Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 37

I should hand over the whole business of medical education and graduation to a medical universitas to be const.i.tuted by the royal colleges and medical schools, whose doings, of course, would be checked by the Medical Council.

Our side has been too apt to look upon medical schools as feeders for Science. They have been so, but to their detriment as medical schools.

And now that so many opportunities for purely scientific training are afforded, there is no reason they should remain so.

The problem of the Medical University is to make an average man into a good practical doctor before he is twenty-two, and with not more expense than can be afforded by the cla.s.s from which doctors are recruited, or than will be rewarded by the prospect of an income of 400 to 500 pounds a year.

It is not right to sacrifice such men, and the public on whom they practise, for the prospect of making 1 per cent of medical students into men of science.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[An undated draft in his own handwriting (probably the draft of a speech delivered the first time he came to the committee as President, October 26) expands the same idea as to the modern requirements of the University:--]

The cardinal fact in the University question, appears to me to be this: that the student to whose wants the mediaeval University was adjusted, looked to the past and sought book-learning, while the modern looks to the future and seeks the knowledge of things.

The mediaeval view was that all knowledge worth having was explicitly or implicitly contained in various ancient writings; in the Scriptures, in the writings of the greater Greeks, and those of the Christian Fathers. Whatever apparent novelty they put forward, was professedly obtained by deduction from ancient data.

The modern knows that the only source of real knowledge lies in the application of scientific methods of inquiry to the ascertainment of the facts of existence; that the ascertainable is infinitely greater than the ascertained, and that the chief business of the teacher is not so much to make scholars as to train pioneers.

From this point of view, the University occupies a position altogether independent of that of the coping-stone of schools for general education, combined with technical schools of Theology, Law, and Medicine. It is not primarily an inst.i.tution for testing the work of schoolmasters, or for ascertaining the fitness of young men to be curates, lawyers, or doctors.

It is an inst.i.tution in which a man who claims to devote himself to Science or Art, should be able to find some one who can teach him what is already known, and train him in the methods of knowing more.

I include under Art,--Literature, the pictorial and plastic art with Architecture, and Music; and under Science,--Logic, Philosophy, Philology, Mathematics, and the Physical Sciences.

The question of the connection of the High Schools for general education, and of the technical schools of Theology, Law, Medicine, Engineering, Art, Music, and so on, with the University is a matter of practical detail. Probably the teaching of the subjects which stand in the relation of preliminaries to technical teaching and final studies in higher general education in the University would be utilised by the colleges and technical schools.

All that I have to say on this subject is, that I see no reason why the existing University of London should not be completed in the sense I have defined by grafting upon it a professoriate with the appropriate means and appliances, which would supply London with the a.n.a.logue of the Ecole des hautes Etudes and the College de France in Paris, and of the Laboratories with the Professor Extraordinarius and Privat Docenten in the German Universities.

[A new Commission was promised to look into the whole question of the London University. This is referred to in a letter to Sir J. Donnelly of March 30, 1892.]

Unless you want to kill Foster, don't suggest him for the Commission.

He is on one already.

The whole affair is a perfect muddle of competing crude projects and vested interests, and is likely to end in a worse muddle, as anything but a patch up is, I believe, outside practical politics at present.

If I had carte blanche, I should cut away the technical "Faculties" of Medicine, Law, and Theology, and set up first-cla.s.s chairs in Literature, Art, Philosophy, and pure Science--a sort of combination of Sorbonne (without Theology) and College de France.

Thank Heaven I have never been asked to say anything, and my chimaeras remain in petto. They would be scouted.

[On the other hand, he was most anxious to keep the School of Science at South Kensington entirely independent. He writes again on May 26:--]

I trust Rucker and Thorpe are convinced by this time that I knew what I was talking about when I told them, months ago, that there would be an effort to hook us into the new University hotch-potch.

I am ready to oppose any such project tooth and nail. I have not been striving these thirty years to get Science clear of their schoolmastering sham-literary peddling to give up the game without a fight. I hope my Lords will be staunch.

I am glad my opinion is already on record.

[And similarly to Sir M. Foster on October 30:--]

You will have to come to London and set up physiology at the Royal College of Science. It is the only place in Great Britain in which scientific teaching is trammelled neither by parsons nor by litterateurs. I have always implored Donnelly to keep us clear of any connection with a University of any kind, sort, or description, and I tried to instil the same lesson into the doctors the other day. But the "liberal education" cant is an obsession of too many of them.

[A further step was taken in June, when he was sent a new draft of proposals, afterwards adopted by the above-mentioned general meeting of the a.s.sociation in March 1893, sketching a const.i.tution for a new university, and asking for the appointment of a Statutory Commission to carry it out. The University thus const.i.tuted was to be governed by a Court, half of which should consist of university professors] ("As for a government by professors only" [he writes in the "Times" of December 6, 1892], "the fact of their being specialists is against them. Most of them are broad-minded; practical men; some are good administrators.

But, unfortunately, there is among them, as in other professions, a fair sprinkling of one-idea'd fanatics, ignorant of the commonest conventions of official relation, and content with nothing if they cannot get everything their own way. It is these persons who, with the very highest and purest intentions, would ruin any administrative body unless they were counterpoised by non-professional, common-sense members of recognised weight and authority in the conduct of affairs."

[Furthermore, against the adoption of a German university system, he continues], "In holding up the University of Berlin as our model, I think you fail to attach sufficient weight to the considerations that there is no Minister of Public Instruction in these realms; that a great many of us would rather have no university at all than one under the control of such a minister, and whose highest representatives might come to be, not the fittest men, but those who stood foremost in the good graces of the powers that be, whether Demos, Ministry, or Sovereign."); [it was to include such faculties as Law, Engineering, Medicine, while it was to bring into connection the various teaching bodies scattered over London. The proposers themselves recognised that the scheme was not ideal, but a compromise which at least would not hamper further progress, and would supersede the Gresham scheme, which they regarded as a barrier to all future academic reform.

The a.s.sociation as thus const.i.tuted Huxley now joined, and was immediately asked to accept the Presidency, not that he should do any more militant work than he was disposed to attempt, but simply that he should sit like Moltke in his tent and keep an eye on the campaign.

He felt it almost a point of honour not to refuse his best services to a cause he had always had at heart, though he wrote:--]

There are some points in which I go further than your proposals, but they are so much, to my mind, in the right direction that I gladly support them.

[And again:--]

The a.s.sociation scheme is undoubtedly a compromise--but it is a compromise which takes us the right way, while the former schemes led nowhere except to chaos.

[He writes to Sir W.H. Flower:--]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, June 27, 1892.

My dear Flower,

I had quite given up the hope that anything but some wretched compromise would come of the University Commission, when I found, to my surprise, no less than gratification, that a strong party among the younger men were vigorously taking the matter up in the right (that is, MY) sense.

In spite of all my good resolves to be a "hermit old in mossy cell," I have enlisted--for ambulance service if nothing better.

The move is too important to spare oneself if one can be of any good.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Of his work in this position Professor Karl Pearson says, in a letter to me:--

Professor Huxley gallantly came to lead a somewhat forlorn hope,--that of establishing a really great university in London. He worked, as may naturally be supposed, with energy and persistence, and one, who like myself was not in full sympathy with the lines he took, can but admire the vigour he threw into the movement. Nothing came of it practically;...but Professor Huxley's leadership did, at any rate, a great deal to unite the London teachers, and raise their ideal of a true university, while at the same time helping to repress the self-interests of many persons and inst.i.tutions which had been before very much to the front.

Clearly this is the sort of thing referred to in a letter of December 20:--]

Got through the a.s.sociation business very well, but had to show that I am the kind of head that does not lend itself to wagging by the tail.

[The Senate of the University of London showed practical unanimity in accepting the idea of taking on teaching functions if the Commission should think it desirable, though the Medical Schools were still desirous of getting their degree granted on the mere license examination of the Royal Colleges, without any evidence of general culture or academical training, and on July 28 Huxley writes:--]

The decision of the representatives of the Medical Schools is just such as I should have expected. I always told my colleagues in the Senate of the University of London that such was their view, and that, in the words of Pears' advertis.e.m.e.nt, they "would not be happy till they got it."

And they won't get it unless the medical examining bodies are connected into a distinct degree-giving body.

[In the course of the autumn matters seemed to be progressing. He writes to Sir M. Foster, November 9:--]