Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume II Part 29

[Thus he had been led to a settled disbelief in Bacon's scientific greatness, that reasoned "prejudice" against which Spedding himself was moved to write twice in defence of Bacon. In his first letter he criticised a pa.s.sage in the lecture touching this question. On the one hand, he remarks, "Bacon would probably have agreed with you as to his pretensions as a scientific discoverer (he calls himself a bellman to call other wits together, or a trumpeter, or a maker of bricks for others to build with)." On the other hand, he asks, ought a pa.s.sage from a fragment--the "Temporis partus masculus"--unpublished in Bacon's lifetime, to be treated as one of his representative opinions?

In his second letter he adduces, on other grounds, his own more favourable impression of Bacon's philosophical influence. A peculiar interest of this letter lies in its testimony to the influence of Huxley's writings even on his elder contemporaries.

From James Spedding.

February 1, 1878.

...When you admit that you study Bacon with a PREJUDICE, you mean of course an unfavourable opinion previously formed on sufficient grounds. Now I am myself supposed to have studied him with a prejudice the other way: but this I cannot admit, in any sense of the word; for when I first made his acquaintance I had no opinion or feeling about him at all--more than the ordinary expectation of a young man to find what he is told to look for. My earliest impression of his character came probably from Thomson--whose portrait of him, except as touched and softened by the tenderer hand of "the sweet-souled poet of the Seasons," did not differ from the ordinary one. It was not long indeed before I did begin to form an opinion of my own; one of those AFTER-judgments which are liable to be mistaken for prejudices by those who judge differently, and which, being formed, do, no doubt, tell upon the balance. For it was not long before I found myself indebted to him for the greatest benefit probably that any man, living or dead, can confer on another. In my school and college days I had been betrayed by an ambition to excel in themes and declamations into the study, admiration, and imitation of the rhetoricians. In the course of my last long vacation--the autumn of 1830--I was inspired with a new ambition, namely, to think justly about everything which I thought about at all, and to act accordingly; a conviction for which I cannot cease to feel grateful, and which I distinctly trace to the accident of having in the beginning of that same vacation given two shillings at a second-hand bookstall for a little volume of Dove's cla.s.sics, containing the Advancement of Learning. And if I could tell you how many superlatives I have since that time degraded into the positive; how many innumerables and infinities I have replaced by counted numbers and estimated quant.i.ties; how many a.s.sumptions, important to the argument in hand, I have withdrawn because I found on more consideration that the fact might be explained otherwise; and how many effective epithets I have discarded when I found that I could not fully verify them; you would think it no less than just that I should claim for myself and concede to others the right of being judged by the last edition rather than the first. That a persistent endeavour to free myself from what you regard as Bacon's characteristic vice should have been the fruit of a desire to follow his example, will seem strange to you, but it is fact. Perhaps you will think it not less strange, but it is my real belief, that if your own writings had been in existence and come in my way at the same critical stage of my moral and mental development, they would have taught me the same lesson and inspired me with the same ambition; for in that particular (if I may say it without offence) I look upon you BOTH as eminent examples of the SAME virtue.

To the lecture he refers once more in a letter to Mr. John Morley. The political situation touched on in this and the next letter is that of the end of the Russo-Turkish war and the beginning of the Afghan war.]

Science Schools, South Kensington, February 7, 1878.

My dear Morley,

Many thanks for the cheque, and still more for your good word for the article. [On Harvey.] I knew it would "draw" Hutton, and his ingenuity has as usual made the best of the possibilities of attack. I am glad to find, however, that he does not think it expedient to reiterate his old story about the valuelessness of vivisection in the establishment of the doctrine of the circulation.

I hear that that absurd creature R-- goes about declaring that I have made all sorts of blunders. Could not somebody be got to persuade him to put what he has to say in black and white?

Controversy is as abhorrent to me as gin to a reclaimed drunkard; but oh dear! it would be so nice to squelch that pompous imposter.

I hope you admire the late aspects of the British Lion. His tail goes up and down from the intercrural to the stiffly erect att.i.tude per telegram, while his head is sunk in the windbag of the House of Commons.

I am beginning to think that a war would be a good thing if only for the inevitable clean sweep of all the present governing people which it would bring about.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[To his eldest daughter.]

Science Schools, South Kensington, December 7, 1878.

Dearest Jess,

You are a badly used young person--you are; and nothing short of that conviction would get a letter out of your still worse used Pater, the bete noire of whose existence is letter-writing.

Catch me discussing the Afghan question with you, you little pepper pot. No, not if I know it. Read Fitzjames Stephen's letter in the "Times," also Bartle Frere's memorandum, also Napier of Magdala's memo. Them's my sentiments.

Also read the speech of Lord Hartington on the address. He is a man of sense like his father, and you will observe that he declares that the Government were perfectly within their right in declaring war without calling Parliament together...

If you had lived as long as I have and seen as much of men, you would cease to be surprised at the reputations men of essentially commonplace powers--aided by circ.u.mstances and some amount of cleverness--obtain.

I am as strong for justice as any one can be, but it is real justice, not sham conventional justice which the sentimentalists howl for.

At this present time real justice requires that the power of England should be used to maintain order and introduce civilisation wherever that power extends.

The Afghans are a pack of disorderly treacherous blood-thirsty thieves and caterans who should never have been allowed to escape from the heavy hand we laid upon them, after the ma.s.sacre of twenty thousand of our men, women, and children in the Khoord Cabul Pa.s.s thirty years ago.

We have let them be, and the consequence is they now lend themselves to the Russians, and are ready to stir up disorder and undo all the good we have been doing in India for the last generation.

They are to India exactly what the Highlanders of Scotland were to the Lowlanders before 1745; and we have just as much right to deal with them in the same way.

I am of opinion that our Indian Empire is a curse to us. But so long as we make up our minds to hold it, we must also make up our minds to do those things which are needful to hold it effectually, and in the long run it will be found that so doing is real justice both for ourselves, our subject population, and the Afghans themselves.

There, you plague.

Ever your affectionate Daddy,

T.H. Huxley.

[A few days later he writes to his son:--]

The Liberals are making fools of themselves, and "the family" declare I am becoming a Jingo! another speech from Gladstone is expected to complete my conversion.

[Among other occupations he still had to attend the Scottish Universities Commission, for which he wrote the paragraph on examinations in its report; he lectured on the Hand at the Working Men's College; prepared new editions of the "Physiography,"

"Elementary Physiology," and "Vertebrate Anatomy," and at length brought out the "Introductory Primer" in the Science Primer Series, in quite a different form from what he had originally sketched out. But his chief interest lay in the Invertebrata. From April 29 to June 3 he lectured to working men at Jermyn Street upon the Crayfish; read a paper on the Cla.s.sification and Distribution of Crayfishes at the Zoological Society on June 4, and lectured at the Zoological Gardens weekly from May 17 to June 21 on Crustaceous Animals. In all this work lay the foundations of his subsequent book on the Crayfish, which I find jotted down in the notes of this year to be written as an introduction to "Zoology," together with the "Dog" as an introduction to the "Mammalia", and "Man"--already dealt with in "Man's Place in Nature"--as an introduction to "Anthropology." This projected series is completed with a half-erased note of an introduction to "Psychology," which perhaps found some expression in parts of the "Hume," also written this year.

He notes down also, work on the Ascidians, and on the morphology of the Mollusca and Cephalopods brought back by the "Challenger," in connection with which he now began the monograph on the rare creature Spirula, a remarkable piece of work, being based upon the dissections of a single specimen, but destined never to be completed by his hand, though his drawings were actually engraved, and nothing remained but to put a few finishing touches and to write detailed descriptions of the plates.

Letters to W.K. Parker and Professor Haeckel touch on this part of his work; the former, indeed, offering a close parallel to a story, obviously of the same period, which the younger Parker tells in his reminiscences, to ill.u.s.trate the way in which he would be utterly engrossed in a subject for the time being. Jeffery Parker, while demonstrator of biology, came to him with a question about the brain of the codfish at a time when he was deep in the investigation of some invertebrate group.] "Codfish?" [he replied,] "that's a vertebrate, isn't it? Ask me a fortnight hence, and I'll consider it."

4 Marlborough Place, September 25, 1878.

My dear Parker,

As far as I recollect Ammocoetes is a vertebrated animal--and I ignore it.

The paper you refer to was written by my best friend--a carefulish kind of man--and I am as sure that he saw what he says he saw, as if I had seen it myself.

But what the fact may mean and whether it is temporary or permanent--is thy servant a dog that he should worry himself about other things with backbones? Not if I know it.

Churchill has got over a whole batch of the American edition of the Vertebrata, so I have a respite. Mollusks are far more interesting--bugs sweeter--while the dinner crayfish hath no parallel for intense and absorbing interest in the three kingdoms of Nature.

What saith the Scripture? "Go to the ANT thou sluggard." In other words, study the Invertebrata.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Sketch of a vast winged ant advancing on a midget, and saying, as it looks through a pair of eyegla.s.ses, "Well, really, what an absurd creature!!"]

4 Marlborough Place, London, April 28, 1878.

My dear Haeckel,

Since the receipt of your letter three months ago, I have been making many inquiries about Medusae for you, but I could hear of none--and so I have delayed my reply, until I doubt not you have been blaspheming my apparent neglect.

My "Sammlung"!! [Collection.] My dear friend, my cabin on board H.M.S.