Huxley memorial lectures to the University of Birmingham

GIFT OF
JANE KoSATHER

Huxley Memorial Lectures

Huxley
Memorial Lectures

to the

University of Birmingham

With an Introduction by

Sir Oliver Lodge, D.Sc., F.R.S.

Birmingham

Cornish Brothers Ltd

Publishers to the University

39 New Street

1914

• -. •
. ' -.-•

Contents

Pages

Introduction by Sir Oliver Lodge ... ... 3—8

Huxley by Sir Michael Foster ... ... 9 — 43

Huxley and Natural Selection by Professor E. B.

Poulton, F.R.S. .. ... ... 45—51

Rationalism and Science in Relation to Social

Movements by Professor Percy Gardner ... 53 — 97

Life and Consciousness by Professor Henri

Bergson ... ... ... ... 99 — 128

Pleochroic Haloes (illustrated) by Professor John

Joly, F.R.S. ... ... ... ... 129—160

338412

INTRODUCTION.

A few years ago a Governor of the University
of Birmingham, admiring the genius of Huxley,
and wishing to do something to perpetuate the
memory of his association with Birmingham, gave
an endowment for the perpetual provision of a
Lecture to be given annually, to the assembled
University and its friends, under the title of " The
Huxley Lecture." No conditions were attached,
and no subject was prescribed, save that it should
be on some theme which might have interested
Huxley — a scope sufficiently wide for anything.

It seemed appropriate that the first one or two
lectures should deal with some aspect of Huxley
himself, and his friend Sir Michael Foster was
asked to give the first lecture on the more personal
side. No claim was made on the lecturers as
to publication, nor was the discourse even written
in every case. Those that were written often
appeared subsequently in some serial publication
and thus became more widely accessible.

4 INTRODUCTION

; ;" -Recently it has been thought desirable to col-
lect such of these lectures as were available and
publish them together ; and thanks are due to the
owners of the copyright for the permission freely
given for this local re-publication.

The connection of Huxley with Birmingham
may not be generally known. But in the year
1874 he came down to give an address on the
occasion of the presentation of a statue of Joseph
Priestley to the town of Birmingham — the town
in which that scientific pioneer and political
philosopher had been ill-used, his property
destroyed, and himself expelled, at the time
of the Birmingham "Church and King" Riots
in 1791. The address which Huxley de-
livered on that occasion is the first of the col-
lected Essays re-published by Messrs. Macmillan
in the Eversley Series. The volume containing
this particular address is called " Science and
Education," it appeared in 1893 and has been
many times reprinted.

Huxley came to Birmingham also to lay the
foundation stone of Mason College, which was
the predecessor and parent of the University;
and when that College was opened — which it was
in 1880, under the early title " Sir Josiah Mason's
Science College " — Huxley came again and
delivered the Inaugural Address; an Address
which is published in the volume already men-
tioned, under the title " Science and Culture,"

INTRODUCTION 5

The complete list of the Huxley Lectures so
far given is as follows : —

Date.

Lecturer.

Title.

1

16th March, 1904

Sir Michael Foster ..

"The Work and Influence of
Thomas Henry Hniley."

(Published in The National Re-

view, Vol. 43, 1904.)

2

23rd March, 1905

Prof. E- B. Poulton ..

"Thomas Henry Huxley and the
Theory ef Natural Selection.1'

(Published [not in .full] in The

Scientific A •merican Supple"

ment, Vol. 59, April, 1905.)

3

27th Nov., 1907

Prof. Sir J.J.Thomson

"The Influence of Recent Dis-

coveries in Electrioityon ourOon-
ceptions of Matter and Ether."

4

25th Nov., 1908

Prof. Sir Ronald Ross

"Malaria."

5

1st Deo., 1909

Prof. William Bateson

" Mendelian Heredity.1'

6

23rd Nov., 1910

Prof. Percy Gardner..

" Rationalism and Science in rela-

tion to Social Movements.'1

7

29th May, 1911

Prof Henri Bergs on •

"Life and Consciousness."

(Published in The Hibbert Journal

October, 1911.)

8

30th Oct., 1912

Prof. John Jo ly

"Pleochroic Haloes.'

(Published in Bedrock, Jan., 1913).

9

8th Deo., 1913

Sir Arthnr Evans

"The Ages of Minos."

And of these, Numbers i, 2, 6, 7, and 8 are here
reproduced; the others, for various reasons, are
not available.

Before leaving the subject of Huxley — a man
for whom I personally had a profound admira-
tion— let me take the opportunity of emphasising
the unfairness, as well as the illiterateness, of
claiming him as a materialistic philosopher, or as
an advocate of philosophic Materialism, merely
because he set his face in the direction of a

6 INTRODUCTION

rational interpretation of nature, and combated
many intellectual errors with which the theology
of that day had, through careless thinking and
uncritical exegesis, been sorely tainted. The
mistake is made — though that is no excuse — be-
cause he emphasised, as Newton did, the duty of
scientific men to study and emphasise every
extension of the province of what we call
" Matter " and " Force " ; and because he urged
that " the growth of science, not merely of physi-
cal science, but of all science, means the demon-
stration of order and natural causation among
phenomena which had not previously been
brought under those conceptions."

Doubtless the claim that Huxley was a sup-
porter of philosophic Materialism, as against
Idealism, is only made by half educated people ;
but such persons are numerous ; and hence for the
present it is desirable to take every opportunity
of pointing out that the contention is untrue, and
was always resented by Huxley himself. The fol-
lowing quotation from his 1886 essay " Science
and Morals," now included in the volume called
" Evolution and Ethics," will suffice to show how
he regarded such a rhetorical accusation.
^Evolution and Ethics, p. 129-130.]

" I understand the main tenet of Material-
ism to be that there is nothing in the universe
but matter and force; and that all the
phenomena of nature are explicable by de-
duction from the properties assignable to

INTRODUCTION 7

these two primitive factors. That great
champion of Materialism whom Mr. Lilly
appears to consider to be an authority in
physical science, Dr. Biichner, embodies this
article of faith on his title-page. Kraft und
Stoff — force and matter — are paraded as the
Alpha and Omega of existence. This I
apprehend is the fundamental article of the
faith materialistic; and whosoever does not
hold it is condemned by the more zealous of
the persuasion (as I have some reason to
know) to the Inferno appointed for fools or
hypocrites. But all this I heartily dis-
believe ; and at the risk of being charged
with wearisome repetition of an old story, I
will briefly give my reasons for persisting in
my infidelity. In the first place, as I have
already hinted, it seems to me pretty plain
that there is a third thing in the universe, to
wit, consciousness, which, in the hardness of
my heart or head, I cannot see to be matter,
or force, or any conceivable modification of
either, however intimately the manifestations
of the phenomena of consciousness may be
connected with the phenomena known as
matter and force. In the second place, the
arguments used by Descartes and Berkeley
to show that our certain knowledge does not
extend beyond our states of consciousness,
appear to me to be as irrefragable now as
they did when I first became acquainted with

8 INTRODUCTION

them some half-century ago. All the
materialistic writers I know of who have tried
to bite that file have simply broken their
teeth. But if this is true, our one certainty
is the existence of the mental world, and that
of Kraft und Stoff falls into the rank of, at
best, a highly probably hypothesis."
With this short introduction I leave the Huxley
Lecturers to speak for themselves.

OLIVER LODGE.
March, 1914.

HUXLEY*

By Sir Michael Foster.

Casting round for a theme which might fitly
be the subject of this first Huxley Lecture which
the University of Birmingham, doing me great
honour, has asked me to deliver, I bethought me
of the wish of the generous founder of the Lec-
tures that, if possible, this first lecture should be
entrusted to some one who knew Huxley, not by
his writings and public utterances only, but in a
closer way, through being numbered within the
happy circle of his inner friends. That wish
seemed to me an invitation to devote this first
lecture to the man himself and his work; and, not
without fear and trembling, I have ventured to
guide myself by such an invitation. I will not
attempt to dwell on any details of his life; these
can be, ought to be, and probably are, known to
you all. I must content myself with some
thoughts about his ways, his views, and his aims.
As I go along I can only touch lightly, and in a
passing way, on some of the many and varied
problems which are started by the consideration
of his manifoldly active life; these, or at least
many of them, will doubtless be fully dealt with

* Being the firit " Huxley " lecture of the University of
Birmingham, delivered on March i6th, 1914.

io HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

by the able men who will succeed me in the com-
ing years. Following in his steps, I shall, even
at the risk of giving offence, try to speak plainly
and straightforwardly when I come to touch on
themes with which he dealt, about which we all
feel so deeply.

Every one in this world, at least every one of
whom others need take count, has a dominant
note. If I ask myself, what was Huxley's
dominant note ? I find myself answering without
hesitation — a love of knowledge, an ever-present
never-satisfied desire to know. There are many
ways of knowing; of these two stand out as dis-
tinctive ways, offering a contrast the one to the
other. One way of knowing lies in gathering up,
in sweeping into the mind, all the grains of
information which happen to be lying around.
This is, as it were, the greediness of multifarious
knowledge, — conspicuous in the child, but also
common in the adult; it is that yearning to know
everything that is going on which is the main-
spring of daily talk and makes the fortunes of the
Press. Such a greed of knowledge Huxley
possessed ; such a way of knowing he followed to
a remarkable degree ; nothing touched him, noth-
ing even came near to him but what he strove to
lay hold of it. And he found such profit to him-
self in this kind of knowledge that he laid it
down as an axiom of education that every one, so
far as possible, should be led towards knowing
something of everything.

HUXLEY ii

Another way of knowing is, when a thing is to
be known, to know it fully and exactly; to be
aware where the known begins, and where it ends ;
to be sure and clear what the terms, the symbols
used in the knowledge, really mean ; to have the
component parts of each bit of knowledge so
arranged that it may fitly serve as the instrument
of clear and exact thinking. This is the kind of
knowledge in which Huxley, above most men,
found his heart's content. We know from his
life that his love of machinery led him at one time
to wish to be an engineer. What fascinated him
in a machine was its completeness and perfection,
the fitting together of all its parts to a common
end, the feature that, if well and truly made, it
could at any time without harm be taken to pieces
and put together again. He demanded that, so
far as possible, each piece of knowledge of which
he had to make use should have the complete-
ness, the perfection, the clean fit of a machine.
With such exact and sharply defined knowledge
alone could he feel that he was thinking clearly.

Some minds there are which find a charm in
indistinctness ; impressionists in matters of know
ledge, truth seems to them to have the greater
charm when its features are softened by a sur-
rounding mist of doubt and uncertainty; placed
before them in sharp, clear outlines, it offends
them as being hard and crude. It was not so with
Huxley. He felt as fully as any one the beauty
born of dimness which rounds off with softness

12 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

the features of the far-off horizon where the
known makes clouds out of the unknown; but to
him that beauty belonged to that far-off horizon
alone; in things within the focus of intellectual
vision beauty lay in clear and well-defined
images; whatever came before him with its out-
lines blurred by imperfect comprehension, loose
expression, and vague presentation, was to him
something ugly. It was this combination of
wide and varied knowledge with a love of exact
and rigorous thinking which gave to him, so it
seems to me, his worth and influence as a man of
science. Circumstances led him to find a sphere
for his scientific activity in that branch of science
which, under the name of Comparative Anatomy,
or Animal Morphology, deals with the multi-
farious forms of the living beings which we call
animals. His early wish had been to become an
engineer, busying himself with machines; turned
away from this by fate, he had wished to give
himself to the somewhat allied science of physi-
ology, which deals with animals as machines.
But this also was not to be; he was driven to
devote himself to a branch of science which was
not his first love, and for which he was in some
respects less fitted. Any lack of fitness, however,
which there might have been was soon lost sight
of amid the many and great products of his
labours.

In each science progress appears as a series of
steps, each step being marked by the appearance

HUXLEY 13

of some work of prominent worth, the intervals
between each such work being filled up with the
products of a number of intermediate less signifi-
cant labours contributing to the progress, but in a
less effective manner. The work whose appear-
ance thus marks a step, whether it be what is
called a discovery, or whether it be the setting
forth of a new view or theory, is often spoken of
as a classic work; it is remembered, and referred
to afterwards again and again, while the less
significant labours are forgotten. For many
years Huxley continued to produce in Compara-
tive Anatomy, including Palaeontology, for to
this also by sheer force of circumstances he was
led to direct his attention, works which are en-
rolled in the list of scientific classics. The earlier
of these, those on jelly fish, molluscs, and other
oceanic animal forms, were done as almost
apprentice work, done while he was as yet a mere
youngster, serving as a surgical subaltern on
board the Rattlesnake in an exploring expedition
to the Australian seas. These and the rest are
to be found in the four large volumes of scientific
memoirs which his publishers, Messrs. Macmillan,
brought out as their contribution to the memory
of his name. Of the many memoirs contained in
those volumes a large number are now and always
will be spoken of as classic memoirs. To the
man of science those volumes alone are adequate
proof of how much Huxley did to push forward
the science among the followers of which fate had
led him to enrol himself.

i4 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

All real scientific work has this distinctive
mark : it is reproductive and fertile, it gives birth
to other scientific work following upon itself, and
that in two ways. It is reproductive in the way
of the parentage of fact; each new discovery of
real worth becomes the starting-point of new
inquiries, leading in turn to new discoveries. It
is also reproductive in the way of the parentage
of spirit and of method; and this parentage is,
perhaps, the more fertile of the two. The new
discovery, the new fact made known, the new view
put forward and commanding assent, is, often at
least, the outcome of a new way of looking at
things; and that new way of looking at things
spreads among those who are working at the same
subject. Again and again the appearance of a
memoir or a book has acted like a magnet, turn-
ing men's minds from looking in one direction and
making them look in another. Huxley's work in
Comparative Anatomy — or perhaps I ought to
use a wider phrase, and say in Biology — was of
the reproductive kind, and reproductive especi-
ally by way of parentage of method.

When he sailed away from England on board
the Rattlesnake much, if not nearly all, the work
which was being done, and for many years past
had been done, in England at least, in the way of
enlarging our knowledge of animal forms, con-
sisted, on the one hand, in the careful but dull
accumulation of facts, unillumined by any thought
as to what was the real meaning of the facts so

HUXLEY 15

industriously gathered together ; and, on the other
hand, in the putting forward of nebulous and fan-
tastic theories as to that meaning, theories not
springing out of the consideration of the facts
themselves, but coming from elsewhere, the off-
spring of foreign ideas, thrust into the facts from
the outside. Huxley's mind, with its clear and
exact way of thinking, with its tendency to look
upon a machine as a model of excellence, rebelled
at the very outset against these vague and mystic
theories, the hybrid products, it seemed to him,
of careful observation and loose thinking. He
strove to replace them by ideas more justly
deserving to be spoken of as scientific. He saw
how in the sister physical sciences progress con-
sisted in the marshalling of facts under laws the
knowledge of which came through observation
and experiment, and which indeed were but the
expression of elaborated observation; and he set
himself to the task of making the same fruitful
method dominant in biology. The very first
papers which he sent home to England from the
far-off Southern Seas not only added largely to
new knowledge, but served as striking lessons in
the new way of attacking biological problems;
these were in turn followed by others, all exempli-
fying the value of the new method; and though
the older men were in two minds about them, dis-
liking the new ideas but admiring the ability with
which they were put forward, the younger men
received them gladly and at once. Under Hux-

16 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

ley's lead a new school of biological inquiry came
into being. Thus from the very beginning of his
career, by mere force of his efforts to get for him-
self a clear view of the things with which he had
to deal, to gain a firm ground from which he could
push forward into the unknown, Huxley, without
thought of others, became a teacher of inquirers.
But he could not do without thinking of others.
To his strong desire to know fully, and to think
clearly for himself, there was added a no less
strong desire that others also should know fully
and should think clearly. Not content, as he well
might have been, with being a teacher by
example, he, very soon after his return to Eng-
land, became a teacher by precept. While some
of us of the biological craft are painfully aware
of how much science would have gained had the
stream of energy which later on spread over such
wide fields been kept in its earlier and narrower
channel, we must admit that the world at large
would thereby have been greatly a loser. Hux-
ley became a teacher by precept, set himself to
the task of bettering the way in which men should
be taught. He began, naturally began, with the
teaching of what I may call the professional few,
with the training of those who enter upon the
study of science, knowing that a knowledge of
science must be, in one way or another, an
important factor in their future life; but he very
soon passed on to the wider task of teaching the
general many. In both these kinds of teaching

HUXLEY 17

he held fast to the conception which had guided
him in his own intellectual development, and
which he formulated in the saying that the goal of
teaching, that to which the face should be turned,
though it might not be reached, should be to make
the learner know something of everything and
everything of something. The one stimulated
intellectual appetite and awakened the innate
capacities and tendencies of the mind, while at
the same time it secured a broad basis on which
to build. The other furnished the only means of
developing that power of clear and exact think-
ing which was the main end of teaching, since
every teaching which failed to secure this was in
vain, and was potent in the measure that it did
secure it. This view of the need of an effort to
secure at one and the same time breadth and
exactitude he carried into his teaching of science.
This is seen clearly in the mode of teaching
biology which he advocated.

The science of biology is split up into several
parts. There are beings whose characters lead
us to call them animals and others which we call
plants, and the differences between the two are
many and great. A living being, again, be it
plant or animal, on the one hand, presents
phenomena of form which have to be studied in
a particular way, and so furnish the subject-
matter of the science of anatomy or morphology.
On the other hand, it presents phenomena of
action, of function, which have to be studied in

i8 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

another way, and which furnish the subject-matter
of the science of physiology. Further, every
living being may be studied from the point of
view of how it came to be, how it is related to other
beings, and what part it plays in the general
economy of nature. Biology is thus split up into
several branches, several more or less inde-
pendent sciences, and the man who looks forward
to advancing knowledge in any one of them finds,
and finds increasingly as knowledge advances,
that he must narrow his efforts to one of them,
or even to a part, perhaps a small part, of that.
And the temptation is natural and strong for the
learner to turn to the narrowing early, even per-
haps at the beginning, pursuing his narrow path
from the outset in ignorance of what is going on
around him. Yet these several sciences, these
several branches of biology, are not really and
wholly independent : they touch each other, here
and there, again and again. Hence Huxley —
and all of us, I venture to think, will agree that
he was right — maintained that, necessary as it
may be for the student to narrow his outlook
when he is well on his way, he will work all the
more fruitfully, gaining results of all the higher
value if, before passing through the straight gate
to his ultimate narrow path, he gets to know what
other paths there are, what are their features, and
whither they lead. Hence he introduced a teach-
ing of biology, in which as many as possible of all
kinds of biological problems, and not one kind

HUXLEY 19

only, should be presented to the student. In that
way he looked to get a breadth which could not
otherwise be gained. Exactitude he trusted to
secure at the same time that he was striving for
breadth by the method of teaching. Selecting a
few themes, and a few only, from the several
branches of biology, and these so far as possible
of an elementary, fundamental character, he
strove to make the student grasp each of these as
fully and as exactly as was within his power. And
he taught through the eyes as well as through the
ears. The younger generation to-day can per-
haps hardly realise to what an extent, thirty or
forty years ago, in science teaching, especially in
biological teaching, oral exposition and the read-
ing of books still supplied the dominant means of
learning. Biological laboratories were then only
beginning to be. Huxley was from the first in-
sistent that a firm grasp, an exact grip, of the
phenomena and laws of nature could only be
gained by him who had been led to see the phe-
nomena for himself, and to work out through
observations and experiments conducted by him-
self the problems presented. Arguments, discus-
sions, apt illustrations, lucid exposition, all these
were needed to make good the lesson; but they
were as so much beating the air, unless they dealt
with things which had been really seen and actu-
ally handled.

It was not in the teaching of biological science
alone that he urged this marriage of breadth with

20 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

exactitude; he advocated it as the proper mode
of training for every kind of career. Begin with
a broad basis, with a basis as broad as the mental
power of the student can compass, but even in
laying down the basis hold fast to exactitude.
Breadth without the clearness and firmness which
comes from direct sight and exact thought merely
breeds mental flabbiness, a treacherous basis to
build on. Some minds cannot spread themselves
over a large field without losing touch with the
exact and the real ; don't attempt to stretch such
minds too much; in the case of these be content
with a basis of smaller area. Having laid a
foundation as broad as the mind of the learner
will allow, a foundation of simple elementary
truths, build on this the teaching of higher, more
difficult matters. As you ascend you will find
that, in order to secure that full comprehension,
that exact and clear thought which you aim to
secure, the limits of mental power will compel
you continually to narrow the range. Be not dis-
heartened at this. Knowing that you have the
broad basis below, do not fear to narrow the range
as you raise tier on tier so long as the demands of
exactitude call for it. As you ascend do not
spoil the compactness of your product by attempt-
ing to put wide, loose wrappings round the solid
core. Be .content that the product of your teach-
ing should be a cone, such as may be used as an
intellectual missile, penetrating because its point
is narrow, effective because its base is broad.

HUXLEY 21

Such, in broad outlines, seem to me to have
been Huxley's views as to the right teaching of
the professional few. But in this matter of teach-
ing his heart went out, beyond the limited circles
of professions, to the great " general many." He
put his hand to the work of rightly teaching these
also.

Nothing, perhaps, in his whole career is more
striking than his coming out in 1870 from the tent
of the Professor to take his part in the popular
battles of the London School Board. Never,
perhaps, was he busier than he was at this time ;
his hands were full with scientific research and
scientific teaching; they were full with scientific
administration. Yet he knew that he had some-
thing to say about the teaching of the people; he
refused to keep for the sect of science that which
he felt was meant for mankind, and came forward
to take his part in what he believed to be a task
of great moment. He did not shrink from enter-
ing upon that which is, perhaps in many ways,
most foreign to a scientific career, a popular con-
test; for, though few could appraise more truly
than he the value of the thought of the few who
know, none were more ready than he to accept the
judgment of the many who feel. And the elec-
tors returned to him the confidence which he had
placed in them.

He carried into the School Board the same
views as to right teaching which had guided him
in the academic lecture-room and in the labora-

22 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

tory, though the difference in the subject matter
and the occasion made a difference in the form in
which these were put forward. In the academic
lecture-room the professional student is taught in
part only; he comes to it already fashioned in
part. In the school the child has to be taught
wholly and from the beginning ; his whole nature
is placed in the teacher's hands. Yet the right
method of teaching is in both cases at bottom the
same. Throughout Huxley's system of profes-
sional teaching, which I have attempted to de-
scribe, the effort to combine breadth of view with
clearness and exactitude of insight, there ran the
fundamental idea that the real goal of profes-
sional teaching is not to fill the head with stores
of knowledge, however accurate, however well
adapted for professional use, but to lay the
foundations of, and to develop as far as possible,
all those qualities which go to make up the effec-
tive scientific professional character. And the
goal of school teaching which Huxley put before
him was the development of the whole nature, the
building up of a fit character in the schoolboy or
schoolgirl. If in professional teaching it was
needful to keep this goal steadily in view, it was,
in his eyes, a thousand times more needful to keep
it in view at the school in the few, but pregnant,
years during which the lad or lass comes under
the moulding hands of the teacher. In the
school, above all other places, everything should
be made subservient to this great end.

HUXLEY 23

The striving for this goal may be seen in all
Huxley's School Board work. As I shall shortly
have occasion to insist, he refused to split up
human nature into this and that part — physical,
intellectual, moral — to be treated apart in dif-
ferent ways. To him human nature was one and
indivisible, to be treated in all its parts according
to the same fundamental method. Hence his
advocacy of physical training, not as a mere\
appendage to, but as an essential part of, school
work. In the narrower training of the grown-up,
or nearly grown-up, biological student he laid no
little stress on physical training, the training of
the eye, the ear, and the hand; for, the clearer
the sight, the sharper the hearing, and the readier
the touch, the greater the firmness with which the
student can lay hold of the phenomena of nature,
the more surely he can gain the basis needed for
exactitude of thought and judgment. In the
broader training of the growing child, physical
training seemed to him to be one of the first of
needs, not for the sake only of what some call the
body, but for the sake of the whole child.

The same desire to reach character guided him
in his selection of subjects to be taught and of
methods of school teaching. It seemed to him
that the primary object of all teaching of the
young must be to awaken the mind, to rouse the
attention, to excite the desire to know more. And
though he knew that a good teacher has the power
to accomplish this, whatever be the subject which

24 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

he handles, while a bad teacher may fail to do
this with any subject, he sought for a basis of early
education in the subjects likely of themselves,
without taxing the teacher, to interest the scholars
and stimulate them to mental effort. These he
found in common things, in things with which the
children came into touch, things of which they
heard, things which they might use in daily life.
He gave what is sometimes called useful know-
ledge a large share in school life, not simply be-
cause it was useful, though this he did not despise,
but because it offered the best opportunities for
awakening the young mind and at the same time
could be so taught as to provide the desired disci-
pline and training of the mind thus awakened.

It was this earnest wish of his to make the
school the means of moulding the whole charac-
ter, and not of developing this or that part of it at
the expense of the rest, that led him to take a step
which has been much criticised, and, if I may
venture to say so, much misunderstood — to advo-
cate the use of the Bible as part of the common
school-lessons in the School Board schools. Of
nothing was he more sure than this, that that
schoolmaster fell short of his high calling who
failed to guide his pupils to know the right from
the wrong, and to follow the former in every-
thing, not only in reading, writing, and arithmetic,
in history, geography, and the other kinds of
knowledge which he and they handled, but also
and no less so in the treatment of the body and

HUXLEY 25

in the conduct of life. The character which the
school had to build up could, in his view, be noth-
ing more than a broken fragment, a fragment
whose broken edges were dangerous if, in attempt-
ing to build it up, the moral phenomena and the
moral laws of the universe were wholly left out of
sight.

But in seeking for a teaching which should thus
build up the whole character he was met by a
great difficulty. He himself had long been con-
vinced that the conduct of life might be guided
by a morality and inspired by a religion having
no part whatever in the theological doctrines of
any Church, whether Roman, Anglican, or any
other. His own life had been guided by that
morality and inspired by that religion. He be-
lieved that those who thought with him on this
matter were increasing in numbers everywhere
and would in the end become dominant. At the
same time he recognised that in the face of the
prevailing influence of the several forms of the
Christian Church, and in the presence of powerful
traditions, inwrought into the very national life,
to teach such a morality and such religion in the
common school called for teachers possessing
convictions which were rare and powers which
were still rarer. On the other hand, he recognised
in the Bible, ingrained into the lives and dear
to the hearts of so many, a most potent instrument
for inculcating the moral lessons which he desired
to see inculcated and for inspiring the moral

26 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

aspirations which he desired to see inspired.
With its beautiful lauguage and its old associa-
tions, it seemed to him a means of awakening the
moral sense and pointing out the duty of man,
such as he could not find elsewhere, such at least
as he could not wisely put on one side.

He was well aware that in it the great moral
lessons which he sought to enforce were closely
wrapped up in other things, were, indeed, con-
veyed by means of teachings, many of which he
was convinced were erroneous, some of which he
held to be mischievous. But he thought that this
difficulty was largely met by the decision that the
Bible was to be taught in the school in such a way
as to be free from dogma. And, weighing one
thing against the other, he accepted Biblical
teaching as what in the language of the world is
called a practical compromise. He was the more
inclined to this step because he believed and
hoped that it was the beginning of other things.
He took it for granted that this Biblical teaching
would be placed in the hands of laymen, and
moulded by the thoughts of laymen. Laymen
would, he conceived, be more and more drawn to
his own way of thinking, and out of the teaching
which he had helped to institute would be evolved
another simpler ethical teaching free from all
theological conceptions. He failed to realise
that to make the Bible the chosen and sole means
of enforcing moral lessons strengthened the ties
binding the teaching of moral duties to the accept-

HUXLEY 27

ance of ideas which he regarded as erroneous, or
even mischievous. He failed to realise how
strongly they who believe the whole Bible to be
the word of God, and hold its teachings to be the
only guide of life, would resent bits of it being
used to enforce moral laws of human invention,
while the rest of it was ignored or disparaged.

What he had hoped to be a compromise of
peace became, even in his time, and since his
death has still more become, like so many other
practical compromises, a mother of strife. He
did not, even in his last days, repent the com-
promise; since through it, it seemed to him,
" twenty years of reasonably good primary educa-
tion had been secured." But he did not regard it
as final. He was forced to admit that the teach-
ing of the duties of life according to natural or,
as it is sometimes called, secular knowledge, that
which he believed to be the true teaching must
stand by itself alone and not attempt to make use
of any other kind of teaching. It was clear to
him that, so soon as it could be brought about,
the State must limit itself to teaching the things
which belong to natural knowledge and these
only, leaving other bodies to teach other things in
their own way, offering to all equal opportunities,
but meddling with none and directly favouring
none. He avowed his conviction that " the prin-
ciple of strict secularity in State education is
sound and must eventually prevail."

His zeal for education did not stop, however, at

28 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

children, or at young men and women; early in
life he began to put his shoulder to the wheel in
the great task of educating the people, of teach-
ing the great public of all sorts and conditions,
high and low, rich and poor, the main truths which
in his opinion ought to guide them in the conduct
of life ; and as the years went on the call to fulfil
this task seemed to him more and more urgent.
He passed from the chair of the professor to the
pulpit of the preacher, and in the later years of
his life gave himself up almost wholly to the issue
of writings which he himself acknowledged to be
of the kind which men call sermons. Any
attempt to describe Huxley's influence on his
fellows and his place in the world which did not
give ample room for the consideration of this side
of his life and this direction of his labours would
be a wholly vain one.

Following out his favourite analogy of a
machine, he recognised in man, on the one hand,
a moving power, or rather moving powers, and, on
the other hand, directive agencies by which the
movements set going by the power, in other
words, the acts of man, are shaped so as to accom-
plish this and that end. Early in life he had
come to the conclusion that these directive agen-
cies were to be found in knowledge, in natural
knowledge, and in this alone. He was convinced
that the true conduct of life was that which was
in accordance with the laws of nature, and that a
knowledge of those laws could alone supply a

HUXLEY 29

judgment, the more trustworthy the fuller the
knowledge, whether this or that act was in accord
with those laws or not, and so whether it was
right or wrong. And when he spoke of cc right '
and " wrong," he meant every kind of right, and
every kind of wrong.

His studies in biology had made it clear to him
that man must be looked upon as a whole ; that in
respect to none of his acts, whatever be their kind,
can man's nature be divided into two halves, in
such a way that the one half is to be considered
as wholly unlike the other half, to be viewed from
a wholly different point of view and to be treated
in a wholly different way. Without attempting
to say what body was or what mind was, he in-
sisted that the two were so wed together that no
one in dealing with them could put them apart
and treat each as if it stood alone. He found it
freely admitted that the conduct of man's
stomach, however much it had been in earlier
times, and indeed still was, governed by the im-
pulses of appetite, and by the results of rough
experience embodied in custom and authority,
was being more and more subjected to rules based
on a still imperfect but rapidly growing know-
ledge of physiological laws. He noted that
whenever any question arose as to what the
stomach should be allowed, or be made to do, the
final appeal was to physiology, and to this alone,
the health and happiness of the stomach being
sought for in obedience to physiological laws, and

30 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

in this alone. And what was true for part of man
he claimed to be true for the whole of man.
Man's whole nature, and not simply this or that
part of it, was subject to natural laws; and the
welfare of the whole, no less than of each part,
was to be sought in obedience to these laws. As
the path to so-called physical health lay in the
strenuous search after physiological laws, and in
obeying them when found, so the path to moral
and social health lay in a like search after ethical
and social laws and in a like obedience to them
when found. He met with no one who contended
that because at the present day our knowledge of
physiological laws is fragmentary and halting it
is to be set aside as of no avail for the conduct of
life in its physical aspects; on the contrary, he
met everywhere with urgent demands for vigorous
research, prompted by the sure conviction that a
fuller knowledge would bring to us the means of
securing a more wholesome physical life. And
he argued that the fact of our knowledge of
ethical and social laws being still more fragmen-
tary and halting than our knowledge of physio-
logical laws — so fragmentary and so halting,
indeed, that the ethical and social knowledge of
to-day might be compared with the physiological
knowledge of centuries ago — was no valid argu-
ment for refusing to accept that knowledge as the
ultimate guide in the conduct of life. On the.
contrary, it seemed to him that this constituted
the very reason why the most strenuous efforts

HUXLEY 31

should be made to advance that knowledge as
rapidly as may be.

Natural knowledge was, he maintained, the
one and the same guide, the only sure guide in
the quest after both physical and moral wel-
fare. The address " On Improving Natural
Knowledge," which was delivered nearly half a
century ago, in 1866, and which comes first in the
first volume of his collected Addresses and
Essays, and is the key to all which follow, sets
forth in telling words his conviction that what
began as a search into things physical has become
a search into things spiritual, and that the value
of natural knowledge lies not so much in the
mastery which it has given over the forces which
determine the welfare of the body (valuable as
that mastery may be) as in the mastery which it
promises over the forces which determine the wel-
fare of man as a whole. Natural knowledge was,
he said, " a real mother of mankind, bringing
them up with kindness, and, if need be, with stern-
ness in the way they should go, and instructing
them in all things needed for their welfare."

The improvement of natural knowledge, whatever direc-
tion it has taken and however low the aims of those who
may have commenced it, has not only conferred practical
benefits on men, but in so doing has effected a revolution
in their conceptions of the universe and of themselves, and
has profoundly altered their modes of thinking and their
views of right and wrong. I say that natural knowledge,
seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas
which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural
knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort,
has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay
the foundation of a new morality.

32 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

Natural knowledge, moreover, gave man, in
his opinion, not only directive agencies, but also
moving powers for the conduct of life. It not
only laid bare the laws according to which man
must walk, but also, rightly grasped, raised up
visions which awakened or which strengthened
the emotions and affections needed to bear man
up in his efforts so to walk, following right and
shunning wrong. Love of good, hatred of evil,
feelings of awe and reverence, such as must ever
arise when man tries to pierce below the surface
of things, yearnings for and strivings towards a
goal of ideal perfection, nearness to which is the
true measure of real happiness — these seemed to
him the heart of every true religion whatever
might be its doctrinal wrappings. Of all these
he believed natural knowledge to be, and in the
struggles of his own life had found it to be, a
true, potent, and yet simple nurse.

He knew that in this view of the work and
power of natural knowledge he was looking
ahead ; he was aware how little had as yet been
achieved in the improvement of natural know-
ledge, how much had yet to be done before that
which it promised could be accomplished. But
the way to effective truth had been entered upon,
time and labour only were needed for the rest.
Filled as he was with this dominant conviction of
the higher power of natural knowledge and of
the crying need for the advance of that know-
ledge, it is no wonder that he felt, and felt

HUXLEY

33

strongly, that every hindrance of man's own mak-
ing to that advance was a hindrance to man's
social and moral progress, and told against man's
highest welfare. It was this feeling which
brought him into conflict with what I may here
venture to speak of collectively as the Church.
And no true conception of Huxley's life can be
gained unless his attitude in this respect be clearly
understood.

He distinguished in the work of the Church
between the moving power and the directive
agencies. The moving power may be found in
the words, love and fear of God, hope and dread
of the life to come. The dominant emotion
indicated by the words love and fear of God
seemed to him, when carefully examined, to be in
essence identical with the dominant emotion
which he recognised as the moving power making
for man's welfare, which had been the moving
power of his own life, which had been his religion,
and which he spoke of as love of good and of truth
and fear of evil and of lies. Whether the good
and the true were presented in a personal form, or
not so presented, seemed to him to make no real
difference in the nature of the emotion itself; and
if, on the one hand, it might seem that the
emotion was intensified when sustained by a per-
sonal conception, on the other hand it might be
regarded as more durable and constant when it
stood alone and was not in any way contingent on
intellectual conceptions. Moreover, so it seemed

34 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

to him at least, as man's knowledge grew more
and more, there would come a growing potency
of that other accompanying emotion of awe and
reverence which springs from the increasing
recognition of the mystery of the unknown for
ever lying beyond the farthermost margin of the
expanding known.

Towards the other moving power of the
Church, the hope and dread of the life to come,
his attitude was very different. These words
signified, not as did the words love of God, a
native emotion shaped, not created, by intel-
lectual conceptions, but an adventitious emotion
whose very birth was due to conceptions in which
natural knowledge was more or less involved.
To him natural knowledge brought no proof, and
could bring no proof, of a life hereafter; this
could neither affirm nor deny that man lived after
death. He fully recognised the great part played
in the conduct of life by the hope of reward and
the dread of punishment; but in the conduct of
life according to natural knowledge both the hope
and the dread must have natural knowledge as
their base; the sequence of the reward or of the
punishment upon the deed must be within the
reach of proof, otherwise neither the one nor the
other could be of avail. The hope and the dread
which did not rest on proof seemed to him a
broken reed not to be trusted.

Deep, however, as was his conviction that the
hope of future reward and the fear of future

HUXLEY 35

punishment having no assured basis of certain
knowledge, could not be used as the main motive
power in the conduct of life without in the end
doing harm, strongly as he felt that to go further
and put these forward as the necessary and indis-
pensable instruments in the moral government of
the world was, as he said in a letter to Charles
Kingsley, " a mischievous lie," this was not the
mainspring of that continued active opposition to
the Church which is displayed in so many especi-
ally of his later writings. That opposition was
engendered not so much by the kind of moving
power put forward by the Church as by the direc-
tive agencies through which the Church strove to
make that moving power effective for the conduct
of life.

He, as I have said, had early come to the con-
viction that since the conduct of life, of moral as
well as physical life, must be guided by obedi-
ence to the laws of nature and by this alone, the
welfare of mankind hung upon the continued
progress of natural knowledge, through which
man learnt the laws which he must obey and saw
his way before him. But it seemed to him that
the Church in every one of its particular forms, in
framing rules for the conduct of life, now to a
greater, now to a lesser degree, had made in the
past, was making in the present, and would make
in the future, use of an appeal to a something
which, under the name of authority, inspiration,
revelation, was not only no part of natural know-

36 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

ledge, but gave rise to teachings which might be,
and often were, in direct contradiction to the
teachings of natural knowledge. He further
found that when such contradiction came to hand
the Church demanded that natural knowledge
should give way. This was the origin of the
active opposition of which I am speaking. Quite
early in his career, while his name was as yet but
little known outside the narrow circle of men of
science, he was brought face to face with this atti-
tude of the Church by the way in which so many
voices of the Church received the views put for-
ward by Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species.
The reception which that book met with entered
like iron into Huxley's soul ; he never forgot it.
Stirred up by it, he was swept away from the
quiet retirement of scientific inquiry, the results
of which could not reach the larger world until
after many days and then mainly through the
mouths of divers interpreters; he was carried
forth into the market-place to speak directly to
the people and become before them the untiring,
fearless champion of the claims of natural know-
ledge. It shaped the whole of the rest of his life.
Henceforward he to a large extent deserted
scientific research and forsook the joys which it
might bring to himself, in order that he might
secure for others that full freedom of inquiry
which is the necessary condition for the advance
of natural knowledge. Here was a book which,
with a quietness born of the consciousness of

HUXLEY 37

strength, made known the conclusions to which
the author, working wholly within the bounds of
natural knowledge, had been led while he during
long years patiently gathered observations and as
patiently meditated during long years on what
those observations meant. Every line in the
book dealt with natural knowledge and with
natural knowledge alone ; the whole of it appealed
to natural knowledge as the only judge of the
validity of its conclusions. By the light of
natural knowledge Huxley himself tried the
book, and, though aware of what was missing in
this part or that, accepted the main contention as
proved, and in accepting it threw aside views to
which at an earlier period he had been led.
Others, trying the book also by the light of natural
knowledge, found it in their opinion wanting.
With these Huxley could not agree; but, though
their arguments seemed to him lacking in force,
he could not otherwise find fault with their atti-
tude.

With those voices of the Church of which I
have spoken, it was different. These, so it
seemed to Huxley, rejected the conclusions of the
book, not because they were not according to
natural knowledge, but because they were, or
appeared to be, in contradiction to what was, or
what appeared to be, the teaching of the Church.
This, he thought, was the real reason of the
opposition which so many of the Church offered
to Charles Darwin's views ; such opponents might

38 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

arm themselves with arguments drawn from
natural knowledge, but the real fight which they
were fighting was, in his opinion, one against the
validity of natural knowledge itself when in con-
flict with the authority of the Church.

To this conflict Huxley girded himself with all
his might on the side of natural knowledge. To
understand his attitude it must be remembered
how strong, as I have already said, was his con-
viction that natural knowledge and natural know-
ledge alone is to be trusted as the ultimate guide
of man in the conduct of life. The efficacy of
the guidance must be measured by the fulness of
the knowledge; and Huxley's knowledge was
great enough to make him see how imperfect was
natural knowledge in its present stage when
called upon to rule the conduct of even physical
life, and how infinitely more imperfect when
appealed to as a guide of the conduct of moral,
social life. The welfare of mankind was, in his
eyes, indissolubly bound up with the advance, the
steady, nay, the rapid advance of natural know-
ledge. Any hindrance to that advance was, to
his mind, a wrong to mankind. What hindrance
could be more hurtful than the contention that
natural knowledge was not master of its own
domain, but must bow its head and keep silence
when even in its own field it came into conflict
with the master of another land? The call to
strive for the doing away of that hindrance rang
loud in Huxley's ears.

HUXLEY 39

It was in his view of some importance, it was of
perhaps of great importance, that Charles Dar-
win's conclusions should be generally accepted as
solid contributions to natural knowledge, in order
to increase their fruitfulness for the further
advance of that knowledge; and we to-day can
recognise how fruitful they have proved. Still
more important was it in his opinion that these
conclusions should be judged as to their
validity by an appeal to natural knowledge,
and to that alone, and not by an appeal
to another tribunal. The reception of Charles
Darwin's book was to him only an instance,
was only one of many signs, of an abid-
ing antagonism. The same thing had happened
again and again in the past, it must be looked for
again and again in the future; the fight will
always be going on. His attitude was not
changed on hearing other voices of the Church
declare that the origin of species, including that
of the human species, by selection, was not
destructive to the teaching of the Church, but, on
the contrary, was in accordance with it, and indeed
had in a way been anticipated by it. He was glad
that one cause of quarrel was out of the way ; but
he felt that even with these voices the potential
cause of quarrel still held its ground. They
now approved of Darwin's views ; but would they
approve of the next great result gained by some
student of natural knowledge in even the near
future should this seem to them to conflict with

40 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

the teaching of the Church? If they found that
it did conflict, would not they also then join in
denouncing it? He had no doubt but what they
would. He was convinced that the antagonism
was a fundamental one. It was one moreover
which he seemed to meet with everywhere.

I had set out [says he] on a journey with no other pur-
pose than that of exploring- a certain province of natural
knowledge ; I strayed no hair's breadth from the course
which it was my right and my duty to pursue ; and yet I
found that, whatever route I took, before long I came to
a tall and formidable-looking fence. . . . The only alter-
natives were either to give up my journey — which I was
not minded to do — or to break the fence down and go
through it.*

And especially during the latter years of his life
he set himself vigorously to the task of breaking
down fences.

The Church, he said to himself, whenever it
sees fit, opposes natural knowledge; in the ser-
vice of my sovereign lord, natural knowledge, it
is my duty to oppose the Church. I am not going
out of my way in doing this ; it lies straight before
me in my path. He went on the way which he
had set before him, well knowing that in so doing
he gave great offence. To many a quiet Christian
heart he brought much pain, handling, as he did,
themes which to them were indissolubly joined to
their inmost feelings of reverence, with the free
manner of a fighter who flashes in his sword
wherever he sees an opening to do his

* Collected Essays, V., Pref. p. vii.

HUXLEY 41

opponent harm. To those who blame him for
this the reply may be given that the greater the
reverence resting on what he was convinced was
a false foundation, the more pressing seemed to
him the duty to show the falseness of the founda-
tion in the clearest, most direct way, such as could
be understood by all. Moreover, the manner in
which he used his weapons in this matter was in
no wise different from his usual manner on other
occasions. He was by temperament " ever a
fighter " ; in his combats within the realms of
natural knowledge, and these were not a few, he
hit quick and he hit hard, for such was his way of
fighting.

Many of his friends, who, like him, put their
trust in natural knowledge, reproached him with
spending his strength in warfare of such a kind.
The surest way to make natural knowledge pre-
vail, they said, is to extend its boundaries; as it
advances other things must give way before it.
Was it not a misdirection of energy that he who
in past years had shown such power and done so
much to drive farther and farther off the line
which parts the known from the unknown, should
spend time and labour in controversies which in
themselves brought no clear advancement of
natural knowledge, and in conducting which he
could make little use of that wealth of natural
knowledge which he already possessed, and had,
with tireless labour, to seek the arguments which
he used in unaccustomed antiquarian and lingu-
istic studies ?

42 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

He thought otherwise. He was convinced, and
increasingly convinced as years went on, that
natural knowledge could not go on to that fuller
development which was needed to make it
accepted as the true guide in the whole conduct
of life, so long as men in general still believed
that as regards parts of that conduct the only true
guide was to be found in the teachings of the
Church and in these alone. He had no doubt
whatever that for the adequate progress of natural
knowledge some one must be bold enough to
stand up against the Church whenever it said to
natural knowledge, " thus far but no farther,"
bold enough to show the world that the Church's
claim to dictate to natural knowledge broke down
when it was tried without fear and without preju-
dice. Seeing none other bold enough, he took
the task upon himself. Whether he was right or
wrong, the world must judge.

He is gone; but the conflict, in which so much
of his life was spent, still remains with us.
Among the followers of natural knowledge, both
the workers and they who only know its ways,
there are and always will be they who hold that
natural knowledge is not merely a hewer of wood
and a drawer of water, a provider of physical
health and material benefits, but beyond that the
only sure guide to moral health and spiritual well-
being, who hold that man can only safely direct
his steps by frank obedience to the known laws of
nature, the more safely the better and the more

HUXLEY 43

fully these laws are known. Such are well aware
that the always increasing, but ever limited
known is wrapped round on all sides with a
boundless unknown. Peering from time to time
into that dark unknown they may people its
depths with fancies ; but they leave those fancies
there when they turn back to their daily task in
the clear light of the known. Yet the feelings of
wonder and awe with which that vast unknown
must always fill them will abide with them,
chastening and humbling them, ennobling their
daily task and fitting them the better to perform
it. Borne up by such feelings Huxley lived and
worked.

MICHAEL FOSTER.

45

*HUXLEY AND NATURAL SELECTION
By Prof. E. B. Poulton, F.R.S.

On March 23, Prof. E. B. Poulton, F.R.S.,
delivered the Huxley Lecture at Birmingham.
He said the attitude of Huxley toward natural
selection was remarkable and unusual. Although
no one fought so nobly, and against such odds in
its favour, although no one had ever fought the
battle of science with such success, [Huxley was
never a convinced believer in the theory he de-
fended from unfair attack.^ At least one cause of
that want of confidence he (the lecturer) believed
to be due to the fact that his researches, deter-
mined by the bent of nature, were anatomical and
palseontological rather than the study of the
living organism in relation to its environment,
and especially its living environment. The
origin and growth of the theory and the circum-
stances under which it was made public had often
been told. Darwin, convinced of evolution by
reflection upon his observations in South America
during the voyage of the "Beagle" (1831-36),
began in July, 1837, systematically to collect
facts bearing upon the modification of species and
its causes. In October of the following year he
read Malthus " On Population," and the idea of
natural selection at once dawned on his mind.

* 'Revised from the ^Scientific American" Supplement, Vol. 59,

p. 24515-16, April IQOS.
In full in " Essays on Evolution," Oxford, 1858, pp. 193-219.

46 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

In June, 1842, he wrote a brief account of the
theory, and two years later an essay; but he could
not be induced to publish until, on June 18, 1858,
almost exactly twenty years after the conception
first came to him, he received a manuscript essay
written by A. R. Wallace in the Moluccas " On
the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely
from the Original Type." Darwin placed him-
self in the hands of his friends Lyell and Hooker,
who asked for an abstract of his own work, and
presented it, with Wallace's essay, to the Linnean
Society on July i, 1858. Now that we knew the
circumstances under which Wallace wrote his
essay, the coincidence was far more striking. He
also was convinced of evolution, and had written
a powerful paper in support of it. But he knew
of no motive cause until, in February, 1858, lying
ill of fever in Ternate, he began to think of
Malthus's book, and the idea of natural selection
instantly flashed across his mind He did not
wait twenty years. In two hours he had thought
out almost the whole of the theory, in three even-
ings he had finished it, and sent it to Darwin.
Thus on July i, 1858, when Darwin was nearly
fifty and Huxley just over thirty-three, the great
theory was before the world, and the most striking
thing about Huxley in relation to it was the fact
that he knew nothing about it. Almost exactly
a year after the appearance of the paper, on June
25, 1859, he wrote to Lyell in favour of the trans-
mutation of species, but against the idea of

NATURAL SELECTION 47

transition between species. The letter showed
that he had no notion of natural selection, but
only of changes wrought by external conditions,
changes sudden and sharply marked off, like those
which follow the replacement of one chemical
element by another in a compound — to use his
own metaphor. ' The Origin of Species " was
published in November, 1859, and an advance
copy was sent by Darwin to Huxley. In his
chapter on the reception of " The Origin of
Species " (" Life and Letters of Charles Darwin,"
Vol. II) Huxley said : " My reflections when I
first made myself master of the central idea of
the ' Origin ' was how extremely stupid not to
have thought of that " — further evidence that he
had known nothing of the details of the Linnean
Society paper, where the central idea was admir-
ably, although, of course, briefly, explained by its
discoverers.

Huxley's want of knowledge of natural selec-
tion in the interval between July i, 1858, and the
end of November, 1859, suggested several inter-
esting reflections. Great and original workers
rarely had the time for wide reading in their sub-
ject away from the lines of their special investiga-
tions. They were also held back by the feeling
that the attempt to be encyclopaedic was itself
destructive of originality ; and yet there was noth-
ing so inspiring to a young worker as the fact that
his attempts had interested a great and original
leader in his own subject. The position looked

48 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

like a dilemma, but the escape was easy. The
conditions of science were daily becoming more
favourable at our Universities, where the older
worker had a parental interest in the younger
and would by no means quench the smoking flax
by unintended neglect. Science was also rich in
societies where old and young could meet, and
where through personal contact, far better than
by endless hours of reading, the deepest inspira-
tion and the highest encouragement could be
given and received.

If, however, the antagonism between the
excessive cultivation of the memory and the
development of originality was seen in the
lives of older men, whose capacity for the
highest work was proved and certain, surely
conclusions of value were to be learned from
those whose duty it was to watch over the
developing mind of the young. A little know-
ledge was said to be a dangerous thing; but as
regarded the awakening and growth of the most
indispensable part of our intellectual equipment
— the imagination — it might be more truly said
that a great deal of knowledge was a dangerous
thing. With the very best intentions, but with
the very worst results, the idea had taken root in
this country that the imagination must not be
allowed free play until some arbitrary amount of
knowledge had been imbibed, and the result was
that too often all original faculty was waterlogged
and drowned in a sea of facts.

NATURAL SELECTION 49

Huxley's independent views on evolution
were what we should expect from a great
student of animal structure rather than of animal
life, who was at the same time a profound and
cautious thinker. Huxley told us that before
the appearance of the " Origin " he took his stand
upon two grounds — first, that up to that time the
evidence in favour of transmutation was wholly
insufficient; and, secondly, that no suggestion re-
specting the causes of the transmutation which
had been made was in any way adequate to ex-
plain the phenomena. And yet all along there
was alive in him a sort of pious conviction that
evolution would turn out true, and the kind of
evolution he imagined was, so far as we were able
to judge, a conception which would arise in the
mind of one who compared animal structures with
the eye and brain of the artist or engineer rather
than of the naturalist. At the age of twenty-six he
wrote to W. S. Macleay ; " I am every day be-
coming more and more certain that you were on
the right track thirty years ago in your views of
the order and symmetry to be traced in the true
natural system." Macleay's ideas of the grouping
of the animal kingdom were about as regular and
symmetrical as the figures seen in a kaleidoscope.
And a conception of sharply separated mathe-
matically grouped forms would naturally lead to
the idea of evolution by sharp and abrupt steps,
whereby a new form would appear by sudden
transformation of the old, just as a chemical com-

50 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

pound changed when one element in it was re-
placed by another.

The evidence at our disposal led to the belief
that such was the state of Huxley's mind when, in
November, 1859, he read the " Origin." He there
met with far more convincing proofs of evolution
than he had ever encountered before, and he
accepted them at once, unreservedly, permanently.
He furthermore encountered what was to him the
entirely new idea of natural selection, and he
recognised that it disposed of his earlier objection
that no motive cause in any way adequate had
been suggested. But to the end of his life he
never went beyond that. He never committed
himself to a full belief in natural selection, and
even contemplated the possibility of its ultimate
disappearance. The difficulty which he felt
early and late, and about which he had a pro-
longed discussion with Darwin, was the fact that
the breeds created by the artificial selection of
man were mutually fertile, while the species
created ex hypotkesi by natural selection were
mutually sterile. Without going into the contro-
versy, it might be said that, according to Darwin,
Huxley's objection merely meant that the results
of an experiment prolonged for an immense
period were not in every respect the same as those
attained when it endured for a time compara-
tively brief. Students of living* nature felt a
confidence in natural selection which was not
shared by this great leader. Just as it required
the naturalist to discover the principle itself, so

NATURAL SELECTION 51

the experience which brought belief in it was that
mainly of the naturalist, and the strongest con-
fidence in the abiding truth of a theory was gained
by those whose imagination had been inspired by
it. Every verified prediction made by the light
of natural selection placed the theory upon a more
secure foundation. That foundation had been
growing more secure for nearly half a century;
but, as Prof. Poulton showed in conclusion, that
increasing confidence was not so much due to the
facts which were the province of the anatomist as
those which formed the every-day experience of
the naturalist, of the man who studied animal
form and change and instinct, not in relation to
the single individual or the single species, but in
relation to the whole environment, and especially
the living environment. That kind of study did
not appeal to Huxley's nature, and therefore the
confidence in natural selection, of which the lec-
turer had spoken, was not for him ; but those who
felt it should never forget how much they owed
to Huxley for the leading part he took in the great
battles which had to be fought before evolution
and natural selection were accorded a fair hear-
ing ; and his success went far beyond even those
issues. Whatever stirring and subversive ideas
the future might be preparing for us, we might be
sure that they would never suffer from the treat-
ment accorded to the " Origin of Species," and
far more than to any other single man the world
owed that immense gain to Thomas Henry
Huxley.

53

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE IN
RELATION TO SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.

By Prof. Percy Gardner.

Whether your Council have made a mistake in
the selection of the present Huxley lecturer it will
be for my audience to judge. But up to a certain
point I think they were certainly right. They
decided that when a lecture was founded to com-
memorate a man so many sided as Thomas
Huxley, justice could not be done to him if only
a succession of biologists were nominated to the
lectureship. I am older than most of my audi-
tors, and vividly remember the part which Huxley
played in the national life. He was not merely
an authority on biologic questions, a first-rate
lecturer on science and a prominent champion of
Darwinism, but also a man through whose clear
and powerful brain all the great questions of our
time circulated, finding there an alembic whence
they often issued altered and clarified. He was
not only a man of science but also a man of
letters, a philosopher, even in a degree a theo-
logian. He once said of Mr. Arthur Balfour
that he had science in his blood; we may say of
Huxley that he had literature in his blood. If

54 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

we accept Matthew Arnold^s_ view jhajL-the.- pur-
suit of letters consists in the acquainting oneself
with the best which has been thought and said in
the world, Huxley was literary; if we accept the
same writer's definition of religion that it is
morality heightened, kindled, lit up by feeling,
Huxley was religious. And it was the combina-
tion in him of science with literature and religion
which made him so great a force in the England
of the Victorian age.

I never had the honour of personal contact with
Huxley, but I heard him speak more than once,
and his writings have deeply interested me since
I was a child. I owe him a debt, which I may
best pay by trying to combine as he did the
fanaticism of veracity which marks the man of
science with the broad outlook on human life
which belongs to the man of letters. But the last
quarter of a century has been a time of rapid, of
constantly accelerated, intellectual movement,
and Huxley, who was himself ever on the crest of
the advancing wave, would condemn me if I did
not try to penetrate further than he did into some
of the tendencies of thought which are ever ebb-
ing and flowing, and are now more clearly to be
discerned than they were twenty years ago.

I.

I have taken as my subject Rationalism and
Science, in relation to social movements, and I
must begin by trying to explain in what sense I

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 55

use these words. We are used to the word
rationalism in religious discussions, and there we
attach to it, as does Lecky in his History of
Rationalism, a somewhat negative meaning. We
think it implies the denial of old-fashioned ortho-
doxy, and greater reliance on reason and common
sense. I do not propose to use the word in this
somewhat narrow acceptation. Again, the word
science is in this country applied almost exclu-
sively to the knowledge of the phenomena of the
material world, physics, chemistry, biology. But
this is an abusive use of the term. For science
can be nothing but orderly knowledge, and
orderly knowledge is just as possible in such
studies as philology and archaeology and history
as in those dealing with the physical world. In
all the great academies of Europe it is fully recog-
nised that science has two great branches, one of
which deals with the visible world, the other with
man, his faculties and his history.

The question which I propose to discuss is the
parts belonging respectively to rationalism and
to science in modern civilisation and progress.
And I beg to be allowed to mean by rationalism
the adoption of certain fixed principles from which
the course of our action may be deduced or argued
out; and by science I would mean the regular
and methodic knowledge of man, in the past and
the present ; the investigation not of ethical prin-
ciples but of consequences, of events, and of the
results of action. But I must explain.

56 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

Human progress in general, the passage of
mankind from a lower to a higher level, consists,
as I earnestly believe, and as I have tried to shew
elsewhere, in the gradual embodiment in society
of certain impulses and tendencies arising in the
obscure regions of sub-conscious life, and gradu-
ally making their way into all the forms of human
activity, thought, feeling, action, art, institutions
and social organization. These creative and life-
giving impulses I should prefer to call divine
ideas; but if anyone regards this phrase as too
theological and question-begging, I will not at
this moment insist upon it. We need not stay to
examine the origin of these ideas ; we have enough
to do in tracing their manifestation in the field of
consciousness. However they originate, they
come bubbling up from unknown depths like the
springs of rivers among the hills, and pass on to
make the fields of life fertile. To each genera-
tion and to every nation it is given, or at least
the opportunity is given, to manifest some par-
ticular ideas in higher or completer form. The
Jews owe their place in the history of the world to
their enthusiasm for the idea of the divine guid-
ance and government of mankind, the Romans
to their sense of civic law and order. The
Greeks, more susceptible to ideas than any race
that ever lived, have left us imperishable embodi-
ments of the ideas of rationality, of human beauty,
of measure and method in all things. The best
achievement of the Teutonic races was their

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 57

development of the ideas of loyalty and chivalry.
These races, and indeed all great races, have
added some adornment to the temple of humanity,
and made the life of each succeeding generation
a thing of higher and nobler possibilities. No
doubt they have all had defects to balance the
excellences, the Jews narrowness and fanaticism,
the Romans hardness and cruelty, the Greeks
frivolity and want of moral purpose, the Teutons
the vices of an aristocracy. But to every man
whose eyes are not jaundiced by cynicism, these
great national inspirations, in spite of all draw-
backs, will appear as the rich legacies of the past,
making life in the present worth living.

Savages and barbarians below a certain stage
of development have attained a definite organiza-
tion, what may be termed an equilibrium. They
often go on from century to century without any
great change. It is the rise of ideas which breaks
the crust of fixed custom. The innovators are
commonly regarded as destructive and mis-
chievous, so that the path of progress is strewn
with the bones of martyrs. It is through the self-
devotion of the few that the many climb painfully
to a higher level.

The ideas as they rise from the unseen depths
of consciousness usually first make themselves
known in action. They affect will and emotion,
which are nearer akin to the unconscious, before
they seek justification in thought. But sooner
or later the rational part of man must be satisfied

58 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

as well as his emotional part. He has to give
some sort of reason for the hope that is in him.

History shews us very clearly how this demand
for a reason is at first met among all peoples and
nations. It is met by a direct claim that the line
of advance is shewn by revelation, that some per-
son or society is inspired by the gods to lead the
people in the right way. We are familiar with
this kind of appeal from our acquaintance with
the Old Testament. Nowhere is it so clearly
and emphatically set forth as in the Jewish
Scriptures, and quite especially in the writings of
the earliest of the great prophets, A^mos and
Hosea. It is the word of the Lord which they
make known to the people; and they tell their
contemporaries in burning sentences that it is their
life and peace to hear that word and to do it.
But our religious horizon has greatly widened of
late years, and we now know that among all
peoples such a claim has been put forth by
prophets. Israel is the prophet among the
nations; but all nations have received from time
to time like prophetic commands. The king of
Assyria did not march to subdue the nations save
at the command of Asshur. Numa received the
laws of Rome from the goddess Egeria.
Pharaoh of Egypt was an impersonation of the
Sun-god Ra. Pythagoras was an inspired
prophet, and his society arose on a theocratic
basis. Nor was this claim at all confined to the
men of the childhood of the world. Socrates was

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 59

launched on his career by the voice of the Apollo
of Delphi. And through all the Middle Ages,
the great Reformers and the Founders of Monas-
tic Societies were fully convinced that they had
a special mandate from above, which they dared
not disobey. I need mention but three of the
most conspicuous names, St. Francis, Luther,
Wesley, all of whom were consciously the
vehicles of a divine command.

This answer to the demands of the human intel-
lect, the direct appeal to a divine inspiration, can-
not be called a form of rationalism. What we
know as rationalism is rather the very opposite.
Rationalism arises as the belief in direct inspira-
tion grows weaker. It is a reply to scepticism.
When a prophet is asked by what authority he
commands, he answers by a manifestation of
spiritual force. But this reply does not satisfy
the doubters of a sceptical age.

I am speaking, it must be remembered, of great
ethical movements, proposals that we should
modify our way of conduct, in regard to some of
the great and important matters of life. A
movement in such and such a direction, we sup-
pose, is springing up in the consciousness of men.
It will scarcely in our days be accepted on the
authority of a prophet claiming a direct mandate
from heaven. It meets with enthusiastic appro-
bation and with determined opposition. We have
as best we may to reason out its goodness or bad-
ness in discussion. This may be done either in

6o HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

the way of rational ethics or of science. The
ethical way is to make appeal to some principle
generally accepted in the society, rights generally
recognized, beliefs which are not seriously ques-
tioned. It has to be shewn that the proposed
change is in accord with or contrary to these, so
that consistency would compel us in the one case
to accept, in the other to reject it. The way of
science is to shew the results which follow the
adoption of the disputed principle, results either
good or bad, either attracting us towards it, or
warning us to avoid it, as we avoid disease and
death.

But abstract talk like this tends to make the
ears dull, so that the speaker does not take his
audience with him. Rather let us take a con-
crete case, in order that we may see the two
methods of which I am speaking not as mere pos-
sibilities but as actually working principles. We
will take up a controversy now practically ex-
tinguished, but raging with great force in the last
century, the controversy which ended in the
abolition of negro slavery in the British Colonies
and in America.

Here the ultimate spring was no doubt an
impulse springing up in the consciences of thou-
sands— a conviction of the sinfulness of slavery.
When the matter had to be argued on the plat-
form and in the legislatures, the impulse had to
be put on terms with men's ordinary ways of
thinking and action. The advocates of emanci-

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 61

pation sometimes appealed to the general belief
in certain rights of man, the principle that a being
having human form and human faculties had also
certain inherent rights, or the thesis that God had
made all men of one blood. This may be re-
garded as the rationalist side of their appeal :
but they also had resort to arguments of another
kind, which were more closely akin to the demon-
strations of science. They tried to shew that
slavery had in the past worked with pernicious
effect on the societies which had adopted it, and
was in the countries which upheld it even in our
own time working great harm on the character
alike of the slave-holder and the slave. Some-
times they would take a lower line, and try to shew
that in production slave labour was actually less
efficient than free labour, and so dearer.

The controversy in regard to slavery may be
said to be now closed. And we are disposed to
think that the arguments were all on one side.
But a century ago, there were good and wise men
who took another view; and they also appealed
alike to accepted principles and to history and
experience, especially the latter.

Thus the abolitional movement found means
for capturing the three great parts of human
nature, will, emotion and intellect. The inner
impulse bent the wills of men, especially carrying
away in a strong enthusiasm the wills of the
leaders of the movement, Wilberforce, Clarkson
and the rest. The ethical appeal told especially

62 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

on the contagious enthusiasms of the platform;
and in these days of popular government, argu-
ments suited to the orator are necessary in all
matters involving legislation. The appeal of
science acted on more thoughtful people, com-
paratively few in number, but having influence
out of proportion to that fewness, in virtue of their
intelligence, and the quiet steadiness of their con-
victions. The final result was a great effort of
national will, but it was helped on, and even made
possible, because emotion and intellect worked
on the same side.

But now we come to other forces which are
mainly beyond human control, the constitution of
man and the human environment. Let us sup-
pose that there were two states existing side by
side; and that in one of these negro slavery was
abolished, while in the other it was retained. The
two would necessarily compete, and one would be
found more efficient, more successful than the
other. Evidently here the abolitional idea would
have to undergo a fresh test, that of working.
And apart from violent interference of one state
with the other, which is of course what happened
in the United States, the final triumph of the one
polity or the other must be determined by fact
and by event. If the idea of abolition was in
harmony with the facts of human nature, it would
triumph. But if the impulse from which it arose
was a baseless sentiment, if the natural rights of
man were a delusion, and if the men of science

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 63

misjudged the results of slavery, then the slave-
state would in the course of time crush out the
state which abolished slavery, and survive.

There is then an ultimate test to which all
human endeavours, all plans and all institutions
must submit, the test of working, of fruits, of sur-
vival. It is a hard test, proceeding without fear
or favour, and ruthlessly trampling out whatever
will not endure it. This is of course no new
doctrine; and from the beginning of literature it
has been expressed in a hundred ways. The
Hebrew Psalmist wrote ' Such as be blessed of
the Lord shall inherit the earth, and they that be
cursed of him shall be cut off.' ' What is con-
trary to nature cannot succeed ' is the burden of
philosophy in all ages, and especially of the
greatest of all practical philosophies, the Stoic.
And when in the last century Darwin emphasized
the principle of the survival of the fittest, it was
but this old wisdom made new.

The law of the survival of the fit and the
destruction of the unfit works in the whole field
of biology. And it works in human society.
But it does not work among men with the same
force and regularity with which it works among
plants and animals. For the free will of man,
however it be explained, is an existing reality :
and man has the power of modifying his sur-
roundings, even in some cases of dominating
them. When two states compete in the markets
of the world, that in which the labour is most efn-

64 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

cient will tend to drive out the other. But the
state of less efficient labour may be stronger as a
military force, and throw the sword into the scale,
or it may be wiser politically and make treaties
which shall give it an advantage in the markets.
Or it may by higher internal organization diminish
the friction which wastes power, and so make up
for inferior powers of production. And within a
state persons or classes of persons who would in
the natural course of things be starved on account
of their inefficiency may be kept alive through
feelings of humanity. And education regulated
by the state may be shaped for the particular pur-
pose of promoting the efficiency which leads to
survival.

In speaking of the conditions and environment
of life it must not be supposed that I speak as a
materialist, and am thinking only of the natural
frame in which our lives are set. I believe fully
that we also live in a spiritual environment, that
our lives are parts of a greater and universal life,
that we belong to a great commonwealth of spirit.
And further I believe that in this spiritual world
there may be traced something akin to human
will and purpose, but on a higher scale. The
ultimate fact for us is not the material world, but
the spiritual power which dwells in it and has
created it. But this spiritual world also has its
laws, not fixed and rigid like the course of the
stars, but yet overpowering and dominant.

Our environment may best be regarded as a

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 65

stream of tendency which bears us all along. If
we are passive we move on steadily. If we
resist, we may swim against the stream, but it is
difficult and a constant drain of energy. If we
swim with the stream we move fast. It is by
swimming against the stream, very often, that
character and personality are made. But our
lives are short; and in the long run the stream
has its way with communities if not with indi-
viduals. Our efficiency, and especially our effi-
ciency in societies, depends greatly on going
rather with than against the current.

It was necessary thus to map out the ground, in
order to lead up to the things on which I really
want to insist. The corollaries which follow the
truths which I have outlined are not regarded as
truisms. And it seems to me of great importance
that they should be brought forward on occasions
like the present, when a broad outlook on the
great problems of life is specially in place. Pro-
gress, I have maintained, consists in the absorp-
tion into the frame of society of practical impulses
or ideas. These ideas must be justified by
appeals to accepted principles and to experience.
And it is of the utmost importance that the ideas
themselves should be in harmony with the laws
of human nature, and that their working in the
world should be seen as it really is. In all these
respects in our days great difficulties arise from
the character of our civilization and the existing
habits of thought.

66 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

It is clear that the intellectual presentation of
the ideas requires three classes of workers. We
need a class of prophets who shall be susceptible
to the ideas as they slowly emerge from the
ground of the unconscious. We need phil-
osophers and men of letters to connect them with
the principles generally accepted by society.
And we need men of science and observation, to
trace the results of their working in history and
in the human world around.

After all the great task is to persuade the
people. In our days, whether for good or for
evil, whether we like it or not, democracy has be-
come more and more the ruling power. Even a
Caesar cannot move in any direction against the
grain of his people's will. Nor can an aristocracy
retain the direction of affairs, unless it can per-
suade the many that it rules for the general good.
The counting of heads to save, as Bentham said,
the trouble of breaking them, is the final test in
all practical matters. This being a fixed point,
let us consider how the working of ideas, which is
to the community what the circulation of the
blood is to an individual body, finds course or
hindrance among us.

We need not greatly concern ourselves about
the prophets. They are, so to speak, the super-
natural element. Their advent cannot be pro-
cured or foretold any more than can the weather
of a week hence. There will always be prophets,
some true and some false, claiming to be heard :

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 67

the great need of mankind is to discern between
those who lead to what is good, and those who
seduce to what is evil. The really practical
questions have to do with the tests by which ideas
are to be tried.

In such testing it seems to me that, ever since
Darwin and his school came upon the stage, the
appeal to fact, to experience, to results has been
steadily gaining in efficacy, at the expense of
what may be called the rationalist appeal to a
priori principles and beliefs. The reason is not
far to seek. The constantly growing restlessness
of mankind, the changes in our surroundings both
social and economic, the drain of those who lived
in the country towards the great cities with their
life of fevered activity, have made it hard for any
accepted principles to hold their place. The
tendency is to call in question all the beliefs
whereby in times past men have directed their
actions. And on the other hand, science, which
is of course only organized and formulated obser-
vation and experience, has been maturing with a
rapidity compared with which its previous pro-
gress was but slow even in the most active and
intellectual ages of the world's history, the ages
of Aristotle and of Leibnitz. Into every branch
of knowledge we are introducing method ; the pro-
gress of discovery is advancing into fields never
yet occupied; the test of results is the one test
which is always accepted.

I am not concerned to justify this progressive

68 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

supersession of rationalism by science. In many
ways it is to be deplored. The restlessness of
modern society is in itself a serious evil ; and one
looks with anxiety to see whether the great root
principles which have been worked into the fabric
of modern society will not be called in question.
Even such institutions as monogamy and the pos-
session of private property do not pass without
inquiry. All this, one hopes, is transitional, the
result of too rapid changes physical and social.
But whether one deplores, or whether one de-
fends, the change in the centre of gravity, that
such a change is taking place is past question.
A recent speaker in the House of Commons spoke
of the doctrine of the rights of man as ' dead as
Rousseau ' : and one could scarcely contradict
him.

And looking in all directions for a remedy, one
can find it only in a broader, more human, more
profound, study of human phenomena, and the
growth of a science treating of man and his facul-
ties as well developed and as detailed as is the
study of the visible universe. No such science
can give us ideals; there can be no mere obser-
vational determination of right and wrong, good
and evil ; but still, fuller knowledge may serve to
protect us against some of the aberrations and
absurdities which threaten society.

I have been reading the recently published
letters of a man for whom I have always had the
deepest respect, John Stuart Mill. Those letters

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 69

are full of the intellectual honesty and moral
courage in which Mill perhaps surpassed all his
contemporaries. But they are instructive in
another way. Mill's career immediately pre-
ceded the great trend in the direction of the
scientific treatment of human problems which we
owe mainly to the influence of Darwin and
Spencer. His letters remarkably illustrate the
distinction which I have drawn between the
rationalist and the scientific way of considering
problems of conduct and sociology. The
rationalist is self-confident, fully trusting in argu-
ment, ready to assert his principles in season and
out of season. The man of science is, or ought
to be, modest, laborious, most anxious to omit no
phenomena, having a deep respect for every view
which has actually worked among men. A letter
of Mill's in regard to the religious observance of
Sunday is very typical.* One would expect the
great advocate of Utilitarian Ethics, before con-
demning this institution, to consider what part it
had played in the history of England and Scot-
land, and what practical results might follow from
its destruction. But the rationalist in Mill is far
too strong for any such investigation. To attri-
bute any sacredness to the day, he writes, ' is as
mere a superstition as any of the analogous pre-
judices which existed in times antecedent to
Christianity.' The preservation of the Sunday

* Letters, I, 100.

70 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

as a day of devotion is, according to the writer,
mere cant. ' The devotion which is not felt
equally at all times does not deserve the name/
And so he proceeds. It is strange that it did not
occur to him to consider why in such a case the
observance of Sunday had so long persisted in
Great Britain. In some of Mill's letters one finds
a painful consummation to which such rationalism
as his may easily lead. He expresses a deliberate
opinion that in the government of the world the
spiritual power of evil is stronger than the power
of good. That, I think, is a conclusion which
will often be reached by a rationalist who first
determines by the light of his own sentiments
what a moral government of the world ought to
be, and then condemns that which actually exists
because it does not conform to such preconceived
notions. The spirit of science is utterly different.
Starting from the facts of the world and of
human nature, the scientist will try so far as he
can to understand them, and where he fails will
be apt to lay the blame on his own faculties. At
all events, taking them as they stand, he will try
how human conduct may best be harmonized with
these fixed surroundings. It is only by accepting
the laws of nature that practical science pro-
gresses; and it is only by accepting the fixed
tendencies of man and society that we can hope
to improve mankind ethically and socially.

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 71

II.

The moral is sufficiently obvious. It is of the ) '
utmost necessity for the well-being and progress
of society that the sciences which have man for
their subject-matter should be earnestly pursued;
that they should be organized at our Universities,
that research in them should be made one of the
great ends of all higher education, that we should
set aside every weight and hindrance which may
prevent us from running this course with all the
energy which we possess.

Theoretically, perhaps, almost any thoughtful
person would concede this principle. Yet when
we come to look at education as it is, we see that
the practical means to this end are by no means
so generally conceded. We in England are in
this matter behind the nations of the Continent,
especially France and Germany. With us educa-
tion is still regarded as necessarily either literary
or scientific. By a literary education we mean an
acquaintance with certain languages an3 tHe
books written in them, a training whereby a man
acquires a good and correct stylejnjwriting. and
a knowledge of the way in which nature and the
great problems of life have been regarded, more
especially by the Greeks and Romans. In its
own way this training is admirable; I should be
one of the last to speak slightingly of it. For
four hundred years it has served to maintain a
high standard of literature and culture. It takes

72 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

the minds of the educated out of their narrow sur-
roundings into the broad spaces of Greek
thought. It keeps before us the imperishable
models of ancient beauty, the poems of Homer
and Virgil, the dramas of Euripides, the dialogues
of Plato, the lives of Plutarch, the statues of
Phidias and Praxiteles. If we were to forget or
to neglect these precious legacies of the past, we
should fall many degrees in civilization. Nor
less is the claim upon us of modern literature and
art in all their phases. But yet this culture leaves
lacunae.

By a scientific education men usually mean a
training in what is in this country regarded as in

_. nT -^ - — rr^ in i -^^

a special degree science, the natural knowledge
which begins with mathematics and ends with
biology, the study of the visible world, of nature
animate and inanimate. This training also is in
its way admirable ; it would be in me an imperti-
nence to attempt to write its panegyric. But has
it no tendency to drift into specialism, a narrow-
ing of the mind to a single small field of study
and observation? and is it free from the danger
of disposing those who too exclusively pursue it
towards materialism, and blindness to the higher
and more human side of life? The space left
between literary education on one side and scien-
tific education on the other, is in England very
imperfectly occupied. Human science is among
us the Cinderella, whose sisters are made much
of, while she has to take what they do not care for.

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 73

And the fairy godmother does not arrive, but in
her place there come many spirits of delusion ; so
that the ground which should be occupied by
ordered knowledge is seized upon by all sorts of
charlatans, and becomes a hunting place for all
kinds of untrained intelligences.

I would earnestly plead for a better recogni-
tion, a more complete organization, a better
endowment for the studies of which man is the
subject matter.

They fall naturally into three groups. Firstly
we have the historic group, a series of sciences
philological, archaeological, and the like, the
purpose of which is to make the life of men in
the past live again in the present in all detail and
vividness. Nothing in that life is irrelevant, no
detail which can possibly be reached by research
is unimportant. Every touch of the brush helps
a great picture, and in the same way the discovery
of a few small documents illuminating some phase
of past history may be in its working quite revo-
lutionary. A ray of light falling on a spot hitherr
to obscure may shew a diamond.

The study of history has no doubt in most
places changed its character and methods, and
become more fully alive. But generally speak-
ing there is still too much in it of a merely literary
character; the enjoyment of the writings of his-
torians, however good in itself, cannot take the
place of an intense realization of the meaning of

74 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

the past to all of us, and an insatiable desire to
learn to the utmost what really took place.

Very often we hear a shameless avowal of con-
tempt for ' mere history/ f Let bygones be by-
gones/ men say ; ' we have to do with the present.1
But the very problems which these men have to
solve in the present, have been attempted a thou-
sand times before in the course of history. Are
we to throw away all the results of human effort
and learn only by the education of failure what is
good for us? Would a biologist confine his
attention to the study of existing species of plants
and animals ? or would a chemist set aside as un-
worthy of study the results of the experiments of
his predecessors? So short is human life, and
so feeble the intelligence of man, that unless he
profits by the experience of past generations, he
will be falling back, not advancing in knowledge.
The truth is that the historian who discovers the
real line of human progress in the past, even in
some quite subordinate part of the field, does at
least as much for the well-being of mankind as
the man who discovers a new gas, or invents a
new mode of more rapid intercourse between
peoples.

Speaking in the light of my own studies I may
say that there are two periods of ancient history
which are of extreme interest to us moderns, not
only as picturesque in themselves, but as shewing
us the true working and results of many of the
social tendencies now prevailing. These periods

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 75

are the age of the spread of Greek culture after
Alexander, and the early age of Christianity in
the Graeco-Roman world. These times are full
of modernity. The problems with which they
teem are our problems, and nothing is more cer-
tain than that factors which then worked will work
in the same direction now. Great shifts of popu-
lation to new regions, the drift of the dwellers in
the country districts towards the towns, the decay
of religious belief, vast wealth of a few and gall-
ing poverty of many, distaste for military service,
increase of divorce, a falling birth-rate, these and
many other modern tendencies were familiar two
thousand years ago. And men of those times,
men quite as wise as any of us, tried to devise
cures for these things, introduced some remedies
which were palliations for the diseases of society,
and some remedies which only increased the evils
they were intended to prevent. All these things
stand written in the history of the past. Are we
so wise or so self-confident as to disdain to learn
the lessons which history teaches ? Must we learn
only as do plants and animals, from the hard
lessons of suffering?

In this matter Germany has something to
teach. A French writer, M. P. Huvelin, writes
as follows : —

* It is an enviable privilege of the Germans that
they realize without effort and by nature the rela-
tions between practical aims and disinterested
study. With them, new social and academic

76 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

needs give life not only to practical work, but to
scientific research. Examples abound. Does
Germany desire to acquire possessions beyond
the sea? At once there arises a literature on
colonial geography, methods of colonization,
colonial legislation. Does she wish to augment
her fleet? Her writers investigate history to see
if there exists a necessary connexion between a
powerful fleet and a prosperous commerce/ And
so forth. The picture may be, as regards Ger-
many, rather highly coloured; but it represents
what would happen in an ideal Germany, or in
any country which realizes the relations between
knowledge and action.

But it may be said that all the facts of ancient
history have been known by our ancestors for
generations, and have been taken into account by
our statesmen and publicists. Nothing could be
less true than such an assertion. We are only
beginning, by the help of exploration, excavation,
renewed study of historians, to understand what
really took place in the ancient world. The con-
ventional notions on the subject which we in-
herit from our fathers are as unlike the reality as
the engravings of the Tower of Babel which we
find in old illustrated Bibles are unlike the
palaces which actually existed at Babylon.* For
example we have begun in recent years to realize
how great a part in ancient history was played by

* No recently published work shews this more clearly
than Professor E. Meyer's Kleine Schriften.

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 77

supply and demand of commodities, by desire of
fresh markets, by poverty and unemployment.
It is the course of events in our own days which
has thrown an entirely fresh light on ancient his-
tory. And if we only take the trouble to pay
attention, ancient history can in return throw a
flood of light on our own present and on the future
which awaits us. And what is true of ancient
history is quite as true of more recent history.

Secondly, we have the psychological group of
studies, which investigate the active and the
thinking powers of man, the conscious powers,
and that great realm of the unconscious which now
takes so great a place in our horizon. It is
astounding what great revolutions are wrought
alike in our conceptions of history and our practi-
cal activities in the world by the introduction of
truer views of the nature of human feelings,
habits and thoughts. Every practical man has to
deal with the minds of his fellows, and the
analogy of all other studies proves that he will
work far more effectually when he has an accurate
and methodical notion of what those minds are,
than he can when he merely knows them by rule
of thumb. Practical statesmen are often dis-
posed to think lightly of the methodical study of
man, yet could not any psychologist point to Acts
of Parliament and decrees of Emperors the
failure of which, from their want of conformity
to human nature, could quite well have been fore-
seen?

78 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

I must not venture to speak of a special side of
psychology which has been lately brought into
prominence, and in regard to which words from
Birmingham are greatly valued, the study of the
sub-conscious side of man. Hence has come in-
deed a great revelation. And I venture to say
that as regards human progress and human happi-
ness this great accession to our knowledge is
far heavier in the balances than such discoveries
as those of radium or of wireless telegraphy
which only touch human life on the outside.

Perhaps it is the new psychology of religion
which has, or is destined to have, the greatest
effect on our practical and ethical life. In recent
years there has been an immense deal of research
and of writing in regard to such matters as the
relations between reason and faith, or the con-
nexion between fact and doctrine, or the
phenomena of religious experience, which must
needs have a profound influence on the faith of
the Christian Church. It is now realized that
religion does not lie in the reception of certain
facts as historic, but in an attitude of the spirit;
and that attitude is the result of an immense his-
torical process. Like all great discoveries this
change sometimes dazzles the explorer. We
have perversions, as when some of the reactionary
parties, more especially the Jesuits, think they
can justify on psychologic grounds all the super-
stitions of the Middle Ages. But without going
this length we may see that too great reliance on

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 79

reason greatly misled the Reformers of the six-
teenth century, making them develop rigid
schemes of theology almost regardless of the fact
that religious truth is relative, and belongs not
like mathematics to an abstract scheme of
thought, but to the ethical and practical side of
man. In a sense even the basest superstition has
some justification, for it could not have arisen but
for its satisfaction of some human need. But a
society is debased if it retains too long beliefs
suited to a barbarous age, but later tending to
dwarf the intelligence and fetter the freedom of
mankind.

Nowhere better than in Huxley's essay upon
Descartes is expressed the growing conviction of
investigators that all knowledge has a base in
psychology, that every fact has a subjective
element, that nothing can be seen but in a human
mirror. The relativity of knowledge to the know-
ing mind is the truth which has altered the basis
of all such branches of study as have to do with
man's thought and feeling, aesthetics, religion,
even economics ; has destroyed their abstract and
rationalist character, and drawn them into the
ways of scientific method.

Thirdly, there is the group of studies included
in sociology. In England in past days we made
the mistake of setting apart one class of social
phenomena, the facts of the production and dis-
tribution of wealth, and supposing that the Politi-
cal Economy which is concerned with these can

8o HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

be dealt with apart from all other phenomena of
society. This is in the long run impossible. We
may of course have Political Economists as
specialists, just as we have Physicians who make
a speciality of the lungs or the throat or the eye.
But after all the health of a body depends upon
all the parts working together, and the well-being
of a nation depends not only upon its wealth but
upon its efficiency in all fields of human activity.
When one considers what must finally be included
in sociology, all the studies which have to do with
man in society, from eugenics and political
economy on one wing to ethics and religion on
the other, one feels that our society has reached a
point like the summit of Pisgah, whence the
promised land may be seen in all its beauty and
fertility, a land, however, which has to be reached
through much toil and many wars. The land is
not yet even thoroughly surveyed; we have no
good map of it, and we are dependent on the
reports of solitary workers who have made their
way into one or another of its many regions, and
brought back weighty loads of fruit.

Let me take a concrete example. Lately I
had the pleasure to take a modest part in an im-
portant conference held in London on the subject
of town-planning. In the last ten years it has
dawned upon the people of Europe and America
that the planning of towns has hitherto been quite
at the mercy of accident, that private owners,
looking only to their own interests, have sue-

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 81

ceeded in making our cities very far from what
they should be, without unity of plan, without
consideration for the general convenience, quite
unfit to serve many of the purposes of civilization.
And there have sprung up in England, France,
Germany and America, not merely a few, but
hundreds of societies pledged as far as may be
to remedy these evils, to make our cities more
orderly in arrangement, more healthy, more
cleanly, free from the thousand nuisances which
make our lives dull and ugly, free from palls of
smoke and the blatant vulgarity of pushing
advertisements. Here indeed is a movement
which stirs the pulses of men ! Here are ideals
which can only be attained by method and
thought, that is to say by science. But the
science by which they are to be reached is not
mere constructive skill, nor the art of gardening,
of paving or of building. It is essentially human
science, and has a place in all three of the sections
which I have mentioned. We want to know with
accuracy what purposes men work with, what are
the laws of health, what contributes to beauty and
what overwhelms us with ugliness. We want
also to study social conditions, the tenure of land,
the divisions of employment in a locality, the
needs of future generations, in order that we may
learn to subordinate the interests of individuals
to the general good, and to make our societies
really healthy and progressive. Unless the laws
of man and of society are first considered, our

82 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

plans will be struggles towards an unknown end.
They will be like planning a shell for a marine
creature of unknown size and habits, like build-
ing a house without knowing what sort of a family
is to live in it.

The organizers of that Conference arranged
that their proceedings should begin with papers
on town-planning in the past, by the Greeks, the
Romans and the Europeans of the Renaissance.
These predecessors of ours had to face, not pre-
cisely our problems, but problems similar to ours.
Cities like Rhodes and Antioch, Alexandria and
Pergamon were laid out by architects whose
technical skill was almost equal to that of their
modern successors, and to whom the utmost free-
dom was given to make a city, with its walls and
market place, its temples, gymnasia and streets,
on the most scientific principles. It would be
absurd that when a federal capital has to be built
for Australia or India, or a great city like Chicago
to be spread out on a plain, the lessons of the
past should not be used to the utmost, and hints
taken from all available records. Surely here is
an example which justifies my contention that for
wise action in the present, and for far-seeing
plans for the future it is above all things neces-
sary that our knowledge of man and of his history
should be as exact, as detailed and as vivid as
possible.

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 83

III.

When we consider how rapid has been the pro-
gress in recent times of physical and biological
sciences, and realize how slow in comparison has
been the progress in the knowledge of man, we
may almost despair. We can scarcely say that,
in many important respects, we know more of the
nature of human well-being than was known by
Aristotle. Yet in some countries, more especi-
ally in Germany and America, at least the magni-
tude of the task and the infinite importance of
reaching sound and trustworthy results are
beginning to be recognised.

As the nineteenth century was the great age of
discovery in the sciences of nature, so, I venture
to prophesy, the twentieth century will be the
great age of discovery in human science. Com-
pared with our mastery of the forces of nature,
our mastery of ourselves and our destiny is in an
infantile stage. We see how utterly defective
are the arrangements of society around us. We
see how our medicine is capable of grappling with
definite diseases, but has no ideal of human
health, how our skill produces an infinite mass of
wealth, and then distributes it in a way that is
simply appalling. We see how marriage remains
at the mercy of the worst regulated impulses of
our nature, without any thought of the future of
the race. We see how charitable feelings to-
wards our fellow men, instead of being a raising

84 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

force in the world, tend constantly, through sheer
want of method and wisdom, to degrade a great
part of the people, and to promote the shiftless-
ness of the idle, and the multiplication of the
unfit. These things brood in the hearts of all
who try to look with unblinded eyes on modern
society. And there comes among us a constant
stream of would-be reformers, who see the evil
and have a nostrum of their own to cure the ills
of the world. As in the Middle Ages men sought
a philosopher's stone, the touch of which would
turn all substances to gold, so these social
alchemists recommend some hastily adopted salve
as sovereign for all the ills of society. When
their remedy takes the form of the foundation of
some socialist society, at all events it is an experi-
ment from the failure of which mankind may learn
much. But if such experiments are to be first
tried on whole nations, it is terrible to think what
misery and destruction will be caused.

The only true course is for practical experi-
ments to follow in the wake of systematic know-
ledge. Systematic knowledge cannot give us
ideals; they must arise within, and cannot be
gained by study of fact and condition. But un-
less the ideals are pursued with a knowledge of
history and of human nature the result can only
be disappointment and disaster.

It seems to me that in our days everyone who
desires extensive changes in the frame of society
calls himself a socialist. As a result the most

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 85

discordant views and purposes are covered by
that convenient term. The Marxian school of
socialists on the Continent have as their avowed
object the improvement of the economic condition
of the manual workers, the securing for them of a
greater share in the world's produce by means of
a kind of social war. In England this is regarded
as the main function of the trades unions; and
with us the term socialism covers a much wider
variety of views, from the desire of simpler and
less ostentatious living to dislike of all existing
institutions. And everyone who chooses to call
himself a socialist thinks that he may dogmatize
as to what socialism really is. One theorist will
tell us that it implies the expropriation of all the
owners of material resources. Another will say
that it is not compatible with the present organiza-
tion of the family. A third will regard it as
bound up with secularity, and incompatible with
the Christian religion. And so forth. But I
would venture to submit, that socialistic theories
and experiments have been going on in the
civilized world from the very beginning of his-
tory. Plato opened an aera of speculation on
the subject in his immortal Republic; and in the
days of Plato there existed a community, that of
the Spartans, in which socialist ideas had more
full course in practical life than they have had
in any commonwealth since. So the study of
history must claim its right before we can venture
to say that we know much about socialism. And

86 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

the study of man as an individual and of man in
society claims its rights; for if we assume human
nature to be other than it is, our whole construc-
tion is built of unsound materials, and will topple
into ruins as fast as we build. Men are the bricks
of which any community must be built, and we
must know what strain those bricks will stand,
and whether they can resist wind and rain. I
take it that the only true basis of socialism lies in
the idea that the good of individuals must be sub-
ordinated to the good of the community. Here
we are all agreed. But we come at once to
the question what is the good of the community,
and how is it to be promoted?

If socialism implies a belief in the perfect
equality of the sexes, then the Maker of the
world certainly is not a socialist, for He has given
the two sexes different faculties, and imposed on
them different tasks. If socialism wishes to
abolish the family, it must discover motives suffi-
cient to induce men and women, apart from the
old family motives, to observe the rules of
morality and to greatly desire to have descend-
ants. If socialism wishes to make the state the
universal employer it must find out how to secure
energy and honesty in those who direct, and
docility and industry among those who labour,
apart from the hard discipline of the struggle for
existence which at present keeps society going,
whether better or worse. It is possible that as
we have superseded sailing vessels by steamships,

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 87

and horse traction by motor traction, so we may
be able some day to discover an organization of
society which will be more economic of force and
productive of better results than the organizations
of the past. But the only safe road to the goal
is the same road which has been followed in our
improvements in communication. First we had
the man of science in his laboratory making ex-
periments, weighing results, eliminating friction,
examining materials. Then we had modest ex-
periments on a small scale, at first experiments
with mere playthings; and these experiments
gradually grew in scale because they succeeded,
until, in branch after branch of transport, the new
methods competed with the old, and fairly beat
them out of the field. When motors were first
heard of we did not proceed to slaughter all our
horses, and when aviation is beginning to succeed
we do not break up our railways. Yet that is the
way in which some of the speculative schools of
socialism would go to work on the organization
of society. Newton, the greatest of our men of
science, claimed to excel his contemporaries only
in patience or persistency. And it is this active
patience, patience in research, patience in con-
forming to the conditions of the world, patience
in enduring what cannot be altered, and in
gradually changing what can be altered, which
must be the essential feature of all reform, unless
we would fling away all the rich results of the

88 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

striving and sufferings of our ancestors, and run
the risk of relapse into a state of barbarism.

I think we may in this matter see clearly the
contrast between the rationalist and the scientific
tendencies in the remoulding of society. In the
French Revolution, for example, the guiding
principle was a regard for certain assumed human
rights. In order to secure those rights every-
thing was thrown into the melting pot. No doubt
the world learned a great deal of wisdom from
the reckless experiments of those stormy days.
But to what did they lead ? To Napoleon, and a
militarism which deluged Europe with blood, and
brought upon France a depression from which
she has not yet recovered. The custom of
science when it sees things going amiss, is not to
leap like Curtius into the opening gulf, but to
interrogate history and experience, to see when
such evils before existed, and how they were met,
where such evils are in our day not to be found,
and the reason why. This method requires
patience both passive and active, passive patience
to bear the evils until we have fair prospect of a
remedy, and active patience or persistence to
bring together all the facts, to examine theory
after theory and make experiment after experi-
ment on a small scale, until we find a way which
is certainly a thoroughfare. A science which is
at home amid the facts of geology and of past
history will strongly believe in the possibilities
of progress; but it will also be very anxious not

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 89

hastily to throw away anything which has in it the
germs of future amelioration.

Here, it seems to me, lies the greatest task of
our Universities in the immediate future. Be-
sides keeping up the standard of literary culture
on the one hand, and studying physical science
largely with a view to practical results on the
other, we want to found great schools of human
science, schools not starting with any settled
theories, but working hard to map out the field,
to find the true line of progress in past history, to
discern of what human nature is capable, and of
what it is incapable. We need both research, and
as a corrective to research the foundation of
classes of workers who may test the practical
validity of the theories formulated by researchers.
And we need these schools especially in Eng-
land. For we are told by all our best advisers
that England is falling behind other countries in
method and in practical efficiency. In past days,
from the time of Locke to that of Darwin, great
scientific movements have commonly started in
England. There is no reason why we should not
at least equal other nations in exploring the vast
field of the orderly knowledge of mankind.

It may be said that this task will naturally fall
rather to the older Universities, where Humani-
ties flourish, while the newer foundations neces-
sarily devote themselves to studies of more imme-
diate practical application. There is no doubt
force in this suggestion. But the older Universi-

90 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

ties are dominated, in a degree which is hardly
realized by those who have not taught there, by
traditional ways of thought. They do not greatly
encourage research; and the energies of their
ablest men are mostly absorbed in teaching on
well-established lines. The newer Universities
have at least greater freedom, and greater power
of self-adaptation to new needs. I remember
reading the first address of your Chancellor to
this University ; and it seemed to me that although
he was no professed savant, yet he had a broader
and a saner notion of the functions of a University
than was usually current in the older academic
bodies. You are the brain of a great working
community ; and such a community needs to think
not only of business success, but of all sides of
human life and action.

I know that you have in Birmingham had your
attention called before to the overwhelming im-
portance of human science. Some of my dis-
tinguished predecessors, Sir Francis Galton and
Mr. Karl Pearson have spoken here with the
greatest ability and the highest authority on the
question of heredity, and other subjects which are
on the border-line between biology and the
humanities. Doubtless these and similar studies
are pursued here in some degree by teachers. It
is difficult to over-express our obligations to those
who carry on researches which have such direct
bearing on the future of mankind. In such
matters as these I am only a learner. But I have

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 91

given serious attention to two branches of the
group of historic studies, those concerned with
Ancient Greece and the Origins of Christianity.
Even in purely historic studies such as these we
greatly need a new spirit and better methods.
Above all we need to feel that the whole history
of the human race is one ; and that everything that
has ever happened in the human field may be a
light to the present. While investigators,
hemmed in by the narrow space of human life,
can but master the phenomena of some few
phases of history or some aspects of society, all
are really working together for a common end.

I have tried to shew that whereas great im-
pulses and ideas come from the unseen, the
manner of their working in the world falls within
the field of conscious thought and endeavour.
And intellect is turning more and more from the
attempt to reconcile them with accepted prin-
ciples, after the manner of the leaders of the
French Revolution and the framers of the
American constitution, towards the consideration
of their results in experience. In our days
democracy has arrived, and has come to stay.
We have to educate our masters, and in the first
place to instruct them as to what really has hap-
pened, and does happen in the world. And it
seems to me that the average citizen, the man
who now governs the world, will soon be more
ready to listen to the proved results of experience
than to any sort of a priori appeal. To go no

92 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

further than to the last general election, it was
very notable how on most platforms the appeal
was to results and consequences. The average
man is being more and more completely trained
to the notion that there is a fixed order in the
world, and that events do not happen at random.
He is now ready in matters of physical science to
take the word of those who have been trained,
those who really know. He does not perhaps yet
recognize so completely that the events of history
and of human society may also be matters of
definite knowledge, and considering how unripe
is most of the fruit of the knowledge of mankind
which is offered him, we can scarcely wonder that
he does not altogether relish it. That only shews
how much remains to be done in this field. We
are used to hearing men set forth the patent evils
of society, and then at once leap to the propound-
ing of some remedy warranted to set everything
right. It is the same procedure with which we are
familiar in the advertisements of quack medi-
cines. ' Do you feel languid, out of spirits ; have
you internal pains? Then try our pill or our
ointment.' In the same way those who see the
evils of modern society jump at some remedy,
some form of socialism it may be, or eugenics, or
female suffrage; and set it up as a general
remedy. The intermediate stage of studying in
what particular way each evil may be met they
overlook. What has to be insisted upon is that
between the perception of an evil and the pro-

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 93

pounding of a remedy there is need for infinite
care and investigation, a process which must not
be slurred over or abridged, and which involves
the keenest exercise of the wisest among us for
generations. Here is the opportunity of our
Universities.

In human science it is far more important than
even in the science of the material world to avoid
superficiality and extreme specialism. As man
is an unit, all the studies which bear upon him
and explain him must be kept together and their
results harmonized. Not good but evil would
result, if the recognition of human science were
to take the form either of teaching superficial
rules from books about psychology or pedagogy,
or of encouraging a minute subdivision of the
field into small plots in which jealous specialists
should sit keeping watch against any infringe-
ment of their domain, and fully convinced, each
of them, that he alone possesses the key of know-
ledge which should guide conduct. As I have
observed, man is an unit, and whether as an indi-
vidual or in an assembly he must pursue one
course and repudiate other courses. The
grounds of action have to be taken from a number
of different studies; the line of action is neces-
sarily a compromise, and influenced by a great
variety of motives. Hence the narrow specialist
who thinks the particular results at which he has
arrived ought at once to dictate conduct, is as
fatal a leader as are the rationalist charlatans of

94 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

whom I have spoken. Great collators of results
and systematizers of knowledge are a prime
necessity of the situation. And they will need
the highest faculties which human nature can
grow.

I should not of course commit the absurdity of
suggesting that all attempts at improving social
conditions should be suspended until we have a
more precise knowledge of what their results are
likely to be. Practical experiments must go on,
and they must needs do something to increase
the bounds of our knowledge, whether they are
successful or not. But I would venture to urge
the great need of more complete organization and
better endowment for human studies.

If the question be asked how these studies may
be organized, the answer seems to be that as they
develop they will organize themselves, and each
branch of the tree will find its due place. In
human science as in natural science one cannot
cultivate any part of the field without increasing
the productiveness of the whole. A man who
gives most of his life to the discovery of a new
chemical element, and a man who gives most of
his life to the examination of the marks on the
backs of crabs or to the respiratory organs of frogs
are equally the children of science, and workers
in the cause of light. In the same way men will
equally be of service to historic science whether
they study the antiquities of Greece, or the insti-

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 95

tutions of the Middle Ages, the faculties of man
or the working of economic laws. All knowledge
is really one; and all men of science are what
Comte called them, in a sense the priests of
humanity.

But to come for a moment to a more practical
point of view, I may venture to affirm, from the
experience of half a life time in University teach-
ing, that for the due cultivation of any branch of
science in a University two things are necessary.
First institutes, workships with a settled place for
working, with apparatus of all sorts and specialist
libraries. For such purposes an ordinary library
is insufficient; the books must be within reach,
and one must be able to turn them over and criti-
cize them in the presence of fellow-workers.
The second thing that is necessary is research
studentships, that the workers may at least be
able to live while they devote themselves for the
good of the community. Whether any such insti-
tutes exist at Birmingham I know not; but I am
sure that sufficient provision of this kind is not
made in any of our English Universities. For
work in anthropology, archaeology, statistics,
psychology, workshops are as necessary as they
are for chemistry or anatomy.

It may be regarded as a paradox if one affirms
that studies which deal with the remote past or
with obscure barbarous tribes in Africa or
Australia have much to do with practical ethics

96 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

and sociology. In the pursuit of physical science
men have passed this stage of objection. No one
would find it difficult to understand that technical
chemical researches may have a bearing on the
selection of the food we eat, or that biological
studies like those of Darwin may have great value
in the field of human action and morals. Why
then should we doubt that special and minute
studies in history and psychology may be a guide
to conduct in the present? In all branches of
science one pursues the truth for its own sake;
but one reaches a result of practical advantage,
a far richer result probably than one could ever
have attained by limiting one's investigation to
what appeared to be fruitful subjects.

The sum of the matter is this. Three appeals
are possible in justification of lines of action.
The first, that to authority, is passing out of
favour. The second, that to fixed principles,
must always be of value to all who try to think
consistently : but in the haste and confusion of
modern life it does not convince people as it used.
The third, that to fact and experience, falls in
very much with the tendencies of the times; and
therefore it is the bounden duty of those who
have leisure and intelligence to organize it, to
endow it, to give it a great place in our Universi-
ties. If it be taken up in a rash and hasty mood,
it may lead the human race into infinite trouble.
But if taken up in the true spirit of science,
modest, slow to affirmation, given to testing again

RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE 97

and again every result, it may furnish the spirit of
progress with data of inestimable value, and give
us in time a complete chart of the ocean of human
life over which we all have to guide our course.

99

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS.*
By Prof. Henri Bergs on.

Generally speaking, when a lecture is dedi-
cated, as this is, to a thinker or scientist whose
name it bears, the lecturer has to make an effort,
at times an effort of some difficulty, to maintain
himself, by the choice of his subject, in the sphere
of interests of this thinker or scientist. But, for
a lecture associated with the great name of
Huxley, no such effort is necessary. Rather, in-
deed, we may ask what scientific question, what
philosophic problem, is there which did not
interest that luminous intellect — one of the
broadest and most comprehensive that nine-
teenth-century England produced, fertile in great
intellects as it was?

It has seemed to me, however, that the ques-
tion of consciousness in general — of its relations
with nature and life — corresponds fairly well with
one of the main lines of Huxley's thought, with
one of his chief pre-occupations. And as I per-
sonally know none more important nor more
crucial in the whole range of philosophy, that is
the subject I have chosen.

* The " Huxley Lecture," delivered at the University of
Birmingham, May 29, 1911, with some additions.

ioo HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

But, before attacking the problem itself, there
is one point to which I wish to call your attention
— namely, the meagre light thrown on this prob-
lem by the " systems " of philosophy properly
so-called. What are we? What are we doing
here? Whence do we come and whither do we
go? These, it seems, are the essential and vital
questions, the questions of supreme interest,
which first present themselves to the philosopher
and which are, or should be, the very cause of
philosophy's existence. But not at all. If we
consider the enormous work done in philosophy
from antiquity down to the present time, we find
that attention has been engrossed with a host of
special problems in psychology, in morals, in
logic, as well as a crowd of very general meta-
physical speculations on the more or less hypo-
thetic principles of things; and then again we
find a welter of critical reflections on the manner
and method of knowledge, and finally a multi-
tude of works of history and discussion which
give us the opinions of thinkers on the opinions
of others; but we perceive that those problems
which interest us as human beings above all else,
and which are for us the vital problems, have
very seldom been squarely faced. I mean that
the solution given has been thrown out in pass-
ing, as a consequence of certain very general and
highly abstract conceptions of Being, of Thought,
of Extensity, of Substance, etc. It seems as if
philosophy thought it would be slighting the

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 101

claims of these problems, failing ih; iespiect" -fa
them, to study them in the same way as an
ordinary question of biology or history, which
cannot be resolved save in an approximate, im-
perfect and provisional manner. No; it seems
that for the answer to these great problems some
great system is necessary in which solemnly and
immutably it may take its place, as a geometrical
theorem takes its final place in a book of Euclid.
The disadvantage of this way of proceeding is
that we thus put in the second place problems
which should be in the first; but, besides that, we
render the solution of these problems dependent
on general systems of philosophy, with which they
stand and fall. And then the solution shares in
the strictness and rigidity of the system to which
it is attached; it must be taken or left, just as it
is, and admits of no gradual development or
perfecting.

Either I am much deceived or the future
belongs to a philosophy which will give back to
these problems their rightful place — the first! —
which will face them in themselves /and for them-
selves, directly; which, no longer returning to
these questions an answer deduced from syste-
matic principles (a self-styled " final " solution,
to be replaced in its turn by other solutions which
will claim equal finality), will be gradually per-
fectible, open to corrections, to retouchings and
unlimited amplifications; a philosophy that will
no longer pretend to have reached a solution of

102 'HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

mathematical certainty (which mathematical cer-
tainty, in such a case, must always be deceptive),
but will be content (like a good number of
sciences at the present time) with a sufficiently
high degree of probability, with a probability
capable of being pushed farther and farther till
it becomes so great that it may end by becoming
practically equivalent to certainty. In short, I
am of opinion that there is no absolutely certain
principle from which the answer to these ques-
tions can be deduced in a mathematical way.
Nor does there exist a privileged fact, or a col-
lection of privileged facts, from which the answer
can be inferred, as, for example, occurs in a
problem in physics or chemistry. But it seems
to me that in a great number of different fields
there is a great number of collections of facts,
each of which, considered apart, gives us a direc-
tion in which the answer to the problem may be
sought — a direction only. But it is a great thing
to have even a direction, and still more to have
several directions, for at the precise point where
these directions converge might be found the
solution we are seeking. What we possess mean-
while are lines of facts, none of which goes far
enough, none of which goes right up to the point
which interests us and at which we want to place
ourselves ; but these lines may be more and more
prolonged, and they, moreover, already suffi-
ciently indicate to us, by the ideal prolongation

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 103

that is open to us, the region in which the answer
to the problem will be found.

Now, it is some of these lines that I desire to
follow with you to-day. Each of them, taken
apart, will give, I repeat, nothing but a proba-
bility ; but all together, by converging on the same
point, may give us an accumulation of probabili-
ties which will gradually approximate scientific
certainty.

Here is the first line I wish to follow, the first
aspect of the question that I wish to point out to
you. What we call " the mind " is, before all,
something conscious — it is consciousness. But
what do we mean by consciousness ? You rightly
guess that I am not going to define this simple
thing which eludes all definition, and which every-
one can experience. But, without exactly giving
a definition which would be much less clear than
the thing defined, we may at least indicate its
most obvious and most striking character. Con-
sciousness signifies, above all, memory. The
memory may not be very extensive; it may
embrace only a very small section of the past,
nothing indeed but the immediate past; but, in
order that there may be consciousness at all,
something of this past must be retained, be it
nothing but the moment just gone by. A con-
sciousness which retained nothing of the past
would be a consciousness that died and was re-
born every instant — it would be no longer
consciousness. Such is just the condition of

104 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

matter ; or, at least, such is just the way we repre-
sent matter when we wish to oppose it to
consciousness. Leibnitz defined matter — that is
to say, what is not consciousness — by calling it a
momentary mind, an instantaneous consciousness.
And, in fact, an instantaneous consciousness is
just what we call unconsciousness. All conscious-
ness, then, is memory; all consciousness is a
preservation and accumulation of the past in the
present.

But, on the other hand, all consciousness is an
anticipation of the future. Analyse your mental
state when you hear someone speaking : you are
intent on what is being said, but also on what is
coming; and even the present only interests you
in so far as it will profit the immediate future.
We are essentially drawn and, as it were, inclined
towards the future, because we are creatures of
action, and every action is like a leap into the
future — into the next moment.

So that to remember the immediate past and to
anticipate the immediate future is the most strik-
ing function of consciousness. Indeed, what we
call the present instant is something that hardly
exists except in theory, for it has already ceased
to exist when it attracts our attention. Try to
'catch the present instant, it has already gone, it
is already far away. Practically, what we call
our present is something that has a certain length
or breadth of duration, and is composed of two
halves, one being our immediate past, the other

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 105

our immediate future. What we feel ourselves
to be at any given moment is what we were just
before and what we are just about to be : we re-
cline on our past and incline towards our future,
and that reclining and inclining seem to be the
very essence of our consciousness. So that con-
sciousness is, above all, a hyphen, a tie between
past and future. Now what is the use of such a
tie, and what is consciousness called upon to do?
To reply to this question, we must first ask what
are, in the whole of Nature, the creatures which,
to all appearances, are conscious beings. To
tell the truth, in order to be absolutely sure that a
being is conscious like ourselves, we ought to
penetrate it, to be it. Here, again, if we seek for
mathematical certainty, we shall obtain nothing,
for you cannot even be mathematically sure that
I, who am speaking to you at this moment, possess
a consciousness. I might be a well-constructed
automaton — going, coming, speaking — without
internal consciousness, and the very words by
which I declare at this moment that I am a con-
scious being might be words pronounced without
consciousness. However, though this is mathe-
matically possible, and consequently the existence
of my consciousness cannot be for you a matter
of mathematical certainty, I think that it is suffi-
ciently probable for you. The truth is, that
whenever you assume consciousness in a being
other than yourself, you infer this consciousness
from certain outward analogies that you find

io6 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

between this being and yourself. So let us follow
up this reasoning by analogy, and ask ourselves
up to what point it is probable that consciousness
may be imputed to nature, and at what point it
probably stops short.

One reply sometimes made to the question is
this : In ourselves, consciousness is bound up in
one way or another with a brain; we may there-
fore assume the presence of consciousness in all
those living beings in whom a brain is found, and
in those alone. But a moment's reflection will
show us the fallacy of this reasoning. For in
applying elsewhere this mode of argument, we
might as well say : digestion in us is bound up
with a stomach, therefore we ought to attribute
the faculty of digestion to the living beings who
possess stomachs, and to those alone. Now this
would be absolutely wrong, for living beings who
have no stomachs and even no organs, which con-
sist of a simple protoplasmic mass, are still able
to digest. Only, in proportion as the organism
becomes more perfect, a division of labour is
brought about : special organs are destined to
diverse functions instead of the whole mass doing
all, and the digestive faculty becomes localised in
a stomach and in other organs which accomplish
it better -, whilst the rest of the organism renounces
the faculty, having got rid of this care by putting
it on to a special organ. But the function was
previously performed in the undifferentiated
organism : it was performed all over it, though

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 107

with less precision. Now, without doubt, in our-
selves consciousness is bound up with a brain in
some way, but as we descend in the animal scale
we see the brain become more and more simpli-
fied (as also does the whole nervous system), and
then the nervous centres separate from each other,
until finally the nervous elements are merged in
the mass of undifferentiated living tissue. Now,
is it not probable that if, at the top of the organic
scale, clear and distinct consciousness is bound
up with a brain and a highly differentiated
nervous system, consciousness accompanies this
system the whole length of the descent, and that
ultimately, when the nervous substance is merged
in the rest of living matter, consciousness itself is
diffused in the whole of this mass : diffused, con-
fused, weakened, but not reduced to nothing?
So that, in the end, consciousness might exist in
Nature wherever there is living matter. At least,
it is not impossible. But is it actually the case?
I believe it would be going too far, and here is a
fresh line of considerations which will, I think,
lead us to limit this conclusion to a certain degree.
We have just said that in the conscious being
that we know best — namely, man — consciousness
appears in some way to be bound up with a brain.
Since in this case it is through a brain that the
consciousness works, and since the work is thus
performed with the greatest precision, let us
glance at the brain, and ask ourselves what are its
most obvious functions. The brain, as you

io8 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

know, forms part of a whole called the cerebro-
spinal nervous system, which, in addition to the
brain itself, comprises the spinal cord, the nerves,
etc. In the spinal cord are set up mechanisms
which permit the various parts of our body to
perform complicated and well co-ordinated move-
ments. These mechanisms may be set in action
without the intervention of the brain, under the
direct influence of an external stimulus; in such
a case, the bodily reaction follows immediately
on the stimulation. But there are cases in which
the external stimulus, instead of obtaining at
once, through the spinal cord, an appropriate
bodily reaction, goes up to the brain, in order to
come down again thence to the spinal cord, and
only then obtains from the cord the complex
physical movement. Why did it go to the brain ?
And what has it gained by this roundabout pro-
ceeding? A glance thrown on the general struc-
ture of the brain will answer these questions.
The brain is in communication with those
mechanisms of the spinal cord that we have just
referred to, and can send to any one of them the
order to work. Imagine a stimulation coming to
the brain from without, by the eye, ear or touch.
The brain is like a switch having the faculty of
putting the current thus received in communica-
tion with one or other of the motor mechanisms of
the spine, chosen at will. So that in sum, and
broadly speaking, the spinal cord is a storehouse
of ready-made complex actions, and the brain is

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 109

the organ permitting choice, in any circumstances,
of that particular complex action which is appro-
priate. The brain is the organ of choice.

Now, according as we descend in the animal
scale, we see that the functions of the brain and
those of the spinal cord become less differ-
entiated, as if a part at least of the faculty of
choosing, which in us is attached to the brain, had
descended to the spinal cord. In this latter,
then, we see that the mechanical attachments are
fewer, and probably also constructed with less
precision. Finally, it seems indeed as if the two
functions, the one an absolutely precise auto-
matism, the other an absolute faculty of choice,
become mingled, and blend with each other so
thoroughly that when we arrive at organisms in
which there are only a few heaps of nerve-cells
scattered here and there, and even more so when
we come to organisms where there are no longer
differentiated nerve-cells, we are faced by a
living substance such that external stimulus pro-
vokes from it a reaction both undecided, though
not altogether chosen (there comes in the element
of choice), and ill-defined although aiming at a
certain precision (there comes in the element of
automatism). Such is probably the condition of
an amoeba — of one of those tiny lumps of proto-
plasmic jelly you can see with the microscope in
a drop of water. When anything that can be
turned into food floats by, the amoeba throws out
in various directions protoplasmic filaments

no HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

which draw the substance towards it. These
pseudopodia are temporary organs, ill-defined
(there comes in the element of mechanism), but
everything seems to happen as if there were at
least a rudiment of intention on the part of the
little organism, a certain choice of appropriate
movements.

It appears, therefore, as if from the top to the
bottom of the animal scale there is present
(although the lower we go, the more vaguely it
is seen) the faculty of choice, and more particu-
larly the choice of action, of combined move-
ments, in response to stimulation arising from
without. This is what we find in pursuing our
second line of facts. Now, observe that the point
we come out at is pretty close to that to which the
first line led us. We said, you will remember,
that the function of consciousness seemed
primarily to retain the past and to anticipate the
future. That is quite natural if its function is to
preside over actions which are chosen. For
choice implies that one thinks of what is to be, —
of the immediate future, — with a view to creating
this future to some extent; and that cannot be
done save by profiting from past experience — by
retaining the past in order to project it within the
future.

But all this gives no answer as yet to the ques-
tion we put : Does consciousness cover the whole
domain of life? and if it does not extend every-
where, where does it stop?

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS in

We have not yet the answer to this question, it
is true; but we are getting near it. For if con-
sciousness implies choice, and choice amongst
various possible actions, consciousness will not
be found presumably in organisms that do not
possess the power of free action — the power, con-
sequently, to choose between several actions. In
very truth, I believe no living organism is abso-
lutely without the faculty of performing actions
and moving spontaneously; for we see that even
in the vegetable world, where the organism is for
the most part fixed to the ground, the faculty of
motion is asleep rather than absent altogether.
Sometimes it wakes up, just when it is likely to
be useful. Therefore, in principle, this faculty
of spontaneous motion probably exists in every
living thing; but, in actual fact, many organisms
have given it up, — as, for example, the numerous
animals living as parasites on other organisms,
and thus able to get their food on the spot, and
again, almost the entire vegetable kingdom. It
seems probable, therefore, and this is my last
word on the point, that consciousness is in prin-
ciple present in all living matter, but that it is
dormant or atrophied wherever such matter re-
nounces spontaneous activity, and on the contrary
that it becomes more intense, more complex, more
complete, just where living matter trends most in
the direction of activity and movement. Observe
that this is a point we can experience in ourselves.
Precisely as our actions cease to be spontaneous

ii2 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

and become automatic, consciousness is with-
drawn from them; when we learn a new physical
exercise, for example, and have to decide on each
of our motions and choose that which is
appropriate, we have distinct consciousness of
each. As we get used to the exercise and it be-
comes automatic, consciousness fades away.
Again, when is our consciousness most acute,
most intensely alive? Is it not, above all, at
those times of internal crisis when we are hesi-
tating between several possible actions, several
lines of conduct that are equally possible ? Con-
sciousness in each of us, then, seems to express
the amount of choice, or, if you will, of creation,
at our disposal for movements and activity.
Analogy authorises us to infer that it is the same
in the whole of the organised world.

Let us consider living matter, then, under its
simplest form, as it may have been in the begin-
ning : a simple mass of protoplasmic jelly like
that of an amoeba. This mass can change its
shape at will — it is therefore vaguely conscious.
Now, in order to develop and evolve, two courses
are open to it. Either it may follow the path
leading towards movement, action — action grow-
ing more and more complex, more and more
deliberate and free as time goes on : this means
adventure and risk, but means also a conscious-
ness more and more wide awake and luminous.
Or, on the contrary, giving up the faculty of
movement and choice that it possesses, even

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 113

though of course in very feeble degree, it may
decide to fix itself just where it finds suitable con-
ditions of life which will do away with the neces-
sity of going to seek the materials it requires :
that means an assured and tranquil life, a hum-
drum sort of existence, but it involves the drowsi-
ness which dogs our inactivity, the slumber of
consciousness.* The former direction corre-
sponds in the main to the line of animal develop-
ment (I say in the main, because many species of
animals give up their mobility, and thus probably
also their consciousness); the latter, in the main,
is proper to vegetables ; again I say " in the
main," since the faculty of moving, and probably
therefore also of consciousness, may occasionally
reawaken in vegetable life.

Now, if we consider from this standpoint the
entrance of life in the world, this entrance will
appear to us like the introduction, into the world,
of something that encroaches upon inert matter.
In the non-living unorganised world, if this were
left alone, necessity would sit enthroned. In
determinate conditions inert matter reacts in a
determinate way; in the inanimate world nothing
is unforeseeable, and if our science were suf-
ficiently advanced we should be able to foretell
what will happen there, precisely as we can fore-
tell the eclipses of the sun and moon. In short,
inert matter is subject to mathematical necessity.

* See on this subject : Cope, The Origin of the Fittest,
1887, p. 76.

ii4 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

But, with the coming of life, we see the appear-
ance of indetermination. A living being, no
matter how simple, is a reservoir of indetermina-
tion and unforeseeability, a reservoir of possible
actions or, in a word, of choice. And in it, too,
we find that faculty of imagining future eventuali-
ties (or, speaking more generally, of anticipating
the future), and at the same time of storing up
the past for that purpose, which is the faculty of
consciousness.

If this be so, consciousness and matter would
appear to be antagonistic forces, which, neverthe-
less, come to a mutual understanding and manage
somehow to get on together. They are antagon-
istic in this, that matter is theoretically the realm
of fatality, while consciousness is essentially that
of liberty ; and yet life, which is nothing but con-
sciousness using matter for its purposes, succeeds
in reconciling them. Life, therefore, must be
something which avails itself of a certain elasticity
in matter — slight in amount as this probably is —
and turns it to the profit of liberty by stealing into
whatever infinitesimal fraction of indetermination
that inert matter may present. Now I believe
that this twofold conclusion is precisely what we
shall come to after following certain other lines
of facts, and that in following these lines we may,
moreover, catch a glimpse at once of how con-
sciousness finds matter an obstacle, and how, not-
withstanding, it succeeds in making use of it. I
will begin with the last point.

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 115

If we ask ourselves how a conscious animal
succeeds in obtaining from matter — that is to say,
from its body — the execution of movements on
which it has decided, we find that its method con-
sists in making use of special substances which
might be called " explosives." These substances
are the foodstuffs, more particularly those called
ternary, the essential elements of which are
carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. In these food-
stuffs is stored up a considerable amount of
potential energy, ready to burst out suddenly,
like the energy stored up in gunpowder. This
energy has been slowly, gradually, borrowed from
the sun by plants ; and the animal which feeds on
a plant, or on another animal that has fed on a
plant, or on an animal that has fed on another
animal that has fed on a plant, etc., thus passes
into his own body an explosive made by life
through a storage of solar energy : when this
animal performs voluntary movements, it does so
by simply producing the infinitesimal spark which
sets off the explosive — by, as it were, just brush-
ing the trigger of a pistol and thus setting free a
considerable force in the direction chosen at will.
Now if, in the beginning, the first living beings
swayed between animal and vegetable conditions,
sharing at once in both one and the other, it is
because life at its origin had to perform the
double work of making the explosive and turning
it to account. In proportion as plants and
animals differentiated, life split up into two king-

n6 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

doms, of which one, the less concerned with
movement, was more concerned with making the
explosive, whilst the other confined itself to mak-
ing- use of it. Nevertheless, the essence of life
seems to be to secure that matter, by a process
necessarily very slow and difficult, should store
up energy ready for life afterwards to expend
this energy suddenly in free movements. Now,
what precisely would a free cause do — a cause
incapable of forcing the necessity of matter, or
only able to force it to an infinitesimal extent, and
which, nevertheless, were desirous of producing
movements of increasingly greater power? It
would act in precisely this way. It would arrange
so as merely to have to press, as it were, the
trigger of a pistol in which there would be no
friction, or to furnish an infinitesimal spark, profit-
ing by an energy that it would have gradually
accumulated by turning every movement to
account.

But we arrive at the same conclusion if we re-
gard the living and conscious being along a dif-
ferent line of facts — not on the side of " choice,"
but on that of " memory." By what sign do we
recognise in current experience a " man of
action," — I mean a man able to impress his mark
on the events, large or small, amongst which he
evolves ? Surely by the fact that he can take in,
at a single glance, a great number of things,
especially a great number of previous happen-
ings. He seizes all these in a single perception

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 117

which instructs him for the action he prepares.
The more successive events he seizes in this
single glance, the better he succeeds in domin-
ating them. Now, if we consider consciousness
confronted with matter, we find that it is charac-
terised by just this fact, that in an interval which
for it is infinitely short, and which constitutes one
of our " instants," it seizes under an indivisible
form millions and billions of events that succeed
each other in inert matter. Yes, that indivisible
sensation of light which I have at this moment, if
I open my eyes for a single instant, is the con-
densation of an immensely long history unrolling
itself in the world of matter : there are, in that
single instant, billions of successive vibrations —
that is to say, a series of events such that, if I
wished to count them even with the utmost
rapidity, it would require thousands and thou-
sands of years for the enumeration. It is this
immense history that I seize all at once under the
pictorial form of a very brief sensation of light.
And we could say just the same of all our other
sensations. Sensation, which is the point at
which consciousness touches matter, is, then, the
condensation, in the duration peculiar to this con-
sciousness, of a history which in itself, — in the
world of matter, — is something infinitely diluted,
and which occupies enormous periods of what
might be called the duration of things. So,
looked at from the side of sensation, conscious-
ness gives us the same impression as it did just

n8 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

now from the side of movement. Consciousness
behaves just like a power entering matter in order
to draw the highest possible advantage from the
elasticity it finds therein, to take possession of
matter from the side of movement as well as from
that of sensation : from the side of movement, by
an explosive action setting free, in a flash, energy
drawn from matter through years and years, and
directing this energy in a chosen way; from the
side of sensation, by an effort of concentration
which seizes as a whole, in one moment, billions
of events happening in things, and thus allows
us to control them.

Thus all the lines of facts we follow seem to
converge on the same point, a point at which we
seem to see the following image arise : on the one
hand, matter subject to necessity, a kind of
immense machine, without memory, or at least
having only just sufficient memory to bridge the
interval between one instant and the next, each
of the states of the material world being capable,
or almost so, of mathematical deduction from the
preceding state, and consequently adding nothing
thereto; on the other hand, consciousness — that
is to say, on the contrary, a force essentially free
and essentially memory, a force whose very
character is to pile up the past on the past, like a
rolling snowball, and at every instant of duration
to organise with this past something new which is
a real creation. That these two forms of exist-
ence, matter and consciousness, have indeed a

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 119

common origin, seems to me probable. I believe
that the first is a reversal of the second, that while
consciousness is action that continually creates
and multiplies, matter is action which continually
unmakes itself and wears out; and I believe also
that neither the matter constituting a world nor
the consciousness which utilises this matter can
be explained by themselves, and that there is a
common source of both this matter and this con-
sciousness. But I cannot now enter deeply into
this question. Let it suffice to say that I see in
the whole evolution of life on our planet an effort
of this essentially creative force to arrive, by
traversing matter, at something which is only
realised in man, and which, moreover, even in
man, is realised only imperfectly.

There is no need to recall here all the facts
which, since Lamarck in France and Darwin in
England, have been adduced to confirm the idea
of an evolution of species, that is to say, of the
generation of some species from others, com-
mencing by forms probably of infinite simplicity.
I think that on this head it is impossible to dis-
pute the results accepted to-day by practically all
biologists. And it is impossible not to admire
the enormous amount of effort expended during
the last fifty years to show the part played in the
evolution of living beings by the necessity these
labour under to adapt themselves to their
environment. But this necessity of adaptation
explains, to my thinking, the arrests of life at

120 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

such or such determinate forms much more than
the movement through which life becomes more
complex and raises itself towards greater and
greater efficiency. A very simple rudimentary
being is as well adapted as a man to its environ-
ment, since it succeeds in living in it : why, then,
if adaptation explains everything, has life gone
on complicating itself, and, moreover, compli-
cating itself more and more delicately and
dangerously? Molluscs such as the Lingulae,
existing at the present time, existed also in the
remotest ages of the palaeozoic era. Why did
life go any further ? Why, if there is not behind
life an impulse, an immense impulse to climb
higher and higher, to run greater and greater risks
in order to arrive at greater and greater efficiency ?
I think it is hard to survey the whole of the
evolution of life without the impression that this
impulse is a reality. The error is to believe that
this impulse has projected living matter in a
single direction, that species are classified along a
single scale, that everything has gone on smoothly
and without let or hindrance. It is, on the con-
trary, obvious that the force I speak of has found
resistances in the matter it had to make use of;
that it has been obliged to split up — I mean to
share along lines of different evolution the dif-
ferent tendencies it carried ; that on each of these
lines there is a crowd of failures, of deviations,
of reversions ; that many of these lines of evolu-
tion have not been able to go on very far; that

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 121

two alone seem to have led to a certain success,
partial only on one, but relatively complete on
the other. These two lines are those of the
Arthropods and the Vertebrates. At the end of
the first we find instinct in its most marvellous
forms; at the end of the second, the human
intellect. It seems then, indeed, as if the force I
speak of were a force that contained in itself, at
least potentially, and interfused, the two forms of
consciousness that we call instinct and intelli-
gence.

Things seem to happen as if an immense cur-
rent of consciousness (a consciousness which
includes a multitude of potentialities all crowd-
ing on and hindering each other) had traversed
matter in order to entice it to organisation and
make of this matter, which is necessity itself, an
instrument of liberty. But it has scarcely
escaped being itself ensnared. Matter, which is
essentially automatism and necessity, enfolds the
consciousness which seeks to entice it, converts it
to its own automatism, and lulls it into its own
unconsciousness. On certain lines of evolution,
as, for example, in the vegetable kingdom, this
automatism and unconsciousness have become
the rule, and the liberty of the evolutive force
cannot show itself except in the creation of forms
which are, indeed, veritable works of art. These
unforeseeable forms, once created, repeat them-
selves automatically, and the individual has no
power of choice. On other lines, consciousness

122 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

succeeds in disentangling itself sufficiently for
the individual to have a certain latitude of choice,
a certain feeling, but the necessities of life are
there, and make of this power of choice a simple
auxiliary of material existence. Thus, along the
whole course of the evolution of life, liberty is
dogged by automatism, and in the long run is
stifled by it. With man alone the chain has been
broken. I cannot here enter into detail as to the
causes which have permitted life, by a sudden
leap from animal to man, to break the chain. I
confine myself to saying that the human brain,
although, seen from without, it differs little from
that of a highly developed animal, yet possesses
this remarkable feature — that it can oppose to
every contracted habit another habit, to every
kind of automatism another automatism, so that
in man liberty succeeds in freeing itself by
setting necessity to fight against necessity.

I doubt that the evolution of life will ever be
explained by a mere combination of mechanical
forces. Obviously there is a vital impulse : what
I was just calling an impulse towards a higher
and higher efficiency, something which ever seeks
to transcend itself, to extract from itself more
than there is — in a word, to create. Now, a force
which draws from itself more than it contains,
which gives more than it has, is precisely what is
called a spiritual force : in fact, I do not see how
otherwise spirit is to be defined. But, on the
other hand, we are wrong when we fail to take

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 123

into account, in the explanation of the organic
world, the obstacles of every kind which this force
encounters. The spectacle of the evolution of
life from its very beginning down to man suggests
to us the image of a current of consciousness
which flows down into matter as into a tunnel,
which endeavours to advance, which makes efforts
on every side, thus digging galleries most of
which are stopped by a rock that is too hard, but
which, in one direction at least, prove possible to
follow to the end and break out into the light once
more. This direction is the line of evolutipn
resulting in man. Now, what has been gained
by forcing this tunnel, and why did life start on
the undertaking ? Here, again, new lines of facts
might lead us to a plausible conclusion, one that
may become more and more probable. But I
have so little time, and it would be necessary to
enter into such great detail on the mechanism of
psychical facts — above all, on the physio-psycho-
logical relation — that I can now only formulate
briefly my conclusions. When, setting one
against the other, we examine consciousness and
matter in their mutual reactions, we have the
impression that matter plays at first, in relation to
consciousness, the part of an instrument that cuts
it up in order to bring about a greater precision.
A thought only becomes precise when it is divided
into words, that is, if it can be so divided; an
orator does not quite know what he is going to
say, and what he means to say, until he has taken

i24 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

a sheet of paper and set forth clearly in separate
phrases, placed side by side, what in his mind
was given in a state of mutual interpenetration.
Thus first does matter separate that which was
blended, and distinguish what was confused.
But moreover, and above all, matter is what pro-
vokes effort and renders it possible. The thought
which is only thought, the work of art which is
only in the conceptual state, the poem which is
only a dream, costs as yet no effort : what re-
quires an effort is the material realisation of the
poem in words, of the artistic conception in a
statue or a picture. This effort is painful, it may
be very painful ; and yet, whilst making it, we
feel that it is as precious as, and perhaps more
precious than, the work it results in, because,
thanks to it, we have drawn from ourselves not
only all that was there, but more than was there :
we have raised ourselves above ourselves.

Now, this effort would not have been put forth
without matter, which, by the unique nature of the
resistance it opposes and the unique nature of the
docility to which it can be brought, plays at one
and the same time the role of obstacle and
stimulus, causes us to feel our force and also to
succeed in intensifying it.

Philosophers who have speculated on the
significance of life and the destiny of man have
not sufficiently remarked that Nature has taken
pains to give us notice every time this destiny is
accomplished; she has set up a sign which

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 125

apprises us every time our activity is in full ex-
pansion; this sign is joy. I say joy; I do not
say pleasure. Pleasure, in point of fact, is no
more than an instrument contrived by Nature to
obtain from the individual the preservation and
the propagation of life ; it gives us no information
concerning the direction in which life is flung
forward. True joy, on the contrary, is always
an emphatic signal of the triumph of life. Now,
if we follow this new line of facts, we find that
wherever joy is, creation has been, and that the
richer the creation the deeper the joy. The
mother looking upon her child is joyous because
she has the consciousness of having created it,
physically and morally. A man who succeeds in
his enterprise — for example, a captain of indus-
try whose business is prospering — is he joyous
solely on account of the money he is winning and
the notoriety he has acquired? Doubtless these
elements count for much in the satisfaction he
feels; but they bring him pleasures rather than
joy, and whatever true joy he tastes belongs
essentially to the consciousness he has of having
established an enterprise which marches on, of
having created something that goes ahead. Con-
sider exceptional joys like those of the great
artist who has produced a masterpiece, of the
scientific man who has made a discovery or inven-
tion. We sometimes say they have worked for
glory and derive their greatest satisfaction from
the applause of mankind. Profound mistake !

126 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

We care for praise in the exact measure in which
we feel not sure of having succeeded ; it is because
we want to be reassured as to our own value and
as to the value of what we have done that we seek
praise and prize glory. But he who is certain,
absolutely certain, that he has brought a living
work to the birth, cares no more for praise and
feels himself beyond glory, because there is no
greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator.
If, then, in every province, the triumph of life is
expressed by creation, ought we not to think that
the ultimate reason of human life is a creation
which, in distinction from that of the artist or man
of science, can be pursued at every moment and
by all men alike ; I mean the creation of self by
self, the continual enrichment of personality by
elements which it does not draw from outside, but
causes to spring forth from itself?

May we not therefore suppose that the passage
of consciousness through matter is destined to
bring to precision, — in the form of distinct per-
sonalities,— tendencies or potentialities which at
first were mingled, and also to permit these per-
sonalities to test their force whilst at the same
time increasing it by an effort of self-creation?
On the other hand, when we see that conscious-
ness, whilst being at once creation and choice, is
also memory, that one of its essential functions is
to accumulate and preserve the past, that very
probably (I lack time to attempt the demonstra-
tion of this point) the brain is an instrument of

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS 127

forgetfulness as much as one of remembrance,
and that in pure consciousness nothing of the past
is lost, the whole life of a conscious personality
being an indivisible continuity, are we not led to
suppose that the effort continues beyond, and that
in this passage of consciousness through matter
(the passage which at the tunnel's exit gives dis-
tinct personalities) consciousness is tempered like
steel, and tests itself by clearly constituting per-
sonalities and preparing them, by the very effort
which each of them is called upon to make, for a
higher form of existence? If we admit that with
man consciousness has finally left the tunnel, that
everywhere else consciousness has remained im-
prisoned, that every other species corresponds to
the arrest of something which in man succeeded
in overcoming resistance and in expanding almost
freely, thus displaying itself in true personalities
capable of remembering all and willing all and
controlling their past and their future, we shall
have no repugnance in admitting that in many,
though perhaps in man alone, consciousness pur-
sues its path beyond this earthly life.

This is as much as to say that, in my opinion,
the aspirations of our moral nature are not in the
least contradicted by positive science. On this,
as on many other points, I quite agree with the
opinion expressed by Sir Oliver Lodge in many
of his works, and especially in his admirable book
on Life and Matter. How could there be dis-
harmony between our intuitions and our science,

128 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

how especially could our science make us re-
nounce our intuitions, if these intuitions are some-
thing like instinct — an instinct conscious, refined,
spiritualised — and if instinct is still nearer life
than intellect and science? Intuition and intel-
lect do not oppose each other, save where intuition
refuses to become more precise by coming into
touch with facts scientifically studied, and where
intellect, instead of confining itself to science
proper (that is, to what can be inferred from facts
or proved by reasoning), combines with this an
unconscious and inconsistent metaphysic which
in vain lays claim to scientific pretensions. The
future seems to belong to a philosophy which will
take into account the whole of what is given : 1
shall have attained the object I proposed if I have
succeeded in indicating to you, however vaguely,
the direction in which such a philosophy would
lead us.

HENRI BERGSON.

PARIS.

129

PLEOCHROIC HALOES.*

By Prof. John foly, F.R.S.

It is now well established that a helium atom
is expelled from certain of the radioactive
elements at the moment of transformation. The
helium atom or alpha ray leaves the transforming
atom with a velocity which varies in the different
radioactive elements, but which is always very
great, attaining as much as 2 x io9 cms. per
second; a velocity which, if unchecked, would
carry the atom round the earth in less than two
seconds. The alpha ray carries a positive charge
of double the ionic amount.

When an alpha ray is discharged from the
transforming element into a gaseous medium its
velocity is rapidly checked and its energy
absorbed. A certain amount of energy is thus
transferred from the transforming atom to the
gas. We recognise this energy in the gas by the
altered properties of the latter ; chiefly by the fact
that it becomes a conductor of electricity. The
mechanism by which this change is effected is in
part known. The atoms of the gas, which appear
to be freely penetrated by the alpha ray, are so

* Being the Huxley Lecture, delivered at the University
of Birmingham on October 3Oth, 1912.

130 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

far dismembered as to yield charged electrons or
ions; the atoms remaining charged with an equal
and opposite charge. Such a medium of free
electric charges becomes a conductor of electricity
by convection when an electromotive force is
applied. The gas also acquires other properties
in virtue of its ionisation. Under certain con-
ditions it may acquire chemical activity and new
combinations may be formed or existing ones
broken up. When its initial velocity is expended
the helium atom gives up its properties as an
alpha ray and thenceforth remains possessed of
the ordinary varying velocity of thermal agitation.
Bragg and Kleeman and others have investigated
the career of the alpha ray when its path or range
lies in a gas at ordinary or obtainable conditions
of pressure and temperature. We will review
some of the facts ascertained.

The range or distance traversed in a gas at
ordinary pressures is a few centimetres. The
following table, compiled by Geiger, gives the
range in air at the temperature of 15° C. : —

cms.

Uranium i 2.50

Uranium 2 ... 2.90

Ionium ... ... ... ... ... 3-°°

Radium 3-3°

Ra Emanation 4-*6

Radium A 4-75

Radium C 6.94

Radium F 3-77

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 131

cms.

Thorium 2.72

Radiothorium 3.87

Thorium X 4.30

Th Emanation 5.00

Thorium A ... 5.70

Thorium Ca 4.80

Thorium Cs 8.60

cms.
Radioactinium ... ... ... ... 4.60

Actinium X 4.40

Act Emanation 5.70

Actinium A 6.50

Actinium C ... ... ... ... 5.40

It will be seen that the ray of greatest range is
that proceeding from thorium C2> which reaches
a distance of 8*6 cms. In the uranium family the
fastest ray is that of radium C. It attains 6*94.
cms. There is thus an appreciable difference
between the ultimate distances traversed by the
most energetic rays of the two families. The
shortest ranges are those of uranium i and 2.

The ionisation effected by these rays is by no
means uniform along the path of the ray. By
examining the conductivity of the gas at different
points along the path of the ray, the ionisation
at these points may be determined. At the limits
of the range the ionisation ceases. In this man-
ner the range is, in fact, determined. The dotted
curve (Fig. i) depicts the recent investigation of
the ionisation effected by a sheaf of parallel rays
of radium C in air, as determined by Geiger.

132 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

The range is laid out horizontally in centimetres.
The numbers of ions are laid out vertically. The
remarkable nature of the results will be at once
apparent. We should have expected that the ray
at the beginning of its path, when its velocity and
kinetic energy were greatest, would have been
more effective than towards the end of its range
when its energy had almost run out. But the
curve shows that it is just the other way. The
lagging ray, about to resign its ionising proper-
ties, becomes a much more efficient ioniser than
it was at first. The maximum efficiency is, how-
ever, in the case of a bundle of parallel rays, not
quite at the end of the range, but about half a
centimetre from it. The increase to the maxi-
mum is rapid, the fall from the maximum to noth-
ing is much more rapid.

It can be shown that the ionisation effected
anywhere along the path of the ray is inversely
proportional to the velocity of the ray at that
point. But this evidently does not apply to the
last 5 or 10 mms. of the range where the rate of
ionisation and of the speed of the ray change
most rapidly. To what are the changing proper-
ties of the rays near the end o~ r,.eir path to be
ascribed? It is only recently that this matter
has been elucidated.

When the alpha ray has sufficiently slowed
down, its power of passing right through atoms,
without appreciably experiencing any effects from
them, diminishes. The opposing atoms begin to

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 133

exert an influence on the path of the ray, deflect-
ing it a little. The heavier atoms will deflect it
most. This effect has been very successfully in-
vestigated by Geiger. It is known as " scatter-
ing." The angle of scattering increases rapidly
with the decrease of velocity. Now the effect of
the scattering will be to cause some of the rays
to complete their ranges or, more accurately, to
leave their direct line of advance a little sooner
than others. In the beautiful experiments of
C. T. R. Wilson we are enabled to obtain ocular
demonstration of the scattering. The photograph
(Fig. 2), which I owe to the kindness of Mr.
Wilson, shows the deflection of the ray towards
the end of its path. In this case the path of the
ray has been rendered visible by the condensation
of water particles under the influence of the
ionisation; the atmosphere in which the ray
travels being in a state of supersaturation with
water vapour at the instant of the passage of the
ray. It is evident that if we were observing the
ionisation along a sheaf of parallel rays, all start-
ing with equal velocity, the effect of the bending
of some of the rays near the end of their range
must be to cause a decrease in the aggregate
ionisation near the very end of the ultimate range.
For, in fact, some of the rays complete their work
of ionising at points in the gas before the end is
reached. This is the cause, or at least an
important contributory cause, of the decline in
the ionisation near the end of the range, when the

134 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

effects of a bundle of rays are being observed.
The explanation does not suggest that the ion-
ising power of any one ray is actually diminished
before it finally ceases to be an alpha ray.

The full line in Fig. i gives the ionisation
curve which it may be expected would be struck
out by a single alpha ray. In it the ionisation
goes on increasing till it abruptly ceases alto-
gether, with the entire loss of the initial kinetic
energy of the particle.

A highly remarkable fact was found out by
Bragg. The effect of the atom traversed by the
ray to check the velocity of the ray is independent
of the physical and chemical condition of the
atom. He measured the " stopping power " of
a medium by the distance the ray can penetrate
into it compared with the distance to which it can
penetrate in air. The less the ratio the greater
the stopping power. The stopping power of a
substance is proportional to the square root of its
atomic weight. The stopping power of an atom
is not altered if it is in chemical union with
another atom. The atomic weight is the one
quality of importance. The physical state,
whether the element is in the solid, liquid or
gaseous state, is unimportant. And when we
deal with molecules the stopping power is simply
proportional to the sum of the square roots of the
atomic weights of the atoms entering into the
molecule. This is the " additive law," and it
obviously enables us to calculate what the range

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 135

in any substance of known chemical composition
and density will be, compared with its range in
air.

This is of special importance in connection
with phenomena we have presently to consider.
It means that, knowing- the chemical composition
and density of any medium whatsoever, solid,
liquid or gaseous, we can calculate accurately the
distance to which any particular alpha ray will
penetrate. Nor have the temperature and pres-
sure to which the medium is subjected any influ-
ence save in so far as they may affect the prox-
imity of one atom to another. The retardation
of the alpha ray in the atom is not affected.

This valuable additive law cannot, however, in
strictness be applied to the amount of ionisation
attending the ray. The form of the molecule, or
more generally its volume, may have an influence
upon this. Bragg draws the conclusion, from this
fact as well as from the notable increase of ionisa-
tion with loss of speed, that the ionisation is
dependent upon the time the ray spends in the
molecule. The energy of the ray is, indeed,
found to be less efficient in producing ionisation
in the smaller atoms.

Before leaving our review of the general laws
governing the passage of alpha rays through
matter, a point of interest must be referred to.
We have hitherto spoken in general terms of the
fact that ionisation attends the passage of the
ray. We have said nothing as to the nature of

136 HUXLEY MEMORIAL 'LECTURES

the ionisation so produced. But in point of fact
the ionisation due to an alpha ray is sui generis.
A glance at one of Wilson's photographs (Fig. 2)
illustrates this. The white streak of water par-
ticles marks the path of the ray. The ions pro-
duced are evidently closely crowded along the
track of the ray. They have been called into
existence in a very minute instant of time. Now
we know that ions of opposite sign if left to them-
selves recombine. The rate of recombination
depends upon the product of the number of each
sign present in unit volume. Here the numbers
are very great and the volume very small. The
ionic density is therefore high, and recombination
very rapidly removes the ions after they are
formed. We see here a peculiarity of the ionisa-
tion effected by alpha rays. It is linear in dis-
tribution and very local. Much of the ionisation
in gases is again undone by recombination before
diffusion leads to the separation of the ions. This
" initial recombination " is greatest towards the
end of the path of the ray where the ionisation is
a maximum. Here it may be so effective that
the form of the curve is completely lost unless a
very large electromotive force is used to separate
the ions when the ionisation is being investigated.
We have now reviewed recent work at suffi-
cient length to understand something of the
nature of the most important advance ever made
in our knowledge of the atom. Let us glance
briefly at what we have learned. The radioactive

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 137

atom in sinking to a lower atomic weight casts out
with enormous velocity an atom of helium. It
thus loses a definite portion of its mass and of its
energy. Helium which is chemically one of the
most inert of the elements, is, when possessed of
such great kinetic energy, able to penetrate and
ionise the atoms which it meets in its path. It
spends its energy in the act of ionising them,
coming to rest, when it moves in air, in a few
centimetres. Its particular initial velocity de-
pends upon which of the radioactive elements has
given rise to it. The length of its path is there-
fore different according to the radioactive element
from which it proceeds. The retardation which
it experiences in its path depends entirely upon
the atomic weight of the atoms which it traverses.
As it advances in its path its effectiveness in
ionising the atom rapidly increases and attains a
very marked maximum. In a gas the ions pro-
duced being much crowded together recombine
rapidly; so rapidly that the actual ionisation may
be quite concealed unless a sufficiently strong
electric force is applied to separate them. Such
is a brief summary of the climax of radioactive
discovery : — the birth, life and death of the alpha
ray. Its advent into Science has altered funda-
mentally our conception of matter. It is fraught
with momentous bearings upon Geological
Science. How the work of the alpha ray is some-
times recorded visibly in the rocks and what we
may learn from that record I propose now to
bring before you.

138 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

In certain minerals, notably the brown variety
of mica known as biotite, the microscope reveals
minute circular marks occurring here and there,
quite irregularly. The most usual appearance is
that of a circular area darker in colour than the
surrounding mineral. The radii of these little
disc-shaped marks when well defined are found
to be remarkably uniform, in some cases four-
hundredths of a millimetre and in others three-
hundredths, about. These are the measurements
in biotite. In other minerals the measurements
are not quite the same as in biotite. Such minute
objects are quite invisible to the naked eye. In
some rocks they are very abundant, indeed they
may be crowded together in such numbers as to
darken the colour of the mineral containing them.
They have long been a mystery to petrologists.

Close examination shows that there is always
a small speck of a foreign body at the centre of
the circle, and it is often possible to identify the
nature of this central substance, small though it
be. Most generally it is found to be the mineral
zircon. Now this mineral was shown by Strutt
to contain radium in quantities much exceeding
those found in ordinary rock substances. Some
other mineral may occasionally form the nucleus,
but we never find any which is not known to be
specially likely to contain a radioactive substance.
Another circumstance we notice. The smaller
this central nucleus the more perfect in form is
the darkened circular area surrounding it. When

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 139

the circle is very perfect and the central mineral
clearly defined at its centre we find by measure-
ment that the radius of the darkened area is
generally 0*033 mm. It may sometimes be 0*040
mm. These are always the measurements in
biotite. In other minerals the radii are a little
different.

We see in the photograph (Fig. 3), much magni-
fied, a halo contained in biotite. We are looking
at a region in a rock section, the rock being
ground down to such a thickness that light freely
passes through it. The biotite is in the centre of
the field. Quartz and felspar surround it. The
rock is a granite. The biotite is not all one
crystal. Two crystals, mutually inclined, are cut
across. The halo extends across both crystals,
but owing to the fact that polarised light is used
in taking the photograph it appears darker in one
crystal than in the other. We see the zircon
which composes the nucleus. The fine lineated
appearance of the biotite is due to the cleavage
of that mineral, which is cut across in the section.

The question arises whether the darkened area
surrounding the zircon may not be due to the in-
fluence of the radioactive substances contained in
the zircon. The extraordinary uniformity of the
radial measurements of perfectly formed haloes
(to use the name by which they have long been
known) suggests that they may be the result of
alpha radiation. For in that case, as we have
seen, we can at once account for the definite

140 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

radius as simply representing the range of the ray
in biotite. The furthest-reaching ray will define
the radius of the halo. In the case of the uranium
family this will be radium C, and in the case of
thorium it will be thorium C2. Now here we pos-
sess a means of at once confirming or rejecting
the view that the halo is a radioactive phenomenon
and occasioned by alpha radiation; for we can
calculate what the range of these rays will be in
biotite, availing ourselves of Bragg's additive
law, already referred to. When we make this
calculation we find that radium C just penetrates
0*033 mm. and thorium C2 0*040 mm. The proof
is complete that we are dealing with the effects
of alpha rays. Observe now that not only is the
coincidence of measurement and calculation a
proof of the view that alpha radiation has occa-
sioned the halo, but it is a very complete verifica-
tion of the important fact stated by Bragg, that
the stopping power depends solely on the atomic
weight of the atoms traversed by the ray.

We have seen that our examination of the
rocks reveals only the two sorts of halo : the
radium halo and the thorium halo. This is not
without teaching. For why not find an actinium
halo ? Now Rutherford long ago suggested that
this element and its derivatives were probably an
offspring of the uranium family; a side branch,
as it were, in the formation of which relatively
few transforming atoms took part. On Ruther-
ford's theory then, actinium should always accom-

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 141

pany uranium and radium, but in very subordinate
amount. The absence of actinium haloes clearly
supports this view. For if actinium was an inde-
pendent element we would be sure to find
actinium haloes. The difference in radius should
be noticeable. If, on the other hand, actinium
was always associated with uranium and radium,
then its effects would be submerged in those of
the much more potent effects of the uranium
series of elements.

It will have occurred to you already that if the
radioactive origin of the halo is assured, the shape
of a halo is not really circular, but spherical.
This is so. There is no such thing as a disc-
shaped halo. The halo is a spherical volume
containing the radioactive nucleus at its centre.
The true radius of the halo may, therefore, only
be measured on sections passing through the
nucleus.

In order to understand the mode of formation
of a halo we may profitably study on a diagram
the events which go on within the halo-sphere.
Such a diagram is seen in Fig. 4. It shows to
relatively correct scale the limiting range of all
the alpha-ray producing members of the uranium
and thorium families. We know that each mem-
ber of a family will exist in equilibrium amount
within the nucleus possessing the parent element.
Each alpha ray leaving the nucleus will just
attain its range and then cease to affect the mica.
Within the halo-sphere, there must be, therefore,

142 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

the accumulated effects of the influences of all the
rays. Each has its own sphere of influence, and
the spheres are all concentric.

The radii in biotite of the several spheres are
given in the following table : —

URANIUM FAMILY.

mm.

Radium C 0.0330

Radium A 0.0224

Ra Emanation 0.0196

Radium F 0.0177

Radium 0.0156

Ionium 0.0141

Uranium i 0.0137

Uranium 2 0.0118

THORIUM FAMILY.

mm.

Thorium C2 0.040

Thorium A 0.026

Th Emanation 0.023

Thorium Ct 0.022

Thorium X 0.020

Radiothorium 0.019

Thorium 0.013

In the photograph (Fig. 5) we see a uranium
and a thorium halo in the same crystal of mica.
The mica is contained in a rock-section and is cut
across the clevage. The effects of thorium C2
are clearly shown as a lighter border surrounding
the accumulated inner darkening due to the other
thorium rays (upper halo). The uranium halo
(to the right) similarly shows the effect of radium
C, but less distinctly.

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 143

Haloes which are uniformly dark all over as
described above are, in point of fact, " over-ex-
posed " ; to borrow a familiar photographic term.
Haloes are found which show much very beauti-
ful internal detail. Too vigorous action obscures
this detail just as detail is lost in an over-exposed
photograph. We may again have " under-
exposed " haloes in which the action of the several
rays is incomplete or in which the action of certain
of the rays has left little if any trace. Beginning
at the most under-exposed haloes we find circular
dark marks having the radius 0*012 or 0*013 mm-
These haloes are due to uranium although their
inner darkening is doubtless aided by the passage
of rays which were too few to extend the darken-
ing beyond the vigorous effects of the two
uranium rays. Then we find haloes carried out
to the radii 0*0 1 6, 0*018 and 0*019 mm. The last
sometimes show very beautiful outer rings having
radial dimensions such as would be produced by
radium A and radium C. Finally we may have
haloes in which interior detail is lost so far out
as the radius due to emanation or radium A, while
outside this floats the ring due to radium C. Cer-
tain variations of these effects may occur, mark-
ing, apparently, different stages of exposure.
Figs. 6 and 7 illustrate some of these stages ; the
latter photograph being greatly enlarged to show
clearly the halo-sphere of radium A.

In most of the cases referred to above the
structure evidently shows the existence of con-

144 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

centric spherical shells of darkened biotite. This
is a very interesting fact. For it proves that in
the mineral the alpha ray gives rise to the same
increased ionisation towards the end of its range
as Bragg determined in the case of gases. And
we must conclude that the halo in every case
grows in this manner. A spherical shell of
darkened biotite is first produced and the inner
colouration is only effected as the more feeble
ionisation along the track of the ray in course of
ages gives rise to sufficient alteration of the
mineral. This more feeble ionisation is, near the
nucleus, enhanced in its effects by the fact that
there all the rays combine to increase the ionisa-
tion and, moreover, the several tracks are there
crowded by the convergency to the centre.
Hence the most elementary haloes seldom show
definite rings due to uranium, etc., but appear as
embryonic disc-like markings. The photographs
on the screen illustrate many of the phases of halo
development. Rutherford succeeded in making
a halo artificially by compressing into a capillary
glass tube a quantity of the emanation of radium.
As the emanation decayed the various derived
products came into existence and all the several
alpha rays penetrated the glass; darkening the
walls of the capillary out to the limit of the range
of radium C in glass. Fig. 8 is a magnified
view of the tube. The dark central part is the
capillary. The tubular halo surrounds it. This
experiment has, however, been anticipated by

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 145

some scores of millions of years, for here is the
same effect in a biotite crystal (Fig. 9). Along
what are apparently tubular passages or cracks
in the mica, a solution, rich in radioactive sub-
stances, has moved ; probably during the final
consolidation of the granite in which the mica
occurs. A continuous and very regular halo has
developed along these conduits. A string of
halo-spheres may lie along such passages. We
must infer that solutions or gases able to establish
the radioactive nuclei moved along these conduits,
and we are entitled to ask if all the haloes in this
biotite are not, in this sense, of secondary origin.
There is, I may add, much to support such a con-
clusion.

It must not be thought that the under-exposed
halo is a recent creation. By no means. All are
old, appallingly old; and in the same rock all
are, probably, of the same, or nearly the same,
age. The under-exposure is simply due to a
lesser quantity of the radioactive elements in the
nucleus. They are under-exposed, in short, not
because of lesser duration of exposure, but be-
cause of insufficient action; as when in taking a
photograph the stop is not open enough for the
time of the exposure.

The halo has, so far, told us that the additive
law is obeyed in solid media and that the in-
creased ionisation attending the slowing down of
the ray obtaining in gases also obtains in solids ;
for, otherwise, the halo would not commence its

i46 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

development as a spherical shell or envelope.
But here we learn that there is probably a certain
difference in the course of events attending the
immediate passage of the ray in the gas and in
the solid. In the former initial recombination
may obscure the intense ionisation near the end
of the range. We can only detect the true end
effects by artificially separating the ions by a
strong electric force. If this recombination hap-
pened in the mineral we should not have the
concentric spheres so well defined as we see them
to be. What, then, hinders the initial recombina-
tion in the solid? The answer probably is that
the newly formed ion is instantly used up in a
fresh chemical combination. Nor is it free to
change its place as in the gas. There is simply a
new equilibrium brought about by its sudden pro-
duction. In this manner the conditions in the
complex molecule of biotite, tourmaline, etc., may
be quite as effective in preventing initial recom-
bination as the most effective electric force we
could apply. The final result is that we find the
Bragg curve reproduced most accurately in the
delicate shading of the rings making up the per-
fectly exposed halo.

That the shading of the rings reproduces the
form of the Bragg curve, projected, as it were,
upon the line of advance of the ray and repro-
duced in depth of shading, shows that in yet
another particular the alpha ray behaves much
the same in the solid as in the gas. A careful

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 147

examination of the outer edge of the circles always
reveals a steep but not abrupt cessation of the
action of the ray. Now Geiger has investigated
and proved the existence of scattering of the
alpha ray by solids. We may, therefore, suppose
with much probability that there is the same scat-
tering within the mineral near the end of the
range. The heavy iron atom of the biotite is,
doubtless, chiefly responsible for this in biotite
haloes. I may observe that this shading of the
outer bounding surface of the sphere of action is
found however minute the central nucleus. In
the case of a nucleus of considerable size another
effect comes in which tends to produce an
enhanced shading. This will result if rays pro-
ceed from different depths in the nucleus. If the
nucleus was of the same density and atomic
weight as the surrounding mica, there would be
little effect. But its density and molecular weight
are generally greater, hence the retardation is
greater, and rays proceeding from deep in the
nucleus experience more retardation than those
which proceed from points near to the surface.
The distances reached by the rays in the mica
will vary accordingly, and so there will be a
gradual cessation of the effects of the rays.

The result of our study of the halo may be
summed up in the statement that in nearly every
particular we have the phenomena which have
been measured and observed in the gas repro-
duced on a minute scale in the halo. Initial re-

148 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

combination seems, however, to be absent or
diminished in effectiveness; probably because of
the new stability instantly assumed by the ionised
atoms.

One of the most interesting points about the
halo remains to be referred to. The halo is
always uniformly darkened all round its circum-
ference and is perfectly spherical. Sections,
whether taken in the plane of cleavage of the
mica or across it, show the same exactly circular
form, and the same radius. Of course, if there
was any appreciable increase of range along or
across the cleavage the form of the halo on the
section across the cleavage should be elliptical.
The fact that there is no measurable ellipticity is,
I think, one which would not on first consideration
be expected.

For what are the conditions attending the pas-
sage of the ray in a medium such as mica?
According to crystallographic conceptions we
have here an orderly arrangement of molecules,
the units composing the crystal being alike in
mass, geometrically spaced, and polarised as re-
gards the attractions they exert one upon another.
Mica, more especially, has the cleavage phe-
nomenon developed to a degree which transcends
its development in any other known substance.
We can cleave it and again cleave it till its flakes
float in the air, and we may yet go on cleaving it
by special means till the flakes no longer reflect
visible light. And not less remarkable is the

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 149

uniplanar nature of its cleavage. There is little
cleavage in any plane but the one, although it is
easy to show that the molecules in the plane of
the flake are in orderly arrangement and are more
easily parted in some directions than in others.
In such a medium beyond all others we must look
with surprise upon the perfect sphere struck out
by the alpha rays, because it seems certain that
the cleavage is due to lesser attraction, and,
probably, further spacing of the molecules, in a
direction perpendicular to the cleavage.

It may turn out that the spacing of the mole-
cules will influence but little the average number
per unit distance encountered by rays moving in
divergent paths. If this is so we seem left to
conclude that in spite of its unequal and polarised
attractions there is equal retardation and equal
ionisation in the molecule in whatever direction it
is approached. Or, again, if the encounters in-
deed differ in number, then some compensating
effect must exist whereby a direction of lesser
linear density involves greater stopping power
in the molecule encountered, and vice versa.

The nature of the change produced by the
alpha rays is unknown. But the formation of the
halo is not, at least in its earlier stages, attended
by destruction of the crystallographic and optical
properties of the medium. The optical proper-
ties are unaltered in nature but increased in
intensity. This applies till the halo has become
so darkened that light is no longer transmitted

150 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

under the conditions of thickness obtaining in
rock sections. It is well known that there is in
biotite a maximum absorption of a plane polarised
light ray when the plane of vibration coincides
with the plane of cleavage. A section across the
cleavage then shows a maximum amount of
absorption. A halo seen on this section simply
produces this effect in a more intense degree.
This is well shown in Fig. 3 (ante) on a portion
of the halo-sphere. The descriptive name
" Pleochroic Halo " has originated from this
fact. We must conclude that the effect of the
ionisation due to the alpha ray has not been to
alter fundamentally the conditions which give
rise to the optical properties of the medium.
The increased absorption is probably associated
with some change in the chemical state of the iron
present. Haloes are, I believe, not found in
minerals from which this element is absent. One
thing is quite certain. The colouration is not due
to an accumulation of helium atoms, i.e., of spent
alpha rays. The evidence for this is conclusive.
If helium was responsible we should have haloes
produced in all sorts of colourless minerals.
Now we sometimes see zircons in felspars and in
quartz, etc., but in no such case is a halo pro-
duced. And halo-spheres formed within and
sufficiently close to the edge of a crystal of mica
are abruptly truncated by neighbouring areas of
felspar or quartz, although we know that the rays
must pass freely across the boundary. Again it

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 151

is easy to show that even in the oldest haloes the
quantity of helium involved is so small that one
might say the halo-sphere was a tolerably good
vacuum as regards helium. There is, finally, no
reason to suppose that the imprisoned helium
would exhibit such a colouration, or, indeed, any
at all.

I have already referred to the great age of the
halo. Haloes are not found in the younger
igneous rocks. It is probable that a halo less
than a million years old has never been seen.
This, prim& fade, indicates an extremely slow
rate of formation. And our calculations quite
support the conclusions that the growth of a halo,
if this has been uniform, proceeds at a rate of
almost unimaginable slowness.

Let us calculate the number of alpha rays
which may have gone to form a halo in the
Devonian granite of Leinster.

It is common to find haloes developed perfectly
in this granite, and having a nucleus of zircon
less than 5 x icr4 cms. in diameter. The volume
of zircon is 65* io'12 c,cs. and the mass 3X io'10
grm. ; and if there was in this zircon icr8 grm.
radium per gram (a quantity about five times the
greatest amount measured by Strutt), the mass
of radium involved is 3 x icf18 grm. From this
and from the fact ascertained by Rutherford that
the number of alpha rays expelled by a gram of
radium in one second is 3*4 x io10, we find that
three rays are shot from the nucleus in a year. If

iS2 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

now, geological time since the Devonian
is 50 millions of years, then 150 millions
of rays built up the halo. If geological
time since the Devonian is 400 millions of years,
then 1 200 millions of alpha rays are concerned in
its genesis. The number of ions involved, of
course, greatly exceeds these numbers. A single
alpha ray fired from radium C will produce 2*37 x
io5 ions in air.

But haloes may be found quite clearly defined
and fairly dark out to the range of the emanation
ray and derived from much less quantities of
radioactive materials. Thus a zircon nucleus
with a diameter of but 3*4 x icr4 cms. formed a halo
strongly darkened within, and showing radium A
and radium C as clear smoky rings. Such a
nucleus, on the assumption made above as to its
radium content, expels one ray in a year.
But, again, haloes are observed with less black-
ened pupils and with faint ring due to radium C,
formed round nuclei of rather less than 2 x icr4
cms. diameter. Such nuclei would expel one ray
in five years. And even lesser nuclei will
generate in these old rocks haloes with their
earlier characteristic features clearly developed.
In the case of the most minute nuclei, if my
assumption as to the uranium content is correct,
an alpha ray is expelled, probably, no oftener
than once in a century; and possibly at still
longer intervals.

The equilibrium amount of radium contained

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 153

in some nuclei may amount to only a few atoms.
Even in the case of the larger nuclei and more
perfectly developed haloes the quantity of radium
involved is many millions of times less than the
least amount we can recognise by any other
means. But the delicacy of the observation is
not adequately set forth in this statement. We
can not only tell the nature of the radioactive
family with which we are dealing; but we can
recognise the presence of some of its constituent
members. I may say that it is not probable the
zircons are richer in radium than I have assumed.
My assumption involves about 3 per cent, of
uranium. I know of no analyses ascribing so great
an amount of uranium to zircon. The variety
cyrtolite has been found to contain half this
amount, about. But even if we doubled our
estimate of radium content, the remarkable nature
of our conclusions is hardly lessened.

It may appear strange that the ever-interesting
question of the Earth's age should find elucida-
tion from the study of haloes. Nevertheless the
subjects are closely connected. The circum-
stances are as follows. Geologists have esti-
mated the age of the Earth since denudation
began, by measurements of the integral effects of
denudation. These methods agree in showing
an age of about io8 years. On the other hand,
measurements have been made of the accumula-
tion in minerals of radioactive debris — the helium
and lead — and results obtained which, although

i54 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

they do not agree very well among themselves,
are concordant in assigning a very much greater
age to the rocks. If the radioactive estimate is
correct, then we are now living in a time when
the denudative forces of the Earth are about
eight or nine times as active as they have been on
the average over the past. Such a state of things
is absolutely unaccountable. And all the more
unaccountable because from all we know we
would expect a somewhat lesser rate of solvent
denudation as the world gets older and the land
gets more and more loaded with the washed-out
materials of the rocks.

Both the methods referred to of finding the
age assume the principle of uniformity. The
geologist contends for uniformity throughout the
past physical history of the Earth. . The physicist
claims the like for the change-rates of the radio-
active elements. Now the study of the rocks
enables us to infer something as to the past his-
tory of our Globe. Nothing is, on the other
hand, known respecting the origin of uranium or
thorium — the parent radioactive bodies. And
while not questioning the law and regularity
which undoubtedly prevail in the periods of the
members of the radioactive families, it appears to
me that it is allowable to ask if the change rate of
uranium has been always what we now believe it
to be. This comes to much the same thing as
supposing that atoms possessing a faster change
rate once were associated with it which were

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 155

capable of yielding both helium and lead to the
rocks. Such atoms might have been collateral in
origin with uranium from some antecedent
element. Like helium, lead may be a derivative
from more than one sequence of radioactive
changes. In the present state of our knowledge
the possibilities are many. The change rate is
known to be connected with the range of the alpha
ray expelled by the transforming element; and
the conformity of the halo with our existing know-
ledge of the ranges is reason for assuming that,
whatever the origin of the more active associate
of uranium, this passed through similar elemental
changes in the progress of its disintegration.
There may, however, have been differences in the
ranges which the halo would not reveal. It is
remarkable that uranium at the present time is
apparently responsible for two alpha rays of very
different ranges. If these proceed from different
elements, one should be faster in its change rate
than the other. Some guidance may yet be forth-
coming from the study of the more obscure
problems of radioactivity.

Now it is not improbable that the halo may
contribute directly to this discussion. We can
evidently attack the biotite with a known number
of alpha rays and determine how many are re-
quired to produce a certain intensity of darken-
ing, corresponding to that of a halo with a nucleus
of measureable dimensions. On certain assump-
tions, which are correct within defined limits, we

156 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES

can calculate, as I have done above, the number
of rays concerned in forming the halo. In doing
so we assume some value for the age of the halo.
Let us take the maximum radioactive value. A
halo originating in Devonian times may attain a
certain central blackening from the effects of,
say, io8 rays. But now suppose we find that we
cannot produce the same degree of blackening
with this number of rays applied in the laboratory.
What are we to conclude ? I think there is only
the one conclusion open to us : that some other
source of alpha rays, or a faster rate of supply,
existed in the past. And this conclusion would
explain the absence of haloes from the younger
rocks ; which, in view of the vast range of effects
possible in the development of haloes, is, other-
wise, not easy to account for. It is apparent that
the experiment on the biotite has a direct bearing
on the validity of the radioactive method of esti-
mating the age of the rocks. It is now being
carried out by Professor Rutherford under reli-
able conditions.

Finally, there is one very certain and valuable
fact to be learned from the halo. The halo has
established the extreme rarity of radioactivity as
an atomic phenomenon. One and all of the
speculations as to the slow breakdown of the
commoner elements may be dismissed. The
halo shows that the mica of the rocks is radio-
actively sensitive. The fundamental criterion of
radioactive change is the expulsion of the alpha

PLEOCHROIC HALOES 157

ray. The molecular system of the mica and of
many other minerals is unstable in presence of
these rays, just as a photographic plate is unstable
in presence of light. Moreover, the mineral
integrates the radioactive effects in the same way
as a photographic salt integrates the effects of
light. In both cases the feeblest activities be-
come ultimately apparent to our inspection. We
have seen that one ray in each year since the
Devonian period will build the fully formed
halo : unlike any other appearance in the rocks.
And we have been able to allocate all the haloes
so far investigated to one or the other of the
known radioactive families. We are evidently
justified in the belief that had other elements
been radioactive we must either find characteris-
tic haloes produced by them, or else find a com-
plete darkening of the mica. The feeblest alpha
rays emitted by the relatively enormous quantities
of the prevailing elements, acting over the whole
duration of geological time — and it must be re-
membered that the haloes we have been studying
are comparatively young — must have registered
their effects on the sensitive minerals. And thus
we are safe in concluding that the common
elements, and, indeed, many which would be
called rare, are possessed of a degree of stability
which has preserved them unchanged since the
beginning of geological time. Each unaffected
flake of mica is, thus, unassailable proof of a fact
which but for the halo would, probably, have
been for ever beyond our cognisance.

246
Range in cms of air

Fig. i.

Fig. 2.

Fig. 3-

Fig. 4.

p

Fig. 6.

Fig. 7.

Fig. 8.

Fig. 9.

159

INDEX

Action, the result of memory grasping facts successfully, 116

Alpha ray, conditions of its passage in mica, 148

Alpha ray, discovery of, fraught with momentous bearings

upon geological science, 137

Alpha ray, nature of the change produced by, 149
Alpha ray, velocity of the, 129
Atoms, opposition of, to rays, 132
Automatism, 121

Beagle, voyage of the, and Darwin's early researches, 45

Bible teaching, Huxley's position in relation to, 25

Biological inquiry, new school of, under Huxley's lead, 16

Biological laboratOTies, introduction of, 19

Biology, Huxley's work in, 14

Biology, the science of, split up into* several branches, 17

Huxley's teaching and view point, 18

Biotite, pleochroic haloes indicating action of alpha ray in, 138
Bragg's discovery of the " stopping power '' of atoms, 134
Brain (the) and consciousness, 106

its functions, 107

functions of, in lower organisms, 109

Brain/ (the human) possesses power to oppose automatism, 122

Character : Huxley's efforts foir teaching which should build

up character, 25
Chemical composition of a medium a basis for calculating

the power of pemetration of rays, 135
Church, Huxley's conflict with the, 33 ; his position, 33

its opposition to natural knowledge, 40

Comparative anatomy, Huxley's memoirs on, 13
Conduct of life, Huxley's view of, 28
Consciousness a hyphen between past and future, 105
Consciousness in the lowest organisms, 112

160 INDEX

Consciousness, its relations with nature and life, 99
Consciousness : what is meant by the term, 103
Conventional notions on the facts of ancient history, 76
Creation, the triumph of life expressed in, 126

Darwin's early studies in evolution, 45

Darwin's Origin of Species, Huxley's championship of, 36

Democracy the ruling power, 66

Descartes, Huxley's essay on, 79

Divine guidance and command claimed among ancient

peoples, a substitute for reason, 58
Divine ideas as the basis of human progress, 56

Earth, age of the, elucidated from the study of haloes, 153
Education: Huxley's work on the London School Board, 21;

his theory of teaching, 22, et seq; school methods, 23 ;

his moral standpoint, 25 ; his views on secular education,

27

Education, scientific, importance of, 71
Environment, Rudimentary beings as well adapted to, as

man, 120

Environment, spiritual, 64
Evil, power of, stronger than the povrer of good (J. S. Mill's

view), 70

Evolution of species, 119
Explosive nature of the energy used for directing movement,

H5

Foodstuffs storing up energy for movement in conscious

animals, 115

French Revolution, faults in its efforts to remould society, 88
Future state, natural knowledge brings no proof of a, 34

Gases, range or distance travelled at ordinary pressure, 130
Geiger's proof of the existence of scattering of the haloes by

solids, 147
Good, power of, not so strong as the power of evil (J. S.

Mill's view), 70
Greek susceptibility to ideas, 56, 57

Halo development, 144
Halo, formation of a, 141
Haloes, " under-exposed," 143

INDEX 161

Helium atom, the, 129

History, the study of, 73

Human progress due to creative and life-giving impulses, 56

Human race, unity of the history of, QI

Human science, how the study of, should be organised, 94

Human science, the twentieth century, the great age of, 83

Huvelin, M.P., on the importance of historical studies, 75

Huxley , lecture on, by Sir Michael Foster, 9 et seq

Huxley, a philosopher and a theologian, 53

Huxley and Natural Selection, by Prof. E. B. Poulton, 45,
et seq

Huxley not a Materialist, 5

Huxley, as a member of the London School Board, 21

Huxley, his connection with Birmingham, 4; his love of
knowledge, 10 ; his interest in machinery, n : his early
wish to be an engineer, 12; his labours in the field of
comparative anatomy, 13; his voyage on the Rattlesnake
and its results, 14; Huxley as a teacher, 16

Huxley, his conflict with the Church, 33 ; his championship of
Darwin, 36

Huxley lectures, complete list of, 5

Ideas, intellectual presentation of, 66

Impulse in low organisms to advance into a higher state, 120

Inquiry, spirit of, calling in question established principles,

68

lonisation effected by various rays, 131
lonisation, nature of, attending the passage of the rays, 136

Jews, the, owe their place in history to their belief in divine

government, 56, 57
Joy, a signal of the triumph of life, 125

Leibnitz's definition of matter, 104

Life and Consciousness, by H. Bergson, 99 et seq

Life, conduct of, Huxley's view of, 28

Life, entrance of, into the world, 113

Literary education imperfect unless accompanied by scientific

teaching, 71

Lodge (Sir Oliver), Life and Matter, 127
London School Board, Huxley's connection with, 21

i62 INDEX

Machinery, Huxley's keen interest in, 1 1

Malthus " on Population," influence of, on Darwin's theory

of natural selection, 45 ; and on Wallace's studies in

evolution, 46 •
Man, evolution of, the unique instance of the power of

evolution to break the chain of automatism, 122
Man, nature of, to be regarded as a whole, 29
Man should be the subject-matter of teaching, 71, 73

the historic sciences as applied to the study of man, 73

psychological science as applied to, 77

sociological science as applied to, 79

Mason College, foundation stone of, laid by Huxley, 4

Materialism, Huxley not a supporter of, 6

Memory, a rapid series of successive vibrations, 117

Memory and consciousness, 103

Mica, the cleavage phenomenon in, 148

Mica, existence of uranium and thorium haloes in, 142

Mill, John Stuart, writings of, 68; his view on the religious

observance of Sunday, 69
Mind (the), is consciousness, 103
Moral nature, aspirations of our, not contradicted by positive

science, 127
Movement, how a conscious animal obtains power of, from

matter, 115

Natural knowledge, improvement of, important, 31

gives man directive agencies and power for the conduct

of life, 32

Natural selection (Huxley and), 45 et seq

Philosophy, meagre light thrown by older systems of, on the

problem of consciousness, 100

Plants, basic quality of all food derived from, 115
Pleochroic Haloes, by Prof. John Joly, 129 et seq

origin of the term, 150

great age of, 151

Priestley, Joseph, statue of, unveiled by Huxley, 4
Psychological science, importance of, as applied to the study

of Man, 78
Psychology of Religion, 78

INDEX 163

Radioactivity, 136

Radioactivity, extreme rarity of, as an atomic phenomenon,

established by the halo, 156
Radium, largely present in Zircon, 138
Rationalism and Science in relation to Social Movements., 53

et seq

Rationalism and divine inspiration, 59
Rationalism, definition of, 55
Rattlesnake, Huxley's voyage on the, 14
Religion, Psychology of, 78
Religion, Unsectarian, Huxley's position as to religious

teaching, 25
Research studentships necessary to the study of human

science, 95

Revelation and reason, 58

Rights of man, doctrine of, " dead as Rousseau," 68
Rocks, the work of the alpha ray recorded visibly on, 137
Romans, the, their sense of civic law and order, 56, 57

Science and rationalism in relation to social movements, 53

et seq

Science, definition of, 55

Science, spirit of, different, from the spirit of rationalism, 70
Scientific education, importance of, for the well-being and

progress of society, 71

Scientific work reproductive and fertile, 14
Secular education, Huxley's views on, 27
Sensation, nature of, 117
Slavery abolition controversy, ethical versus rational impulse

of, 60

effect of competition between a slave-holding and a non-
slave-holding state, 62
Social movements, rationalism and science in relation to, 53

et seq

Socialism and its results, 84
Sociological science, importance of, as applied to the study of

man, 79
Specialism, extreme, importance of avoiding, in human

science, 93
Spinal cord (the), a storehouse of ready-made complex actions,

1 08

164 INDEX

Spiritual environment, and the commonwealth of spirit, 64
Spontaneous motion in the vegetable world, in
Stomach (the), and the digestive processes, 105
Sunday, religious observance of (J. S. Mill's view), 69
Superficiality, importance of avoiding, in human science, 93
Survival of the fittest, principle of, exemplified, 63

Teaching, Huxley's theory of, 22
Thought, expression of, in words, 123

Thought, materialisation of, into literary or artistic form, 124
Town-planning, in reality a branch of human science, 80;
value of the study of ancient architecture in, 82

Universities should become great schools of human science, 89
Vegetable world, spontaneous motion in the, in

Wallace, A. R. : synchronism of his discovery of evolution
with that of Darwin, 46

Zircon, quantity of radium found in, 138

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