lord Justice Fry's scheme, and I was so convinced that that scheme would be wrecked amidst the complication of interests and ideals that claimed consideration, that I gave up attending to it. In fact, living so much out of the world now, and being sadly deaf, I am really unfit to intervene in business of this kind.

Worse still, I am conscious that my own ideal is, for the present at any rate, hopelessly impracticable. I should cut away medicine, law, and theology as technical specialities in charge of corporations which might be left to settle (in the case of medicine, in accordance with the State) the terms on which they grant degrees.

The university or universities should be learning and teaching bodies devoted to art (literary and other), history, philosophy, and science, where any one who wanted to learn all that is known about these matters should find people who could teach him and put him in the way of learning for himself.

That is what the world will want one day or other, as a supplement to all manner of high schools and technical inst.i.tution in which young people get decently educated and learn to earn their bread--such as our present universities.

It will be a place for men to get knowledge; and not for boys and adolescents to get degrees.

I wish I could get the younger men like yourself to see that this is the goal which they may reach, and in the meanwhile to take care that no such Philistine compromise as is possible at present, becomes too strong to survive a sharp shake.

I am, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[He sketches his ideal of a modern university, and especially of its relation to the Medical Schools, in a letter to Professor Ray Lankester of April 11:--]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, April 11, 1892.

My dear Lankester,

We have been having ten days of sunshine, and I have been correspondingly lazy, especially about letter-writing. This, however, is my notion; that unless people clearly understand that the university of the future is to be a very different thing from the university of the past, they had better put off meddling for another generation.

The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge, and except in the way of dialectic cobweb-spinning, its professors had nothing to do with novelties. Of the historical and physical (natural) sciences, of criticism and laboratory practice, it knew nothing. Oral teaching was of supreme importance on account of the cost and rarity of ma.n.u.scripts.

The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge: its professors have to be at the top of the wave of progress. Research and criticism must be the breath of their nostrils; laboratory work the main business of the scientific student; books his main helpers.

The lecture, however, in the hands of an able man will still have the utmost importance in stimulating and giving facts and principles their proper relative prominence.

I think we should get pretty nearly what is wanted by grafting a College de France on to the University of London, subsidising University College and King's College (if it will get rid of its tests, not otherwise), and setting up two or three more such bodies in other parts of London. (Scotland, with a smaller population than London, has four complete universities!)