Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work Part 13

"Into this Universe, and _Why_ not knowing Nor _Whence_, like water w.i.l.l.y-nilly flowing; And out of it, like Wind along the Waste I know not _Whither_, w.i.l.l.y-nilly blowing."

But, the more profoundly does the conception of evolution lay hold of human thought, the more inevitable it becomes to recognise that man and all that is best in man--his aspirations, ideas, virtues, and practical and abstract justice and goodness--are just as much the product of the cosmic process and part of the Cosmos as the most sinister results of the struggle for existence.

CHAPTER XVII

CLOSING DAYS AND SUMMARY

Huxley's Life in London--Decennial Periods--Ill-health--Retirement to Eastbourne--Death--Personal Appearance--Methods of Work--Personal Characteristics--An Inspirer of Others--His Influence in Science--A Naturalist by Vocation--His Aspirations.

Huxley's life followed the quiet and even tenor of that of a professional man of science and letters. The great adventure in it was his youthful voyage on the _Rattlesnake_. That over, and his choice made in favour of science as against medicine, he settled down in London. He married happily and shared in the common joys and sorrows of domestic life. Advancement came to him steadily, and, although he was never rich, after the first few years of life in London, his income was always adequate to his moderate needs. For the greater part of his working life, he lived actually in London, in the ordinary style and with the ordinary social enjoyments of a professional man.

His duties in connection with the Royal College of Science and with the Geological Survey were not arduous but constant; his time was fully occupied with these, with his scientific and literary work, with the business of scientific societies, with the occasional obligations of royal commissions, public boards, and lecturing engagements. The quiet routine of his life was diversified by many visits to provincial towns to deliver lectures or addresses, by meetings of the British a.s.sociation, by holidays in Switzerland, during which, with Tyndall, he made special studies of the phenomena of glaciation, and in the usual Continental resorts, and by several trips to America.

In a rough-and-ready fashion, Huxley's active life may be broken into a set of decennial periods, each with tolerably distinctive characters. The first period, roughly from 1850 to 1860, was almost purely scientific. It was occupied by his voyage, by his transition to science as a career, his researches into the invertebrate forms of life, the beginning of his palaeontological investigations, and a comparatively small amount of lecturing and literary work. The second decennium still found him employed chiefly in research, vertebrate and extinct forms absorbing most of his attention. He was occupied actively with teaching, but the dominant feature of the decennium was his a.s.sumption of the Darwinian doctrines. In connection with these latter, his literary and lecturing work increased greatly, and the side issues of what was, in itself, purely a scientific controversy began to lead him into metaphysical and religious studies. The third period, from 1870 to 1880, was considerably different in character. He had become the most prominent man in biological science in England, at a time when biological science was attracting a quite unusual amount of scientific and public attention. Public honours and public duties, some of them scientific, others general, began to crowd upon him, and the time at his disposal for the quiet labours of investigation became rapidly more limited within this period. He was secretary of the Royal Society, a member of the London School Board, president of the British a.s.sociation, Lord Rector at several universities, member of many royal commissions, government inspector of fisheries, president of the Geological Society. In this mult.i.tude of duties it was natural that the bulk of strictly scientific output was limited, but, on the other hand, his literary output was much larger. Between 1880 and 1890 he had reached the full maturity of a splendid reputation, and honours and duties pressed thick upon him. For part of the time he was president of the Royal Society, the most distinguished position to which a scientific man in England can attain, and he was held by the general public at least in as high esteem as by his scientific contemporaries. A small amount of original scientific work still appeared from his pen, but he was occupied chiefly with more general contributions to thought.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CARICATURE OF HUXLEY DRAWN BY HIMSELF Reproduced by permission from _Natural Science_, vol. vii., No. 46]

Throughout his life, Huxley had never been robust. From his youth upwards he had been troubled by dyspepsia with its usual accompaniment of occasional fits of severe mental and physical depression. In 1872 he was compelled to take a long holiday in Egypt, and, although he returned to resume full labour, it is doubtful if from that time onwards he recovered even the strength normal to him. In 1885, his ill-health became grave; in the following years he had two attacks of pleurisy, and symptoms of cardiac mischief became pressing. He gradually withdrew from his official posts, and, in 1890, retired to Eastbourne, where he had built himself a house on the Downs. The more healthy conditions and the comparative leisure he permitted himself had a good effect, and he was able to write some of his most brilliant essays and to make a few public appearances: at Oxford in 1893, when he delivered the Romanes lecture; at the meeting of the British a.s.sociation in 1894, when he spoke on the vote of thanks to the President, the Marquis of Salisbury; at the Royal Society in the same year when he received the recently established "Darwin Medal."

Early in the spring of 1895, he had a prostrating attack of influenza, and from that time until his death on June 29, 1895, he was an invalid. He was buried in the Marylebone cemetery at Finchley, to the north of London.

Huxley was of middle stature and rather slender build. His face, as Professor Ray Lankester described it, was "grave, black-browed, and fiercely earnest." His hair, plentiful and worn rather long, was black until in old age it became silvery white. He wore short side whiskers, but shaved the rest of his face, leaving fully exposed an obstinate chin, and mobile lips, grim and resolute in repose, but capable of relaxation into a smile of almost feminine charm.

He was a very hard worker and took little exercise. Professor Howes describes a typical day as occupied by lecture and laboratory work at the College of Science until his hurried luncheon; then a cab-drive to the Home Office for his work as Inspector of Fisheries; then a cab home for an hour's work before dinner, and the evening after dinner spent in literary work or scientific reading. While at work, his whole attention was engrossed, and he disliked being disturbed. This abstraction of his attention is ill.u.s.trated humorously by a story told by one of his demonstrators. Huxley was engaged in the investigations required for his book on the Crayfish, and his demonstrator came in to ask a question about a codfish. "Codfish?" said Huxley; "that's a vertebrate, isn't it? Ask me in a fortnight and I'll consider it."

While at work he smoked almost continuously, and from time to time he took a little relaxation, for the strains of a fiddle were occasionally heard from his room. Indeed he was devoted to music, regarding it as one of the highest of the aesthetic pleasures. He tells us himself:

"When I was a boy, I was very fond of music, and I am so now; and it so happened that I had the opportunity of hearing much good music. Among other things, I had abundant opportunities of hearing that great old master, Sebastian Bach. I remember perfectly well--although I knew nothing about music then, and, I may add, know nothing whatever about it now--the intense satisfaction and delight which I had in listening, by the hour together, to Bach's fugues. It is a pleasure which remains with me, I am glad to think; but, of late years, I have tried to find out the why and wherefore, and it has often occurred to me that the pleasure derived from musical compositions of this kind is essentially of the same nature as that which is derived from pursuits which are commonly regarded as purely intellectual. I mean, that the source of pleasure is exactly the same as in most of my problems in morphology--that you have the theme in one of the old masters' works followed out in all its endless variations, always appearing and always reminding you of unity in variety."

He had a hot temper, and did not readily brook opposition, especially when that seemed to him to be the result of stupidity or of prejudice rather than of reason, and his own reason was of a very clear, decided, and exact order. He had little sympathy with vacillation of any kind, whether it arose from mere infirmity of purpose or from the temperament which delights in balancing opposing considerations. He said on one occasion:

"A great lawyer-statesman and philosopher of a former age--I mean Francis Bacon--said that truth came out of error much more rapidly than out of confusion. There is a wonderful truth in that saying. Next to being right in this world, the best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because you will come out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of these days, have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against a fact, and that sets you all straight again. So I will not trouble myself as to whether I may be right or wrong in what I am about to say, but at any rate I hope to be clear and definite; and then you will be able to judge for yourselves whether, in following out the train of thought I have to introduce, you knock your heads against facts or not."

The particular suggestions to which these remarks were the characteristic introduction related to definite problems of education, that is to say, to questions upon which some action was urgent. It was in all cases of life, in science or affairs, that Huxley was resolute for clear ideas and definite courses of conduct. As a matter of fact, no one ever took greater care to satisfy himself as best he could as to what was right and what was wrong; but where action rather than reflection was needed, then his principle was to act, and to know definitely and clearly why you acted and for what you acted. In matters of opinion, on the other hand, he was all for not coming to a definite opinion when the facts obtainable did not justify such an opinion. In thought, agnosticism, the refusal to accept any ideas or principles except on sufficient evidence; in action, positivism, to act promptly in definite and known directions for definite and known objects: these were his principles.

Another aspect of the same trait of character, he shewed in an address to medical students at a distribution of prizes. After congratulating the victors he confessed to "an undercurrent of sympathy for those who have not been successful, for those valiant knights who have been overthrown in their tourney, and have not made their appearance in public." After recounting an early failure of his own, he proceeded:

"I said to myself, 'Never mind; what's the next thing to be done?' And I found that policy of 'never minding' and going on to the next thing to be done, to be the most important of all policies in the conduct of practical life. It does not matter how many tumbles you have in this life, so long as you do not get dirty when you tumble; it is only the people who have to stop to be washed and made clean, who must necessarily lose the race. You learn that which is of inestimable importance--that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are.

You learn to put your trust, by and by, in an economy and frugality of the exercise of your powers both moral and intellectual; and you very soon find out, if you have not found it out before, that patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness."

All Huxley's work was marked by a quality which may be called conscientiousness or thoroughness. Looking through his memoirs, written many years ago, the subjects of which have since been handled and rehandled by other writers with new knowledge and with new methods at their disposal, one is struck that all the observations he made have stood their ground. With new facts new generalisations have often been reached, and some of the positions occupied by Huxley have been turned. But what he saw and described had not to be redescribed; the citations he made from the older authorities were always so chosen as to contain the exact gist of the writers. These qualities, admirable in scientific work, became at once admirable and terrible in his controversial writings. His own exactness made him ruthless in exposing any inexactness in his adversaries, and there were few disputants who left an argument with Huxley in an undamaged condition.

The consciousness which he had of his own careful methods, added to a natural pugnacity, gave him an intellectual courage of a very high order. As he knew himself to have made sure of his premisses, he did not care whither his conclusions might lead him, against whatsoever established doctrine or accepted axiom.

There was, however, a strong spice of natural combativeness in his nature, the direct result of his native and highly trained critical faculty. He tells us that in the pre-Darwinian days he was accustomed to defend the fixity of species in the company of evolutionists and in the presence of the orthodox to attack the same doctrine. Later in life, when evolution had become fashionable, and the principles of Darwinism were being elevated into a new dogmatism, he was as ready to criticise the loose adherents of his own views as he had been to expose the weakness of the conventional dogmatists.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Huxley's work as a whole was its infectious nature. His vigorous and decided personality was reflected on all the subjects to which he gave attention, and in the same fashion as his presence infected persons with a personal enthusiasm so his writings stimulated readers to efforts along the same lines. His great influence is clear in the number and distinction of the biologists who came under his personal care, and in the great army of writers and thinkers who have been inspired by his views and methods on general questions. His position as an actual contributor to science has to a certain extent been lost sight of for two reasons. In the first place, his effect on the world as an expositor of the scientific method in its general application to life has overshadowed his exact work; in the second place, his exact work itself has been partly lost sight of in the new discoveries and advances to which it gave rise. It is therefore necessary to reiterate that, apart from all his other successes, he had made for himself an extremely distinguished position in the annals of exact science. Sir Michael Foster and Prof. Ray Lankester, in their preface to the collected edition of his scientific memoirs, make a just claim for him. These memoirs, they wrote, show that, "apart from the influence exerted by his popular writings, the progress of biology during the present century was largely due to labours of his of which the general public knew nothing, and that he was in some respects the most original and most fertile in discovery of all his fellow workers in the same branch of science."

There can be little question that it was no accident that determined the direction of Huxley's career. He was a naturalist by inborn vocation. The contrast between a natural bent and an acquired habit of life was well seen in the case of Huxley and Macgillivray, his companion on the _Rattlesnake_. The former was appointed as a surgeon, and it was no part of his duties to busy himself with the creatures of the sea; and yet his observations on them made a series of real contributions to biological science and laid the sure foundation of a world-wide and enduring reputation. The latter was the son of a naturalist, a naturalist by profession, and appointed to the expedition as its official naturalist; and yet he made only a few observations and a limited collection of curiosities, and even his exiguous place in the annals of zoology is the accidental result of his companionship with Huxley. The special natural endowments which Huxley brought to the study of zoology were, in the first place, a faculty for the patient and a.s.siduous observation of facts; in the second, a swift power of discriminating between the essential and the accessory among facts; in the third, the constructive ability to arrange these essentials in wide generalisations which we call laws or principles and which, within the limits necessarily set by inductive principles, are the starting-point for new deductions. These were the faculties which he brought to his science, but there were added to them two personal characteristics without which they would not have taken him far. They were impelled by a driving force which distinguishes the successful man from the muddler and without which the finest mental powers are as useless as a complicated machine disconnected from its driving-wheel. They were directed by a lofty and disinterested enthusiasm, without which the most talented man is a mere self-seeker, useless or dangerous to society. The faculties and qualities which made Huxley great as a zoologist were practically those which he applied to the general questions of biological theory, to the problems of education and of society, and to philosophy and metaphysics. A comparison between his sane and forcible handling of questions that lay outside the special province to which the greater part of his life was devoted, with the dubious and involved treatment given such questions by the professional politicians to whom the English races tend to entrust their destinies, is a useful comment on that value of science as discipline to which Huxley so strenuously called attention.

There can be no better way of ending this sketch of Huxley's life and work than by quoting his own account of the objects to which he had devoted himself consciously. These were:

"To promote the increase of natural knowledge and to forward the application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems of life to the best of my ability, in the conviction which has grown with my growth and strengthened with my strength, that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.

"It is with this intent that I have subordinated any reasonable or unreasonable ambition for scientific fame which I may have permitted myself to entertain to other ends; to the popularisation of science; to the development and organisation of scientific education; to the endless series of battles and skirmishes over evolution; and to untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit, that clericalism, which in England, as everywhere else, and to whatever denomination it may belong, is the deadly enemy of science.

"In striving for the attainment of these objects, I have been but one among many, and I shall be well content to be remembered, or even not remembered, as such. Circ.u.mstances, among which I am proud to reckon the devoted kindness of many friends, have led to my occupation of various prominent positions, among which the presidency of the Royal Society is the highest. It would be mock modesty on my part, with these and other scientific honours which have been bestowed upon me, to pretend that I have not succeeded in the career which I have followed, rather because I was driven into it than of my own free will; but I am afraid I should not count even these things as marks of success if I could not hope that I had not somewhat helped that movement of opinion which has been called the New Reformation."

The Story of the Nations.

Messrs. G.P. Putnam's Sons take pleasure in announcing that they have in course of publication, in co-operation with Mr. T. Fisher Unwin, of London, a series of historical studies, intended to present in a graphic manner the stories of the different nations that have attained prominence in history.

In the story form the current of each national life is distinctly indicated, and its picturesque and noteworthy periods and episodes are presented for the reader in their philosophical relation to each other as well as to universal history.

It is the plan of the writers of the different volumes to enter into the real life of the peoples, and to bring them before the reader as they actually lived, labored, and struggled--as they studied and wrote, and as they amused themselves. In carrying out this plan, the myths, with which the history of all lands begins, will not be overlooked, though these will be carefully distinguished from the actual history, so far as the labors of the accepted historical authorities have resulted in definite conclusions.

The subjects of the different volumes have been planned to cover connecting and, as far as possible, consecutive epochs or periods, so that the set when completed will present in a comprehensive narrative the chief events in the great STORY OF THE NATIONS; but it is, of course, not always practicable to issue the several volumes in their chronological order.

THE STORY OF THE NATIONS.

The following are now ready:

GREECE. Prof. Jas. A. Harrison.

ROME. Arthur Gilman.

THE JEWS. Prof. James K. Hosmer.

CHALDEA. Z.A. Ragozin.

GERMANY. S. Baring-Gould.

NORWAY. Hjalmar H. Boyesen.

SPAIN. Rev. E.E. and Susan Hale.

HUNGARY. Prof. A. Vambery.

CARTHAGE. Prof. Alfred J. Church.

THE SARACENS. Arthur Gilman.

THE MOORS IN SPAIN. Stanley Lane-Poole.

THE NORMANS. Sarah Orne Jewett.

PERSIA. S.G.W. Benjamin.

ANCIENT EGYPT. Prof. Geo. Rawlinson.

ALEXANDER'S EMPIRE. Prof. J.P. Mahaffy.

a.s.sYRIA. Z.A. Ragozin.

THE GOTHS. Henry Bradley.