Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume II Part 1

The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley.

Volume 2.

by Leonard Huxley.

CHAPTER 2.1. 1870.

[With the year 1870 comes another turning-point in Huxley's career.

From his return to England in 1850 till 1854 he had endured four years of hard struggle, of hope deferred; his reputation as a zoologist had been established before his arrival, and was more than confirmed by his personal energy and power. When at length settled in the professorship at Jermyn Street, he was so far from thinking himself more than a beginner who had learned to work in one corner of the field of knowledge, still needing deep research into all kindred subjects in order to know the true bearings of his own little portion, that he treated the next six years simply as years of further apprenticeship. Under the suggestive power of the "Origin of Species"

all these scattered studies fell suddenly into due rank and order; the philosophic unity he had so long been seeking inspired his thought with tenfold vigour, and the battle at Oxford in defence of the new hypothesis first brought him before the public eye as one who not only had the courage of his convictions when attacked, but could, and more, would, carry the war effectively into the enemy's country. And for the next ten years he was commonly identified with the championship of the most unpopular view of the time; a fighter, an a.s.sailant of long-established fallacies, he was too often considered a mere iconoclast, a subverter of every other well-rooted inst.i.tution, theological, educational, or moral.

It is difficult now to realise with what feelings he was regarded in the average respectable household in the sixties and early seventies.

His name was anathema; he was a terrible example of intellectual gravity beyond redemption, a man with opinions such as cannot be held "without grave personal sin on his part" (as was once said of Mill by W.G. Ward), the representative in his single person of rationalism, materialism, atheism, or if there be any more abhorrent "ism"--in token of which as late as 1892 an absurd zealot at the headquarters of the Salvation Army crowned an abusive letter to him at Eastbourne by the statement, "I hear you have a local reputation as a Bradlaughite."

But now official life began to lay closer hold upon him. He came forward also as a leader in the struggle for educational reform, seeking not only to perfect his own biological teaching, but to show, in theory and practice, how scientific training might be introduced into the general system of education. He was more than once asked to stand for Parliament, but refused, thinking he could do more useful work for his country outside.

The publication in 1870 of "Lay Sermons," the first of a series of similar volumes, served, by concentrating his moral and intellectual philosophy, to make his influence as a teacher of men more widely felt. The "active scepticism," whose conclusions many feared, was yet acknowledged as the quality of mind which had made him one of the clearest thinkers and safest scientific guides of his time, while his keen sense of right and wrong made the more reflective of those who opposed his conclusions hesitate long before expressing a doubt as to the good influence of his writings. This view is very clearly expressed in a review of the book in the "Nation" (New York 1870 11 407).

And as another review of the "Lay Sermons" puts it ("Nature" 3 22), he began to be made a kind of popular oracle, yet refused to prophesy smooth things.

During the earlier period, with more public demands made upon him than upon most men of science of his age and standing, with the burden of four Royal Commissions and increasing work in learned societies in addition to his regular lecturing and official paleontological work, and the many addresses and discourses in which he spread abroad in the popular mind the leaven of new ideas upon nature and education and the progress of thought, he was still constantly at work on biological researches of his own, many of which took shape in the Hunterian lectures at the College of Surgeons from 1863-1870. But from 1870 onward, the time he could spare to such research grew less and less.

For eight years he was continuously on one Royal Commission after another. His administrative work on learned societies continued to increase; in 1869-70 he held the presidency of the Ethnological Society, with a view to effecting the amalgamation with the Anthropological,] "the plan," [as he calls it,] "for uniting the Societies which occupy themselves with man (that excludes 'Society'

which occupies itself chiefly with woman)." [He became President of the Geological Society in 1872, and for nearly ten years, from 1871 to 1880, he was secretary of the Royal Society, an office which occupied no small portion of his time and thought, "for he had formed a very high ideal of the duties of the Society as the head of science in this country, and was determined that it should not at least fall short through any lack of exertion on his part" (Sir M. Foster, Royal Society Obituary Notice). (See Appendix 2.)

The year 1870 itself was one of the busiest he had ever known. He published one biological and four paleontological memoirs, and sat on two Royal Commissions, one on the Contagious Diseases Acts, the other on Scientific Instruction, which continued until 1875.

The three addresses which he gave in the autumn, and his election to the School Board will be spoken of later; in the first part of the year he read two papers at the Ethnological Society, of which he was President, on "The Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind," March 9--and on "The Ethnology of Britain,"

May 10--the substance of which appeared in the "Contemporary Review"

for July under the t.i.tle of "Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology"

("Collected Essays" 7 253). As President also of the Geological Society and of the British a.s.sociation, he had two important addresses to deliver. In addition to this, he delivered an address before the Y.M.C.A. at Cambridge on "Descartes' Discourse."

How busy he was may be gathered from his refusal of an invitation to Down:--]

26 Abbey Place, January 21, 1870.

My dear Darwin,

It is hard to resist an invitation of yours--but I dine out on Sat.u.r.day; and next week three evenings are abolished by Societies of one kind or another. And there is that horrid Geological address looming in the future!

I am afraid I must deny myself at present.

I am glad you liked the sermon. Did you see the "Devonshire man's"

attack in the "Pall Mall?"

I have been wasting my time in polishing that worthy off. I would not have troubled myself about him, if it were not for the political bearing of the Celt question just now.

My wife sends her love to all you.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[The reference to the "Devonshire Man" is as follows:--Huxley had been speaking of the strong similarity between Gaul and German, Celt and Teuton, before the change of character brought about by the Latin conquest; and of the similar commixture, a dash of Anglo-Saxon in the ma.s.s of Celtic, which prevailed in our western borders and many parts of Ireland, e.g. Tipperary.

The "Devonshire Man" wrote on January 18 to the "Pall Mall Gazette,"

objecting to the statement that "Devonshire men are as little Anglo-Saxons as Northumbrians are Welsh." Huxley replied on the 21st, meeting his historical arguments with citations from Freeman, and especially by completing his opponent's quotation from Caesar, to show that under certain conditions, the Gaul was indistinguishable from the German. The a.s.sertion that the Anglo-Saxon character is midway between the pure French or Irish and the Teutonic, he met with the previous question, Who is the pure Frenchman? Picard, Provencal, or Breton? or the pure Irish? Milesian, Firbolg, or Cruithneach?

But the "Devonshire Man" did not confine himself to science. He indulged in various personalities, to the smartest of which, a parody of Sydney Smith's dictum on Dr. Whewell, Huxley replied:--]

"A Devonshire Man" is good enough to say of me that "cutting up monkeys is his forte, and cutting up men is his foible." With your permission, I propose to cut up "A Devonshire Man"; but I leave it to the public to judge whether, when so employed, my occupation is to be referred to the former or to the latter category.

[For this he was roundly lectured by the "Spectator" on January 29, in an article under the heading "Pope Huxley." Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the controversy, he was chidden for the abusive language of the above paragraph, and told that he was a very good anatomist, but had better not enter into discussions on other subjects.

The same question is developed in the address to the Ethnological Society later in the year and in "Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology" (see above), and reiterated in an address from the chair in Section D at the British a.s.sociation in 1878 at Dublin, and in a letter to the "Times" for October 12, 1887, apropos of a leading article upon "British Race-types of To-day."

Letter-writing was difficult under such pressure of work, but the claims of absent friends were not wholly forgotten, though left on one side for a time, and the warm-hearted Dohrn, could not bear to think himself forgotten, managed to get a letter out of him--not on scientific business.]

26 Abbey Place, January 30, 1870.

My dear Dohrn,

In one sense I deserve all the hard things you may have said and thought about me, for it is really scandalous and indefensible that I have not written to you. But in another sense, I do not, for I have very often thought about you and your doings, and as I have told you once before, your memory always remains green in the "happy family."

But what between the incessant pressure of work and an inborn aversion to letter-writing, I become a worse and worse correspondent the longer I live, and unless I can find one or two friends who will [be] content to bear with my infirmities and believe that however long before we meet, I shall be ready to take them up again exactly where I left off, I shall be a friendless old man.

As for your old Goethe, you are mistaken. The Scripture says that "a living dog is better than a dead lion," and I am a living dog. By the way, I bought Cotta's edition of him the other day, and there he stands on my bookcase in all the glory of gilt, black, and marble edges. Do you know I did a version of his "Aphorisms on Nature" into English the other day. [For the first number of "Nature," November 1869.] It astonishes the British Philistines not a little. When they began to read it they thought it was mine, and that I had suddenly gone mad!

But to return to your affairs instead of my own. I received your volume on the "Arthropods" the other day, but I shall not be able to look at it for the next three weeks, as I am in the midst of my lectures, and have an annual address to deliver to the Geological Society on the 18th February, when, I am happy to say, my tenure of office as President expires.

After that I shall be only too glad to plunge into your doings and, as always, I shall follow your work with the heartiest interest. But I wish you would not take it into your head that Darwin or I, or any one else thinks otherwise than highly of you, or that you need "re-establishing" in any one's eyes. But I hope you will not have finished your work before the autumn, as they have made me President of the British a.s.sociation this year, and I shall be very busy with my address in the summer. The meeting is to take place in Liverpool on the 14th September, and I live in hope that you will be able to come over. Let me know if you can, that I may secure you good quarters.

I shall ask the wife to fill up the next half-sheet. But for Heaven's sake don't be angry with me in English again. It's far worse than a scolding in Deutsch, and I have as little forgotten my German as I have my German friends.

[On February 18 he delivered his farewell address to the Geological Society, on laying down the office of President. ("Palaeontology and the Doctrine of Evolution" "Collected Essays" 8.) He took the opportunity to revise his address to the Society in 1862, and pointed out the growth of evidence in favour of evolution theory, and in particular traced the paleontological history of the horse, through a series of fossil types approaching more and more to a generalised ungulate type and reaching back to a three-toed ancestor, or collateral of such an ancestor, itself possessing rudiments of the two other toes which appertain to the average quadruped.]

If [he said] the expectation raised by the splints of horses that, in some ancestor of the horses, these splints would be found to be complete digits, has been verified, we are furnished with very strong reasons for looking for a no less complete verification of the expectation that the three-toed Plagiolophus-like "avus" of the horse must have been a five-toed "atavus" at some early period.

[Six years afterwards, this forecast of paleontological research was to be fulfilled, but at the expense of the European ancestry of the horse. A series of ancestors, similar to these European fossils, but still more equine, and extending in unbroken order much farther back in geological time, was discovered in America. His use of this in his New York lectures as demonstrative evidence of evolution, and the immediate fulfilment of a further prophecy of his will be told in due course.

His address to the Cambridge Y.M.C.A, "A Commentary on Descartes'

'Discourse touching the method of using reason rightly, and of seeking scientific truth,'" was delivered on March 24. This was an attempt to give this distinctively Christian audience some vision of the world of science and philosophy, which is neither Christian nor Unchristian, but Extra-christian, and to show] "by what methods the dwellers therein try to distinguish truth from falsehood, in regard to some of the deepest and most difficult problems that beset humanity, "in order to be clear about their actions, and to walk sure-footedly in this life," as Descartes says. For Descartes had laid the foundation of his own guiding principle of "active scepticism, which strives to conquer itself."

[Here again, as in the "Physical Basis of Life," but with more detail, he explains how far materialism is legitimate, is, in fact, a sort of shorthand idealism. This essay, too, contains the often-quoted pa.s.sage, apropos of the] "introduction of Calvinism into science."

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer. The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me.

[This was the latest of the essays included in "Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews," which came out, with a dedicatory letter to Tyndall, in the summer of 1870, and, whether on account of its subject matter or its t.i.tle, always remained his most popular volume of essays.

To the same period belongs a letter to Matthew Arnold about his book "St. Paul and Protestantism."]