Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work Part 8

(earth knowledge or geology in its etymological sense), that is to say, a general knowledge of the earth, and what is on it and in it and about it. If anyone who has experience of the ways of young children will call to mind their questions, he will find that so far as they can be put in any scientific category, they will come under this head of 'Erdkunde.' The child asks, 'What is the moon, and why does it shine?' 'What is this water, and where does it run?' 'What is the wind?' 'What makes these waves in the sea?' 'Where does this animal live, and what is the use of that plant?' And if not snubbed and stunted by being told not to ask foolish questions, there is no limit to the intellectual craving of a young child; nor any bounds to the slow but solid accretion of knowledge and development of the thinking faculty in this way.

To all such questions, answers which are necessarily incomplete, though true as far as they go, may be given by any teacher whose ideas represent real knowledge and not mere book learning: and a panoramic view of nature, accompanied by a strong infusion of the scientific habit of mind, may thus be placed within the reach of every child of nine or ten."

In 1880 Huxley, in a.s.sociation with Professor Roscoe, the chemist, and Professor Balfour Stewart, the physicist, took a great practical step toward securing the widest possible extension of elementary knowledge in science. They became general editors, for the English publishing house of Macmillan, of a series of "Science Primers." These were written in simple language, suitable for those with no preliminary knowledge of science, but were the work of the chief authorities in the leading branches of science. They were published at what was then the phenomenally cheap price of a shilling, and they sold in almost incredible numbers. Huxley himself wrote the introductory volume to this great series of tracts, taking for his subject the simplest and most natural phenomena of the world and the simplest chains of cause and effect that can be observed around us. The keynote of the little book was that knowledge of nature could be gained only by observation and experiment, and that for these the ordinary things in the world around us provided ample material. A few years later he wrote a more advanced volume on the same subject. He had now found an English name for the German _Erdkunde_, and his book on _Physiography_ was simply an account of the leading things and forces of nature. A traveller set down in a foreign land will at once get into difficulties unless he has provided himself with a guide to the geography, the manners and customs, and the regulations of the country in which he finds himself.

Huxley's aim was to provide a similar guide to nature; an outline of elementary knowledge of the world into which we all come as strangers.

He wrote of force and energy, of the forms of water, of heat and cold, of the atmosphere, of winds and tides and weather, and of the main features of the lives of plants and animals. There was nothing new in what he wrote; he simply took from the chief sciences their leading principles and elementary facts, and set them forth in plain and simple language so that all could read and understand. The novelty was that an attempt should be made to bring these facts within the reach of all. The idea proved extremely infectious; in Europe and America, in many languages and by many authors, Huxley's main lines were followed, with the result that a new branch of education, and almost of science, was created.

The body of man and the processes of life, in the earlier part of the century, were almost as unknown to most people as were the structure of the earth and the great processes of nature. What was known of human anatomy and physiology was contained in ponderous treatises, written in difficult and technical language suitable only for students of medicine and doctors. It was thought to be not only unnecessary but slightly coa.r.s.e for those not in the profession to know anything of the viscera of digestion, circulation, and so forth. Huxley laid low this great superst.i.tion by his _Elementary Lessons in Physiology_, a little volume first published in 1866, which ran through many editions. In it he wrote primarily for teachers and learners in boys' and girls' schools, and selected from the great bulk of knowledge and opinion called human physiology only the important and well-established truths. So successful was he in his selection that, notwithstanding the immense increase in knowledge since he wrote, the book still remains an adequate and useful elementary treatise, and by this time must have given their main knowledge of the human body to hundreds and thousands of readers who otherwise would have remained ignorant.

The books of which we have been writing were addressed to the general public, but, in addition, Huxley wrote several, of which three are specially important, for those students who devote themselves specially to anatomy. _The Crayfish_, his famous volume in the International Scientific Series, has been called by Professor Howes, the a.s.sistant and successor of Huxley at the Royal College of Science, "probably the best biological treatise ever written." Many naturalists have written elaborate monographs on single animals: Lyonet worked for years on the willow caterpillar, Strauss Durckheim devoted an even minuter attention to the common c.o.c.kchafer, and the great Boja.n.u.s investigated almost every fibre in the structure of the tortoise. The volumes produced by these anatomists were valuable and memorable, and occupy an honoured place in the library of science, but Huxley's aim was wider and greater. He showed how careful study of one of the commonest and most insignificant of animals leads, step by step, from every-day knowledge to the widest generalisations and the most difficult problems of zoology. He made study of a single creature an introduction to a whole science, and taught students to regard any form of life not merely as a highly complicated and deeply interesting anatomical study, but as a creature that is only one out of an innumerable host of living things, every fibre in its body, every rhythm in its functions proclaiming the degree and nature of its relationship to other animals. R. Louis Stevenson, writing of his native town, tried to give "a vision of Edinburgh, not as you see her, in the midst of a little neighbourhood, but as a boss upon the round world, with all Europe and the deep sea for her surroundings. For every place is a centre to the earth, whence highways radiate, or ships set sail for foreign ports; the limit of a parish is not more imaginary than the frontier of an empire." It is this wider sweep, this attempt to see and to teach not merely the facts about things but the relations of these facts to the similar facts in other things, that makes the difference between the new knowledge and the old. The questions to be asked and answered are not merely, What are the structures in this animal? but, How and why do they come to be what they are? Huxley was a ruthless enemy of the books and teachers which or who made the mere acquisition of details of knowledge their chief object.

"I remember," he wrote, "in my youth there were detestable books which ought to have been burned by the hands of the common hangman, for they contained questions and answers to be learned by heart, of this sort, 'What is a horse? The horse is termed _Equus caballus_; belongs to the cla.s.s Mammalia; order, Pachydermata; family, Solidungula.' Was any human being the wiser for learning that magic formula? Was he not more foolish inasmuch as he was deluded into taking words for knowledge?"

Huxley himself admitted his difficulty in remembering apparently meaningless facts, and occasionally aided his memory by inventing for them a humorous significance. Professor Howes relates a story of this kind. While examining the papers of candidates for some examination, Huxley came across one in which the mitral or bicuspid valve of the heart was erroneously described as being placed in the right cavity.

"Poor little beggar," said Huxley; "I never could get them myself until I reflected that a bishop could never be in the right." This insistence on the uselessness of formal knowledge applied only to those who were being taught or who were learning from books or lectures. Of the value and discipline of knowledge of facts gained at first hand from objects themselves either in original investigation or with the aid of books, Huxley had the highest possible opinion. By such a method of work alone he believed it possible to distinguish what we believe on authority from what we have convinced ourselves to be true, and, as we shall see later, he regarded it as the most important duty of a man to have acquired the habit of cla.s.sifying the ma.s.s of ideas in his brain into those which he knew and those which he thought to be true from having read or heard or imagined them.

The two other of the three great treatises for anatomical students are the _Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals_, published in 1871, and the _Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals_, published in 1877. Of these two volumes it is sufficient to say that they formed the chief introduction to the study of animal zoology for many years, and that a large number of the best-known zoologists of the end of this century received from them their first instruction in the science. As text-books they have been superseded lately by larger volumes in which there is found more s.p.a.ce for some of the recent advances in knowledge, especially comparative embryology, and the more intricate knowledge of the structure of the soft parts of marine invertebrates made possible by the newer and more successful methods of preserving delicate tissues. Just before Huxley ceased his regular work as a teacher at the Royal College of Science, there arrived a series of marine embryos, beautifully preserved and prepared for microscopic work by the zoologists at the International Zoological Station at Naples. Huxley is reported to have exclaimed at their beauty, and to have said: "You young men cannot realise your advantages; you have brought to you for study at your leisure in London, creatures that I had to lash my microscope to the mast to get a glimpse of." Huxley's books were written for students with fewer advantages, and, naturally, laid more stress on the harder skeletal parts and such structures as could be more easily preserved; but with this inevitable limitation they still serve as luminous and comprehensive guides to the subjects of which they treat. There is no doubt but that if he had been a younger man when the new technical methods made their appearance, he would have adopted them and their results in his volumes. One of the first great pieces of work which utilised methods more like those now used in all laboratories than those employed during the greater part of Huxley's life as a teacher was the cla.s.sical investigation by Van Beneden into the changes in the egg of Ascaris which accompany the process of fertilisation. When Huxley read the memoir he exclaimed, "All this by the use of glacial acetic acid--is it possible!" At once, Professor Howes relates, he repeated the whole investigation himself, and, when satisfied, declared that the "history of the histological investigation of the future would be the history of its methods." Not only have the chemical substances used in preparing tissues for examination greatly increased since Huxley's time as an active worker, but a very important method of investigation has come into general use. In Huxley's time tissues or animals too large or too opaque to be examined microscopically as whole structures were either teased by needles or were cut with a razor by hand into comparatively thick slices. The process of cutting, however practised the operator, was tedious and uncertain, and it was almost impossible to cut a piece of tissue into a series of thin slices without losing or destroying considerable portions. Microtomes, with various accessory mechanical appliances, have now been invented, and by means of these not only are slices of great tenuity made with ease, but there is little difficulty in cutting the most delicate organism into a ribbon of consecutive slices. Such new methods have made almost a revolution in the study of zoology, particularly of the lower forms of life and of the embryonic stages of higher animals, and books written before these methods became common have naturally been superseded.

Huxley did far more for the teaching of science than the preparation of books, however useful these were. He was the practical inventor of the laboratory system of teaching zoological science, and all over the world the methods invented by him have been adopted in university laboratories and technical schools. He had always declared that since zoology was a physical science, the method of studying it must needs be a.n.a.logous to that which is followed in other physical sciences. If a man wishes to be a chemist, it is necessary not only that he should read chemical books and attend chemical lectures, but that he should actually perform the fundamental experiments in the laboratory for himself, and thus learn exactly what the words which he reads in his books and hears from his teachers, mean. "If you want a man to be a tea-merchant, you don't tell him to read books about China or about tea, but you put him into a tea-merchant's office where he has the handling, the smelling, and the tasting of tea. Without the sort of knowledge which can be gained only in this practical way, his exploits as a tea-merchant will soon come to a bankrupt termination." The great and obvious difficulty in the practical teaching of biology appeared to be the immense number of different kinds of animals and plants in existence. A human life would not suffice for the examination of a hundredth part of these. Huxley met the difficulty by the "type"

system.

"There are certainly more than 100,000 species of insects, and yet anyone who knows one insect, if a properly chosen one, will be able to have a fair conception of the structure of the whole.

I do not mean to say he will know that structure thoroughly, or as well as is desirable that he should know it; but he will have enough real knowledge to enable him to understand what he reads, to have genuine images in his mind of these structures which become so variously modified in all the forms of insects he has not seen. In fact, there are such things as types of form among animals and vegetables, and for the purpose of getting a definite knowledge of what const.i.tutes the leading modifications of animal and plant life, it is not needful to examine more than a comparatively small number of animals and plants."

The type system in itself was not absolutely new. Rolleston, the Linacre professor at Oxford, in his _Forms of Animal Life_ had devised the method of teaching comparative anatomy by the study of a graded series of animals. But his method depended on the existence of a series of dissections and preparations made by a skilled craftsman; the tradition of teaching by authority instead of by investigation was maintained, although the authority of books and lectures was aided by museum specimens in gla.s.s bottles, the actual basis of the book being a series of dissections prepared by Mr. Charles Robertson, Rolleston's laboratory a.s.sistant, for the great International Exhibition of 1861.

The authorities of Huxley's students were to be found in nature itself. The green sc.u.m from the nearest gutter, a handful of weed from a pond, a bean-plant, some fresh-water mud, a frog, and a pigeon were the ultimate authorities of his course. His students were taught how to observe them, and how to draw and record their observations.

However familiar the objects, each student had to verify every fact afresh for himself. The business of the teacher was explanation of the methods of verification, insistence on the accomplishment of verification. It was a training in the immemorial att.i.tude of the scientific mind, codified by Huxley and made an integral part in national education.

As a matter of fact it was comparatively late in his life as a teacher that Huxley had complete opportunity for putting into practice his scheme for the laboratory teaching of biology. In 1854 there was no laboratory attached to the Natural History Department of the School of Mines. Lectures alone were given, and the only opportunity the student had of any practical acquaintance with the facts was in a short interview with the professor at the lecture table after the lecture.

This condition continued practically to 1872. But a few years before that Huxley and his colleagues got up a kind of p.r.o.nunciamento deploring the existing state of affairs. In his evidence before the Royal Commission of 1870 Huxley said: "There is a complete want in the School of Mines, as it now exists, of any means of teaching several of the subjects practically. For example, I am set there to teach natural history without a biological laboratory and without the means of shewing a single dissection." Against strong internal opposition and at considerable pecuniary loss Huxley and some of his colleagues succeeded, in 1872, in getting the School of Mines transferred to South Kensington, where it became the Royal College of Science. For the first course of instruction given in the new buildings, Huxley obtained the aid of Prof. M. Foster, Prof. Rutherford, and Prof. Ray Lankester. The laboratory course originated by Huxley and shaped by him with these three distinguished a.s.sistants became the model of the regular courses given subsequently, and, with various slight modifications, has since been adopted almost universally. Later on, Huxley described it as follows:

"I lecture to a cla.s.s of students daily for about four months and a half, and my cla.s.s have, of course, their text-books; but the essential part of the whole teaching, and that which I regard as really the most important part of it, is a laboratory for practical work, which is simply a room with all the appliances needed for ordinary dissection. We have tables properly arranged in regard to light, microscopes and dissecting instruments, and we work through the structure of a certain number of plants and animals. As, for example, among the plants we take the yeast-plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polyp. We dissect a starfish, an earthworm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a crayfish, and a black beetle.

We go on to a common skate, a codfish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled dissectors, but to give every student a clear and definite conception, by means of sense images, of the characteristic structure of each of the leading modifications of the animal kingdom; and that is perfectly possible by going no further than the length of that list of forms which I have enumerated. If a man knows the structure of the animals I have mentioned, he has a clear and exact, however limited apprehension of the essential features of the organization of all those great divisions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms to which the forms I have mentioned severally belong. And it then becomes possible to him to read with profit; because every time he meets with the name of a structure, he has a definite image in his mind of what the name means in the particular creature he is reading about, and therefore the reading is not mere reading. It is not mere repet.i.tion of words; but every term employed in the description, we will say of a horse, or of an elephant, will call up the image of the things he had seen in the rabbit, and he is able to form a distinct conception of that which he has not seen, as a modification of that which he has seen."

Huxley himself was originally a medical man; all through his life he was chiefly interested in the biological sciences which underlie a scientific practice of medicine, and as teacher and examiner he had much to do with the shaping of medical education in London. Acting in various public capacities, as a member of commissions dealing with medical education, or as a witness before them, in magazine articles and in public speeches he made many contributions to the problems to be faced in medical education. Some of these related to the conditions peculiar to medical training in London. In the greatest city of the world there was during Huxley's life and there is still nothing comparable with the great universities of Europe and America, of Scotland and Ireland. Some dozen hospitals, supported partly by endowments, partly by charities, attempt each to maintain a complete, independent medical school. As the requirements of medical education in staff, laboratories, and general equipment has advanced, these hospitals have made heroic efforts to advance with them.

Notwithstanding the zeal and public spirit of the staff and managers of the hospitals, this want of system has naturally resulted in a multiplication of inefficient inst.i.tutions and a number of makeshift arrangements. Huxley repeatedly urged the concentration of all this diffuse effort into a few centres, but this inevitable reform has not yet become possible.

A second important consideration, and one that has a much wider application, relates to the kind of person by whom the scientific sides of medical teaching should be given. Primitively, all the instruction to medical students was given by those actually engaged in the practice of medicine. Huxley was strongly of the opinion that the teachers of anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and so forth, should be specialists devoted to these subjects for life, and not merely surgeons and physicians who engaged in teaching until their practice grew sufficiently to monopolise their attention.

"I get every year," he said, "the elaborate reports of Henle and Meissner--volumes of I suppose 400 pages altogether--and they consist merely of abstracts of the memoirs and works which have been written on Anatomy and Physiology--only abstracts of them.

How is a man to keep up his acquaintance with all that is doing in the physiological world--in a world advancing with enormous strides every day and every hour--if he has to be distracted with the cares of practice?"

There would always be found men, he declared, who would make the choice between the wealth which may come by successful practice and a modest competency, when that modest competency was to be combined with a scientific career and the means of advancing knowledge. It was to those who made the latter choice that he would entrust the teaching of the sciences underlying medicine; partly because from the mere mechanical reason of time these men would be better able to keep pace with the most recent advances in knowledge, and partly because their teaching would be stimulated by their own work in advancing knowledge.

In this great matter the world is rapidly advancing towards the standard of Huxley; as each new appointment is made it becomes more and more probable that the man chosen will be a teacher and investigator rather than a pract.i.tioner.

In another general question of the politics of medical education Huxley took a strong line, and the tendency of change is toward his view. One of the first results of the awakening of medical education in the middle of this century was a tendency to throw an almost intolerable burden of new subjects upon the medical student. In the revolt from the old apprenticeship system, in which the student, from the very first, gave his chief attention to practice, and was left almost to himself to pick up a scanty knowledge of the principles and theories underlying his profession, the pendulum swung too far the other way, and there was almost no branch of the biological and physical sciences in which he was not expected to go through a severe training. On the old system the greater part of his time was spent in the wards of the hospital; on the new system it was only at an advanced stage of his career that he entered the wards at all, a great part of his time and energy being spent in the purely scientific teaching of the medical college. Huxley, although he had largely aided in the overthrow of the happy-go-lucky older system, of which Mr. Bob Sawyer was no exaggerated type, was equally severe on the reckless extensions of the new system. "If I were a despot," he said, "I would cut down the theoretical branches to a very considerable extent." He would discard comparative anatomy and botany, materia medica, and chemistry and physics, except as applied to physiology, from the medical student's course. At first sight, this seems a hard saying, but it is to be remembered that at that time the normal curriculum of a medical student lasted only four years, a s.p.a.ce of time barely sufficient for the necessary minimum of purely medical and surgical work. Huxley's view was that chemistry and physics, botany and zoology, should be part of the general education, not of the special medical education; he wished students to spend one or two years after their ordinary career at school in work on these elementary scientific subjects, and then to begin their medical course free from the burden of extra-professional subjects. With certain limits due to the different local conditions in different teaching centres Huxley's system is being adopted. In most cases the authorities in medical education are unable to leave the whole responsibility of the elementary education in science to the schools from which medical students come, as the conditions under which scientific subjects are still taught in schools leave much to be desired. The average length of the medical curriculum has been extended and the elementary scientific subjects are taken first, sometimes at the medical colleges, sometimes in the scientific departments of universities.

The interesting general point of view is that Huxley, although himself a biologist and teacher of biology, took too broad an outlook on the general policy of education to insist upon his own subject to the detriment of the precise practical objects of the training of medical students.

In the days of Huxley's greatest activity, while by the natural force of events and by his special efforts science was becoming more and more recognised as a necessary and important branch of general education, the cry was raised against it that scientific education was not capable of giving what is called culture. A scientific man was regarded as a mere scientific specialist, and science was considered to have no place in, and in fact to be an enemy of, "liberal education." In 1880, at Birmingham, Huxley attacked this view in a speech delivered at the opening of the Mason College. Sir Josiah Mason, the benevolent founder of that great inst.i.tution, had made it one of the conditions of the foundation that the College should make no provision for "mere literary instruction and education." This gave Huxley a text for raising the whole question of the relation of science to culture. He declared that he held very strongly by two convictions.

"The first is, that neither the discipline nor the subject matter of cla.s.sical education is of such direct value to the student of physical science as to justify the expenditure of valuable time on either; and the second is, that for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education."

He quoted from Matthew Arnold, then in the zenith of his fame as a chief apostle of culture, and shewed that there were two propositions involved in the "literary" view of culture. The first was that a "criticism of life" was the essence of culture; the second, that literature contained the materials which sufficed for the construction of such a criticism. With the first proposition he had no dispute, taking the view that culture was something quite different from learning or technical skill. "It implies the possession of an ideal, and the habit of critically estimating the value of things by comparison with a theoretic standard. Perfect culture should supply a complete theory of life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its possibilities and its limitations." Against the second proposition he urged in the first place that it was self-evident that after having learned all that Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity have thought and said, and all that modern literature has to tell us, it was still necessary to have a deeper foundation for criticism of life. An acquaintance with what physical science had done, particularly in later years, was as necessary to criticism of life as any of the literary materials. Next, following the biological habit of examining anything by studying its development, he shewed how the connection between "culture" and study of cla.s.sical literature had come into existence. For many centuries Latin grammar, with logic and rhetoric, studied through Latin, were the fundamentals of education. A liberal education was possible only through study of the language in which all or nearly all the materials for it were written. With the changes produced by the Renascence there came a battle between Latin and Greek, and Greek came to be part of a liberal education. Later on, there came a similar battle between the cla.s.sical and modern languages, and now the modern languages have included and absorbed all the necessary material for knowledge and criticism. Those who cling to cla.s.sics as the basis of culture and education are clinging to old weapons long after these have ceased to be effective, simply because at one time in history only these weapons were available in the struggle for knowledge.

CHAPTER XI

GENERAL PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION

Establishment of Compulsory Education in England--The Religious Controversy--Huxley Advocates the Bible without Theology--His Compromise on the "Cowper-Temple" Clause--Influence of the New Criticism--Science and Art Instruction--Training of Teachers--University Education--The Baltimore Address--Technical Education--So-called "Applied Science"--National Systems of Education as "Capacity-Catchers."

In the last chapter, the special relation of Huxley to scientific education was described, and, naturally enough, it is in special connection with scientific education that his influence is best known.

But he was keenly interested in all the larger problems of general, university, and technical education, and he played a great part in shaping the lines upon which these problems have been solved in England.

In the years immediately before 1870, all England was wrestling with the great problem of elementary education, in the arrangements for which it was far behind not only the leading European countries but even its sister-kingdom, Scotland. In 1870 there came into operation an Act of Parliament for the regulation of elementary education under the supervision of locally elected school boards. Hitherto elementary education had been controlled by the Established Church, and by other denominational religious bodies, and the quality and quant.i.ty of the instruction provided, for financial and various other reasons, had been extremely unsatisfactory. But a long and furious battle had raged around the religious question; elementary education was now to be national, compulsory, and universal; where religious bodies maintained schools that complied with certain fixed standards of efficiency, attendance of children at these was to be regarded as satisfactory, and in addition to the ordinary subjects, such theological and religious teaching as the supporting bodies chose might be added. But in the schools for all and sundry, under the control of boards representing the whole population, and deriving that part of their income represented by the subscriptions of the religious bodies in the denominational schools from public rates, levied on the whole population, was any definite creed to be inculcated? The extreme Church party, perhaps naturally, held that the creed established by law in the land should be taught in these new schools; extreme supporters of other creeds, and a majority of ordinary people of all creeds or of no creeds, objected to a new establishment of a sectarian doctrine, even though that sectarian doctrine were the doctrine of the national religion. The final result of the dispute as codified in the Act of Parliament was what was known as the Cowper-Temple Clause: "No religious catechism or religious formulary which is distinctive of any particular denomination shall be taught in the school." The actual value of any clause, however it may appear to be a fair compromise, depends on the spirit in which it is practically interpreted, and no sooner had the Act been pa.s.sed than the battle was renewed again over the interpretation of the clause. Many of the Church controversialists held that the liberal or more advanced party intended to exclude all reference to the Bible or to religion, on the plea that some sect could be found to which the most attenuated expression of religion would appear to be against the plain meaning of the clause, and Huxley, who had been in the forefront of the controversy, and who was a candidate for the first London School Board, was decried as an enemy of the Bible and of all religion and morality because he had expressed what he called a secular interpretation of the clause. In an article published in the _Contemporary Review_ immediately after the election, Huxley explained precisely what he took the clause to mean, and, afterwards, at all events during the existence of the Board to which he was elected, succeeded in carrying out his intentions in the main.

His first general point was to deprecate the action of those extremists of both sides who tried to make the education of children a mere battle-ground of religious dogmas. He then laid down what he conceived to be the lines of most general utility upon which, under the provisions of the Act, the education of children should be conducted. In the foreground he placed physical training and drill, as of supreme importance to young children, especially in the case of the poor children of large towns.

"All the conditions of the lives of such are unfavourable to their physical well-being. They are badly lodged, badly housed, badly fed, and live from one year's end to another in bad air, without a chance of a change. They have no play-grounds; they amuse themselves with marbles and chuck-farthing, instead of cricket and hare-and-hounds; and if it were not for the wonderful instinct which leads all poor children of tender years to throw themselves under the feet of cab-horses whenever they can, I know not how they would learn to use their limbs with agility."

This, humanitarianism as it was, was not the mere emotional sentiment of the typical humanitarian; he went on to give the soundest practical reasons for physical development.

"Whatever doubts people may entertain about the efficacy of natural selection, there can be none about artificial selection; and the breeder who should attempt to make, or keep up, a fine stock of pigs, or sheep, under the conditions to which the children of the poor are exposed, would be the laughing stock even of the bucolic mind. Parliament has already done something in this direction by declining to be an accomplice in the asphyxiation of school children. It refuses to make any grant to a school in which the cubical contents of the school-room are inadequate to allow of proper respiration."

He wished to see physical training put on the same system.

The second great point upon which he laid stress was the necessity of providing training in domestic economy, cookery, and other household accomplishments, for poor girls. These demands of Huxley seem simple and obvious, now that by his efforts and the efforts of others they have been accomplished, but in England, even thirty years ago, it required more than an ordinary prevision and boldness to insist upon them.

Huxley pa.s.sed next to the burning question of the time. He treated it in the broadest and least sectarian spirit.

"The boys and girls for whose education the School Boards have to provide, have not merely to discharge domestic duties, but each of them is a member of a social and political organisation of great complexity, and has, in future life, to fit himself into that organisation, or be crushed by it. To this end it is surely needful, not only that they should be made acquainted with the elementary laws of conduct, but that their affections should be trained, so as to love with all their hearts that conduct which tends to the attainment of the highest good for themselves and their fellow-men, and to hate with all their hearts that opposite course of action which is fraught with evil."

He then proceeded to point out the distinction between the affection which is called religion, and the science which is called theology, and, without entering into the question as to whether the latter were or were not a true science, he insisted on the danger of a confusion between the two.

"We are divided into two parties--the advocates of so-called 'religious' teaching on the one hand, and those of so-called 'secular' teaching on the other. And both parties seem to me to be not only hopelessly wrong, but in such a position that if either succeeded completely, it would discover, before many years were over, that it had made a great mistake and done serious evil to the cause of education. For, leaving aside the more far-seeing minority on either side, what the religious party is crying for is mere theology, under the name of religion; while the secularists have unwisely and wrongfully admitted the a.s.sumption of their opponents, and demand the abolition of all religious teaching, when they only want to be free of theology--burning your ship to get rid of the c.o.c.kroaches." ... "If I were compelled to choose for one of my own children, between a school in which real religious instruction is given, and one without it, I should prefer the former, even though the child might have to take a good deal of theology with it. Nine-tenths of a dose of bark is mere half-rotten wood; but one swallows it for the sake of the particles of quinine, the beneficial effect of which may be weakened, but is not destroyed, by the wooden dilution, unless in the case of a few exceptionally tender stomachs. Hence, when the great ma.s.s of the English people declare that they want to have the children in the elementary schools taught the Bible, and when it is plain from the terms of the Act, the debates in and out of Parliament, and especially the emphatic declarations of the Vice-President of the Council that it was intended that such Bible-teaching should be permitted, unless good cause for prohibiting it could be shewn, I do not see what reason there is for opposing that wish."

He went on to explain that, although he had always been strongly in favour of secular education, by that term he meant only education without theology, and he praised the English Bible in language as n.o.ble as has ever been applied to it by the most ardent of theologians.

"The Pagan moralists lack life and colour, and even the n.o.ble Stoic, Marcus Antoninus, is too high and refined for an ordinary child. Take the Bible as a whole; make the severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings and positive errors; eliminate, as a sensible lay-teacher would do, if left to himself, all that is not desirable for children to occupy themselves with; and there still remains in this old literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and n.o.blest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to n.o.ble and simple, from Land's End to John-o'-Groat's House, as Dante and Ta.s.so once were to the Italians; that it is written in the n.o.blest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary s.p.a.ce in the interval between two eternities; and earns the blessings and the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their work."

Lastly, he laid down the lines of the general education to be given.

He pointed out that already in the existing schools a very considerable burden of work was imposed on the children in the form of catechism, lists of the kings of Israel, geography of Palestine, and that when these fantastic modes of education had been eliminated there was plenty of time and energy to be employed. The instruction in physical training was more than half play; that in the domestic subjects had an engrossing interest of its own. He proposed, first, the necessary discipline in the means for acquiring knowledge, the tools for employing it, that is to say, reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, he believed that a certain amount of knowledge, of intellectual discipline, and of artistic training should be conveyed in the elementary schools, and for these purposes he proposed to teach some rudiments of physical science, drawing, and singing.

In most respects the progress of primary education in England has been a continuous progress along these lines suggested by Huxley, and he may be regarded as in this fashion one of the great shapers of the destinies of his race, for nothing can have a bearing more important on the character and fate of a race than the manner of training provided for the ma.s.ses of individuals composing it. It is only in the matter of the religious instruction that the course of events has been widely different from the neutral exposition of the Bible as suggested by him. In 1870 a great majority of the people of England who reflected upon the matter at all, and all those who accepted current ideas without reflection, accepted the Bible as an inspired, direct, and simple authority on all great matters of faith and morality.

Therefore, when Huxley, as by far the most important man among those who advocated a secular education, was an advocate and not in the least an opponent of Bible teaching, they were well content to let the matter rest. There were, it is true, a certain number of zealots who entered the boards with the avowed purpose, on the one hand, of getting as much dogmatic teaching and interpretation added as it might be possible to smuggle in, and, on the other, to reduce the simplest Bible teaching to a minimum. But the vast majority of persons were out of sympathy with these fanaticisms. Since 1870, however, a gradual change has occurred in the att.i.tude of the majority to the Bible in England. The growth of the new criticism and of knowledge of it has produced the result that now only a small minority of reflecting people in England accept the Bible in the old simple way; the majority thinks that it requires interpretation and explanation by the authority of the Church. And so a new battle over dogma has begun; moderate Church people no longer accept the compromise of Huxley, but strive for an interpretation which must be dogmatic, and there is a new dispute as to what may be regarded as undenominational religion.

When a majority of reasonable persons accepted Huxley's suggestions of simple Bible teaching they did so not because they believed, as he did, that the Bible was simply great literature, great tradition, and great morality, but because they believed it to be direct, inspired authority. It is a curious coincidence that Huxley himself did so much to spread knowledge of the new criticism, and that a first result of this diffusion was to overthrow the compromise arranged largely by his influence, and which for many years provided a middle way in which sensible persons avoided the extremes of theological and anti-theological zealots.