Readings from Huxley, ed., with introduction

READINGS

FROM
HUXLEY

RINAKER

Presented to the
LIBRARY of the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

by
The Estate of the late

PROFESSOR A. S. P. WOODHOUSE

Head of the

Department of English

University College

1944-1964

^j.

READINGS
FROM HUXLEY

EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION BY

CLARISSA RINAKER, PH.D.

ASSOCIATE IN ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, IQ20, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.

PKINTBD IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO MY COLLEAGUES

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION v

SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY . xxvii

BIBLIOGRAPHY xxxii

READINGS FROM HUXLEY

AUTOBIOGRAPHY i

ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING

NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 16

THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION . 37

PROLEGOMENA 43

V THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE IN HUMAN

SOCIETY 79

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 113

~* A LIBERAL EDUCATION 132

ON SCIENCE AND ART IN RELATION TO EDU-
CATION 138

INTRODUCTION

THE pursuit of truth was the keynote of Huxley's
life and work. Not that he was always right; as Sam
Slick said, "there is a great deal of human nature in all
mankind." Like the rest of us, though we must admit
less often than the rest of us, he sometimes mistook
error for truth; he held at various times, perhaps even
at the same time, ideas inconsistent with one another.
He was right more often than we, however, and he was
able to add to the world's knowledge, to the sum of
truth, not only because he had early learned from Car-
lyle the hatred of cant, humbugs, and shams, but also
because his conception of truth provided a method of
discovering and rejecting error. Huxley never regarded
truth as final, but always as progressive. Like the
pragmatist, he held it impossible to establish fixed and
eternal truth by discovering and reasoning from the so-
called laws of the universe; he_rather sought by obser-
vation, deduction, and verification — i.e., by the scientific
method — to generalise the facts of existence as we
find them, and thus to arrive at rational certainty. In
the scientific field, which was particularly his own, and
which lends itself to a strict method of truth seeking
and finding more readily (but no more justly) than do
abstract subjects, this method was highly successful and
led to the establishment of important truth. In the
field of ethics, however, Huxley was less successful.
His most valuable work there was destructive — in ex-
posing by his method of verification the fallacy of de-

vi INTRODUCTION

pending too much upon absolute authority. When he
undertook, however, to build up his own system of
ethics, he had not the same command of evidence that
he had in science, and he sometimes accepted assump-
tions which a rigid application of his method would
have led him to reject.

To one who insists upon an immutable, absolute truth,
Huxle'y may well seem not to arrive at truth at all;
indeed he admitted that "it may fairly be doubted
whether any generalisation, or hypothesis, based upon
physical data is absolutely true, in the sense that a
mathematical proposition is so." And he bases "ra-
tional certainty" upon two grounds: "the one that the
evidence in favour of a given statement is as good as
it can be"- — when "the statement is to be taken as
true"; the other, "that such evidence is plainly insuffi-
cient," — when it is untrue. But in each case it is true
or false only "until something arises to modify the
verdict, which, however properly reached, may always
be more or less wrong, the best information being never
complete, and the best reasoning being liable to fallacy."
This pragmatic kind of truth is, however, more rather
than less dependable than so-called absolute truth be-
cause, as Huxley points out, since the errors of such
scientific generalisation "can become apparent only out-
side the limits of practicable observation, it may be just
as usefully adopted . . . as if it were absolutely true."
The justification of employing such postulates "as
axioms of physical philosophy, lies in the circumstance
that expectations logically based upon them are verified,
or at any rate, not contradicted, whenever they can be
tested by experience." Truth which rests upon authority
or a priori assumption, on the other hand, defies both
changing circumstances and verification of its dicta. A
recent critic of Huxley, Mr. Paul Elmer More, condemns

INTRODUCTION vii

Huxley's use of uncontradicted as well as verified hy-
potheses because, he says, the way to truth does not
lie through error. That assertion seems to me less well
founded than Bacon's saying, reiterated by Huxley,
that "truth more easily comes out of error than out of
confusion." This is certainly the case when one is
armed with Huxley's habit of testing every hypothesis
by bringing in all the evidence available — "is the evi-
dence adequate to bear out the theory, or is it not?"-
and his determination to "rest in no lie, and to rest in
no verbal delusions."

The perception that truth is not final did not, as I
said at starting, prevent Huxley from regarding it as
the immediate jewel of his soul. Perhaps indeed truth
is to be the more jealously cherished when every man
bears the responsibility of discovering and preserving
it. At any rate Huxley conceived highly of his duty
to truth, watched anxiously his worthiness to serve it,
and was resolved greatly to find quarrel in a straw when
truth was at the stake. He wrote to his sister in 1850:

"I will leave my mark somewhere, and it shall be clear and
distinct | T.H.H., his mark. | and free from the abominable- blur
of cant, humbug, and self-seeking which surrounds everything
in this present world — that is to say, supposing that I am
not already unconsciously tainted myself, a result of which I
have a morbid dread."

After forty years his adherence to truth was but
strengthened by the battles he had waged in her name
against adversaries superior in numbers, entrenched in
ages old habits of thought, and fortified by ecclesiastical
authority.

"Belief in majorities is not rooted in my breast, and if all
the world were against me the fact might warn me to revise
and criticise my opinions, but would not in itself supply a ghost

viii INTRODUCTION

of a reason for forsaking them. For myself I say deliberately,
it is better to have a millstone tied around the neck and be
thrown into the sea than to share the enterprises of those to
whom the world has turned, and will turn, because they minister
to its weaknesses and cover up the awful realities which it
shudders to look at."

So effectively did Huxley serve truth in the realm of
science that it is hard now to realise that fifty years ago
it was necessary to contend vigorously for the introduc-
tion of the experimental method in the study of the
natural sciences as well as in physics and chemistry, that
there was a fury of opposition to the theory of evolu-
tion, or that the very foundations of religion were felt
to rock when science asserted that the Biblical account of
the creation and of the flood is chiefly legend, that
there is insufficient real evidence of the "existence and
activity of a demonic world," and that the strict his-
torical accuracy of the Pentateuch and the Gospels may
be questioned.

Huxley's contributions to purely scientific knowledge
I am incompetent to discuss; I accept the judgment of
others that they are of the highest value. But I believe
that, valuable as his scientific studies are, they do not
claim the attention of students of literature as his
less technical essays do. One gains, however, a
heightened opinion of the powers of man when he looks
over the eleven pages of titles of scientific memoirs in
Leonard Huxley's Life and Letters of his father. The
first is "On a Hitherto Undescribed Structure in the Hu-
man Hair Sheath," 1845, the last, "The Gentians: Notes
and Queries," 1888; the subjects between range over

INTRODUCTION ix

observations on plants and animals of the land and sea,
little known, familiar, and fossil, on the structure and
motion of glaciers, on comparative anatomy and oste-
ology, on the relation of man to the lower animals, on
ethnology, paleontology, and on other subjects whose
names mean nothing to the lay reader. These scientific
studies Huxley did not see fit to include in the nine
volumes of his collected essays, 1893 and 1894, and only
three of these volumes are chiefly scientific, Darwiniana,
Man's Place in Nature, and Discourses, Biological and
Geological. These three include some of his most
brilliant writing and are admirable models of lucid and
fascinating exposition of difficult subjects. They ex-
hibit too his great gift of showing the significance of
science in human life, of seeing science not as a realm
apart but as a means of understanding the world in
which we live and man's relation to it. And so science
taught Huxley not only that the chalky cliffs of Eng-
land and the coral reefs of the south seas have been
built up during ages from the skeletons of tiny animals,
and that all life, both vegetable and animal, is connected
by a common physical basis, but that even man, "in
substance and in structure, one with the brutes," takes
his place in "Nature's great progression." However I
have omitted selections from these essays from this little
book because they have lost the glamour of novelty and
they have not the lively challenge of the essays on sub-
jects still in dispute.

But if we cannot dwell on the results of Huxley's
labours in the realm of pure science, we can admire the
method by which they were attained, the "only method
by which intellectual truth can be reached," as Huxley
said, which "simply uses with scrupulous exactness the
methods which we all, habitually and at every moment,
use carelessly." And we can perceive ample justifica-

x INTRODUCTION

tion, so. far as science is concerned, for his belief that
"the only source of real knowledge lies in the applica-
tion of scientific methods of inquiry to the ascertainment
of the facts of existence; that the ascertainable is in-
finitely greater than the ascertained." So when Darwin
startled the world with his theory of evolution, Huxley
was ready first to examine it, to point out its weak
points, and then to become its ardent champion and
"Darwin's bull-dog." "The only rational course for
those who had no other object than the attainment of
truth," he wrote in a chapter contributed to the Life of
Darwin, "was to accept 'Darwinism' as a working hy-
pothesis and see what could be made of it. Either it
would prove its capacity to elucidate the facts of or-
ganic life, or it would break down under the strain."

Once convinced of the essential truth of the theory
of evolution, Huxley did valuable service in extending
the application of that truth to human life. For him
the theory destroyed the mechanistic conception of the
universe and showed that a world which had grown from
a nebulous mass and produced forms of life and of in-
telligence is a world in which further progress is pos-
sible and in which man may have a share in shaping
his own destiny and that of his fellows. Instead of re-
garding man's place in the scheme of evolution as de-
grading, as many of his contemporaries did, he saw in
his rise from "lowly stock," "the best evidence of the
splendour of his capacities," and "in his long progress
through the Past, a reasonable ground of faith in his
attainment of a noble Future."

One of the great moments in Huxley's career was his
reply to Wilberforce who, as the champion of orthodoxy,
attacked the theory of evolution at a meeting of the
British Association at Oxford in 1860. The Bishop is
said to have spoken "for full half an hour with inimitable

INTRODUCTION xi

spirit, emptiness, and unfairness" to a large and distin-
guished audience. He concluded by turning to Huxley,
who sat on the platform, and asking "with a smiling
insolence" whether it was "through his grandfather or
his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a
monkey?" At this stooping to personality Huxley is
said to have struck his hand upon his knee, exclaiming
to his neighbor, "The Lord hath delivered him into
mine hands." Huxley's reply created a tremendous
sensation, so tremendous that no one could remember
exactly what he said. What was clear to all was that
he had delivered a stinging and characteristic rebuke to
that smug orthodoxy which repudiated science when
it seemed to threaten its authority. The most accurate
account of the reply, according to Leonard Huxley, is
that of J. R. Green.

"I asserted — and I repeat — that a man has no reason to be
ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were
an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would
rather be a man — a man of restless and versatile intellect —
who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere
of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has
no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric,
and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at
issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious
prejudice."

II

Next to his work as a scientist Huxley is perhaps best
known for his work in education, particularly in his own
field of scientific education. Like Matthew Arnold, who
was even more actively eneaeed in educational reform,
he endeavoured, in one of the darkest ages for education
in England, to make accessible to all a substantial and

Xll

INTRODUCTION

liberal education and to revise the curricula and methods
of teaching in schools of all grades. It is often sup-
posed, from Arnold's mentioning Huxley in Literature
and Science, that the two were at odds in their educa-
tional programmes. As a matter of fact it was Herbert
Spencer who urged the extreme demands of science which
Arnold rejected, while Arnold and Huxley probably
agreed in more points than they differed in. As a man
of letters Arnold had great faith in the humanities and
wished to reform and extend the teaching of literature
and the classics, to the end that men might gain "sober-
ness, righteousness, and wisdom." As a scientist Huxley
sought to demonstrate the educational value of scientific
study and wished to add it to the older subjects, that
men might be freed from the thraldom of error. But
Huxley was far from thinking that science should con-
stitute the whole, or even the greater part, of a general
education. He repeatedly insisted that it should but be
added to literature, history, ethics, philosophy, music,
and drawing.

Huxley's idea of the purpose of education is very
practical, yet, well-considered, not without elevation; it
is to learn the rules of the game of life.

"In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect
in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely
things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the
fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and
loving desire to move in harmony with those laws."

To this end he deemed it necessary to make the educa-
tion of specialists — of doctors and scientists — more
literary and to make general education more scientific.
In exceptional cases, if he could feel sure that the would-
be scientist had "the physical and mental energy to make
a mark in science/' he would "drive him straight at

INTRODUCTION xiii

science, taking care that he got a literary training
through English, French, and German. An average
capacity, on the other hand," he added, "may be im-
mensely helped by university means of flotation." To
insure a wide diffusion of scientific education he main-
tained that instruction in the elements of physical science
should commence in the elementary schools, but it
should not be "teaching astronomy and the use of the
globes, and the rest of the abominable trash — but a
little instruction of the child in what is the nature of
common things about him; what their properties are,
and in what relation this actual body of man stands to
the universe outside of it."

The importance of the subject of universal education
greatly impressed Huxley. "A great deal is said of
British interests just now," he said in 1877, "but, depend
upon it, that no Eastern difficulty needs our interven-
tion as a nation so seriously, as the putting down both
the Bashi-Bazouks of ignorance and the Cossacks of
sectarianism at home. What has already been achieved
in these directions is a great thing. ... An education
better in its processes, better in its substance, than that
which was accessible to the great majority of well-to-do
Britons a quarter of a century ago, is now obtainable
by every child in the land." But he was far from satis-
fied with the provision of respectable elementary edu-
cation. He wished also such continuation schools —
good public secondary schools, popular universities, and
technical schools — as would constitute "an educational
ladder from the gutter to the university, whereby chil-
dren of exceptional ability might reach the place for
which nature had fitted them." He was most eager,
and held it one of the best arguments for the state sup-
port of education, to provide means for discovering, de-
veloping, and utilizing the capacities of specially gifted

xiv INTRODUCTION

men. "The most important object of all educational
schemes," he said, "is to catch these exceptional people,
and turn them to account for the good of society . . .
to keep these glorious sports of Nature from being either
corrupted by luxury or starved by poverty, and to put
them into the position in which they can do the work
for which they are especially fitted."

Ill

Huxley's efforts to put into effect his educational
schemes kindled an interest in political theory, and his
theories are the logical result of his habit of subjecting
a priori reasoning to the process of verification by facts.
In 1871 when, as a member of the School Board he wished
to demonstrate the wisdom and legality of state support
of education, he wrote an address, Administrative
Nihilism, in which he pointed out the danger to the
state of the doctrine of laissez-faire in education, and
demonstrated the right and duty of the state to provide
means of education. His main argument is that it is
the duty of the state not simply to punish wrongdoing,
but actively to promote the welfare of its citizens.

His other political essays were written nearly twenty
years later. They are directed mainly against the "su-
perficially plausible doctrines" of Rousseau and
similar political speculators. Their doctrines were being
revived by Henry George and other millenarian social-
ists and seemed to Huxley to threaten the peace if not
the safety of society, and he felt bound to expose them.
"I thought," he said, "it was my duty to see whether
some thirty years' training in the art of making diffi-
cult questions intelligible to audiences without much
learning, but with that abundance of keen practical sense

INTRODUCTION xv

which characterises English workmen of the better class,
would enable me to do something towards the counter-
action of the fallacious guidance which is offered to
them." And so he shows that to base any political
theory on the supposed substitution of a voluntary social
contract for an hypothetical state cf nature, whether
for the purpose of guaranteeing the freedom of the in-
dividual or of maintaining the general welfare by the
complete surrender of individual rights to the sovereign
state, is to create a false dilemma. Government need
not choose between Anarchy and Regimentation, An-
archy, which permits no other restraint upon individual
freedom than "such ethical and intellectual considera-
tions as may be fully recognised by the individual," and
Regimentation, which undertakes to "regulate not only
production and consumption, but every detail of human
life." Both these theories are based upon the assump-
tion of a state of nature which never existed and upon
the unwarranted derivation of civil from natural rights.
"Perhaps it is the prejudice of scientific habit," wrote
Huxley, "which leads me to think that it might be as
well to proceed from the known to the unknown."
Therefore he maintained that the problems of govern-
ment cannot be solved in the lump by reference to a
priori formulae but by facing the concrete problems as
they appear. We can, however, learn from experience in
self and family government to steer a middle course be-
tween rigid restraint and unlimited freedom.

IV

In his essay On the Improvement of the Natural
History Sciences Huxley claimed for the study of science
not only that it "conferred practical benefits on men,"

xvi INTRODUCTION

but, by changing "their conceptions of the universe and
of themselves," "their modes of thinking and their views
of right and wrong," it discovered "the ideas which can
alone still spiritual cravings." Not everyone would find
his spiritual cravings satisfied by so forbidding a moral
system as Huxley's — certainly not one who had learned
to rest comfortably in a religious belief which guarantees
the ultimate triumph of good, which makes evil either a
hideous but fleeting nightmare or a mysterious source of
discipline and means to moral perfection, and which re-
lieves him of responsibility for and voluntary share in
the improvement of the world and of himself — beyond
the acceptance of the opportunity offered him and
obedience of the laws laid down for his guidance.

By applying in the field of religion the same principle
that he used in every other field of knowledge, Huxley
arrived first at negative results, the failure to find "logi-
cally satisfactory evidence" of the truth of religious doc-
trines or of such generally accepted beliefs as human
immortality and the existence of a God. Therefore he
accepted the "verdict of 'not proven' " though he re-
garded it as "undoubtedly unsatisfactory and essentially
provisional, so far forth as the subject of the trial is
capable of being dealt with by due process of reason."
He wished, however, to give himself a label among
"-ists of one sort or another" and to relieve himself of
the name of atheist, materialist, and other opprobrious
titles which implied that he had closed the case against
religion. So he invented the title "agnostic" as "sug-
gestively antithetic to the 'gnostic' of Church history,
who professed to know so much about the very things
of which I was ignorant," and for his principle, "ag-
nosticism." Agnosticism he called a method rather than
a creed, "except in so far as it expresses absolute faith
in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical

INTRODUCTION xvii

as intellectual." The essence of this principle is his
theory of truth, "that it is wrong for a man to say
that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposi-
tion unless he can produce evidence which logically
justifies that certainty." On the other hand he denied
and repudiated "as immoral . . . the contrary doc-
trine, that there are propositions which men ought to
believe, without logically satisfactory evidence." In
obedience to this principle he was unable to believe in
the doctrine of immortality, since to do so seemed to
him to mean accepting desire as a basis of truth. "Nor
does it help to tell me that the aspirations of mankind
— that my own highest aspirations even — lead me
towards the doctrine of immortality. I doubt the fact,
to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in
grand words asking me to believe a thing because I
like it."

Huxley's belief that even the evidence for religion must
be subjected to the same test of verification as any other
sort of truth led him to deny the accuracy of much
Biblical and ecclesiastical history. His criticism of the
"Mosaic" authorship of the Pentateuch and the tra-
ditional authorship of the Gospels, his challenge of the
scientific correctness of the Biblical account of Creation
and the Flood, and of the "demonology of primitive
Christianity" brought upon him the unmerited reproach
of hating Christianity and of wantonly attacking the
Bible. As a result he became involved in a heated
controversy with Gladstone and some less distinguished
champions, who feared that the fate of religion itself
depended upon the literal acceptance of ecclesiastical tra-
dition as well as of the Bible. Two volumes of Huxley's
Collected Essays, Science and Hebrew Tradition, and
Science and Christian Tradition, contain his contributions
to this controversy, and include some of his most

xviii INTRODUCTION

spirited writing. They are not represented in this book,
however, for, as Huxley said, "few literary dishes are less
appetising than cold controversy."

Although the principle of agnosticism made accep-
tance of orthodox religion impossible for Huxley, he
was not without what he considered true religion,
"the reverence and love for the ethical ideal, and
the desire to realise that ideal in life, which every
man ought to feel." To religion of this sort he held as
firmly as to his ideal of truth, with which it is perhaps
identical.

In the field of morals Huxley was therefore convinced
that to " 'learn what is true, in order to do what is right,'
is the summing up of the whole duty of man, for all
who are unable to satisfy their mental hunger with the
east wind of authority." But where is moral truth to
be found? Not in nature any more than in religious
authority. Huxley found no evidence of moral and
benevolent government in the universe. The governing
principle of nature, by which he meant the "sum of the
'customs of mattery he regarded as "intellectual and
not moral." Yet he was disposed at times to find in
nature one moral quality, justice. "The more I know
intimately the lives of -other men (to say nothing of my
own), the more obvious it is to me that the wicked does
not flourish nor is the righteous punished. But for this
to be clear we must bear in mind . . . that the re-
wards of life are contingent upon obedience to the whole
law — physical as well as moral — and that moral
obedience will not atone for physical sin, or vice versa"
This is perhaps less a description of a moral quality
than a recognition of the operation in nature of the laws
of cause and effect.

At any rate Huxley habitually regarded nature as the
enemy of morality and of the society in which morality

INTRODUCTION xix

flourishes. "Of moral purpose," he said, "I see no trace
in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human
manufacture — and very much to our credit." Huxley
really has two systems of morality, one derived partly
by the method he condemned, from a priori reasoning
about the laws of nature and the laws of society, the
other by observation and experiment. According to the
first the law of nature is the law of the struggle for
existence, and teaches man to cultivate self-assertion in
order that he may survive in that struggle. The law
which governs human society, on the other hand, "com-
mands the sacrifice of the self to the common good" and
develops the quality of self-restraint. But in making
self-assertion the necessary virtue of man in a state of
nature and self-restraint the virtue of man in society,
Huxley was following not the evidence of experience
but the old error of identifying the self with the lower
impulses instead of with all man's interests. As a result
he involves man in a hopeless dilemma. If he makes
self-assertion the law of his being, society is impossible;
if he makes self-restraint his law, he becomes the victim
either of less virtuous men or of nature, which is always
waiting to reduce him to the level from which he has
risen by cultivating the opposite quality. Moreover he
makes sympathy the basis of moral conduct and the
'golden rule" a "negation of law by the refusal to put
it in motion against law-breakers." What he overlooked
is that man needs neither unlimited expansion nor mere
restraint but development in the direction of a moral
ideal.

In his other system of morals, which is not of course
distinct from the one I have just briefly described,
Huxley recognised that men have such moral ideals.
The aim of morality is then the preservation of society
so that the "individual may reach the fullest and highest

xx INTRODUCTION

life attainable by man." And the means of attaining
this end are "discoverable — like the other so-called
laws of Nature — by observation and experiment, and
only in that way." The rules of the game of life Huxley
compares to the draughtsman's rules for perspective.
The moral man has also a "moral sense" or "innate
sense of moral beauty" analogous to the artistic sense
and stronger in some men than in others. This moral
sense furnishes its possessors with the motive for doing
their duty which must be supplied to others by the "fear
of punishment in all its grades, from mere disapproba-
tion to hanging." These "men of moral genius" give us
our "ideals of duty and visions of moral perfection,
which ordinary mankind could never have attained:
though, happily for them, they can feel the beauty of
a vision" and can endeavour to reproduce "some faint
image of it in the actual world." They furnish the
"ethical ideals" without which neither human beings nor
human society can progress. On this basis Huxley
asserts that "the moral law, like the laws of physical
nature, rests in the long run upon instinctive intuitions,
and is neither more nor less 'innate' and 'necessary' than
they are." That it is still, like the laws of physical
nature, is discovered and verified by observation and
experience.

But Huxley saw two finally insuperable obstacles put
by non-moral nature in the way of man's progress toward
his ideal of moral perfection: over-population, which
would eventually throw him back into the struggle for
existence, and the reversal of the evolutionary progress,
which would make his efforts useless. The contempla-
tion of this losing fight is infinitely depressing — or
would be to one of less indomitable courage than Huxley.
In the conflict with nature man, he says, "in virtue of
his intelligence" is able so to "influence and modify the

INTRODUCTION xxi

cosmic process" as visibly to improve his condition. And
this road of progress toward human perfection can be
followed so long as the process of evolution continues on
an upward course, but, "some time, the summit will be
reached and the downward route will be commenced.
The most daring imagination will hardly venture upon
the suggestion that the power and intelligence of man
can ever arrest the procession of the great year." In
the face of the ultimate catastrophe when the cooling
globe will have finally triumphed over human effort,
Huxley had to find what comfort he could nearer at
hand. "There is nothing of permanent value," he wrote
in 1890 "(putting aside a few human affections),
nothing that satisfies quiet reflection — except the sense
of having worked according to one's capacity and light,
to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of
all sorts."

In the case of the individual he saw also no end to
the struggle between the law of nature and the law of
morality, and the outcome was no more cheering. "The
motive of the drama of human life is the necessity, laid
upon every man who comes into the world, of discovering
the mean between self-assertion and self-restraint suited
to his character and his circumstances. And the eter-
nally tragic aspect of the drama lies in this: that the
problem set before us is one the elements of which can
be but imperfectly known, and of which even an ap-
proximately right solution rarely presents itself, until
that stern critic, aged experience, has been furnished
with ample justification for venting his sarcastic humour
upon the irreparable blunders we have already made."

The gloom of Huxley's view of the universe is in-
creased by the ideas of human freedom and necessity
which he sometimes, but not consistently, held. To be
sure, his view at its gloomiest is, as he said, no more

xxii INTRODUCTION

deterministic than Jonathan Edwards's, but he himself
rejected the tu quoque argument. And at times he
expressed other ideas which, had they been definitely
connected with his idea of evolution, could have pro-
duced a conception of a growing world in which new
yet not uncaused events occur. On the side of de-
terminism he held that men are but "conscious auto-
mata, endowed with free will in the only intelligible
sense of that much-abused term — inasmuch as in many
respects we are able to do as we like — but none the
less parts of the great series of causes and events which,
in unbroken continuity, composes that which is, and has
been, and shall be — the sum of existence." This is
of course not consistent with his belief in man's ability
to modify his environment and to realize even partly his
mofal ideals. But his explanation that the idea of neces-
sity has a "logical, and not a physical foundation" is
more hopeful. And his distinction between necessity and
law is quite in accord with his theory of truth: "Neces-
sary," he says, means "that of which we cannot conceive
the contrary," and "law" is "a rule which we have al-
ways found to hold good, and which we expect always
will hold good." On this basis he is justified in con-
demning the way in which the "notion of necessity" has
been "illegitimately thrust into the perfectly legitimate
conception of law" by changing "will into must." It is
unfortunate for Huxley's reputation as an ethical phil-
osopher that he did not hold more firmly to the ideas
thus briefly indicated, and develop them in connection
with his other ideas of human progress towards a moral
ideal.

In spite of the gloomy view he took of both the im-
mediate and the ultimate result of human effort, so long
as both good and evil exist and any amelioration is
possible, Huxley repudiated pessimism as firmly as op-

INTRODUCTION xxiii

timism. And his useful life, his courageous spirit, and
his firm belief that in spite of pain, sorrow, and evil, life
is well worth living, and that "escape from pain and
sorrow" is not the "proper object of life," silence the
accusation that springs to one's lips. All philosophical
questions resolved themselves for him into one, "What
can I know?" and where he found knowledge unattain-
able, he was content to remain an agnostic. And if his
agnosticism permitted him no abiding faith in the future,
he had at least an enduring heart for the trials of the
present.

"I doubt, or at least I have no confidence in, the doctrine of
ultimate happiness, and I am more inclined to look the oppo-
site possibility fully in the face, and if that also be inevitable,
make up my mind to bear it also.

"You will tell me there are better consolations than Stoicism;
that may be, but I do not possess them, and I have found my
'grin and bear it' philosophy stand me in such good stead in
my course through oceans of disgust and chagrin, that I should
be loth to give it up."

V

The same strict regard for truth that distinguished
all Huxley's work was, I cannot but believe, the secret
of his beautiful and lucid way of writing. His theory
of style was to use "such language that you can stand
cross-examination on each word," and his friends testi-
fied to his remarkable sense for the right word. "I have
a great love and respect for my native tongue," he wrote,
"and take great pains to use it properly. Sometimes I
write essays half-a-dozen times before I can get them
into the proper shape; and I believe I become more
fastidious as I grow older."

xxiv INTRODUCTION

But style was not merely a matter of words; it was,
he said, the "striving after the clear and forcible ex-
pression of definite conceptions; in which process the
Glassian precept, 'first catch your definite conceptions,'
is probably the most difficult to obey." Indeed his style
is so much a part of his matter that an unfriendly critic,
wishing to show that he was no great speaker, said that
"all he did was to set some interesting theory unadorned
before his audience, when such success as he attained
was due to the compelling nature of the subject itself."

No tribute to his style could be more apt. Being al-
ways master of his subject, he is able to lead his reader
through the intricacies of a complicated explanation or
argument so as to make it not only clear but apparently
simple. His method of arriving at general truths by way
of particular facts stood him in good stead. Accustomed
to deal with details, his words are always "really clothed
with meaning," and he had always ready an appropriate
illustration or analogy. Equally accustomed to analyse,
to weigh ideas, and to relate them to one another, he
was able to set forth his own ideas with logical pre-
cision and in due order. He never hurries the reader into
the subject, but carefully prepares the ground. Although
illustrations abound, he never really disgresses. There
is a constant forward movement toward the conclusion,
which is reached with at least satisfaction and often with
admiration of the skill with which the thought has been
developed. Nor has he the defects which are often
associated with precision and logic. His style is fresh,
interesting, and varied, sometimes colloquial and homely,
sometimes dignified and impressive. There is a great
deal of humour, now genial, now biting, ironical, or grim.
And there is often a rich literary flavour that shows not
only familiarity with the great English classics and the
Bible, but also acquaintance with classical literature.

INTRODUCTION xxv

Most of all there is the vigorous and genial personality
of a man who was not merely a scientist, nor even merely
a seeker after truth in itself, but who felt the need of re-
lating all knowledge to human life, who approved the
English pre-occupation with religion and politics, and
who turned more and more as years went on from pure
science to broader fields of interest.

SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY

THERE are at least two good reasons for studying
Huxley's essays in college classes — his style and his
ideas. The editor does not wish to annoy the student
or teacher with numerous suggestions for the study of
either. What are here offered will perhaps serve as
points of departure for one who may feel somewhat at a
loss how to commence. The questions on style are
pretty conventional; they aim simply to bring out quali-
ties useful to students of composition. The questions on
thought do not inquire what Huxley's thought is, but
seek rather to extend its application to modern condi-
tions, to test its value or soundness, and to suggest similar
or different ideas which may be made subjects for
composition or class discussion.

The content of each essay and the development of the
thought as a whole can best be brought out by making a
complete sentence outline of it. Such an outline should
commence with a summary of the whole essay in a single
complex sentence in which dependent clauses contain
subordinate ideas, and independent clauses, principal
ideas. The main topics should be similarly summarised,
and the points in development of them, and so on.
These sentences should be arranged in outline form with
appropriate symbols, I, A, i, a, etc., to indicate their
logical relations. This exercise, though difficult at first,
is valuable not only for the analysis of others' essays, but
also in developing logical processes of thinking, and in
furnishing models for outlines for original compositions.
Having made such an outline, the student can easily study
thf structure of the whole.

xxvii

xxviii SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY

QUESTIONS

Structure and Style. What is the method of develop-
ment of the whole essay? Are there many or few main
points. Are all given equal development? Can you ex-
plain the distribution of emphasis? Are there any di-
gressions?

Compare the introductions of the various essays. Are
they effective? Can you suggest a reason why each
begins as it does? Can you suggest a better introduction?

Study the conclusions of the essays in the same way.

Can you summarise each paragraph in a sentence?
What provision is made for transition? Is the thought
developed more often by passing from general to par-
ticular, or the reverse? Does Huxley make use of
enumeration? summaries? topic sentences? If there is
a topic sentence, where is it placed? How is it developed?

Are sentences predominately long, short, or varied?
What effect is produced by each kind? Can you find
examples of the effective use of parallel constructions,
periodic sentences, balance, antithesis, and climax? Can
you find sentences that seem to you composed with great
care, and others that seem to you rough?

Find examples of words that are technical, colloquial,
quaint, antiquated, precise, abstract, concrete. Does
Huxley's vocabulary seem to you varied? appropriate?
carefully chosen? Find examples of literary allusions.
From what sources are they chiefly taken? Are figures
of speech used to any considerable extent? What figures
are most often used?

SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY xxix

Essays.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Does Huxley's Autobiography seem
to you to bring out the chief events in his life? Upon
what part of his life does it dwell chiefly? What seem to
you to be its defects as biography? Read a life of
Huxley in the Dictionary of National Biography or Ency-
clopedia Britannica and compare the details there
selected with those in the Autobiography. How do you
explain Huxley's choice of details? Why is the Autobi-
ography interesting? Do you think from your reading
of Huxley and from his biography that he succeeded in
the objects to which he refers in the last paragraphs of
his Autobiography?

ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE. Why do you
think the introduction to this essay is so impressive?
What does Huxley gain by commencing with the plague
and the fire? What were the great achievements of the
sixteen centuries which he describes as lacking in material
progress? Does he adequately develop his claim that the
improvement of natural knowledge has changed the
ethical ideals of men? What are the "foundations of a
new morality" which he says are laid in this way? Is it
really a new morality? Is his conception of the "old"
morality altogether accurate?

METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION. Does the
objective existence of the material world depend upon
Huxley's theory of matter as its "substratum?" Is there
any other theory of causation besides Huxley's? How
else are the "laws of Nature" defined?

PROLEGOMENA. How does observation of a country
side lead into the subject of evolution? WThat aspect of
the evolutionary process does the introduction most
emphasise? Why is the familiar metaphor of a "chain"
and "links" inappropriate to represent the evolutionary
process?

xxx SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY

To what extent is the creation theory consistent
with the theory of evolution? What "knowledge" is the
basis of Huxley's "faith" in an "eternal order?" To
what extent did over-population and the struggle for
existence operate as a cause of the Great War? Why
did these factors operate differently in France, Great
Britain, Germany, and the United States?

Cite illustrations to show that self-restraint is not the
"essence of the ethical process." How does Huxley's
idea of the self lead him into this mistake? Why is his
interpretation of the "golden rule" inaccurate?

Can you cite any evidence of the operation of any
process of natural selection in American social, political,
or industrial life today? of direct selection? Cite illustra-
tions to show how the struggle for the means of enjoy-
ment affects modern society, socially, politically, or in-
dustrially? What human faculties, types, and classes
are most favoured by the conditions of modern life?
What conditions in modern American life tend to
favour a religious, intellectual, artistic, or democratic
ideal?

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE IN HUMAN SOCIETY.
Is absolute self-negation a step in the direction of moral
perfection? To what extent is the United States a na-
tion of shop-keepers? To what extent is Huxley's dis-
cussion of the industrial problem in England applicable
to the United States today? Are there any new factors
in the present situation?

To what extent are the three kinds of special scientific
training of which Huxley speaks available in the United
States? By what agencies is special industrial training
usually provided in this country? Have we any effective
kind of "capacity-catching machinery?" How has the
interest in technical training affected the curricula of our
public schools? Is the technical training there offered

SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY xxxi

generally practical and efficient? What evidence does
Huxley give of not wholly trusting "the people?" How
did he wish to safeguard the welfare of communities
against the dangers to which he thought them liable from
a too democratic government? Do you approve his
caution?

SCIENCE AND CULTURE. To what extent is this
address an argument? How does its argumentative
character affect the introduction and method of develop-
ment? Just what is the issue? What is Huxley's atti-
tude toward his "opponents" throughout this address?
Is the kind of classical education that Huxley opposes
offered in American colleges? To what extent is the
kind of education he favours offered in America?

This address and that on Science and Art should be
carefully compared with Matthew Arnold's address on
Literature and Science to discover exactly how much
Arnold and Huxley differ in their educational ideas.

A LIBERAL EDUCATION. Is the metaphor with which
this extract begins effective? Is it accurate? Comment
on the style of the extract.

SCIENCE AND ART. To what extent does education in
the United States conform to Huxley's ideal? Can you
plan a course of study for yourself in the college you
are now attending which would conform both to Huxley's
ideal and to the college requirements? If you cannot,
where do you think the error lies? See also questions on
Science and Culture above.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This list, though not complete, includes Huxley's most
important books and the standard biography.

1863 Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.

1870 Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews.

1871 \famial of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals.
1873 Critiques and Addresses.

1877 Anatomy of Invertebrated AniiMW

1877 American Addresses,

1877 Physiography.

-1878 Hume. English Men of Letters Series.

1879 The Crayfish; an introduction to the Study of Zoology.

1880 Introductory Science Primer.

1881 Science and Culture, and other Essays.

1891 Social Diseases and Worse Remedies.

1892 Essays on some Controverted Questions.

1893 Evolution and Ethics.

1893-4 Collected Essays: I. Methods and Results; H. Dar-
winiana; HI. Science and Education; IV. Science and
Hebrew Tradition ; V. Science and Christian Tradition ;
VI. Hume, with Helps to the Study of Berkeley; VH.
Man's Place in Nature ; \TH. Discourses, Biological and
Geological; DC. Evolution and Ethics and other

1898- Scientific Memoirs.

1916 Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. By his Son,
Leonard Huxley. Two Volumes.

^ Ty tl

READINGS FROM HUXLEY

AUTOBIOGRAPHY'

And when I consider, in one view, the many things . . .
which I have upon my hands, I fed the burlesque of being em-
ployed in this manner at my time of fife. But, in another view,

and taking in all 4 iii'imxfanfr^ fhggp rtiingj^ as I rifling as they

may appear, no less than things of greater importance, stem to
be put upon me to do.— Bishop Butler* to the Duchess of

Somerset.

THE "many things" to which the Duchess's corre-
spondent here refers are the repairs and improvements
of the episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if the great
apologist, greater in nothing than in the simple dignity
of his character, would have considered the writing an
account of himself as a thing which could be put upon
him to do whatever circumstances might be tak<*n in_
But the good bishop lived in an age when a man might
write books and yet be permitted to keep his private

* The Autobiography was first published in a scries of bio-
graphical sketches by C. Engel, 1800. Huxky wrote to his wife
about it March 2, 1889: "A man who is bringing out a series of
portraits of celebrities, with a sketch of their career attached,
has bothered me out of my fife for something to go with my
portrait, and to escape the abominable bad taste of some of the
notices, I have done that. I shall show it you before it goes
back to Engel in proof ." — Life and Letters, 11:24$.

2 Joseph Butler (1602-1752) was bishop of Durham, and author
of The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Consti-
tution and Course of Nature, 1736, an important defense of
Christian theology. Huxley said he befieved •» the "great prin-
ciple of the 'Analogy'," but he preferred his own statement of
it: Tnere is no absurdity in theology so great that you cannot
parallel it by a greater absurdity of Nature."— Life and Letters,
1:259-

2 AUTOBIOGRAPHY

existence to himself; in the pre-Boswellian epoch, when
the germ of the photographer lay concealed in the womb
of the distant future, and the interviewer who pervades
our age was an unforeseen, indeed unimaginable, birth
of time.

At present, the most convinced believer in the
aphorism "Bene qui latuit, bene vixit," 3 is not always
able to act up to it. An importunate person informs
him that his portrait is about to be published and will
be accompanied by a biography which the importunate
person proposes to write. The sufferer knows what that
means; either he undertakes to revise the "biography"
or he does not. In the former case, he makes himself
responsible; in the latter, he allows the publication of
a mass of more or less fulsome inaccuracies for which
he will be held responsible by those who are familiar
with the prevalent art of self-advertisement. On the
whole, it may be better to get over the "burlesque of
being employed in this manner" and do the thing him-
self.

It was by reflections of this kind that, some years
ago, I was led to write and permit the publication of
the subjoined sketch.

I was born about eight o'clock in the morning on the
4th of May, 1825, at Baling, which was, at that time,
as quiet a little country village as could be found within
half-a-dozen miles of Hyde Park Corner. Now it is a
suburb of London with, I believe, 30,000 inhabitants.
My father was one of the masters in a large semi-public
school which at one time had a high reputation. I am
not aware that any portents preceded my arrival in this
world, but, in my childhood, I remember hearing a

3 "He who has lived a quiet life has lived well."— -Ovid:
Tristia, 3, 4, 25.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 3

traditional account of the manner in which I lost the
chance of an endowment of great practical value. The
windows of my mother's room were open, in conse-
quence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the
same reason, probably, a neighbouring beehive had
swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the window-
sill, was making its way into the room when the horri-
fied nurse shut down the sash. If that well-meaning
woman had only abstained from her ill-timed inter-
ference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and
I should have been endowed with that mellifluous elo-
quence which, in this country, leads far more surely
than worth, capacity, or honest work, to the highest
places in Church and State. But the opportunity was
lost, and I have been obliged to content myself through
life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain
language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more
ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement.

Why I was christened Thomas Henry I do not know;
but it is a curious chance that my parents should have
fixed for my usual denomination upon the name of that
particular Apostle with whom I have always felt most
sympathy. Physically and mentally I am the son of
my mother so completely — even down to peculiar
movements of the hands, which made their appearance
in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed
them — that I can hardly find any trace of my father
in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing, which
unfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated,
a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose
which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy.

My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional
and energetic temperament, and possessed of the most
piercing black eyes I ever saw in a woman's head. With
no more education than other women of the middle

4 AUTOBIOGRAPHY

classes in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity.
Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was
rapidity of thought. If one ventured to suggest she had
not taken much time to arrive at any conclusion, she
would say: "I cannot help it, things flash across me."
That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full
strength; it has often stood me in good stead; it has
sometimes played me sad tricks, and it has always been
a danger. But, after all, if my time were to come over
again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with
than my inheritance of mother wit.

I have next to nothing to say about my childhood.
In later years my mother, looking at me almost reproach-
fully, would sometimes say, "Ah! you were such a
pretty boy!" whence I had no difficulty in concluding
that I had not fulfilled my early promise in the matter
of looks. In fact, I have a distinct recollection of
certain curls of which I was vain, and of a conviction
that I closely resembled that handsome, courtly gentle-
man, Sir Herbert Oakley, who was vicar of our parish,
and who was as a god to us country folk, because he
was occasionally visited by the then Prince George of
Cambridge. I remember turning my pinafore wrong
side forwards in order to represent a surplice, and
preaching to my mother's maids in the kitchen as nearly
as possible in Sir Herbert's manner one Sunday morning
when the rest of the family were at church. That is
the earliest indication I can call to mind of the strong
clerical affinities which my friend Mr. Herbert Spencer4

4 Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was a very original and im-
portant philosopher and friend of Huxley. Like Huxley he
helped to extend the application of the theory of evolution, par-
ticularly in pure and social science. He devoted himself to the
development of a "Synthetic Philosophy" and the unification of
knowledge by the formulation of laws which hold good for all
orders of phenomena. Huxley once pointed out his weakness

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 5

has always ascribed to me, though I fancy they have
for the most part remained in a latent state.

My regular school training was of the briefest, per-
haps fortunately, for though my way of life has made
me acquainted with all sorts and conditions of men,
from the highest to the lowest, I deliberately affirm that
the society I fell into at school was the worst I have
ever known. We boys were average lads, with much
the same inherent capacity for good and evil as any
others; but the people who were set over us cared
about as much for our intellectual and moral welfare
as if they were baby-farmers. We were left to the
operation of the struggle for existence among ourselves,
and bullying was the least of the ill practices current
among us. Almost the only cheerful reminiscence in
connection with the place which arises in my mind is
that of a battle I had with one of my classmates, who
had bullied me until I could stand it no longer. I was
a very slight lad, but there was a wild-cat element in
me which, when roused, made up for lack of weight,
and I licked my adversary effectually. However, one
of my first experiences of the extremely rough-and-
ready nature of justice, as exhibited by the course of
things in general, arose out of the fact that I — the
victor — had a black eye, while he — the vanquished —
had none, so that I got into disgrace and he did not.
We made it up, and thereafter I was unmolested. One
of the greatest shocks I ever received in my life was to
be told a dozen years afterwards by the groom who
brought me my horse in a stable-yard in Sydney that
he was my quondam antagonist. He had a long story

for the deductive method of reasoning in the jesting remark that
"if Spencer ever wrote a tragedy, its plot would be the slaying
of a beautiful deduction by an ugly fact." — Life and Letters of
Herbert Spencer, 11:264.

6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY

of family misfortune to account for his position, but at
that time it was necessary to deal very cautiously with
mysterious strangers in New South Wales, and on in-
quiry I found that the unfortunate young man had not
only been "sent out," but had undergone more than one
colonial conviction.

As I grew older, my great desire was to be a me-
chanical engineer, but the fates were against this and,
while very young, I commenced the study of medicine
under a medical brother-in-law. But, though the In-
stitute of Mechanical Engineers would certainly not own
me, I am not sure that I have not all along been a sort
of mechanical engineer in partibus infidelium.5 I am
now occasionally horrified to think how very little I
ever knew or cared about medicine as the art of heal-
ing. The only part of my professional course which
really and deeply interested me was physiology, which
is the mechanical engineering of living machines; and,
notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper
business, I am afraid there is very little of the genuine
naturalist in me. I never collected anything, and
species work was always a burden to me; what I cared
for was the architectural and engineering part of the
business, the working out of the wonderful unity of
plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse living
constructions, and the modifications of similar appar-
atuses to serve diverse ends. The extraordinary attrac-
tion I felt towards the study of the intricacies of living
structure nearly proved fatal to me at the outset. I
was a mere boy — I think between thirteen and four-
teen years of age — when I was taken by some older
student friends of mine to the first post-mortem ex-
amination I ever attended. All my life I have been
most unfortunately sensitive to the disagreeables which

5 "In the faction of the unfaithful."

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 7

attend anatomical pursuits, but on this occasion my
curiosity overpowered all other feelings, and I spent two
•or three hours in gratifying it. I did not cut myself
and none of the ordinary symptoms of dissection-
poison supervened, but poisoned I was somehow, and I
remember sinking into a strange state of apathy. By
way of a last chance, I was sent to the care of some
good, kind people, friends of my father's, who lived
in a farmhouse in the heart of Warwickshire. I re-
member staggering from my bed to the window on the
bright spring morning after my arrival, and throwing
open the casement. Life seemed to come back on the
wings of the breeze, and to this day the faint odor of
wood-smoke, like that which floated across the farm-
yard in the early morning, is as good to me as the
"sweet south upon a bed of violets." I soon recovered,
but for years I suffered from occasional paroxysms of
internal pain, and from that time my constant friend,
hypochondriacal dyspepsia, commenced his half century
of co-tenancy of my fleshly tabernacle.

Looking back on my "Lehrjahre," 6 I am sorry to
say that I do not think that any account of my doings
as a student would tend to edification. In fact, I should
distinctly warn ingenuous youth to avoid imitating my
example. I worked extremely hard when it pleased me,
and when; it did not — which was a very frequent
case — I was extremely idle (unless making caricatures
of one's pastors and masters is to be called a branch of
industry), or else wasted my energies in wrong direc-
tions. I read everything I could lay hands upon, in-
cluding novels, and took up all sorts of pursuits to
drop them again quite as speedily. No doubt it was
very largely my own fault, but the only instruction
from which I ever obtained the proper effect of educa-
6 "Apprenticeship."

8 AUTOBIOGRAPHY

tion was that which I received from Mr., Wharton
Jones, who was the lecturer on physiology at the
Charing Cross School of Medicine. The extent and
precision of his knowledge impressed me greatly, and
the severe exactness of his method of lecturing was quite
to my taste. I do not know that I have ever felt so
much respect for anybody as a teacher before or since.
I worked hard to obtain his approbation, and he was
extremely kind and helpful to the youngster who, I
am afraid, took up more of his time than he had any
right to do. It was he who suggested the publication
of my first scientific paper — a very little one — in the
Medical Gazette of 18457 and most kindly corrected
the literary faults which abounded in it, short as it was;
for at that time, and for many years afterwards, I de-
tested the trouble of writing, and would take no pains
over it.

It was in the early spring of 1846, that, having fin-
ished my obligatory medical studies and passed the first
M.B. examination at the London University — though
I was still too young to qualify at the College of Sur-
geons— I was talking to a fellow-student (the present
eminent physician, Sir Joseph Fayrer), and wondering
what I should do to meet the imperative necessity for
earning my own bread, when my friend suggested that
I should write to Sir William Burnett, at that time
Director-General for the Medical Service of the Navy,
for an appointment. I thought this rather a strong
thing to do, as Sir William was personally unknown to
me, but my cheery friend would not listen to my
scruples, so I went to my lodgings and wrote the best
letter I could devise. A few days afterwards I received
the usual official circular acknowledgment, but at the

7 The subject of Huxley's first paper was "On a Hitherto Un-
described Structure in the Human Hair Sheath."

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 9

bottom there was written an instruction to call at
Somerset House on such a day. I thought that looked
like business, so at the appointed time I called and
sent in my card, while I waited in Sir William's ante-
room. He was a tall, shrewd-looking old gentleman,
with a broad Scotch accent — and I think I see him
now as he entered with my card in his hand. The first
thing he did was to return it, with the frugal reminder
that I should probably find it useful on some other
occasion. The second was to ask whether I was an
Irishman. I suppose the air of modesty about my
appeal must have struck him. I satisfied the Director-
General that I was English to the backbone, and he
made some inquiries as to my student career, finally
desiring me to hold myself ready for examination.
Having passed this, I was in Her Majesty's Service, and
entered on the books of Nelson's old ship, the Victory,
for duty at Haslar Hospital, about a couple of months
after I made my application.

My official chief at Haslar was a very remarkable
person, the late Sir John Richardson, an excellent
naturalist, and far-famed as an indomitable Arctic trav-
eller. He was a silent, reserved man, outside the circle
of his family and intimates; and, having a full share
of youthful vanity, I was extremely disgusted to find
that "Old John," as we irreverent youngsters called him,
took not the slightest notice of my worshipful self
either the first time I attended him, as it was my duty
to do, or for some weeks afterwards. I am afraid to
think of the lengths to which my tongue may have run
on the subject of the churlishness of the chief, who was,
in truth, one of the kindest-hearted and most consider-
ate of men. But one day, as I was crossing the hospital
square, Sir John stopped me, and heaped coals of fire
on my head by telling me that he had tried to get me

io AUTOBIOGRAPHY

one of the resident appointments, much coveted by the
assistant surgeons, but that the Admiralty had put in
another man. "However," said he, "I mean to keep you
here till I can get you something you will like," and
turned upon his heel without waiting for the thanks I
stammered out. That explained how it was I had
not been packed off to the West Coast of Africa like
some of my juniors, and why, eventually, I remained
altogether seven months at Haslar.

After a long interval, during which "Old John" ig-
nored my existence almost as completely as before, he
stopped me again as we met in a casual way, and describ-
ing the service on which the Rattlesnake was likely to be
employed, said that Captain Owen Stanley, who was to
command the ship, had asked him to recommend an as-
sistant surgeon who knew something of science; would I
like that? Of course I jumped at the offer. "Very well,
I give you leave; go to London at once and see Captain
Stanley." I went, saw my future commander, who was
very civil to me, and promised to ask that I should be
appointed to his ship, as in due time I was. It is a singu-
lar thing that, during the few months of my stay at Has-
lar, I had among my messmates two future Directors-
General of the Medical Service of the Navy (Sir Alex-
ander Armstrong and Sir John Watt-Reid), with the
present President of the College of Physicians and my
kindest of doctors, Sir Andrew Clark.

Life on board her Majesty's ships in those days was
a very different affair from what it is now, and ours
was exceptionally rough, as we were often many months
without receiving letters or seeing any civilized people
but ourselves. In exchange, we had the interest of being
about the last voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be
possible to meet with people who knew nothing of fire-
arms — as we did on the south coast of New Guinea —

AUTOBIOGRAPHY n

and of making acquaintance with a variety of interesting
savage and semi-civilized people, But, apart from ex-
perience of this kind and the opportunities offered for
scientific work, to me, personally, the cruise was ex-
tremely valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp
discipline; to be down on the realities of existence by
living on bare necessaries; to find out how extremely
well worth living life seemed to be when one woke up
from a night's rest on a soft plank, with the sky for
canopy and cocoa and weevilly biscuit the sole prospect
for breakfast; and, more especially, to learn to work for
the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all
went to the bottom and I along with it. My brother
officers were as good fellows as sailors ought to be and
generally are, but, naturally, they neither knew nor cared
anything about my pursuits, nor understood why I should
be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which my friends,
the middies, christened "Buffons," after the title con-
spicuous on a volume of the "Suites a Buffon," which
stood on my shelf in the chart-room.

During the four years of our absence, I sent home
communication after communication to the "Linnean So-
ciety,"8 with the same result as that obtained by Noah
when he sent the raven out of his ark. Tired at last of
hearing nothing about them, I determined to do or die,
and in 1849 I drew up a more elaborate paper and for-
warded it to the Royal Society.9 This was my dove, if I
had only known it. But owing to the movements of the
ship, I heard nothing of that either until my return to

8 The Linnean Society for the promotion of zoology and
botany was founded in 1788 to supplement the work of the
Royal Society.

9 The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowl-
edge is the oldest scientific society in Great Britain. Huxley gives
an account of its founding in his lecture On the Advisableness of
Improving Natural Knowledge, in this volume, p. 18.

12 AUTOBIOGRAPHY

England in the latter end of the year 1850, when I found
that it was printed and published, and that a huge packet
of separate copies awaited me. When I hear some of my
young friends complain of want of sympathy and encour-
agement, I am inclined to think that my naval life was
not the least valuable part of my education.

Three years after my return were occupied by a bat-
tle between my scientific friends on the one hand and
the Admiralty on the other, as to whether the latter
ought, or ought not, to act up to the spirit of a pledge
they had given to encourage officers who had done scien-
tific work by contributing to the expense of publishing
mine. At last the Admiralty, getting tired, I suppose,
cut short the discussion by ordering me to join a ship,
which thing I declined to do, and as Rastignac, in the
Pere Goriot, says to Paris, I said to London "a nous
deux" 10 I desired to obtain a Professorship of either
Physiology or Comparative Anatomy, and as vacancies
occurred I applied, but in vain. My friend, Professor
Tyndall,11 and I were candidates at the same time, he
for the Chair of Physics and I for that of Natural History
in the University of Toronto, which, fortunately, as it
turned out, would not look at either of us. I say for-
tunately, not from any lack of respect for Toronto,
but because I soon made up my mind that London was

10 "(It's) between us two."

11 John Tyndall (1820-1893) was a distinguished scientist and
natural philosopher. Besides making important scientific dis-
coveries, Tyndall, like Huxley, helped to disseminate the im-
portant scientific ideas of his day and to render them intelligible
to laymen. Huxley regarded Tyndall as more successful than he
was in conciliating his audiences, and wrote him on the occasion
of a lecture "On the Scientific Uses of the Imagination": "Those
confounded parsons seem to me to let you say anything while
they bully me for a word or a phrase. It's the old story, 'one
man may steal a horse while the other may 'not look over the
wall."' — Life and Letters; 1:331.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 13

the place for me, and hence I have steadily declined the
inducements to leave it, which have at various times
been offered. At last, in 1854, on the translation of my
warm friend Edward Forbes, to Edinburgh, Sir Henry De
la Beche, the Director- General of the Geological Survey,
offered me the post Forbes had vacated of Paleontologist
and Lecturer on Natural History. I refused the former
point blank, and accepted the latter only provisionally,
telling Sir Henry that I did not care for fossils, and that
I should give up Natural History as soon as I could get a
physiological post. But I held the office for thirty-one
years, and a large part of my work has been paleonto-
logical.

At that time I disliked public speaking, and had a firm
conviction that I should break down every time I opened
my mouth. I believe I had every fault a speaker could
have (except talking at random or indulging in rhetoric),
when I spoke to the first important audience I ever ad-
dressed, on a Friday evening at the Royal Institution,12
in 1852. Yet, I must confess to having been guilty,
malgre moi™ of as much public speaking as most of my
contemporaries, and for the last ten years it ceased to be
so much of a bugbear to me. I used to pity myself for
having to go through this training, but I am now more
disposed to compassionate the unfortunate audiences,
especially my ever- friendly hearers at the Royal Insti-
tution, who were the subjects of my oratorical experi-
ments.

The last thing that it would be proper for me to do
would be to speak of the work of my life, or to say at

12 The Royal Institution is "an establishment in London for
diffusing the knowledge of useful mechanical improvements." It
was founded in 1799 to "teach the application of science to the
useful purposes of life." Huxley described his appearance there
in a letter to his sister, Life and Letters, 1:106-107.

13 "In spite of myself."

14 AUTOBIOGRAPHY

the end of the day whether I think I have earned my
wages or not. Men are said to be partial judges of them-
selves. Young men may be, I doubt if old men are.
Life seems terribly foreshortened as they look back, and
the mountain they set themselves to climb in youth turns
out to be a mere spur of immeasurably higher ranges
when, by failing breath, they reach the top. But if I
may speak of the objects I have had more or less defi-
nitely in view since I began the ascent of my hillock, they
are briefly these: To promote the increase of natural
knowledge and to forward the application of scientific
methods of investigation to all the problems of life to
the best of my ability, in the conviction which has grown
with my growth and strengthened with my strength, that
there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind ex-
cept veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute
facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-
believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier
features is stripped off.

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

In striving for the attainment of these objects, I have
been but one among many, and I shall be well content
to be remembered, or even not remembered, as such.
Circumstances, among which I am proud to reckon the
devoted kindness of many friends, have led to my oc-
cupation of various prominent positions, among which

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 15

the Presidency of the Royal Society is the highest. It
would be mock modesty on my part, with these and
other scientific honours which have been bestowed upon
me, to pretend that I have not succeeded in the career
which I have followed, rather because I was driven
into it than of my own free will; but I am afraid I
should not count even these things as marks of success
if I could not hope that I had somewhat helped that
movement of opinion which has been called the New
Reformation.14

14 With respect to his part in this movement Huxley wrote
to his wife in 1873: "The part I have to play is not to found a
new school of thought or to reconcile the antagonisms of the old
schools. We are in the midst of a gigantic movement greater
than that which preceded and produced the Reformation, and
really only the continuation of that movement. . . . But this
organisation will be the work of generations of men, and those
who further it most will be those who teach men to rest in no
lie, and to rest in no verbal delusion. I may be able to help a
little in this direction — perhaps I may have helped already."
-- Life and Letters, 1:427-428.

ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IM-
PROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE1

THIS time two hundred years ago — in the beginning
of January, 1666 — those of our forefathers who in-
habited this great and ancient city, took breath between
the shocks of two fearful calamities: one not quite past,
although its fury had abated; the other to come.

Within a few yards of the very spot on which we are
assembled, so the tradition runs, that painful and deadly
malady, the plague, appeared in the latter months of
1664; and, though no new visitor, smote the people of
England, and especially of her capital, with a violence
unknown before, in the course of the following year.
The hand of a master has pictured what happened in
those dismal months; and in that truest of fictions, "The
History of the Plague Year," Defoe shows death, with
every accompaniment of pain and terror, stalking

1 This lay sermon was delivered in St. Martin's Hall, January
7, 1866, and was subsequently published in the Fortnightly Re-
view and in Methods and Results, Collected Essays, I. Twelve
years earlier Huxley had delivered in the same place an address
On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences in
which he advanced similar ideas. He said of the scientific method
on that occasion: "So far as I can arrive at any clear compre-
hension of the matter, Science is not, as many would seem to
suppose, a modification of the black art, suited to the tastes of
the nineteenth century, and flourishing mainly in consequence of
the decay of the Inquisition.

"Science is, I believe, nothing but trained and organised com-
mon sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ
from a raw recruit." — Science and Education, Collected Essays,

ni:4s.

16

IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 17

through the narrow streets of old London, and changing
their busy hum into a silence broken only by the wailing
of the mourners of fifty thousand dead; by the woful
denunciations and mad prayers of fanatics; and by the
madder yells of despairing profligates.

But, about this time in 1666, the death-rate had sunk
to nearly its ordinary amount; a case of plague occurred
only here and there, and the richer citizens who had
flown from the pest had returned to their dwellings.
The remnant of the people began to toil at the accus-
tomed round of duty, or of pleasure; and the stream
of city life bid fair to flow back along its old bed, with
renewed and uninterrupted vigour.

The newly kindled hope was deceitful. The great
plague, indeed, returned no more; but what it had done
for the Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in
the autumn of 1666, did for London; and, in September
of that year, a heap of ashes and the indestructible
energy of the people were all that remained of the glory
of five-sixths of the city within the walls.

Our forefathers had their own ways of accounting for
each of these calamities. They submitted to the plague
in humility and in penitence, for they believed it to be
the judgment of God. But, towards the fire they were
furiously indignant, interpreting it as the effect of the
malice of man, — as the work of the Republicans, or of
the Papists, according as their prepossessions ran in
favour of loyalty or of Puritanism.

It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who,
standing where I now stand, in what was then a thickly-
peopled and fashionable part of London, should have
broached to our ancestors the doctrine which I now
propound to you — that all their hypotheses were alike
wrong; that the plague was no more, in their sense,

1 8 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

Divine judgment, than the fire was the work of any
political, or of any religious, sect; but that they were
themselves the authors of both plague and fire, and that
they must look to themselves to prevent the recurrence
of calamities, to all appearance so peculiarly beyond the
reach of human control — so evidently the result of the
wrath of God, or of the craft and subtlety of an enemy.
And one may picture to one's self how harmoniously the
holy cursing of the Puritan of that day would have
chimed in with the unholy cursing and the crackling wit
of the Rochesters2 and Sedleys,2 and with the revilings
of the political fanatics, if my imaginary plain dealer
had gone on to say that, if the return of such misfor-
tunes were ever rendered impossible, it would not be
in virtue of the victory of the faith of Laud,3 or of
that of Milton;4 and, as little, by the triumph of re-
publicanism, as by that of monarchy. But that the
one thing needful for compassing this end was, that the
people of England should second the efforts of an in-
significant corporation, the establishment of which, a
few years before the epoch of the great plague and the
great fire, had been as little noticed, as they were
conspicuous.

Some twenty years before the outbreak of the plague
a few calm and thoughtful students banded themselves
together for the purpose, as they phrased it, of "im-
proving natural knowledge." The ends they proposed

2 John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, and Sir Charles
Sedley were profligate wits and dramatists of the reign of
Charles II.

3 William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a vigorous
opponent of Puritanism. He was impeached by the Long Par-
liament and beheaded in 1645, four years before his master,
Charles I.

4 John Milton, the poet, was Cromwell's Latin secretary and a
staunch defender of the Puritan faith.

IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 19

to attain cannot be stated more clearly than in the
words of one of the founders of the organisation: -

"Our business was (precluding matters of theology
and state affairs) to discourse and consider of philo-
sophical enquiries, and such as related thereunto: — as
Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation,
Staticks, Magneticks, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and
Natural Experiments; with the state of these studies
and their cultivation at home and abroad. We then
discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in
the veins, the vense lactese, the lymphatic vessels, the
Copernican hypothesis, the nature* of comets and new
stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape (as it then
appeared) of Saturn, the spots on the sun and its turn-
ing on its own axis, the inequalities and selenography
of the moon, the several phases of Venus and Mercury,
the improvement of telescopes and grinding of glasses
for that purpose, the weight of air, the possibility or
impossibility of vacuities and nature's abhorrence there-
of, the Torricellian experiment5 in quicksilver, the de-
scent of heavy bodies and the degree of acceleration
therein, with divers other things of like nature, some
of which were then but new discoveries, and others not
so generally known and embraced as now they are;
with other things appertaining to what hath been called
the New Philosophy, which, from the times. of Galileo6
at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam)7 in

5 The principle of the modern barometer had just been discov-
ered, in 1643, by Evangelista Torricelli, an Italian physicist and
friend of Galileo.

6 Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the famous Italian astronomer,
constructed a thermometer and a telescope, and discovered Ju-
piter's satellites and the spots on the sun. His doctrines were
condemned by the Pope and he was finally forced to abjure the
Copernican theory.

7 Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is usually credited with having
greatly aided the progress of science by the development of the

20 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

England, hath been much cultivated in Italy, France,
Germany, and other parts abroad, as well as with us in
England."

The learned Dr. Wallis, writing in 1696, narrates, in
these words, what happened half a century before, or
about 1645. The associates met at Oxford, in the
rooms of Dr. Wilkins, who was destined to become a
bishop; and subsequently coming together in London,
they attracted the notice of the king. And it is a
strange evidence of the taste for knowledge which the
most obviously worthless of the Stuarts shared with his
father and grandfather, that Charles the Second was
not content with saying witty things about his phil-
osophers, but did wise things with regard to them.8
For he not only bestowed upon them such attention as
he could spare from his poodles and his mistresses, but,
being in his usual state of impecuniosity, begged for
them of the Duke of Ormond; and, that step being
without effect, gave them Chelsea College, a charter,
and a mace: crowning his favours in the best way they
could be crowned, by burdening them no further with
royal patronage or state interference.

inductive method. Huxley, however, thought differently. He
condemned Bacon's method as "hopelessly impracticable" and
added that "the 'anticipation of nature' by the invention of
hypotheses based on incomplete inductions, which he specially
condemns, has proved itself to be a most efficient, indeed an
indispensable, instrument of scientific progress." — The Progress
of Science, Methods and Results, Collected Essays. 1:47. Hux-
ley's theory of the method of scientific investigation is given in
the next selection.

8 The Earl of Rochester is said to have written the following
lines on the door of Charles II's bedchamber:

"Here lies our sovereign lord the 'king,

Whose word no man relies on;
He never says a foolish thing

Nor never does a wise one."

IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 21

Thus it was that the half-dozen young men, studious
of the "New Philosophy," who met in one another's
lodgings in Oxford or in London, in the middle of the
seventeenth century, grew in numerical and in real
strength, until, in its latter part, the "Royal Society for
the Improvement of Natural Knowledge" had already
become famous, and had acquired a claim upon the
veneration of Englishmen, which it has ever since re-
tained, as the principal focus of scientific activity in
our islands, and the chief champion of the cause it was
formed to support.

It was by the aid of the Royal Society that Newton
published his "Principia."9 If all the books in the world,
except the "Philosophical Transactions,"10 were destroyed,
it is safe to say that the foundations of physical science
would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual
progress of the last two centuries would be largely,
though incompletely, recorded. Nor have any signs of
halting or of decrepitude manifested themselves in our
own times. As in Dr. Wallis' days, so in these, "our
business is, precluding theology and state affairs, to dis-
course and consider of philosophical enquiries." But
our "Mathematick" is one which Newton would have to
go to school to learn; our "Staticks, Mechanicks, Mag-
ne ticks, Chymicks, and Natural Experiments" consti-
tute a mass of physical and chemical knowledge, a
glimpse at which would compensate Galileo for the
doings of a score of inquisitorial cardinals; our
"Physick" and "Anatomy" have embraced such infinite
varieties of being, have laid open such new worlds in
time and space, have grappled, not unsuccessfully, with

9 Newton's Principia, or The Mathematical Principles of Natu-
ral Philosophy, was published by the Royal Society in 1686.

10 The Philosophical Transactions has been since 1665 one of
the regular publications of the Royal Society.

22 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

such complex problems, that the eyes of Vesalius11 and
of Harvey12 might be dazzled by the sight of the tree
that has grown out of their grain of mustard seed.

The fact is perhaps rather too much, than too little,
forced upon one's notice, nowadays, that all this mar-
vellous intellectual growth has a no less wonderful ex-
pression in practical life; and that, in this respect, if
in no other, the movement symbolised by the progress
of the Royal Society stands without a parallel in the
history of mankind.

A series of volumes as bulky as the "Transactions of
the Royal Society" might possibly be filled with the
subtle speculations of the Schoolmen;13 not improbably,
the obtaining a mastery over the products of mediaeval
thought might necessitate an even greater expenditure
of time and of energy than the acquirement of the
"New Philosophy"; but though such work engrossed
the best intellects of Europe for a longer time than has
elapsed since the great fire, its effects were "writ in
water," 14 so far as our social state is concerned.

On the other hand, if the noble first President of the
Royal Society could revisit the upper air and once more
gladden his eyes with a sight of the familiar mace, he
would find himself in the midst of a material civilisation
more different from that of his day, than that of the

11 Andreas Vesalius was a Belgian anatomist of the sixteenth
century.

12 William Harvey (1578-1657), a great English physiologist,
is best known for his discovery and demonstration of the circu-
lation of the blood.

13 The Schoolmen, who flourished during the Middle Ages,
were engaged chiefly in fine-spun and dogmatic expositions of
church doctrine or in such idle speculations as whether the angels
speak the Hebrew language and how many of them can dance
the Spanish Tarantella upon the point of a cambric needje.

14 The inscription upon Keats' tomb is, by his request, "Here
lies one whose name was writ in water."

IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 23

seventeenth was from that of the first century. And
if Lord Brouncker's native sagacity had not deserted his
ghost, he would need no long reflection to discover that
all these great ships, these railways, these telegraphs,
these factories, these printing-presses, without which the
whole fabric of modern English society would collapse
into a mass of stagnant and starving pauperism, — that
all these pillars of our State are but the ripples and the
bubbles upon the surface of that great spiritual stream,
the springs of which, only he and his fellows were
privileged to see; and seeing, to recognise as that which
it behoved them above all things to keep pure and un-
defiled.

It may not be too great a flight of imagination to
conceive our noble revenant not forgetful of the great
troubles of his own day, and anxious to know how often
London had been burned down since his time, and how
often the plague had carried off its thousands. He would
have to learn that, although London contains tenfold the
inflammable matter that it did in 1666; though, not
content with filling our rooms with woodwork and light
draperies, we must needs lead inflammable and explosive
gases into every corner of our streets and houses, we
never allow even a street to burn down. And if he
asked how this had come about, we should have to ex-
plain that the improvement of natural knowledge has
furnished us with dozens of machines for throwing water
upon fires, any one of which would have furnished the
ingenious Mr. Hooke, the first "curator and experi-
menter" of the Royal Society, with ample materials for
discourse before half a dozen meetings of that body;
and that, to say truth, except for the progress of natural
knowledge, we should not have been able to make even
the tools by which these machines are constructed. And,
further, it would be necessary to add, that although

24 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

severe fires sometimes occur and inflict great damage,
the loss is very generally compensated by societies, the
operations of which have been rendered possible only
by the progress of natural knowledge in the direction
of mathematics, and the accumulation of wealth in vir-
tue of other natural knowledge.

But the plague? My Lord Brouncker's observation
would not, I fear, lead him to think that Englishmen of
the nineteenth century are purer in life, or more fervent
in religious faith, than the generation which could pro-
duce a Boyle,15 an Evelyn,16 and a Milton. He might
find the mud of society at the bottom, instead of at the
top, but I fear that the sum total would be as deserving
of swift judgment as at the time of the Restoration. And
it would be our duty to explain once more, and this time
not without shame, that we have no reason to believe
that it is the improvement of our faith, nor that of our
morals, which keeps the plague from our city ; but, again,
that it is the improvement of our natural knowledge.

We have learned that pestilences will only take up their
abode among those who have prepared unswept and un-
garnished residences for them. Their cities must have
narrow, unwatered streets, foul with accumulated gar-
bage. Their houses must be ill-drained, ill-lighted, ill-
ventilated. Their subjects must be ill- washed, ill- fed,

15 Robert Boyle (1627-1691) is best known as a physicist and
the discoverer of Boyle's law of the elasticity of gases. Huxley re-
fers to him here, however, as the student and propagator of
religion. He established by his will the "Boyle lectures" for the
defense of Christianity against unbelievers.

16 John Evelyn (1620-1706), the diarist, is described by Leslie
Stephen as "the typical instance of the accomplished and pub-
lic-spirited country gentleman of the Restoration, a pious and
devoted member of the Church of England and a staunch loy-
alist in spite of his grave disapproval of the members of the
court." Both Boyle and Evelyn were members of the Royal
Society.

IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 25

ill-clothed. The London of 1665 was such a city. The
cities of the East, where plague has an enduring dwelling,
are such cities. We, in later times, have learned some-
what of Nature, and partly obey her. Because of this
partial improvement of our natural knowledge and of
that fractional obedience, we have no plague; because
that knowledge is still very imperfect and that obedience
yet incomplete, typhoid is our companion and cholera our
visitor. But it is not presumptuous to express the belief
that, when our knowledge is more complete and our obe-
dience the expression of our knowledge, London will
count her centuries of freedom from typhoid and cholera,
as she now gratefully reckons her two hundred years of
ignorance of that plague which swooped upon her thrice
in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Surely, there is nothing in these explanations which is
not fully borne out by the facts? Surely, the principles
involved in them are now admitted among the fixed
beliefs of all thinking men? Surely, it is true that our
countrymen are less subject to fire, famine, pestilence,
and all the evils which result from a want of command
over and due anticipation of the course of Nature, than
were the countrymen of Milton; and health, wealth, and
well-being are more abundant with us than with them?
But no less certainly is the difference due to the improve-
ment of our knowledge of Nature, and the extent to which
that improved knowledge has been incorporated with the
household words of men, and has supplied the springs of
their daily actions.

Granting for a moment, then, the truth of that which
the'depreciators of natural knowledge are so fond of
urging, that its improvement can only add to the re-
sources of our material civilisation; admitting it to be
possible that the founders of the Royal Society them-
selves looked for no other reward than this, I cannot

26 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

confess that I was guilty of exaggeration when I hinted,
that to him who had the gift of distinguishing between
prominent events and important events, the origin of a
combined effort on the part of mankind to improve natu-
ral knowledge might have loomed larger than the Plague
and have outshone the glare of the Fire ; as a something
fraught with a wealth of beneficence to mankind, in com-
parison with which the damage done by those ghastly
evils would shrink into insignificance.

It is very certain that for every victim slain by the
plague, hundreds of mankind exist and find a fair share
of happiness in the world, by the aid of the spinning
jenny. And the great fire, at its worst, could not have
burned the supply of coal, the daily working of which,
in the bowels of the earth, made possible by the steam
pump, gives rise to an amount of wealth to which the mil-
lions lost in old London are but as an old song.

But spinning jenny and steam pump are, after all, but
toys, possessing an accidental value; and natural knowl-
edge creates multitudes of more subtle contrivances, the
praises of which do not happen to be sung because they
are not directly convertible into instruments for creating
wealth. When I contemplate natural knowledge squan-
dering such gifts among men, the only appropriate com-
parison I can find for her is, to liken her to such a peas-
ant woman as one sees in the Alps, striding ever upward,
heavily burdened, and with mind bent only on her home ;
but yet without effort and without thought, knitting for
her children. Now stockings are good and comfortable
things, and the children will undoubtedly be much the
better for them; but surely it would be short-sighted, to
say the least of it, to depreciate this toiling mother as n
mere stocking-machine — a mere provider of physical
comforts?

IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 27

However, there are blind leaders of the blind, and not 1
a few of them, who take this view of natural knowledge, j
and can see nothing in the bountiful mother of humanity
but a sort of comfort-grinding machine. According to
them, the improvement of natural knowledge always has ;
been, and always must be, synonymous with no more
than the improvement of the material resources and the
increase of the gratifications of men.

Natural knowledge is, in their eyes, no real mother of
mankind, bringing them up with kindness, and, if need
be, with sternness, in the way they should go, and in-
structing them in all things needful for their welfare;
but a sort of fairy godmother, ready to furnish her pets
with shoes of swiftness, swords of sharpness, and omnip-
otent Alladin's lamps, so that they may have telegraphs
to Saturn, and see the other side of the moon, and thank
God they are better than their benighted ancestors.

If this talk weretrue,^, for one, should not greatly '
^olHn^h^service of natural knowledge. I think

X ~-y ^y,-^ »_ «. -», — .

I would just as soon be quietly chipping my own flint J
axe after the manner of my forefathers a few thousand
years back, as be troubled with the endless malady of
thought which now infests us all, for such reward. But
I venture to say that such views are contrary alike to
reason and to fact.VThose who discourse in such fashion
seem to me to be so intent upon trying to see what is
above Nature, or what is behind her, that they are blind
to what stares them in the face in her.

I should not venture to speak thus strongly if my
justification were not to be found in the simplest and
most obvious facts, — if it needed more than an appeal
to the most notorious truths to justify my assertion, that
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

28 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

[ practical benefits on men, but, in so doing, has_effected
1 a revolution in their conceptions of the universe anoTof
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 crav-
ings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascer-
' tain tHe laws of comfort, has been "driven to discover
i those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new
; morality.

Let us take these points separately; and first, what
great ideas has natural knowledge introduced into men's
minds?

I cannot but think that the foundations of all natural
knowledge were laid when the reason of man first came
face to face with the facts of Nature; when the savage
first learned that the fingers of one hand are fewer than
those -of both ; that it is shorter to cross a stream than
to head it; that a stone stops where it is unless it be
moved, and that it drops from the hand which lets it go;
that light and heat come and go with the sun ; that sticks
burn away in a fire; that plants and animals grow and
die; that if he struck his fellow savage a blow he would
make him angry, and perhaps get a blow in return, while
if he offered him a fruit he would please him, and per-
haps receive a fish in exchange. When men had acquired
this much knowledge, the outlines, rude though they
were, of mathematics, of physics, of chemistry, of biology,
i of moral, economical, and political science, were sketched.
7 Nor did the germ of religion fail when science began to
ibud. Listen to words which, though new, are yet three
thousand years old: —

"... When in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak

IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 29

And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest, and all the stars
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart." 17

If the half-savage Greek could share our feelings thus
far, it is irrational to doubt that he went further, to find
as we do, that upon that brief gladness there follows a
certain sorrow, — the little light of awakened human in-
telligence shines so mere a spark amidst the abyss of the
unknown and unknowable; seems so insufficient to do
more than illuminate the imperfections that cannot be
remedied, the aspirations that cannot be realised, of
man's own nature. But in this sadness, this conscious-
ness of the limitation of man, this sense of an open secret
which he cannot penetrate, lies the essence of all religion ;
and the attempt to embody it in the forms furnished by
the intellect is the origin of the higher theologies.

Thus it seems impossible to imagine but that the
foundations of all knowledge — secular or sacred — were
laid when intelligence dawned, though the superstructure
remained for long ages so slight and feeble as to be
compatible with the existence of almost any general view
respecting the mode of governance of the universe. No
doubt, from the first, there were certain phenomena
which, to the rudest mind, presented a constancy of
occurrence, and suggested that a fixed order ruled, at any
rate, among them. I doubt if the grossest of Fetish
worshippers ever imagined that a stone must have a god
within it to make it fall, or that a fruit had a god within
it to make it taste sweet. With regard to such matters
as these, is is hardly questionable that mankind from the
first took strictly positive and scientific views.

But, with respect to all the less familiar occurrences
which present themselves, uncultured man, no doubt, has

17 Need it be said that this is Tennyson's English for Homer's
Greek? [T. H. H.I

30 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

always taken himself as the standard of comparison, as
the centre and measure of the world; nor could he well
avoid doing so. And finding that his apparently un-
caused will has a powerful effect in giving rise to many
occurrences, he naturally enough ascribed other and
greater events to other and greater volitions, and came
to look upon the world and all that therein is, as the
product of the volitions of persons like himself, but
stronger, and capable of being appeased or angered, as he
himself might be soothed or irritated. Through such
conceptions of the plan and working of the universe all
mankind have passed, or are passing. And we may now
consider what has been the effect of the improvement
of natural knowledge on the views of men who have
reached this stage, and who have begun to cultivate
natural knowledge with no desire but that of ''increasing
God's honour and bettering man's estate."

For example, what could seem wiser, from a mere ma-
terial point of view, more innocent, from a theological
one, to an ancient people, than that they should learn
the exact succession of the seasons, as warnings for their
husbandmen; or the position of the stars, as guides to
their rude navigators? But what has grown out of this
search for natural knowledge of so merely useful a char-
acter? You all know the reply. Astronomy, — which
of all sciences has filled men's minds with general ideas
of a character most foreign to their daily experience,
and has, more than any other, rendered it impossible for
them to accept the beliefs of their fathers. Astronomy,
— which tells them that this so vast and seemingly
solid earth is but an atom among atoms, whirling, no man
knows whither, through illimitable space; which dem-
onstrates that what we call the peaceful heaven above us,
is but that space, filled by an infinitely subtle matter
whose particles are seething and surging, like the waves

IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 31

of an angry sea; which opens up to us infinite regions
where nothing is known, or ever seems to have been
known, but matter and force, operating according to
rigid rules ; which leads us to contemplate phsenomena ]
the very nature of which demonstrates that they must !
have had a beginning, and that they must have an end,
but the very nature of which also proves that the be-
ginning was, to our conceptions of time, infinitely remote,
and that the end is as immeasurably distant.

But It is not alone those who pursue astronomy who
ask for bread and receive ideas. What more harmless
ffiari the attempt to lift and distribute water by pumping
it; what more absolutely and grossly utilitarian? Yet
out of pumps grew the discussions about Nature's ab-
horrence of a vacuum; and then it was discovered that
Nature does not abhor a vacuum, but that air has
weight; and that notion paved the way for the doctrine
that all matter has weight, and that the force which pro-
duces weight is co-extensive with the universe, — in
short, to the theory of universal gravitation and endless
force. While learning how to handle gases led to the
discovery of oxygen, and to modern chemistry, and to the
notion of the indestructibility of matter.

Again, what simpler, or more absolutely practical,
than the attempt to keep the axle of a wheel from heat-
ing when the wheel turns round very fast? How useful
for carters and gig drivers to know something about this ;
and how good were it, if any ingenious person would
find out the cause of such phenomena, and thence educe
a general remedy for them. Such an ingenious person
was Count Rumford; 18 and he and his successors have

18 Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753-1814), an
American by birth, was an adventurer, a scientist, and an inven-
tor of a practical turn of mind. He boasted, among other things,
of having cured five hundred London chimneys of smoking.

32 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

landed us in the theory of the persistence, or indestruc-
tibility, of force. And in the infinitely minute, as in the
infinitely great, the seekers after natural knowledge of
the kinds called physical and chemical, have everywhere
found a definite order and succession of events which
seem never to be infringed.

And how has it fared with "Physick" and Anatomy?
Have the anatomist, the physiologist, or the physician,
whose business it has been to devote themselves assidu-
ously to that eminently practical and direct end, the alle-
viation of the sufferings of mankind, — have they been
able to confine their vision more absolutely to the strictly
useful? I fear they are worst offenders of all. For if
the astronomer has set before us the infinite magnitude
of space, and the practical eternity of the duration of the
universe; if the physical and chemical philosophers have
demonstrated the infinite minuteness of its constituent
parts, and the practical eternity of matter and of force;
and if both have alike proclaimed the universality of a
definite and predicable order and succession of events,
the workers in biology have not only accepted all these,
but have added more startling theses of their own. For,
as these astronomers discover in the earth no center of
the universe, but an eccentric speck, so the naturalists
find man to be no center of the living world, but one
amidst endless modifications of life; and as the astron-
omer observes the mark of practically endless time set
upon the arrangements of the solar system so the stu-
dent of life finds the records of ancient forms of exist-
ence peopling the world for ages, which, in relation to
human experience, are infinite.

Furthermore, the physiologist finds life to be as de-
pendent for its manifestation on particular molecular
arrangements as any physical or chemical phenomenon;
and wherever he extends his researches, fixed order and

IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 33

unchanging causation reveal themselves, as plainly as in
the rest of Nature.

Nor can I find that any other fate has awaited the
germ of Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of knowl-
edge, out of the action and interaction of man's mind,
with that which is not man's mind, it has taken the in-
tellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of
Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism.
With these, and their relative merits and demerits, I
have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my pur-
pose to say, that if the religion of the present differs
from that of the past, it is because the theology^jrf _the
present has become more scientific than that of the
pasty because itjhas not only renounced idols of wood
"alffdr'idols of stone, but begins to see the necessity of
breaking in pieces the idols built up of books and tra-
ditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs: and of
cherisEmg the noblest and most human of man's emo-
tions, by worship "for the most part of the. silent sort"
at the altar of the Unknown.

Such are a few of the new conceptions implanted in
our minds by the improvement of natural knowledge.
Men have acquired the ideas of the practically infinite
extent of the universe and of its practical eternity; they
are familiar with the conception that our earth is but
an infinitesimal fragment of that part of the universe
which can be seen; and that, nevertheless, its duration
is, as compared with our standards of time, infinite.
They have further acquired the idea that man is but
one of innumerable forms of life now existing in the
globe, and that the present existences are but the last
of an immeasurable series of predecessors. Moreover,
every step they have made in natural knowledge has
tended to extend and rivet in their minds the concep-
tion of a definite order of the universe — which is em-

34 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

bodied in what are called, by an unhappy metaphor, the
laws of Nature — and to narrow the range and loosen
the force of men's belief in spontaneity, or in changes
other than such as arise out of that definite order itself.
Whether these ideas are well or ill founded is not
the question. No one can deny that they exist, and
have been the inevitable outgrowth of the improvement
of natural knowledge. And if so, it cannot be doubted
that they are changing the form of men's most cherished
and most important convictions.

And as regards the second point — the extent to which
the improvement of natural knowledge has remodelled
and altered what may be termed the intellectual_ethics^
of men, — what are among the moral convictions most
fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people?

They are the convictions that authority is the soundest
basis of belief; that merit attaches to a readiness to
believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and
scepticism a sin; that when good authority has pro-
nounced what is to be believed, and faith has accepted
it, reason has no further duty. There are many excel-
lent persons who yet hold by these principles, and it is
not my present business, or intention, to discuss their
views. All I wish to bring clearly before your minds
is the unquestionable fact, that the improvement of
natural knowledge is effected by methods which directly
give the lie to all these convictions, and assume the
exact reverse of each to be true.

The imprpygf of pafan^ ta™w1eHprp absolutely refuses
to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism19

19 It is scarcely necessary to point out that Huxley is not
here talking about scepticism in religion, but only about the
habit of doubt that leads to truth. The "golden rule" which
should guide one in this skepticism Huxley stated thus in his

IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 35

is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardon-
able sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great
advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute
rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest
scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith;
and the most ardent votary of science holds his firmest
convictions, not because the men he most venerates hold

address On Descartes' Discourse on Method (1870): "Give un-
qualified assent to no propositions but those the. truth oTwtiich
is~~so clear and distinct that it cannot be doubted/' And later
fie~dehned the scientific doubt thus: "Vvnen 1 say that Descartes
consecrated doubt, you must remember that it was that sort of
doubt which Goethe has called the active scepticism whose
whole aim is to conquer itself; and not that other sort which
is born of flippancy and ignorance, and whose aim is only to
perpetuate itself, as an excuse for idleness and indifference. But
it is impossible to define what is meant by scientfic doubt better
than in Descartes' own words. After describing the gradual prog-
ress of his negative criticism, he tells us: —

"For all that, I did not imitate the sceptics, who doubt only
for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the
contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and
to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or
the clay beneath.' " — M ethods and Results, Collected Essays,
1:169.

In the conclusion of the lay sermon, On the Physical Basis
of Life, 1868, Huxley had pointed that on subjects concerning
which we can know nothing certainly it is useless to speculate,
and then stated in a fine passage what he considered the duty of
man to be: "We live in a world which is full of misery and
ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to
make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable
and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.
To do this effectually it is necessary to be fully possessed of
only two beliefs: the first, that the order of Nature is ascertain -
able by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited;
the second, that our volition* counts for something as a condition
of the course of events.

"Each of these beliefs can be verified experimentally, as often
as we like to try. Each, therefore, stands upon the strongest
foundation upon which any belief can rest, and forms one of our
highest truths."

* Or, to speak more accurately, the physical state of which
volition is the expression. — [1892. T. H. H.] Same, 163.

xx

36 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

them; not because their verity is testified by portents
and wonders; but because his experience teaches him
that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into
contact with their primary source, Nature — whenever
he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment and
to observation — Nature will confirm them. The man

| of science has learned to believe in justification, not by

'; faith, but by verification.

Thus, without for a moment pretending to despise
the practical results of the improvement of natural
knowledge, and its beneficial influence on material civili-
zation, it must, I think, be admitted that the great
ideas, some of which I have indicated, and the ethical
spirit which I have endeavoured to sketch, in the few
moments which remained at my disposal, constitute the
real and permanent significance of natural knowledge.
If these ideas be destined, as I believe they are, to
be more and more 'firmly established as the world grows
older; if that spirit be fated, as I believe it is, to extend
itself into all departments of human thought, and to
become co-extensive with the range of knowledge; if,
as our race approaches its maturity, it discovers, as I
believe it will, that there is but one kind of knowledge

j and but one method^f acquiring it; then we, wfacTare
still children, may justly feel it our highest duty to
recognize the advisableness of improving natural knowl-
edge, and so to aid ourselves and our successors in
their course towards the noble goal which lies before
mankind.

THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC
INVESTIGATION '

PHYSICAL science is one and indivisible. Although,
for practical purposes, it is convenient to mark it out
into the primary regions of Physics, Chemistry, and
Biology, and to subdivide these into subordinate prov-
inces, yet the method of investigation and the ultimate
object of the physical inquirer are everywhere the same.

The object is the discovery of the rational order
which pervades the universe; the method consists of
observation and experiment (which is observation under
artificial conditions) for the determination ,of the facts
of Nature; of inductive and deductive reasoning for the
discovery of their mutual relations and connection. The
various branches of physical science differ in the extent
to which, at any given moment of their history, obser-
vation on the one hand, or ratiocination on the other,
is their more obvious feature, but in no other way; and
nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one
sometimes meets with, that physics has one method,
chemistry another, and biology a third.

All physical science starts from certain postulates.
One of them is the objective existence of a material
world. It is assumed that the phenomena which are

1 This extract is taken from an essay, The Progress of Science,
written in 1887 for The Reign of Queen Victoria, by T. H. Ward.
The essay is published in Methods and Results, Collected Es-
says, I.

37

38 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION

comprehended under this name have a "substratum"
of extended, impenetrable, mobile substance, which ex-
hibits the quality known as inertia, and is termed
matter.2 Another postulate is the universality of the
law of causation; that nothing happens without a cause
(that is, a necessary precedent condition), and that the
state of the physical universe, at any given moment, is
the consequence of its state at any preceding moment.
Another is that any of the rules, or so-called "laws of
Nature," by which the relation of phenomena is truly
denned, is true for all time. The validity of these pos-
tulates is a problem of metaphysics; they are neither
self-evident nor are they, strictly speaking, demonstrable.
The justification of their employment, as axioms of
physical philosophy, lies in the circumstance that ex-
pectations logically based upon them are verified, or, at
any rate, not contradicted, whenever they can be tested
by experience.

Physical science therefore rests on verified or uncontra-
dicted hypotheses ; and, such being the case, it is not sur-
prising that a great condition of its progress has been the
invention of verifiable hypotheses. It is a favourite popu-

2 I am aware that this proposition may be challenged. It
may be said, for example, that, on the hypothesis of Boscovich,
matter has no extension, being reduced to mathematical points
serving as centres of "forces." But as the "forces" of the various
centres are conceived to limit one another's action in such a
manner that an area around each centre has an individuality of
its own, extension comes back in the form of that area. Again,
a very eminent mathematician and physicist — the late Clerk
Maxwell — has declared that impenetrability is not essential to
our notions of matter, and that two atoms may conceivably
occupy the same space. I am loth to dispute any dictum of a
philosopher as remarkable for the subtlety of his intellect as for
his vast knowledge; but the assertion that one and the same
point or area of space can have different (conceivably opposite)
attributes appears to me to violate the principle of contradiction,
which is the foundation not only of physical science, but of logic
in general. It means that A can be not-A. [T. H. H.].

SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 39

lar delusion that the scientific inquirer is under a sort
of moral obligation to abstain from going beyond that
generalisation of observed facts which is absurdly called
"Baconian" induction.3 But any one who is practically
acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who
refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and
any one who has studied the history of science knows
that almost every great step therein has been made by the
" anticipation of Nature," that is, by the invention of
hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very
little foundation to start with; and, not unfrequently,
in spite of a long career of usefulness, turned out to
be wholly erroneous in the long run.

The geocentric system of astronomy, with its ec-
centrics and its epicycles, was an hypothesis utterly at
variance with fact, which nevertheless did great things
for the advancement of astronomical knowledge.
Kepler 4 was the wildest of guessers. Newton's corpus-
cular theory of light was of much temporary use in
optics, though nobody now believes in it; and the un-
dulatory theory, which has superseded the corpuscular
theory and has proved one of the most fertile of in-
struments of research, is based on the hypothesis of
the existence of an "ether," the properties of which are
defined in propositions, some of which, to ordinary ap-
prehension, seem physical antinomies.

It sounds paradoxical to say that the attainment of
scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by
the help of scientific errors. But the subject-matter of
physical science is furnished by observation, which can-

3 See p. 19, n.

4 Johan Kepler (1571-1630), a German astronomer, devoted
years to the observation of the orbit of Mars, with the result that
he announced in his Astronomia, 1609, the laws of elliptical
orbits, "one of the cardinal principles of modern astronomy," and
other important discoveries.

40 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION

not extend beyond the limits of our faculties; while, even
within those limits, we cannot be certain that any ob-
servation is absolutely exact and exhaustive. Hence it
follows that any given generalisation from observation
may be true, within the limits of our powers of observa-
tion at a given time, and yet turn out to be untrue, when
those powers of observation are directly or indirectly en-
larged. Or, to put the matter in another way, a doc-
trine which is untrue absolutely, may, to a very great
extent, be susceptible of an interpretation in accordance
with the truth. At a certain period in the history of
astronomical science, the assumption that the planets
move in circles was true enough to serve the purpose of
correlating such observations as were then possible;
after Kepler, the assumption that they move in ellipses
became true enough in regard to the state of observa-
tional astronomy at that time. We say still that the
orbits of the planets are ellipses, because, for all ordi-
nary purposes, that is a sufficiently near approximation
to the truth; but, as a matter of fact, the center of
gravity of a planet describes neither an ellipse nor any
other simple curve, but an immensely complicated undu-
lating line. It may fairly be doubted whether any gen-
eralisation, or hypothesis, based upon physical data is
absolutely true, in the sense that a mathematical propo-
sition is so; but, if its errors can become apparent only
outside the limits of practicable observation, it may be
just as usefully adopted for one of the symbols of that
algebra by which we interpret Nature, as if it were
absolutely true.

The development of every branch of physical knowl-
edge presents three stages, which, in their logical relation,
are successive. The first is the determination of the sen-
sible character and order of the phenomena. This is
Natural History, in the original sense of the term, and

SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 41

here nothing but observation and experiment avail us.
The second is the determination of the constant relations
of the phenomena thus denned, and their expression in
rules or laws. The third is the explication of these par-
ticular laws by deduction from the most general laws of
matter and motion. The last two stages constitute Natu-
ral Philosophy in its original sense. In this region, the
invention of verifiable hypotheses is not only permis-
sible, but it is one of the conditions of progress.

Historically, no branch of science has followed this
order of growth; but, from the dawn of exact knowledge
to the present day, observation, experiment, and specu-
lation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science
has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been,
either because its votaries have been content with mere
unverified or un verifiable speculation (and this is the
commonest case, because observation and experiment are
hard work, while speculation is amusing) ; or it has
been, because the accumulation of details of observation
has for a time excluded speculation.

The progress of physical science, since the revival of
learning, is largely due to the fact that men have gradu-
ally learned to lay aside the consideration of unverifiable
hypotheses; to guide observation and experiment by
verifiable hypotheses; and to consider the latter,- not as
ideal truths, the real entities of an intelligible world be-
hind phenomena, but as a symbolical language, by the
aid of which Nature can be interpreted in terms appre-
hensible by our intellects. And if physical science, dur-
ing the last fifty years, has attained dimensions beyond
all former precedent, and can exhibit achievements of
greater importance than any former such period can
show, it is because able men, animated by the true sci-
entific spirit, carefully trained in the method of science,

42 SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION

and having at their disposal immensely improved appli-
ances, have devoted themselves to the enlargement of
the boundaries of natural knowledge in greater number
than during any previous half-century of the world's
history.

PROLEGOMENA l

IT may be safely assumed that, two thousand years
ago, before Caesar set foot in southern Britain, the
whole country-side visible from the windows of the room
in which I write, was in what is called "the state of
nature." Except, it may be, by raising a few sepulchral
mounds, such as those which still, here and there, break
the flowing contours of the downs, man's hands had

1 Prolegomena was written in 1894 when Huxley, preparing to
publish his Evolution and Ethics, found it necessary to supply
a preface explaining some ideas which he had taken for generally
accepted, particularly what he considered the conflict between
the laws of society and of ethics and the laws of nature. Although
Huxley was extraordinarily successful in rendering new ideas in-
telligible to popular audiences, the discourse on Evolution and
Ethics is pretty difficult, and Huxley admitted his error and
repaired it by one of his finest essays. He says in the preface
that he had forgotten a "maxim touching lectures of a popu-
lar character, which has descended to me from that prince of
lecturers, Mr. Faraday. He was once asked by a beginner, called
upon to address a highly select and cultivated audience, what
he might suppose his hearers to know already. Whereupon the
past master of the art of exposition emphatically replied,
'Nothing!'

"To my shame as a retired veteran, who has all his life profited
by this great precept of lecturing strategy, I forgot all about it
just when it would have been most useful. I was fatuous enough
to imagine that a number of propositions, which I thought
established, and which, in fact, I had advanced without chal-
lenge on former occasions, needed no repetition.

"I have endeavoured to repair my error by prefacing the lecture
with some matter — chiefly elementary or recapitulatory — to
which I have given the title of 'Prolegomena.' I wish I could

43

44 PROLEGOMENA

made no mark upon it; and the thin veil of vegetation
which overspread the broad-backed heights and the
shelving sides of the coombs was unaffected by his in-
dustry. The native grasses and weeds, the scattered
patches of gorse, contended with one another for the
possession of the scanty surface soil; they fought against
the droughts of summer, the frosts of winter, and the
furious gales which swept, with unbroken force, now
from the Atlantic, and now from the North Sea, at all
times of the year ; they filled up, as they best might, the
gaps made in their ranks by all sorts of underground
and overground animal ravagers. One year with an-
other, an average population, the floating balance of the
unceasing struggle for existence among the indigenous
plants, maintained itself. It is as little to be doubted,
that an essentially similar state of nature prevailed, in
this region, for many thousand years before the coming
of Caesar; and there is no assignable reason for denying
that it might continue to exist through an equally pro-
longed futurity, except for the intervention of man.

Reckoned by our customary standards of duration,
the native vegetation, like the "everlasting hills" which
it clothes, seems a type of permanence. The little
Amarella Gentians, which abound in some places to-
day, are the descendants of those that were trodden
underfoot by the prehistoric savages who have left their
flint tools about, here and there; and they followed an-

have hit upon a heading of less pedantic aspect which would have
served my purpose; and if it be urged that the new building
looks over large for the edifice to which it is added, I can only
plead the precedent of the ancient architects, who always made
the adytum the smallest part of the temple." — Preface, vii-viii.
In the discourse on the Struggle for Existence in Human So-
ciety he discussed one aspect of the same subject, how the strug-
gle for existence, which is a law of nature, injects itself after all
into human society and threatens to destroy the social order.
See next essay.

PROLEGOMENA 45

cestors which, in the climate of the glacial epoch, prob-
ably flourished better than they do now. Compared
with the long past of this humble plant, all the history
of civilized men is but an episode.

Yet nothing is more certain than that, measured by
the liberal scale of time-keeping of the universe, this
present state of nature, however it may seem to have
gone and to go on for ever, is but a fleeting phase of her
infinite variety; merely the last of the series of changes
which the earth's surface has undergone in the course
of the millions of years of its existence. Turn back a
square foot of the thin turf, and the solid foundation of
the land, exposed in cliffs of chalk five hundred feet
high on the adjacent shore, yields full assurance of a
time when the sea covered the site of the "everlasting
hills"; and when the vegetation of what land lay nearest,
was as different from the present Flora of the Sussex
downs, as that of Central Africa now is.2 No less
certain is it that, between the time during which the
chalk was formed and that at which the original turf
came into existence, thousands of centuries elapsed, in
the course of which, the state of nature of the ages
during which the chalk was deposited, passed into that
which now is, by changes so slow that, in the coming
and going of the generations of men, had such witnessed
them, the contemporary conditions would have seemed
to be unchanging and unchangeable.

But it is also certain that, before the deposition of
the chalk, a vastly longer period had elapsed, through-
out which it is easy to follow the traces of the same
process of ceaseless modification and of the internecine
struggle for existence of living things; and that even
when we can get no further back, it is not because there
is any reason to think we have reached the beginning,

2 See "On a Piece of Chalk," Essays, viiiri. [T. H. H.]

46 PROLEGOMENA

but because the trail of the most ancient life remains
hidden, or has become obliterated.

Thus that state of nature of the world of plants
which we began by considering, is far from possessing
the attribute of permanence. Rather its very essence
is impermanence. It may have lasted twenty or thirty
thousand years, it may last for twenty or thirty thou-
sand years more, without obvious change; but, as surely
as it has followed upon a very different state, so it will
be followed by an equally different condition. That
which endures is not one or another association of living
forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the
product, and of which these are among the transitory
expressions. And in the living world, one of the most
characteristic features of this cosmic process is the
struggle for existence, the competition of each with all,
the result of which is the selection, that is to say, the
survival of those forms which, on the whole, are best
adapted to the conditions which at any period obtain;
and which are, therefore, in that respect, and only in
that respect, the fittest.3 The acme reached by the
cosmic process in the vegetation of the downs is seen in
the turf, with its weeds and gorse. Under the conditions,
they have come out of the struggle victorious; and, by
surviving, have proved that they are the fittest to sur-
vive.

That the state of nature, at any time, is a temporary
phase of a process of incessant change, which has been

3 That every theory of evolution must be consistent not merely
with progressive development, but with indefinite persistence in
the same condition and with retrogressive modification, is a point
which I have insisted upon repeatedly from the year 1862 till
now. See Collected Essays, vol. ii. pp. 461-89; vol. iii. p.. 33;
vol. viii, p. 304. In the address on "Geological Contemporaneity
and Persistent Types" (1862), the paleontological proofs of this
proposition were, I believe, first set forth. [T. H. H.]

PROLEGOMENA 47

going on for innumerable ages, appears to me to be a
proposition as well established as any in modern history.
Paleontology assures us, in addition, that the ancient phil-
osophers who, with less reason, held the same doctrine,
erred in supposing that the phases formed a cycle, exactly
repeating the past, exactly foreshadowing the future, in
their rotations. On the contrary, it furnishes us with
conclusive reasons for thinking* that, if every link in
the ancestry of these humble indigenous plants had been
preserved and were accessible to us, the whole would
present a converging series of forms of gradually dimin-
ishing complexity, until, at some period in the history of
the earth, far more remote than any of which organic
remains have yet been discovered, they would merge in
those low groups among which the boundaries between
animal and vegetable life become effaced.4

The word "evolution," now generally applied to the
cosmic process, has had a singular history, and is used in
various senses.5 Taken in its popular signification it
means progressive development, that is, gradual change
from a condition of relative uniformity to one of relative
complexity; but its connotation has been widened to in-
clude the phenomena of retrogressive metamorphosis,
that is, of progress from a condition of relative complexity
to one of relative uniformity.

As a natural process, of the same character as the
development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from
its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of
supernatural intervention. As the expression of a fixed
order, every stage of which is the effect of causes operat-
ing according to definite rules, the conception of evolu-
tion no less excludes that of chance. It is very desirable

4 "On the Border Territory between the Animal and the Vege-
table Kingdoms," Essays, vol. viii. p. 162. [T. H. H.]

5 See "Evolution in Biology," Essays, vol. ii. p. 187. [T. H. H.I

48 PROLEGOMENA

to remember that evolution is not an explanation of the
cosmic process, but merely a generalised statement of
the method and results of that process. And, further,
that, if there is proof that the cosmic process was set
going by any agent, then that agent will be the creator
of it and of all its products, although supernatural inter-
vention may remain strictly excluded from its further
course.

So far as that limited revelation of the nature of
things, which we call scientific knowledge, has yet gone,
it tends, with constantly increasing emphasis, to the
belief that, not merely the world of plants, but that of
animals; not merely living things, but the whole fabric
of the earth; not merely our planet, but the whole solar
system; not merely our star and its satellites, but the
millions of similar bodies which bear witness to the
order which pervades boundless space, and has endured
through boundless time; are all working out their pre-
destined courses of evolution.

With none of these have I anything to do, at present,
except with that exhibited by the forms of life which
tenant the earth. All plants and animals exhibit the
tendency to vary, the causes of which have yet to be
ascertained; it is the tendency of the conditions of life,
at any given time, while favouring the existence of the
variations best adapted to them, to oppose that of the
rest and thus to exercise selection; and all living things
tend to multiply without limit, while the means of sup-
port are limited; the obvious cause of which is the pro-
duction of offspring more numerous than their progeni-
tors, but with equal expectation of life in the actuarial
sense. Without the first tendency there could be no
evolution. Without the second, there would be no good
reason why one variation should disappear and another
take its place; that is to say there would be no selection.

PROLEGOMENA 49

Without the third, the struggle for existence, the agent of
the selective process in the state of nature, would vanish.6
Granting the existence of these tendencies, all the
known facts of the history of plants and of animals may
be brought into rational correlation. And this is more
than can be said for any other hypothesis that I know of.
Such hypotheses, for example, as that of the existence of
a primitive, orderless chaos; of a passive and sluggish
eternal matter moulded, with but partial success, by
archetypal ideas; of a brand-new world-stuff suddenly
created and swiftly shaped by a supernatural power;
receive no encouragement, but the contrary, from our
present knowledge. That our earth may once have
formed part of a nebulous cosmic magma is certainly
possible, indeed seems highly probable; but there is no
reason to doubt that order reigned there, as completely as
amidst what we regard as the most finished works of
nature or of man.7 The faith which is born of knowl-
edge, finds its object in an eternal order, bringing forth
ceaseless change, through endless time, in endless space;
the manifestations of the cosmic energy alternating be-
tween phases of potentiality and phases of explication.
It may be that, as Kant suggests,8 every cosmic magma
predestined to evolve into a new world, has been the no
less predestined end of a vanished predecessor.

n.

Three or four years have elapsed since the state of
nature, to which I have referred, was brought to an
end, so far as a small patch of the soil is concerned,
by the intervention of man. The patch was cut off

6 Collected Essays, vol. ii. passim. [T. H. H.]

7 Ibid., vol. iv. p. 138; vol. v. pp. 71-73. [T. H. H.]

8 Ibid., vol. viii. p. 321. [T. H. H.]

So PROLEGOMENA

from the rest by a wall; within the area thus protected,
the native vegetation was, as far as possible, extirpated;
while a colony of strange plants was imported and set
down in its place. In short, it was made into a garden.
At the present time, this artificially treated area presents
an aspect extraordinarily different from that of so much
of the land as remains in the state of nature, outside the
wall. Trees, shrubs, and herbs, many of them apper-
taining to the state of nature of remote parts of the
globe, abound and flourish. Moreover, considerable
quantities of vegetables, fruits, and flowers are pro-
duced, of kinds which neither now exist, nor have ever
existed, except under conditions such as obtain in the
garden; and which, therefore, are as much works of the
art of man as the frames and glass-houses in which
some of them are raised. That the "state of Art," thus
created in the state of nature by man, is sustained by
and dependent on him, would at once become apparent,
if the watchful supervision of the gardener were with-
drawn, and the antagonistic influences of the general
cosmic process were no longer sedulously warded off,
or counteracted. The walls and gates would decay;
quadrupedal and bipedal intruders would devour and
tread down the useful and beautiful plants; birds, in-
sects, blight, and mildew would work their will; the
seeds of the native plants, carried by winds or other
agencies, would immigrate, and in virtue of their long-
earned special adaptation to the local conditions, these
despised native weeds would soon choke their choice
exotic rivals. A century or two hence, little beyond
the foundations of the wall and of the houses and
frames would be left, in evidence of the victory of the
cosmic powers at work in the state of nature, over the
temporary obstacles to their supremacy, set up by the
art of the horticulturist.

PROLEGOMENA 51

It will be admitted that the garden is as much a work
of art,9 or artifice, as anything that can be mentioned.
The energy localised in certain human bodies, directed
by similarly localised intellects, has produced a colloca-
tion of other material bodies which could not be brought
about in the state of nature. The same proposition is
true of all the works of man's hands, from a flint im-
plement to a cathedral or a chronometer; and it is be-
cause it is true, that we call these things artificial, term
them works of art, or artifice, by way of distinguishing
them from the products of the cosmic process, working
outside man, which we call natural, or works of nature.
The distinction thus drawn between the works of nature
and those of man, is universally recognized; and it is,
as I conceive, both useful and justifiable.

in.

No doubt, it may be properly urged that the operation
of human energy and intelligence, which has brought
into existence and maintains the garden, by what I have
called "the horticultural process," is, strictly speaking,
part and parcel of the cosmic process. And no one
could more readily agree to that proposition than I.
In fact, I do not know that any one has taken more
pains than I have, during the last thirty years, to in-
sist upon the doctrine, so much reviled in the early part
of that period, that man, physical, intellectual, and

9 The sense of the term "Art" is becoming narrowed; "work
of Art" to most people means a picture, a statue, or a piece of
bijouterie; by way of compensation "artist" has included in its
wide embrace cooks and ballet girls, no less than painters and
sculptors. [T. H. H.]

52 PROLEGOMENA

moral, is as much a part of nature, as purely a product
of the cosmic process, as the humblest weed.10

But if, following up this admission, it is urged that,
such being the case, the cosmic process cannot be in
antagonism with that horticultural process which is part
of itself — I can only reply, that if the conclusion that
the two are antagonistic is logically absurd, I am sorry
for logic, because, as we have seen, the fact is so.11
The garden is in the same position as every other work
of man's art; it is a result of the cosmic process working
through and by human energy and intelligence; and, as
is the case with every other artificial thing set up in
the state of nature, the influences of the latter are con-
stantly tending to break it down and destroy it. No
doubt, the Forth bridge12 and an ironclad in the offing,
are, in ultimate resort, products of the cosmic process;
as much so as the river which flows under the one, or
the sea-water on which the other floats. Nevertheless,
every breeze strains the bridge a little, every tide does
something to weaken its foundations; every change of
temperature alters the adjustment of its parts, produces
friction and consequent wear and tear. From time to
time, the bridge must be repaired, just as the ironclad
must go into dock; simply because nature is always tend-
ing to reclaim that which her child, man, has borrowed
from her and has arranged in combinations which are
not those favoured by the general cosmic process. .

Thus, it is not only true that the cosmic energy, work-
ing through man upon a portion of the plant world,

10 See "Man's Place in Nature," Collected Essays, vol. vii.,
and "On the Struggle for Existence in Human Society" (1888),
vol. ix. [T. H. H.]

11 See The Method of Scientific Investigation.

12 Forth bridge is a remarkable railway bridge over a mile and
a half long crossing the Firth of Forth. It is built on the canti-
lever principle, and was completed in 1889.

PROLEGOMENA 53

opposes the same energy as it works through the state
of nature, but a similar antagonism is everywhere mani-
fest between the artificial and the natural. Even in the
state of nature itself, what is the struggle for existence
but the antagonism of the results of the cosmic process
in the region of life, one to another?13

IV.

Not only is the state of nature hostile to the state
of art of the garden ; but the principle of the horticultural
process, by which the latter is created and maintained, is
antithetic to that of the cosmic process. The character-
istic feature of the latter is the intense and unceasing
competition of the struggle for existence. The character-
istic of the former is the elimination of that struggle, by
the removal of the conditions which give rise to it. The
tendency of the cosmic process is to bring about the
adjustment of the forms of plant life to the current con-
ditions; the tendency of the horticultural process is the
adjustment of the conditions to the needs of the forms of
plant life which the gardener desires to raise.

The cosmic process uses unrestricted multiplication as
the means whereby hundreds compete for the place and
nourishment adequate for one; it employs frost and
drought to cut off the weak and unfortunate; to survive,
there is need not only of strength, but of flexibility and of
good fortune.

The gardener, on the other hand, restricts multiplica-
tion; provides that each plant shall have sufficient space

13 Or to put the case still more simply. When a man lays
hold of the two ends of a piece of string and pulls them, with
intent to break it, the right arm is certainly exerted in antag-
onism to the left arm; yet both arms derive their energy from
the same original source. [T. H. H.]

54 PROLEGOMENA

and nourishment; protects from frost and drought; and,
in every other way, attempts to modify the conditions, in
such a manner as to bring about the survival of those
forms which most nearly approach the standard of the
useful, or the beautiful, which he has in his mind.

If the fruits and the tubers, the foliage and the flowers
thus obtained, reach, or sufficiently approach, that ideal,
there is no reason why the status quo attained should
not be indefinitely prolonged. So long as the state of
nature remains approximately the same, so long will the
energy and intelligence which created the garden suffice
to maintain it. However, the limits within which this
mastery of man over nature can be maintained are nar-
row. If the conditions of the cretaceous epoch returned,
I fear the most skilful of gardeners would have to give up
the cultivation of apples and gooseberries; while,, if those
of the glacial period once again obtained, open asparagus
beds would be superfluous, and the training of fruit
trees against the most favourable of south walls, a waste
of time and trouble.

But it is extremely important to note that, the state
of nature remaining the same, if the produce does not
satisfy the gardener, it may be made to approach his
ideal more closely. Although the struggle for existence
may be at end, the possibility of progress remains. In
discussions on these topics, it is often strangely forgotten
that the essential conditions of the modification, or evo-
lution, of living things are variation and hereditary
transmission. Selection is the means by which certain
variations are favoured and their progeny preserved.
But the struggle for existence is only one of the means
by which selection may be effected. The endless
varieties of cultivated flowers, fruits, roots, tubers, and
bulbs are not products of selection by means of the
struggle for existence, but of direct selection, in view

PROLEGOMENA 55

of an ideal of utility or beauty. Amidst a multitude of
plants, occupying the same station and subjected to the
same conditions, in the garden, varieties arise. The
varieties tending in a given direction are preserved, and
the rest are destroyed. And the same process takes
place among the varieties until, for example, the wild
kale becomes a cabbage, or the wild Viola tricolor a prize
pansy.

v.

The process of colonisation presents analogies to the
formation of a garden which are highly instructive.
Suppose a shipload of English colonists sent to form a
settlement, in such a country as Tasmania was in the
middle of the last century. On landing, they find them-
selves in the midst of a state of nature, widely different
from that left behind them in everything but the most
general physical conditions. The common plants, the
common birds and quadrupeds, are as totally distinct
as the men from anything to be seen on the side of the
globe from which they come. The colonists proceed to
put an end to this state of things over as large an area
as they desire to occupy. They clear away the native
vegetation, extirpate or drive out the animal population,
so far as may be necessary, and take measures to defend
themselves from the re-immigration of either. In their
place, they introduce English grain) and fruit trees;
English dogs, sheep, cattle, horses; and English men;
in fact, they set up a new Flora and Fauna and a new
variety of mankind, within the old state of nature.
Their farms and pastures represent a garden on a great
scale, and themselves the gardeners who have to keep
it up, in watchful antagonism to the old regime. Con-

56 PROLEGOMENA

sidered as a whole, the colony is a composite unit intro-
duced into the old state of nature; and, thenceforward,
a competitor in the struggle for existence, to conquer or
be vanquished.

Under the conditions supposed, there is no doubt of
the result, if the work of the colonists be carried out
energetically and with intelligent combination of all
their forces. On the other hnnd, if they are slothful,
stupid, and careless; or if they waste their energies in
contests with one another, the chances are that the
old state of nature will have the best of it. The native
savage will destroy the immigrant civilized man; of the
English animals and plants some will be extirpated by
their indigenous rivals, others will pass into the feral
state and themselves become components of the state
of nature. In a few decades, all other traces of the
settlement will have vanished.

VI.

Let us now imagine that some administrative au-
thority, as far superior in power and intelligence to men,
as men are to their cattle, is set over the colony, charged
to deal with its human elements in such a manner as to
assure the victory of the settlement over the antagonistic
influences of the state of nature in which it is set down.
He would proceed in the same fashion as that in which
the gardener dealt with his garden. In the first place,
he would, as far as possible, put a stop to the influence
of external competition by thoroughly extirpating and
excluding the native rivals, whether men, beasts, or
plants. And our administrator would select his human
agents, with a view to his ideal of a successful colony,

PROLEGOMENA 57

just as the gardener selects his plants with a view to his
ideal of useful or beautiful products.

In the second place, in order that no struggle for the
means of existence between these human agents should
weaken the efficiency of the corporate whole in the
battle with the state of nature, he would make arrange-
ments by which each would be provided with those
means; and would be relieved from the fear of being
deprived of them by his stronger or more cunning
fellows. Laws, sanctioned by the combined force of
the colony, would restrain the self-assertion of each
man within the limits required for the maintenance of
peace. In other words, the cosmic struggle for existence,
as between man and man, would be rigorously sup-
pressed; and selection, by its means, would be as com-
pletely excluded as it is from the garden.

At the same time, the obstacles to the full develop-
ment of the capacities of the colonists by other condi-
tions of the state of nature than those already mentioned,
would be removed by the creation of artificial conditions
of existence of a more favourable character. Protec-
tion against extremes of heat and cold would be
afforded by houses and clothing; drainage and irriga-
tion works would antagonise the effects of excessive rain
and excessive drought; roads, bridges, canals, carriages,
and ships would overcome the natural obstacles to loco-
motion and transport; mechanical engines would supple-
ment the natural strength of men and of their draught
animals; hygienic precautions would check, or remove,
the natural causes of disease. With every step of this
progress in civilization, the colonists would become more
and more independent of the state of nature; more and
more, their lives would be conditioned by a state of art.
In order to attain his ends, the administrator would have
to avail himself of the courage, industry, and co-opera-

58 PROLEGOMENA

tive intelligence of the settlers; and it is plain that the
interest of the community would be best served by in-
creasing the proportion of persons who possess such
qualities, and diminishing that of persons devoid of
them. In other words, by selection directed towards an
ideal.

Thus the administrator might look to the establish*
ment of an earthly paradise, a true garden of Eden, in
which all things should work together towards the well-
being of the gardeners: within which the cosmic process,
the coarse struggle for existence of the state of nature,
should be abolished; in which that state should be re-
placed by a state of art; where every plant and every
lower animal should be adapted to human wants, and
would perish if human supervision and protection were
withdrawn; where men themselves should have been se-
lected, with a view to their efficiency as organs for the
performance of the functions of a perfected society.
And this ideal polity would have been brought about,
not by gradually adjusting the men to the conditions
around them, but by creating artificial conditions for
them; not by allowing free play of the struggle for
existence, but by excluding that struggle; and by sub-
stituting selection directed towards the administrator's
ideal for the selection it exercises.

vn.

But the Eden would have its serpent, and a very
subtle beast too. Man shares with the rest of the
living world the mighty instinct of reproduction and
its consequence, the tendency to multiply with great
rapidity. The better the measures of the administrator

PROLEGOMENA 59

achieved their object, the more completely the destruc-
tive agencies of the state of nature were defeated, the
less would that multiplication be checked.

On the other hand, within the colony, the enforce-
ment of peace, which deprives every man of the power
to take away the means of existence from another^
simply because he is the stronger, would have put an
end to the struggle for existence between the colonists,
and the competition for the commodities of existence,
which would alone remain, is no check upon population.

Thus, as soon as the colonists began to multiply, the
administrator would have to face the tendency to the
reintroduction of the cosmic struggle into his artificial
fabric, in consequence of the competition, not merely for
the commodities, but for the means of existence. When
the colony reached the limit of possible expansion, the
surplus population must be disposed of somehow; or the
fierce struggle for existence must recommence and de-
stroy that peace, which is the fundamental condition of
the maintenance of the state of art against the state of
nature.

Supposing the administrator to be guided by purely
scientific considerations, he would, like the gardener,
meet this most serious difficulty by systematic extirpa-
tion, or exclusion, of the superfluous. The hopelessly
diseased, the infirm aged, the weak or deformed in body
or in mind, the excess of infants born, would be put
away, as the gardener pulls up defective and superfluous
plants, or the breeder destroys undesirable cattle. Only
the strong and the healthy, carefully matched, with a
view to the progeny best adapted to the purposes of the
administrator, would be permitted to perpetuate their
kind.

60 PROLEGOMENA

VIII.

Of the more thoroughgoing of the multitudinous at-
tempts to apply the principles of cosmic evolution, or
what are supposed to be such, to social and political
problems, which have appeared of late years, a con-
siderable proportion appear to me to be based upon
the notion that human society is competent to furnish,
from its own resources, an administrator of the kind I
have imagined. The pigeons, in short, are to be their
own Sir John Sebright.14 A despotic government,
whether individual or collective, is to be endowed with
the preternatural intelligence, and with what, I am
afraid, many will consider the preternatural ruthlessness,
required for the purpose of carrying out the principle of
improvement by selection, with the somewhat drastic
thoroughness upon which the success of the method
depends. Experience certainly does not justify us in
limiting the ruthlessness of individual "saviours of so-
ciety"; and, on the well-known grounds of the aphorism
which denies both body and soul to corporations, it
seems probable (indeed the belief is not without sup-
port in history) that a collective despotism, a mob got
to believe in its own divine right by demagogic mission-
aries, would be capable of more thorough work in this
direction than any single tyrant, puffed up with the same
illusion, has ever achieved. But intelligence is another
affair. The fact that "saviours of society" take to that
trade is evidence enough that they have none to spare.
And such as they possess is generally sold to the capi-

14 Not that the conception of such a society is necessarily
based upon the idea of evolution. The Platonic state testifies to
the contrary. [T. H. H.]

Sir John Sebright (1767-1846) published in 1809 a valuable
letter on The Art of Improving the Breeds of Domestic Animals.

PROLEGOMENA 61

talists of physical force on whose resources they de-
pend. However^ I doubt whether even the keenest
judge of character, if he had before him a hundred boys
and girls under fourteen, could pick out, with the least
chance of success, those who should be kept, as certain
to be serviceable members of the polity, and those who
should be chloroformed, as equally sure to be stupid,
idle, or vicious. The "points" of a good or of a bad
citizen are really far harder to discern than those of a
puppy or a short-horn calf; many do not show them-
selves before the practical difficulties of life stimulate
manhood to full exertion. And by that time the mis-
chief is done. The evil stock, if it be one, has had time
to multiply, and selection is nullified.

IX.

I have other reasons for fearing that this logical ideal
of evolutionary regimentation — this pigeon-fanciers'
polity — is unattainable. In the absence of any such
a severely scientific administrator as we have been
dreaming of, human society is kept together by bonds
of such a singular character, that the attempt to perfect
society after his fashion would run serious risk of loosen-
ing them.

Social organization is not peculiar to men. Other
societies, such as those constituted by bees and ants,
have also arisen out of the advantage of co-operation in
the struggle for existence; and their resemblances to,
and their differences from, human society are alike in-
structive. The society formed by the hive bee fulfils
the ideal of the communistic aphorism "to each accord-
ing to his needs, from each according to his capacity."
Within it, the struggle for existence is strictly limited.

62 PROLEGOMENA

Queen, drones, and workers have each their allotted
sufficiency of food; each performs the function assigned
to it in the economy of the hive, and all contribute to
the success of the whole cooperative society in its com-
petition with rival collectors of nectar and pollen and
with other enemies, in the state of nature without. In
the same sense as the garden, or a colony, is a work
of human art, the bee polity is a work of apiarian art,
brought about by the cosmic process, working through
the organization of the hymenopterous type.

Now this society is the direct product of an organic
necessity, impelling every member of it to a course of
action which tends to the good of the whole. Each
bee has its duty and none has any rights. Whether
bees are susceptible of feeling and capable of
thought is a question which cannot be dogmatically
answered. As a pious opinion, I am disposed to
deny them more than the merest rudiments of
consciousness.15 But it is curious to reflect that a
thoughtful drone (workers and queens would have no
leisure for speculation) with a turn for ethical philos-
ophy, must needs profess himself an intuitive moralist
of the purest water. He would point out, with perfect
justice, that the devotion of the workers to a life of
ceaseless toil for a mere subsistence wage, cannot be
accounted for either by enlightened selfishness, or by
any other sort of utilitarian motives; since these bees
begin to work, without experience or reflection, as they
emerge from the cell in which they are hatched. Plainly,
an eternal and immutable principle, innate in each bee,
can alone account for the phenomena. On the other
hand, the biologist, who traces out all the extant stages
of gradation between solitary and hive bees, as clearly

15 Collected Essays, vol. i., "Animal Automatism"; vol. v.,
"Prologue," pp. 45 et seq. [T. H. H.]

PROLEGOMENA 63

sees in the latter, simply the perfection of an automatic
mechanism, hammered out by the blows of the struggle
for existence upon the progeny of the former, during
long ages of constant variation.

x.

I see no reason to doubt that, at its origin, human
society was as much a product of organic necessity as
that of the bees.16 The human family, to begin with,
rested upon exactly the same conditions as those which
gave rise to similar associations among animals lower
in the scale. Further, it is easy to see that every in-
crease in the duration of the family ties, with the result-
ing co-operation of a larger and larger number of de-
scendants for protection and defence, would give the
families in which such modification took place a dis-
tinct advantage over the others. And, as in the hive,
the progressive limitation of the struggle for existence
between the members of the family would involve in-
creasing efficiency as regards outside competition.

But there is this vast and fundamental difference be-
tween bee society and human society. In the former,
the members of the society are each organically predes-
tined to the performance of one particular class of func-
tions only. If they were endowed with desires, each
could desire to perform none but those offices for which
its organization specially fits it; and which, in view of
the good of the whole, it is proper it should do. So long
as a new queen does not make her appearance, rivalries
and competition are absent from the bee polity.

Among mankind, on the contrary, there is no such
predestination to a sharply defined place in the social
16 Collected Essays, vol. v., Prologue, pp. 5o-54«

64 PROLEGOMENA

organism. However much men may differ in the quality
of their intellects, the intensity of their passions, and the
delicacy of their sensations, it cannot be said that one is
fitted by his organization to be an agricultural labourer
and nothing else, and another to be a landowner and
nothing else. Moreover, with all their enormous differ-
ences in natural endowment, men agree in one thing,
and that is their innate desire to enjoy the pleasures
and to escape the pains of life; and, in short, to do
nothing but that which it pleases them to do, without
the least reference to the welfare of the society into which
they are born. That is their inheritance (the reality at
the bottom of the doctrine of original sin) from the
long series of ancestors, human and semi-human and
brutal, in whom the strength of this innate tendency to
self-assertion was the condition of victory in the struggle
for existence. That is the reason of the aviditas vitoe^
— the insatiable hunger for enjoyment — of all man-
kind, which is one of the essential conditions of success
in the war with the state of nature outside; and yet the
sure agent of the destruction of society if allowed free
play within.

The check upon this free play of self-assertion, or
natural liberty, which is the necessary condition for the
origin of human society, is the product of organic neces-
sities of a different kind from those upon which the
constitution of the hive depends. One of these is the
mutual affection of parent and offspring, intensified by
the long infancy of the human species. But the most
important is the tendency, so strongly developed in man,
to reproduce in himself actions and feelings similar to,
or correlated with, those of other men. Man is the most
consummate of all mimics in the animal world; none but

17 « 'Thirst' or 'craving desire' for life." Note 7 to Evolution
and Ethics, Collected Essays, IX 196.

PROLEGOMENA 65

himself can draw or model; none comes near him in
the scope, variety, and exactness of vocal imitation;
none is such a master of gesture; while he seems to be
impelled thus to imitate for the pure pleasure of it. And
there is no such another emotional chameleon. By a
purely reflex operation of the mind, we take the hue
of passion of those who are about us, or, it may be, the
complementary colour. It is not by any conscious "put-
ting one's self in the place" of a joyful or a suffering
person that the state of mind we call sympathy usually
arises;18 indeed, it is often contrary to one's sense of
right, and in spite of one's will, that "fellow-feeling
makes us wondrous kind," or the reverse. However
complete may be the indifference to public opinion, in
a cool, intellectual view, of the traditional sage, it has
not yet been my fortune to meet with any actual sage
who took its hostile manifestations with entire equa-
nimity. Indeed, I doubt if the philosopher lives, or ever
has lived, who could know himself to be heartily despised
by a street boy without some irritation. And, though
one cannot justify Haman for wishing to hang Mordecai
on such a very high gibbet, yet, really, the conscious-
ness of the Vizier of Ahasuerus, as he went in and out
of the gate, that this obscure Jew had no respect for
him, must have been very annoying.19

18 Adam Smith makes the pithy observation that the man who
sympathises with a woman in childbed, cannot be said to put
himself in her place. ("The Theory of the Moral Sentiments,"
Part vii. sec. iii. chap, i.) Perhaps there is more humour than
force in the example; and, in spite of this and other observations
of the same tenor, I think that the one defect of the remarkable
work in which it occurs is that it lays tod much stress on con-
scious substitution, too little on purely reflex sympathy.
[T. H. H.]

19 Esther v. 9-13. "... but when Haman saw Mordecai in
the king's gate, that he stood not up, nor moved for him, he
was full of indignation against Mordecai. . . . And Haman told
them of the glory of his riches . . . and all the things wherein

66 PROLEGOMENA

It is needful only to look around us, to see that the
greatest restrainer of the anti-social tendencies of men
is fear, not of the law, but of the opinion of their
fellows. The conventions of honour bind men who
break legal, moral, and religious bonds; and, while
people endure the extremity of physical pain rather than
part with life, shame drives the weakest to suicide.

Every forward step of social progress brings men into
closer relations with their fellows, and increases the im-
portance of the pleasures and pains derived from sym-
pathy. We judge the acts of others by our own
sympathies, and we judge our own acts by the sym-
pathies of others, every day and all day long, from
childhood upwards, until associations, as indissoluble as
those of language, are formed between certain acts and
the feelings of approbation or disapprobation. It be-
comes impossible to imagine some acts without disap-
probation, or others without approbation of the actor,
whether he be one's self, or any one else. We come to
think in the acquired dialect of morals. An artificial
personality, the "man within," as Adam Smith20 calls
conscience, is built up beside the natural personality.
He is the watchman of society, charged to restrain the
anti-social tendencies of the natural man within the
limits required by social welfare.

the king had promoted him. . . . Yet all this availeth me
nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's
gate." What a shrewd exposure of human weakness it is!
[T. H. H.]

20 "Theory of the Moral Sentiments," Part iii. chap 3. On
the influence and authority of conscience. [T. H. H.]

Adam Smith (1723-1790), the Scotch economist, published in
1759 his Theory of Moral Sentiments. He is best known as the
author of the Wealth of Nations and the founder of the science
of political economy.

PROLEGOMENA 67

XI.

I have termed this evolution of the feelings out of
which the primitive bonds of human society are so
largely forged, into the organized and personified sym-
pathy we call conscience, the ethical process.21 So far
as it tends to make any human society more efficient in
the struggle for existence with the state of nature, or
with other societies, it works in harmonious contrast
with the cosmic process. But it is none the less true
that, since law and morals are restraints upon the
struggle for existence between men in society, the ethi-
cal process is in opposition to the principle of the cos-
mic process, and tends to the suppression of the qualities
best fitted for success in that struggle.22

It is further to be observed that, just as the self-
assertion, necessary to the maintenance of society against
the state of nature, will destroy that society if it is al-
lowed free operation within; so the self-restraint, the
essence of the ethical process, which is no less an es-
sential condition of the existence of every polity, may,
by excess, become ruinous to it.

Moralists of all ages and of all faiths, attending only
to the relations of men towards one another in an ideal
society, have agreed upon the "golden rule," "Do as

21 Worked out, in its essential features, chiefly by Hartley and
Adam Smith, long before the modern doctrine of evolution was
thought of. [T. H. H.]

David Hartley (1705-1757) was an influential ethical phil-
osopher. In his Observations on Man, 1749, he set forth his
doctrine of the gradual development of pure benevolence from
the simpler passions.

22 See the essay "On the Struggle for Existence in Human
Society," and Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 276, for Kant's recog-
nition of these facts. [T. H. H.]

68 PROLEGOMENA

you would be done by." In other words, let sympathy
be your guide; put yourself in the place of the man
towards whom your action is directed; and do to him
what you would like to have done to yourself under the
circumstances. However much one may admire the gen-
erosity of such a rule of conduct; however confident one
may be that average man may be thoroughly depended
upon not to carry it out to its full logical consequences;
it is nevertheless desirable to recognise the fact that
these consequences are incompatible with the existence
of a civil state, under any circumstances of this world
which have obtained, or, so far as one can see, are
likely to come to pass.

For I imagine there can be no doubt that the great
desire of every wrongdoer is to escape from the painful
consequences of his actions. If I put myself in the
place of the man who has robbed me, I find that I am
possessed by an exceeding desire not to be fined or im-
prisoned; if in that of the man who has smitten me on
one cheek, I contemplate with satisfaction the absence
of any worse result than the turning of the other cheek
for like treatment. Strictly observed, the "golden rule"
involves the negation of law by the refusal to put it in
motion against law-breakers; and, as regards the ex-
ternal relations of a polity, it is the refusal to continue
the struggle for existence. It can be obeyed, even par-
tially, only under the protection of a society which re-
pudiates it. Without such shelter, the followers of the
"golden rule" may indulge in hopes of heaven, but they
must reckon with the certainty that other people will
be masters of the earth.

What would become of the garden if the gardener
treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers
as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place?

PROLEGOMENA 69

XII.

Under the preceding heads, I have endeavoured to
represent in broad, but I hope faithful, outlines the
essential features of the state of nature and of that cos-
mic process of which it is the outcome, so far as was
needful for my argument; I have contrasted with the
state of nature the state of art, produced by human
intelligence and energy, as it is exemplified by a garden;
and I have shown that the state of art, here and else-
where, can be maintained only by the constant counter-
action of the hostile influences of the state of nature.
Further, I have pointed out that the "horticultural proc-
ess," which thus sets itself against the "cosmic process"
is opposed to the latter in principle, in so far as it tends to
arrest the struggle for existence, by restraining the mul-
tiplication which is one of the chief causes of that strug-
gle, and by creating artificial conditions of life, better
adapted to the cultivated plants than are the conditions
of the state of nature. And I have dwelt upon the fact
that, though the progressive modification, which is the
consequence of the struggle for existence in the state of
nature, is at an end, such modification may still be
effected by that selection, in view of an ideal of useful-
ness, or of pleasantness, to man, of which the state of
nature knows nothing.

I have proceeded to show that a colony, set down in
a country in the state of nature, presents close analogies
with a garden ; and I have indicated the course of action
which an administrator, able and willing to carry out
horticultural principles, would adopt, in order to secure
the success of such a newly formed polity, supposing it to
be capable of indefinite expansion. In the contrary case,
I have shown that difficulties must arise; that the un-
limited increase of the population over a limited area

70 PROLEGOMENA

must, sooner or later, reintroduce into the colony that
struggle for the means of existence between the colonists,
which it was the primary object of the administrator to
exclude, insomuch as it is fatal to the mutual peace
which is the prime condition of the union of men in
society.

I have briefly described the nature of the only radical
cure, known to me, for the disease which would thus
threaten the existence of the colony; and, however re-
gretfully, I have been obliged to admit that this rigor-
ously scientific method of applying the principles of evo-
lution to human society hardly comes within the region
of practical politics; not for want of will on the part of
a great many people; but because, for one reason, there
is no hope that mere human beings will ever possess
enough intelligence to select the fittest. And I have
adduced other grounds for arriving at the same con-
clusion.

I have pointed out that human society took its rise
in the organic necessities expressed by imitation and by
the sympathetic emotions; and that, in the struggle for
existence with the state of nature and with other so-
cieties, as part of it, those in which men were thus led
to close co-operation had a great advantage.23 But,
since each man retained more or less of the faculties
common to all the rest, and especially a full share of the
desire for unlimited self-gratification, the struggle for
existence within society could only be gradually elimi-
nated. So long as any of it remained, society continued
to be an imperfect instrument of the struggle for exist-
ence, and, consequently, was improvable by the selective
influence of that struggle. Other things being alike, the
tribe of savages in which order was best maintained; in
which there was most security within the tribe and the

23 Collected Essays, vol. v., Prologue, p. 52. [T. H. H.]

PROLEGOMENA 71

most loyal mutual support outside it, would be the
survivors.

I have termed this gradual strengthening of the social
bond, which, though it arrest the struggle for existence
inside society, up to a certain point improves the chances
of society, as a corporate whole, in the cosmic struggle —
the ethical process. I have endeavoured to show that,
when the ethical process has advanced so far as to secure
every member of the society in the possession of the
means of existence, the struggle for existence, as between
man and man, within that society is, ipso facto, at an
end. And, as it is undeniable that the most highly civi-
lized societies have substantially reached this position, it
follows that, so far as they are concerned, the struggle
for existence can play no important part within them.24
In other words, the kind of evolution which is brought
about in the state of nature cannot take place.

I have further shown cause for the belief that direct
selection, after the fashion of the horticulturist and the
breeder, neither has played, nor can play, any important
part in the evolution of society ; apart from other reasons,
because I do not see how such selection could be prac-
tised without a serious weakening, it may be the de-
struction, of the bonds which hold society together. It
strikes me that men who are accustomed to contemplate
the active or passive extirpation of the weak, the unfor-
tunate, and the superfluous; who justify that conduct on
the ground that it has the sanction of the cosmic process,
and is the only way of ensuring the progress of the race ;
who, if they are consistent, must rank medicine among

24 Whether the struggle for existence with the state of nature
and with other societies, so far as they stand in the relation of
the state of nature with it, exerts a selective influence upon mod-
ern society, and in what direction, are questions not easy to
answer. The problem of the effect of military and industrial war-
fare upon those who wage it is very complicated. [T. H. H.]

72 PROLEGOMENA

the black arts and count the physician a mischievous
preserver of the unfit; on whose matrimonial under-
takings the principles of the stud have the chief influ-
ence; whose whole lives, therefore, are an education
in the noble art of suppressing natural affection and
sympathy, are not likely to have any large stock of these
commodities left. But, without them, there is no con-
science, nor any restraint on the conduct of men, except
the calculation of self-interest, the balancing of certain
present gratifications against doubtful future pains; and
experience tells us how much that is worth. Every day,
we see firm believers in the hell of the theologians com-
mit acts by which, as they believe when cool, they risk
eternal punishment; while they hold back from those
which are opposed to the sympathies of their associates.

XIII.

That progressive modification of civilization which
passes by the name of the "evolution of society," is, in
fact, a process of an essentially different character, both
from that which brings about the evolution of species, in
the state of nature, and from that which gives rise to the
evolution of varieties, in the state of art.

There can be no doubt that vast changes have taken
place in English civilization since the reign of the Tudors.
But I am not aware of a particle of evidence in favour
of the conclusion that this evolutionary process has been
accompanied by any modification of the physical, or the
mental, characters of the men who have been the sub-
jects of it. I have not met with any grounds for sus-
pecting that the average Englishmen of today are sen-
sibly different from those that Shakespeare knew and
drew. We look into his magic mirror of the Elizabethan

PROLEGOMENA 73

age, and behold, nowise darkly, the presentment of our-
selves.

During these three centuries, from the reign of Eliza-
beth to that of Victoria, the struggle for existence be-
tween man and man has been so largely restrained
among the great mass of the population (except for one
or two short intervals of civil war), that it can have had
little, or no, selective operation. As to anything com-
parable to direct selection, it has been practised on so
small a scale that it may also be neglected. The criminal
law, in so far as by putting to death or by subjecting to
long periods of imprisonment, those who infringe its
provisions, prevents the propagation of hereditary crim-
inal tendencies; and the poor-law, in so far as it sepa-
rates married couples whose destitution arises from
hereditary defects of character, are doubtless selective
agents operating in favour of the non-criminal and the
more effective members of society. But. the proportion
of the population which they influence is very small ; and,
generally, the hereditary criminal and the hereditary
pauper have propagated their kind before the law affects
them. In a large proportion of cases, crime and pauper-
ism have nothing to do with heredity; but are the con-
sequence, partly, of circumstances and, partly, of the
possession of qualities, which, under different conditions
of life, might have excited esteem and even admiration.
It was a shrewd man of the world who, in discussing
sewage problems, remarked that dirt is riches in the
wrong place; and that sound aphorism has moral appli-
cations. The benevolence and open-handed generosity
which adorn a rich man, may make a pauper of a poor
one; the energy and courage to which the successful sol-
dier owes his rise, the cool and daring subtlety to which
the great financier owes his fortune, may very easily,
under unfavourable conditions, lead their possessors

74 PROLEGOMENA

to the gallows, or to the hulks. Moreover, it is fairly
probable that the children of a "failure" will receive
from their other parent just that little modification of
character which makes all the difference. I sometimes
wonder whether people, who talk so freely about extir-
pating the unfit, ever dispassionately consider their own
history. Surely, one must be very "fit," indeed, not to
know of an occasion, or perhaps two, in one's life, when
it would have been only too easy to qualify for a place
among the "unfit."

In my belief the innate qualities, physical, intellectual,
and moral, of our nation have remained substantially the
same for the last four or five centuries. If the struggle
for existence has affected us to any serious extent (and
I doubt it) it has been, indirectly, through our military
and industrial wars with other nations.

XIV.

What is often called the struggle for existence in so-
ciety (I plead guilty to having used the term too loosely
myself), is a contest, not for the means of existence, but
for the means of enjoyment. Those who occupy the
first places in this practical competitive examination are
the rich and the influential ; those who fail, more or less,
occupy the lower places, down to the squalid obscurity
of the pauper and the criminal. Upon the most liberal
estimate, I suppose the former group will not amount to
two per cent, of the population. I doubt if the latter
exceeds another two per cent. ; but let it be supposed, for
the sake of argument, that it is as great as five per cent.25

25 Those who read the last Essay in this volume will not
accuse me of wishing to attenuate the evil of the existence of
this group, whether great or small. [T. H. H.]

The essay referred to is Social Diseases and Worse Remedies,
which includes The Struggle for Existence and Letters to the
"Times" on the "Darkest England Scheme," a condemnation of the
constitution of the Salvation Army.

PROLEGOMENA 75

As it is only in the latter group that any thing com-
parable to the struggle for existence in the state of nature
can take place; as it is only among this twentieth
of the whole people that numerous men, women, and
children die of rapid or slow starvation, or of the diseases
incidental to permanently bad conditions of life; and
as there is nothing to prevent their multiplication before
they are killed off, while, in spite of greater infant mor-
tality, they increase faster than the rich; it seems
clear that the struggle for existence in this class can have
no appreciable selective influence upon the other 95 per
cent, of the population.

What sort of a sheep breeder would he be who should
content himself with picking out the worst fifty out of a
thousand, leaving them on a barren common till the
weakest starved, and then letting the survivors go back
to mix with the rest? And the parallel is too favourable;
since in a large number of cases, the a£tual poor and
the convicted criminals are neither the weakest nor the
worst.

In the struggle for the means of enjoyment, the qual-
ities which insure success are energy, industry, intellec-
tual capacity, tenacity of purpose, and, at least, as much
sympathy as is necessary to make a man understand the
feelings of his fellows. Were there none of those arti-
ficial arrangements by which fools and knaves are kept
at the top of society instead of sinking to their natural
place at the bottom,26 the struggle for the means of
enjoyment would ensure a constant circulation of the
human units of the social compound, from the bottom
to the top and from the top to the bottom. The sur-
vivors of the contest, those who continued to form the

26 I have elsewhere lamented the absence from society of a
machinery for facilitating the descent of incapacity. "Admin-
istrative Nihilism." Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 54. [T. H. H.]

76 PROLEGOMENA

great bulk of the polity, would not be those "fittest" who
got to the very top, but the great body of the moderately
"fit," whose numbers and superior propagative power,
enable them always to swamp the exceptionally endowed
minority.

I think it must be obvious to every one, that, whether
we consider the internal or the external interests of so-
ciety, it is desirable they should be in the hands of those
who are endowed with the largest share of energy, of
industry, of intellectual capacity, of tenacity of purpose,
while they are not devoid of sympathetic humanity; and,
in so far as the struggle for the means of enjoyment
tends to place such men in possession of wealth and in-
fluence, it is a process which tends to the good of society.
But the process, as we have seen, has no real resemblance
to that which adapts living beings to current conditions
in the state of nature; nor any to the artificial selection
of the horticulturist.

xv.

To return, once more, to the parallel of horticulture.
In the modern world, the gardening of men by them-
selves is practically restricted to the performance, not
of selection, but of that other function of the gardener,
the creation of conditions more favourable than those
of the state of nature; to the end of facilitating the free
expansion of the innate faculties of the citizen, so far
as it is consistent with the general good. And the busi-
ness of the moral and political philosopher appears to
me to be the ascertainment, by the same method of ob-
servation, experiment, and ratiocination, as is practised
in other kinds of scientific work, of the course of conduct
which will best conduce to that end.

But, supposing this course of conduct to be scientifi-

PROLEGOMENA 77

cally determined and carefully followed out, it cannot
put an end to the struggle for existence in the state of
nature; and it will not so much as tend, in any way,
to the adaptation of man to that state. Even should the
whole human race be absorbed in one vast polity, within
which "absolute political justice" reigns, the struggle
for existence with the state of nature outside it, and the
tendency to the return to the struggle within, in conse-
quence of over-multiplication, will remain; and, unless
men's inheritance from the ancestors who fought a good
fight in the state of nature, their dose of original sin, is
rooted out by some method at present unrevealed, at any
rate to disbelievers in supernaturalism, every child born
into the world will still bring with him the instinct of
unlimited self-assertion. He will have to learn the les-
son of self-restraint and renunciation. But the practice
of self-restraint and renunciation is not happiness, though
it may be something much better.

That man, as a "political animal," is susceptible of
a vast amount of improvement, by education, by instruc-
tion, and by the application of his intelligence to the
adaptation of the conditions of life to his higher needs, I
entertain not the slightest doubt. But so long as he re-
mains liable to error, intellectual or moral; so long as
he is compelled to be perpetually on guard against the
cosmic forces, whose ends are not his ends, without and
within himself; so long as he is haunted by inexpugnable
memories and hopeless aspirations; so long as the recog-
nition of his intellectual limitations forces him to ac-
knowledge his incapacity to penetrate the mystery of
existence; the prospect of attaining untroubled happi-
ness, or of a state which can, even remotely, deserve the
title of perfection, appears to me to be as misleading an
illusion as ever was dangled before the eyes of poor
humanity. And there have been many of them.

78 PROLEGOMENA

. That which lies before the human race is a constant
struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the
State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity ;
in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civi-
lization, capable of maintaining and constantly improv-
ing itself, until the evolution of our globe shall have en-
tered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic
process resumes its sway; and, once more, the State of
Nature prevails over the surface of our planet.

Note (see p. 30). — It seems the fashion nowadays to ignore
Hartley; though, a century and a half ago, he not only laid the
foundations but built up much of the superstructure of a true
theory of the Evolution of the intellectual and moral faculties.
He speaks of what I have termed the ethical process as "our
Progress from Self-interest to Self-annihilation." Observations on
Man (1749), vol. ii. p. 281. [T. H. H.]

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
IN HUMAN SOCIETY1

THE vast and varied procession of events, which we
call Nature, affords a sublime spectacle and an inexhaus-
tible wealth of attractive problems to the speculative
observer. If we confine our attention to that aspect
which engages the attention of the intellect, nature ap-
pears a beautiful and harmonious whole, the incarnation
of a faultless logical process, from certain premises in
the past to an inevitable conclusion in the future. But
if it be regarded from a less elevated, though more hu-
man, point of view; if our moral sympathies are allowed

1 This essay appeared in the Nineteenth Century for February,
1888, and was prefixed as an introductory essay to a pamphlet,
Social Diseases and Worse Remedies, 1891. Huxley said that
the purpose of the essay was to state the principles that in his
opinion lay at the bottom of the "social question." "So far as
Individualism and Regimental Socialism are concerned, this paper
simply emphasizes and expands the opinions expressed in an
address to the members of the Midland Institute, delivered seven-
teen years earlier, and still more fully developed in several essays
published in the "Nineteenth Century" in 1889, which I hope,
before long, to republish.

"The fundamental proposition which runs through the writings,
which thus extend over a period of twenty years, is, that the
common a priori doctrines and methods of reasoning about
political and social questions are essentially vicious; and that
argumentation on this basis leads, with equal force, to two con-
tradictory and extremely mischievous systems, the one that of
Anarchaic Individualism, the other that of despotic or Regi-
mental Socialism." Evol. and Ethics, 189-190. Administrative,
Nihilism was the address to the members of the Midland Institute.
The essays from the Nineteenth Century referred to were published
in Collected Essays 1:290-430 and 1X1147-187.

79

8o THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

to influence our judgment, and we permit ourselves to
criticise our great mother as we criticise one another;
then our verdict, at least so far as sentient nature is
concerned, can hardly be so favourable.

In sober truth, to those who have made a study of
the phenomena of life as they are exhibited by the higher
forms of the animal world, the optimistic dogma, that
this is the best of all possible worlds, will seem little
better than a libel upon possibility. It is really only
another instance to be added to the many extant, of the
audacity of a priori speculators who, having created God
in their own image, find no difficulty in assuming that the
Almighty must have been actuated by the same motives
as themselves. They are quite sure that, had any other
course been practicable, He would no more have made
infinite suffering a necessary ingredient of His handi-
work than a respectable philosopher would have done
the like.

But even the modified optimism of the time-honoured
thesis of physico- theology, that the sentient world is,
on the whole, regulated by principles of benevolence,
does but ill stand the test of impartial confrontation with
the facts of the case. No doubt it is quite true that
sentient nature affords hosts of examples of subtle con-
trivances directed towards the production of pleasure or
the avoidance of pain; and it may be proper to say
that these are evidences of benevolence. But if so, why
is it not equally proper to say of the equally numerous
arrangements, the no less necessary result of which is the
production of pain, that they are evidences of malevo-
lence?

If a vast amount of that which, in a piece of human
workmanship, we should call skill, is visible in those
parts of the organization of a deer to which it owes its
ability to escape from beasts of prey, there is at least

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 81

equal skill displayed in that bodily mechanism of the
wolf which enables him to track, and sooner or later
to bring down, the deer. Viewed under the dry light of
science, deer and wolf are alike admirable; and, if both
were non-sentient automata, there would be nothing to
qualify our admiration of the action of the one on the
other. But the fact that the deer suffers, while the wolf
inflicts suffering, engages our moral sympathies. We
should call men like the deer innocent and good, men such
as the wolf malignant and bad ; we should call those who
defended the deer and aided him to escape brave and com-
passionate, and those who helped the wolf in his bloody
work base and cruel. Surely, if we transfer these judg-
ments to nature outside the world of man at all, we
must do so impartially. In that case, the goodness of the
right hand which helps the deer, and the wickedness of
the left hand which eggs on the wolf, will neutralize one
another: and the course of nature will appear to be
neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral.

This conclusion is thrust upon us by analogous facts
in every part of the sentient world; yet, inasmuch as it
not only jars upon prevalent prejudices, but arouses the
natural dislike to that which is painful, much ingenuity
has been exercised in devising an escape from it.

From the theological side, we are told that this is a
state of probation, and that the seeming injustices and
immoralities of nature will be compensated by and by.
But how this compensation is to be effected, in the case
of the great majority of sentient things, is not clear. I
apprehend that no one is seriously prepared to maintain
that the ghosts of all the myriads of generations of her-
bivorous animals which lived during the millions of years
of the earth's duration, before the appearance of man,
and which have all that time been tormented and de-
voured by carnivores, are to be compensated by a peren-

82 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

nial existence in clover; while the ghosts of carnivores
are to go to some kennel where there is neither a pan of
water nor a bone with any meat on it. Besides, from
the point of view of morality, the last stage of things
would be worse than the first. For the carnivores, how-
ever brutal and sanguinary, have only done that which,
if there is any evidence of contrivance in the world, they
were expressly constructed to do. Moreover, carnivores
and herbivores alike have been subject to all the miseries
incidental to old age, disease, and over-multiplication,
and both might well put in a claim for "compensation"
on this score.

On the evolutionist side, on the other hand, we are
told to take comfort from the reflection that the terrible
struggle for existence tends to final good, and that the
suffering of the ancestor is paid for by the increased per-
fection of the progeny. There would be something in
this argument if, in Chinese fashion, the present genera-
tion could pay its debts to its ancestors; otherwise it is
not clear what compensation the Eohippus gets for his
sorrows in the fact that, some millions of years after-
wards, one of his descendants wins the Derby. And,
again, it is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a
constant tendency to increased perfection. That process
undoubtedly involves a constant remodelling of the
organism in adaptation to new conditions ; but it depends
on the nature of these conditions whether the direction of
the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.
Retrogressive is as practical as progressive metamorpho-
sis. If what the physical philosophers tell us, that our
globe has been in a state of fusion, and, like the sun, is
gradually cooling down, is true; then the time must
come when evolution will mean adaptation to an universal
winter, and all forms of life will die out, except such low
and simple organisms as the Diatom of the arctic and

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 83

antarctic ice and the Protococcus of the red snow. If our
globe is proceeding from a condition in which it was too
hot to support any but the lowest living thing to a con-
dition in which it will be too cold to permit of the exist-
ence of any others, the course of life upon its surface
must describe a trajectory like that of a ball fired from
a mortar; and the sinking half of that course is as much
a part of the general process of evolution as the rising.
From the point of view of the moralist the animal
world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show.
The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight —
whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest
live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to
turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given. He
must admit that the skill and training displayed are won-
derful. But he must shut his eyes if he would not see
that more or less enduring suffering is the meed of both
vanquished and victor. And since the great gams is
going on in every corner of the world, thousands of times
a minute; since, were our ears sharp enough, we need
not descend to the gates of hell to hear —

sospiri, pianti, ed alti guai.
Voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle2

— it seems to follow that, if the world is governed by
benevolence, it must be a different sort of benevolence
from that of John Howard.3

But the old Babylonians wisely symbolized Nature by
their great goddess Istar, who combined the attributes of

2 ... Sighs, complaints, and ululations loud

And voices high and hoarse, with sound of hands,
Dante, Inferno, Canto 111:22, 27. Longfellow's translation.

3 John Howard was an eighteenth century British philanthro-
pist who brought about important reforms in British prisons.

84 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

Aphrodite with those of Ares. Her terrible aspect is not
to be ignored or covered up with shams ; but it is not the
only one. If the optimism of Leibnitz4 is a foolish though
pleasant dream, the pessimism of Schopenhauer5 is a
nightmare, the more foolish because of its hideousness.
Error which is not pleasant is surely the worst form of
wrong.

This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but
to say that it is the worst is mere petulant nonsense.
A worn-out voluptuary may find nothing good under the
sun, or a vain and inexperienced youth, who cannot get
the moon he cries for, may vent his irritation in pessimis-
tic moanings; but there can be no doubt in the mind of
any reasonable person that mankind could, would, and
in fact do, get on fairly well with vastly less happiness
and far more misery than find their way into the lives of
nine people out of ten. If each and all of us had been
visited by an attack of neuralgia, or of extreme mental
depression, for one hour in every twenty- four — a sup-
position which many tolerably vigorous people know, to
their cost, is not extravagant — the burden of life would
have been immensely increased without much practical
hindrance to its general course. Men with any manhood
in them find life quite worth living under worse condi-
tions than these.

There is another sufficiently obvious fact, which ren-
ders the hypothesis that the course of sentient nature is

4 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716) was a German
philosopher and mathematician who developed a complicated
system of idealism. He believed that this is the best of all pos-
sible worlds, that perfection is its ethical end, and that God is its
efficient cause and final harmony.

5 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher
who held that since blind force rules the world, there is no hope
of the world growing better, and that happiness is secured only
by the suppression of all desires and the attainment of a purely
passive state.

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 85

dictated by malevolence quite untenable. A vast multi-
tude of pleasures, and these among the purest and the
best, are superfluities, bits of good which are to all
appearances unnecessary as inducements to live, and are,
so to speak, thrown into the bargain of life. To those
who experience them, few delights can be more en-
trancing than such as are afforded by natural beauty, or
by the arts, and especially by music; but they are
products of, rather than factors in, evolution, and it is
probable that they are known, in any considerable de-
gree, to but a very small proportion of mankind.

The conclusion of the whole matter seems to be that,
if Ormuzd has not had his way in this world, neither
has Ahriman. Pessimism is as little consonant with the
facts of sentient existence as optimism. If we desire to
represent the course of nature in terms of human thought,
and assume that it was intended to be that which it is,
we must say that its governing principle is intellectual
and not moral; that it is a materialized logical process,
accompanied by pleasures and pains, the incidence of
which, in the majority of cases, has not the slightest
reference to moral desert. That the rain falls alike upon
the just and the unjust, and that those upon whom the
Tower of Siloam fell were no worse than their neighbours,
seem to be Oriental modes of expressing the same con-
clusion.

In the strict sense of the word "nature," it denotes
the sum of the phenomenal world, of that which has
been, and is, and will be; and society, like art, is there-
fore a part of nature. But it is convenient to distinguish
those parts of nature in which man plays the part of
immediate cause, as something apart; and, therefore,
society, like art, is usefully to be considered as distinct

86 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

from nature. It is the more desirable, and even necessary,
to make this distinction, since society differs from nature
in having a definite moral object; whence it comes about
that the course shaped by the ethical man — the member
of society or citizen — necessarily runs counter to that
which the non-ethical man — the primitive savage, or
man as a mere member of the animal kingdom — tends
to adopt. The latter fights out the struggle for exist-
ence to the bitter end, like any other animal ; the former
devotes his best energies to the object of setting limits to
the struggle.6

In the cycle of phenomena presented by the life of
man, the animal, no more moral end is discernible than
in that presented by the lives of the wolf and of the deer.
However imperfect the relics of prehistoric men may be,
the evidence which they afford clearly tends to the con-
clusion that, for thousands and thousands of years, be-
fore the origin of the oldest known civilizations, men
were savages of a very low type. They strove with their
enemies and their competitors; they preyed upon things
weaker or less cunning than themselves; they were born,
multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of gen-
erations alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and
the hyaena, whose lives were spent in the same way; and
they were no more to be praised or blamed, on moral
grounds, than their less erect and more hairy compatriots.

As among these, so among primitive men, the weakest
and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and
shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their
circumstances, but not the best in any other sense, sur-
vived. Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the
limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hob-

6 [The reader will observe that this is the argument of the Ro«
manes Lecture, in brief. — 1894. T. H. H.]
Evolution and Ethics was the second Romanes Lecture.

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 87

besian7 war of each against all was the normal state
of existence. The human species, like others, plashed
and floundered amid the general stream of evolution,
keeping its head above water as it best might, and think-
ing neither of whence nor whither.

The history of civilization — that is, of society — on
the other hand, is the record of the attempts which the
human race has made to escape from this position. The
first men who substituted the state of mutual peace for
that of mutual war, whatever the motive which impelled
them to take that step, created society. But, in establish-
ing peace, they obviously put a limit upon the struggle for
existence. Between the members of that society, at any
rate, it was not to be pursued a outrance.8 And of all
the successive shapes which society has taken, that most
nearly approaches perfection in which the war of indi-
vidual against individual is most strictly limited. The
primitive savage, tutored by Istar, appropriated whatever
took his fancy, and killed whomsoever opposed him, if
he could. On the contrary, the ideal of the ethical man
is to limit his freedom of action to a sphere in which he
does not interfere with the freedom of others; he seeks
the common weal as much as his own; and, indeed, as an
essential part of his own welfare. Peace is both end and
means with him ; and he founds his life on a more or less
complete self-restraint, which is the negation of the
unlimited struggle for existence. He tries to escape from

7 Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), an important political phil-
osopher, in his Leviathan; or the Matter, Form, and Power of
a Common-wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, 1651, described the
state of nature as one in which complete anarchy and barbarism
prevailed. The only alternative he proposed was a state over
which the sovereign had absolute power, and in which the sub-
jects were bound to obedience by a "social contract" which de-
rived its sanction from their fear of force and hope of personal
advantage.

8 "To the death."

88 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

his place in the animal kingdom, founded on the free
development of the principle of non-moral evolution, and
to establish a kingdom of Man, governed upon the
principle of moral evolution. For society not only has
a moral end, but in its perfection, social life, is embodied
morality.

But the effort of ethical man to work towards a moral
end by no means abolished, perhaps has hardly modified,
the deep-seated organic impulses which impel the natu-
ral man to follow his non-moral course. One of the most
essential conditions, if not the chief cause, of the strug-
gle for existence, is the tendency to multiply without
limit, which man shares with all living things. It is
notable that "increase and multiply" is a commandment
traditionally much older than the ten; and that it is,
perhaps, the only one which has been spontaneously and
ex animo9 obeyed by the great majority of the human
race. But, in civilized society, the inevitable result of
such obedience is the re-establishment, in all its inten-
sity, of that struggle for existence — the war of each
against all — the mitigation or abolition of which was the
chief end of social organization.

It is conceivable that, at some period in the history of
the fabled Atlantis,10 the production of food should have
been exactly sufficient to meet the wants of the popula-
tion, that the makers of the commodities of the artificer
should have amounted to just the number supportable by
the surplus food of the agriculturists. And, as there
is no harm in adding another monstrous supposition to
the foregoing, let it be imagined that every man, woman,
and child was perfectly virtuous, and aimed at the good

9 "From the heart," "sincerely."

10 Atlantis was a fabled island in the western ocean mentioned
by classical writers. Bacon's New Atlantis described an ideal
commonwealth on an island in the mid-Atlantic.

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 89

of all as the highest personal good. In that happy land,
the natural man would have been finally put down by
the ethical man. There would have been no competition,
but the industry of each would have been serviceable to
all; nobody being vain and nobody avaricious, there
would have been no rivalries; the struggle for existence
would have been abolished, and the millennium would
have finally set in. But it is obvious that this state of
things could have been permanent only with a station-
ary population. Add ten fresh mouths; and as, by the
supposition, there was only exactly enough before, some-
body must go on short rations. The Atlantis society
might have been a heaven upon earth, the whole nation
might have consisted of just men, needing no repen-
tance, and yet somebody must starve. Reckless Istar,
non-moral Nature, would have riven the ethical fabric. I
was once talking with a very eminent physician11 about
the vis medicatrix natures.12 "Stuff!" said he; "nine
times out of ten nature does not want to cure the man:
she wants to put him in his coffin." And Istar-Nature
appears to have equally little sympathy with the ends
of society. "Stuff! she wants nothing but a fair field and
free play for her darling the strongest."

Our Atlantis may be an impossible figment, but the
antagonistic tendencies which the fable adumbrates have
existed in every society which was ever established, and,
to all appearance, must strive for the victory in all that
will be. Historians point to the greed and ambition of
rulers, to the reckless turbulence of the ruled, to the
debasing effects of wealth and luxury, and to the dev-
astating wars which have formed a great part of the
occupation of mankind, as the causes of the decay of
states and the foundering of old civilizations, and thereby

11 The late Sir W. Gull. [T. H. H.]

12 "Healing power of nature."

9o THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

point their story with a moral. No doubt immoral mo-
tives of all sorts have figured largely among the minor
causes of these events. But beneath all this superficial
turmoil lay the deep-seated impulse given by unlimited
multiplication. In the swarms of colonies thrown out by
Phoenicia and by old Greece; in the ver sacrum13 of the
Latin races ; in the floods of Gauls and of Teutons which
burst over the frontiers of the old civilization of Europe ;
in the swaying to and fro of the vast Mongolian hordes
in late times, the population problem comes to the front
in a very visible shape. Nor is it less plainly manifest in
the everlasting agrarian questions of ancient Rome than
in the Arreoi societies of the Polynesian Islands.

In the ancient world, and in a large part of that in
which we live, the practice of infanticide was, or is, a
regular and legal custom; famine, pestilence, and war
were and are normal factors in the struggle for existence,
and they have served, in a gross and brutal fashion, to
mitigate the intensity of the effects of its chief cause.

But, in the more advanced civilizations, the progress
of private and public morality has steadily tended to
remove all these checks. We declare infanticide murder,
and punish it as such; we decree, not quite so success-
fully, that no one shall die of hunger; we regard death
from preventable causes of other kinds as a sort
of constructive murder, and eliminate pestilence to the
best of our ability; we declaim against the curse of war,
and the wickedness of the military spirit, and we are
never weary of dilating on the blessedness of peace and
the innocent beneficence of Industry. In their moments
of expansion, even statesmen and men of business go
thus far. The finer spirits to an ideal civitas Dei; 14
a state when, every man having reached the point of ab-

13 " A special offering presented from the firstlings of spring."

14 "City of God."

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 91

solute self-negation, and having nothing but moral per-
fection to strive after, peace will truly reign, not merely
among nations, but among men, and the struggle for
existence will be at an end.

Whether human nature is competent, under any cir-
cumstances, to reach, or even seriously advance towards,
this ideal condition, is a question which need not be dis-
cussed. It will be admitted that mankind has not yet
reached this stage by a very long way, and my business is
with the present. And that which I wish to point out is
that, so long as the natural man increases and multi-
plies without restraint, so long will peace and industry
not only permit, but they will necessitate, a struggle for
existence as sharp as any that ever went on under the
regime of war. If Istar is to reign on the one hand,
she will demand her human sacrifices on the other.

Let us look at home. For seventy years peace and
industry have had their way among us with less inter-
ruption and under more favourable conditions than in
any other country on the face of the earth. The wealth
of Croesus was nothing to that which we have accumu-
lated, and our prosperity has filled the world with envy.
But Nemesis did not forget Croesus: has she forgotten us?

I think not. There are now 36,000,000 of people in
our islands, and every year considerably more than
300,000 are added to our numbers.15 That is to say,
about every hundred seconds, or so, a new claimant to
a share in the common stock or maintenance presents
him or herself among us. At the present time, the prod-
uce of the soil does not suffice to feed half its popula-
tion. The other moiety has to be supplied with food

15 These numbers are only approximately accurate. In 1881,
our population amounted to 35,241,482, exceeding the number in
1871 by 3,396,103. The average annual increase in the decennial
period 1871-1881 is therefore 339,6io. The number of minutes in
a calendar year is 525,600. [T. H. H.]

92 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

which must be bought from the people of food-producing
countries. That is to say, we have to offer them the
things which they want in exchange for the things we
want. And the things they want and which we can pro-
duce better than they are mainly manufactures — indus-
trial products.

The insolent reproach of the first Napoleon had a
very solid foundation. We not only are, but, under
penalty of starvation, we are bound to be, a nation of
shopkeepers. But other nations also lie under the same
necessity of keeping shop, and some of them deal in the
same goods as ourselves. Our customers naturally seek
to get the most and the best in exchange for their prod-
uce. If our goods are inferior to those of our competi-
tors, there is no ground, compatible with the sanity of
the buyers, which can be alleged, why they should not
prefer the latter. And, if that result should ever take
place on a large and general scale, five or six millions of
us would soon have nothing to eat. We know what the
cotton famine16 was; and we can therefore form some
notion of what a dearth of customers would be.

Judged by an ethical standard, nothing can be less
satisfactory than the position in which we find ourselves.
In a real, though incomplete, degree we have attained
the condition of peace which is the main object of social
organization; and, for argument's sake, it may be as-
sumed that we desire nothing but that which is in itself
innocent and praiseworthy — namely, the enjoyment of
the fruits of honest industry. And lo! in spite of our-
selves, we are in reality engaged in an internecine strug-
gle for existence with our presumably no less peaceful
and well-meaning neighbours. We seek peace and we do

16 During the American Civil War importations of cotton to
England were cut off, and thousands of cotton workers were
thrown out of work and into destitution.

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 93

not ensue it. The moral nature in us asks for no more
than is compatible with the general good; the non-moral
nature proclaims and acts upon that fine old Scottish
family motto, "Thou shalt starve ere I want." Let us
be under no illusions, then. So long as unlimited multi-
plication goes on, no social organization which has ever
been devised, or is likely to be devised, no fiddle-faddling
with the distribution of wealth, will deliver society from
the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction within
itself, in its intensest form, of that struggle for existence
the limitation of which is the object of society. And
however shocking to the moral sense this eternal compe-
tition of man against man and of nation against nation
may be; however revolting may be the accumulation of
misery at the negative pole of society, in contrast with
that of monstrous wealth at the positive pole;17 this
state of things must abide, and grow continually worse,
so long as Is tar holds her way unchecked. It is the
true riddle of the Sphinx; and every nation which does
not solve it will sooner or later be devoured by the mon-
ster itself has generated.

The practical and pressing question for us, just now,
seems to me to be how to gain time. "Time brings
counsel," as the Teutonic proverb has it; and wiser folk
among our posterity may see their way out of that which
at present looks like an impasse.

It would be folly to entertain any ill-feeling towards
those neighbours and rivals who, like ourselves, are slaves
of Istar; but, if somebody is to be starved, the modern
world has no Oracle of Delphi to which the nations can
appeal for an indication of the victim. It is open to us

17 [It is hard to say whether the increase of the unemployed
poor, or that of the unemployed rich, is the greater social evil.
— 1894. T. H. H.]

94 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

to try our fortune; and, if we avoid impending fate,
there will be a certain ground for believing that we are
the right people to escape. Securus judicat or bis.™

To this end, it is well to look into the necessary con-
dition of our salvation by works. They are two, one
plain to all the world and hardly needing insistence;
the other seemingly not so plain, since too often it has
been theoretically and practically left out of sight. The
obvious condition is that our produce shall be better
than that of others. There is only one reason why our
goods should be preferred to those of our rivals — our
customers must find them better at the price. That
means that we must use more knowledge, skill, and in-
dustry in producing them, without a proportionate in-
crease in the cost of production; and, as the price of
labour constitutes a large element in that cost, the rate
of wages must be restricted within certain limits. It is
perfectly true that cheap production and cheap labour
are by no means synonymous; but it is also true that
wages cannot increase beyond a certain proportion with-
out destroying cheapness. Cheapness, then, with, as
part and parcel of cheapness, a moderate price of labour,
is essential to our success as competitors in the markets
of the world.

The second condition is really quite as plainly indispen-
sable as the first, if one thinks seriously about the mat-
ter. It is social stability. Society is stable, when the
wants of its members obtain as much satisfaction as, life
being what it is, common sense and experience show may
be reasonably expected. Mankind, in general, care very
little for forms of government or ideal considerations of
any sort; and nothing really stirs the great multitude to
break with custom and incur the manifest perils of
revolt except the belief that misery in this world, or

18 "Unconcerned about the world, he rules."

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 95

damnation in the next, or both, are threatened by the
continuance of the state of things in which they have
been brought up. But when they do attain that convic-
tion, society becomes as unstable as a package of dyna-
mite, and a very small matter will produce the explosion
which sends it back to the chaos of savagery.

It needs no argument to prove that when the price
of labour sinks below a certain point, the worker in-
fallibly falls into that condition which the French em-
phatically call la miser e — a word for which I do not
think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a con-
dition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are
necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of
the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in
which men, women, and children are forced to crowd
into dens wherein decency is abolished and the most
ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible
of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are
reduced to bestiality and drunkenness; in which the
pains accumulate at compound interest, in the shape of
starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral deg-
radation; in which the prospect of even steady and
honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with
hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave.

That a certain proportion of the members of every
great aggregation of mankind should constantly tend to
establish and populate such a Slough of Despond as this
is inevitable, so long as some people are by nature idle
and vicious, while others are disabled by sickness or
accident, or thrown upon the world by the death of
their bread-winners. So long as that proportion is re-
stricted within tolerable limits, it can be dealt with;
and, so far as it arises only from such causes, its exist-
ence may and must be patiently borne. But, when the
organization of society, instead of mitigating this ten-

96 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

dency, tends to continue and intensify it; when a given
social order plainly makes for evil and not for good,
men naturally enough begin to think it high time to try
a fresh experiment. The animal man, finding that the
ethical man has landed him in such a slough, resumes
his ancient sovereignty, and preaches anarchy; which
is, substantially, a proposal to reduce the social cosmos
to chaos, and begin the brute struggle for existence
once again.

Any one who is acquainted with the state of the popu-
lation of all great industrial centres, whether in this or
other countries, is aware that, amidst a large and increas-
ing body of that population, la misere reigns supreme. I
have no pretensions to the character of a philanthropist,
and I have a special horror of all sorts of sentimental
rhetoric; I am merely trying to deal with facts, to some
extent within my own knowledge, and further evidenced
by abundant testimony, as a naturalist; and I take it to
be a mere plain truth that, throughout industrial Eu-
rope, there is not a single large manufacturing city
which is free from a vast mass of people whose condi-
tion is exactly that described; and from a still greater
mass who, living just on the edge of the social swamp,
are liable to be precipitated into it by any lack of de-
mand for their produce. And, with every addition to
the population, the multitude already sunk in the pit
and the number of the host sliding towards it continually
increase.

Argumentation can hardly be needful to make it
clear that no society in which the elements of decompo-
sition are thus swiftly and surely accumulating can
hope to win in the race of industries.

Intelligence, knowledge, and skill are undoubtedly
conditions of success; but of what avail are they likely
to be unless they are backed up by honesty, energy, good-

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 97

will, and all the physical and moral faculties that go to
the making of manhood, and unless they are stimulated
by hope of such reward as men may fairly look to? And
what dweller in the slough of want, dwarfed in body
and soul, demoralized, hopeless, can reasonably be ex-
pected to possess these qualities?

Any full and permanent development of the produc-
tive powers of an industrial population, then, must be
compatible with and, indeed, based upon a social or-
ganization which will secure a fair amount of physical
and moral welfare to that population; which will make
for good and not for evil. Natural science and religious
enthusiasm rarely go hand in hand, but on this matter
their concord is complete; and the least sympathetic
of naturalists can but admire the insight and the devo-
tion of such social reformers as the late Lord Shaftes-
bury,19 whose recently published "Life and Letters"
gives a vivid picture of the condition of the working
classes fifty years ago, and of the pit which our indus-
try, ignoring these plain truths, was then digging under
its own feet.

There is, perhaps, no more hopeful sign of progress
among us, in the last half-century, than the steadily
increasing devotion which has been and is directed to
measures for promoting physical and moral welfare
among the poorer classes. Sanitary reformers, like most
other reformers whom I have had the advantage of
knowing, seem to need a good dose of fanaticism, as
a sort of moral coca, to keep them up to the mark, and,
doubtless, they have made many mistakes; but that the
endeavour to improve the condition under which our
industrial population live, to amend the drainage of

19 Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Lord Shaftesbury (1801-
1885), was a philanthropist who was active in improving the
conditions of the working classes.

98 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

densely peopled streets, to provide baths, washhouses,
and gymnasia, to facilitate habits of thrift, to furnish
some provision for instruction and amusement in public
libraries and the like, is not only desirable from a philan-
thropic point of view, but an essential condition of safe
industrial development, appears to me to be indisputable.
It is by such means alone, so far as I can see, that we
can hope to check the constant gravitation of industrial
society towards la misere, until the general progress of
intelligence and morality leads men to grapple with the
sources of that tendency. If it is said that the carrying
out of such arrangements as those indicated must en-
hance the cost of production, and thus handicap the
producer in the race of competition, I venture, in the
first place, to doubt the. fact ; but if it be so, it results
that industrial society has to face a dilemma, either
alternative of which threatens destruction.

On the one hand, a population the labour of which
is sufficiently remunerated may be physically and
morally healthy and socially stable, but may fail in
industrial competition by reason of the dearness of its
produce. On the other hand, a population the labour
of which is insufficiently remunerated must become
physically and morally unhealthy, and socially unstable;
and though it may succeed for a while in industrial
competition, by reason of the cheapness of its produce,
it must in the end fall, through hideous misery and
degradation, to utter ruin.

Well, if these are the only possible alternatives, let
us for ourselves and our children choose the former,
and, if need be, starve like men. But I do not believe
that the stable society made up of healthy, vigorous,
instructed, and self-ruling people would ever incur
serious risk of that fate. They are not likely to be
troubled with many competitors of the same character,

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 99

just yet; and they may be safely trusted to find ways
of holding their own.

Assuming that the physical and moral well-being and
the stable social order, which are the indispensable con-
ditions of permanent industrial development, are secured,
there remains for consideration the means of attaining
that knowledge and skill without which, even then, the
battle of competition cannot be successfully fought. Let
us consider how we stand. A vast system of elementary
education has now been in operation among us for six-
teen years,20 and has reached all but a very small frac-
tion of the population. I do not think that there is
any room for doubt that, on the whole, it has worked
well, and that its indirect no less than its direct benefits
have been immense. But, as might be expected, it
exhibits the defects of all our educational systems —
fashioned as they were to meet the wants of a bygone
condition of society. There is a widespread and, I
think, well-justified complaint that it has too much to
do with books and too little to do with things. I am
as little disposed as any one can well be to narrow early
education and to make the primary school a mere an-
nexe of the shop. And it is not so much in the interests
of industry, as in that of breadth of culture, that I
echo the common complaint against the bookish and
theoretical character of our primary instruction.

If there were no such things as industrial pursuits, a
system of education which does nothing for the faculties
of observation, which trains neither the eye nor the
hand, and is compatible with utter ignorance of the

20 The Education Bill of 1870 was the beginning of the pres-
ent organized system of popular education in England. Huxley
has a number of addresses on the general subject of education,
one of which, Science and Art, and an extract from another, A
Liberal Education, appear in this volume. These and others com-
pose Science and Education, Collected Essays, volume III.

ioo THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

commonest natural truths, might still be reasonably re-
garded as strangely imperfect. And when we consider
that the instruction and training which are lacking are
exactly those which are of most importance for the
great mass of our population, the fault becomes almost
a crime, the more that there is no practical difficulty in
making good these defects. There really is no reason
why drawing should not be universally taught, and it
is an admirable training for both eye and hand. Ar-
tists are born, not made; but everybody may be taught
to draw elevations, plans, and sections; and pots and
pans are as good, indeed better, models for this purpose
than the Apollo Belvedere. The plant is not expensive;
and there is this excellent quality about drawing of the
kind indicated, that it can be tested almost as easily and
severely as arithmetic. Such drawings are either right
or wrong, and if they are wrong the pupil can be made
to see that they are wrong. From the industrial point
of view, drawing has the further merit that there is
hardly any trade in which the power of drawing is not
of daily and hourly utility. In the next place, no good
reason, except the want of capable teachers, can be
assigned why elementary notions of science should not
be an element in general instruction. In this case, again,
no expensive or elaborate apparatus is necessary. The
commonest thing — a candle, a boy's squirt, a piece of
chalk — in the hands of a teacher who knows his busi-
ness, may be made the starting-point whence children
may be led into the regions of science as far as their
capacity permits, with efficient exercise of their obser-
vational and reasoning faculties on the road. If object
lessons often prove trivial failures, it is not the fault
of object lessons, but that of the teacher, who has not
found out how much the power of teaching a little
depends on knowing a great deal, and that thoroughly;

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 101

and that he has not made that discovery is not the
fault of the teachers, but of the detestable system of
training them which is widely prevalent.21

As I have said, I do not regard the proposal to add
these to the present subjects of universal instruction as
made merely in the interests of industry. Elementary
science and drawing are just as needful at Eton2- (where
I am happy to say both are now parts of the regular
course) as in the lowest primary school. But their im-
portance in the education of the artisan is enhanced,
not merely by the fact that the knowledge and skill thus
gained — little as they may amount to — will still be
of practical utility to him; but, further, because they
constitute an introduction to that special training which
is commonly called "technical education."

I conceive that our wants in this last direction may
be grouped under three heads: (i) Instruction in the
principles of those branches of science and of art which
are peculiarly applicable to industrial pursuits, which
may be called preliminary scientific education. ( 2 ) In-
struction in the special branches of such applied science
and art, as technical education proper. (3) Instruction
of teachers in both these branches. (4) Capacity-
catching machinery.

A great deal has already been done in each of these
directions, but much remains to be done. If elementary
education is amended in the way that has been sug-

21 Training in the use of simple tools is no doubt very de-
sirable, on all grounds. From the point of view of "culture,"
the man whose "fingers are all thumbs" is but a stunted crea-
ture. But the practical difficulties in the way of introducing
handiwork of this kind into elementary schools appear to me to
be considerable. [T. H. H.]

22 Eton College is perhaps the best of the great English "pub-
lic schools." Huxley was a governor of the college from 1879
to 1888.

102 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

gested, I think that the school-boards will have quite
as much on their hands as they are capable of doing
well. The influences under which the members of these
bodies are elected do not tend to secure fitness for
dealing with scientific or technical education; and it is
the less necessary to burden them with an uncongenial
task, as there are other organizations, not only much
better fitted to do the work, but already actually doing it.
In the matter of preliminary scientific education, the
chief of these is the Science and Art Department,23
which has done more during the last quarter of a century
for the teaching of elementary science among the masses
of the people than any organization which exists either
in this or in any other country. It has become veritably
a people's university, so far as physical science is con-
cerned. At the foundation of our old universities they
were freely open to the poorest, but the poorest must
come to them. In the last quarter of a century, the
Science and Art Department, by means of its classes
spread all over the country and open to all, has con-
veyed instruction to the poorest. The University Ex-
tension movement24 shows that our older learned cor-

23 The Science and Art Department, now the Board of Educa-
tion, was created in 1853 and in 1857 established at South Ken-
sington. It is a department of government having general charge
of education. Huxley speaks of this department, which he
served as examiner, as "a measure which came into existence
unnoticed, but which will, I believe, turn out to be of more im-
portance to the welfare of the people than many political
changes over which the noise of battle has rent the air." Scien-
tific Education 1869, Collected Essays, III:i3i.

24 The University Extension movement was commenced by
James Stuart, of the University of Cambridge, who wished to
establish "a sort of peripatetic university, the professors of
which would circulate among the big towns and thus give a
wider opportunity for receiving such a teaching." His system
was officially adopted by the University of Cambridge in 1873,
and by London University and the University of Oxford soon
after.

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 103

porations have discovered the propriety of following
suit.

Technical education, in the strict sense, has become
a necessity for two reasons. The old apprenticeship
system has broken down, partly by reason of the changed
conditions of industrial life, and partly because trades
have ceased to be "crafts," the traditional secrets where-
of the master handed down to his apprentices. Inven-
tion is constantly changing the face of our industries,
so that "use and wont," "rule of thumb," and the like,
are gradually losing their importance, while that knowl-
edge of principles which alone can deal successfully with
changed conditions is becoming more and more valuable.
Socially, the "master" of four or five apprentices is dis-
appearing in favour of the "employer" of forty, or four
hundred, or four thousands, "hands," and the odds and
ends of technical knowledge, formerly picked up in a
shop, are not, and cannot be, supplied in the factory.
The instruction formerly given by the master must there-
fore be more than replaced by the systematic teaching
of the technical school.

Institutions of this kind on varying scales of magni-
tude and completeness, from the splendid edifice set up
by the City and Guilds Institute25 to the smallest local
technical school, to say nothing of classes, such as those
in technology instituted by the Society of Arts26 (sub-
sequently taken over by the City Guilds), have been

25 The City and Guilds of London Institute exists "for the
establishment of, or for the assistance to, trade schools, for the
conduct of examinations, and for subsidizing other institutions,
in London or in the provinces, having cognate subjects." The
Institute provides instruction in lower technical and trade sub-
jects, in engineering, and in pure science. Much of its work is
carried on by evening classes and "extension" lectures.

26 The Society of Arts, founded in 1754, has for its object
education of various kinds, especially in pure and applied arts.

104 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

established in various parts of the country, and the
movement in favour of their increase and multiplication
is rapidly growing in breadth and intensity. But there
is muth difference of opinion as to the best way in
which the technical instruction, so generally desired,
should be given. Two courses appear to be practicable:
the one is the establishment of special technical schools
with a systematic and lengthened course of instruction
demanding the employment of the whole time of the
pupils. The other is the setting afoot of technical
classes, especially evening classes, comprising a short
series of lessons on some special topic, which may be
attended by persons already earning wages in some
branch of trade or commerce.

There is no doubt that technical schools, on the plan
indicated under the first head, are extremely costly;
and, so far as the teaching of artisans is concerned, it
is very commonly objected to them that, as the learners
do not work under trade conditions, they are apt to
fall into amateurish habits, which prove of more hin-
drance than service in the actual business of life. When
such schools are attached to factories under the direc-
tion of an employer who desires to train up a supply of
intelligent workmen, of course this objection does not
apply; nor can the usefulness of such schools for the
training of future employers and for the higher grade of
the employed be doubtful; but they are clearly out of
the reach of the great mass of the people, who have to
earn their bread as soon as possible. We must therefore
look to the classes, and especially to evening classes, as
the great instrument for the technical education of the
artisan. The utility of such classes has now been placed
beyond all doubt; the only question which remains is
to find the ways and means of extending them.

We are here, as in all other questions of social or-

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 105

ganization, met by two diametrically opposed views. On
the one hand, the methods pursued in foreign countries
are held up as our example. The State is exhorted to
take the matter in hand, and establish a great system of
technical education. On the other hand, many econo-
mists of the individualist school exhaust the resources of
language in condemning and repudiating, not merely the
interference of the general government in such matters,
but the application of a farthing of the funds raised by
local taxation to these purposes. I entertain a strong
conviction that, in this country, at any rate, the State
had much better leave purely technical and trade in-
struction alone. But, although my personal leanings are
decidedly towards the individualists, I have arrived at
that conclusion on merely practical grounds. In fact,
my individualism is rather of a sentimental sort, and I
sometimes think I should be stronger in the faith if it
were less vehemently advocated.27 I am unable to see
that civil society is anything but a corporation estab-
lished for a moral object only — namely, the good of
its members — and therefore that it may take such
measures as seem fitting for the attainment of that which
the general voice decides to be the general good. That
the suffrage of the majority is by no means a scientific
test of social good and evil is unfortunately too true;
but, in practice, it is the only test we can apply, and
the refusal to abide by it means anarchy. The purest
despotism that ever existed is as much based upon that
will of the majority (which is usually submission to
the will of a small minority) as the freest republic. Law

27 In what follows I am only repeating and emphasizing
opinions which I expressed seventeen years ago, in an Address
to the members of the Midland Institute (republished in Critiques
and Addresses in 1873, and in Vol. I, of these Essays). I have
seen no reason to modify them, notwithstanding high authority
on the other side. [T. H. H.]

io6 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

is the expression of the opinion of the majority; and
it is law, and not mere opinion, because the many are
strong enough to enforce it.

I am as strongly convinced as the most pronounced
individualist can be, that it is desirable that every man
should be free to act in every way which does not limit
the corresponding freedom of his fellow-man. But I
fail to connect that great induction of political science
with the practical corollary which is frequently drawn
from it: that the State — that is, the people in their
corporate capacity — has no business to meddle with
anything but the administration of justice and external
defence. It appears to me that the amount of freedom
which incorporate society may fitly leave to its members
is not a fixed quantity, to be determined a priori by
deduction from the fiction called "natural rights"; but
that it must be determined by, and vary with, circum-
stances. I conceive it to be demonstrable that the higher
and the more complex the organization of the social
body, the more closely is the life of each member bound
up with that of the whole; and the larger becomes the
category of acts which cease to be merely self -regarding,
and which interfere with the freedom of others more or
less seriously.

If a squatter, living ten miles away from any neigh-
bour, chooses to burn his house down to get rid of
vermin, there may be no necessity (in the absence of
insurance offices) that the law should interfere with his
freedom of action; his act can hurt nobody but himself.
But, if the dweller in a street chooses to do the same
thing, the State very properly makes such a proceeding
a crime, and punishes it as such. He does meddle with
his neighbour's freedom, and that seriously. So it might,
perhaps, be a tenable doctrine, that it would be needless,
and even tyrannous, to make education compulsory in

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 107

a sparse agricultural population, living in abundance on
the produce of its own soil; but, in a densely populated
manufacturing country, struggling for existence with
competitors, every ignorant person tends to become a
burden upon, and, so far, an infringer of the liberty of,
his fellows, and an obstacle to their success. Under such
circumstances an education rate is, in fact, a war tax,
levied for purposes of defence.

That State action always has been more or less mis-
directed, and always will be so, is, I believe, perfectly
true. But I am not aware that it is more true of the
action of men in their corporate capacity than it is of
the doings of individuals. The wisest and most dis-
passionate man in existence, merely wishing to go from
one stile in a field to the opposite, will not walk quite
straight — he is always going a little wrong, and always
correcting himself; and I can only congratulate the in-
dividualist who is able to say that his general course of
life has been of a less undulatory character. To abolish
State action, because its direction is never more than
approximately correct, appears to me to be much the
same thing as abolishing the man at the wheel altogether,
because, do what he will, the ship yaws more or less.
"Why should I be robbed of my property to pay for
teaching another man's children?" is an individualist
question, which is not unfrequently put as if it settled
the whole business. Perhaps it does, but I find difficul-
ties in seeing why it should. The parish in which I
live makes me pay my share for the paving and lighting
of a great many streets that I never pass through; and
I might plead that I am robbed to smooth the way and
lighten the darkness of other people. But I am afraid
the parochial authorities would not let me off on this
plea; and I must confess I do not see why they should.

I cannot speak of my own knowledge, but I have

io8 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

every reason to believe that I came into this world a
small reddish person, certainly without a gold spoon in
my mouth, and in fact with no discernible abstract or
concrete "rights" or property of any description. If
a foot was not set upon me, at once, as a squalling nui-
sance, it was either the natural affection of those about
me, which I certainly had done nothing to deserve, or
the fear of the law which, ages before my birth, was
painfully built up by the society into which. I intruded,
that prevented that catastrophe. If I was nourished,
cared for, taught, saved from the vagabondage of a
wastrel, I certainly am not aware that I did anything to
deserve those advantages. And, if I possess anything
now, it strikes me that, though I may have fairly earned
my day's wages for my day's work, and may justly call
them my property — yet, without that organization of
society, created out of the toil and blood of long gen-
erations before my time, I should probably have had
nothing but a flint axe and an indifferent hut to call
my own; and even those would be mine only so long
as no stronger savage came my way.

So that if society, having, quite gratuitously, done all
these things for me, asks me in turn to do something
towards its preservation — even if that something is to
contribute to the teaching of other men's children — I
really, in spite of all my individualist leanings, feel
rather ashamed to say no. And if I were not ashamed,
I cannot say that I think that society would be dealing
unjustly with me in converting the moral obligation into
a legal one. There is a manifest unfairness in letting
all the burden be borne by the willing horse.

It does not appear to me, then, that there is any
valid objection to taxation for purposes of education;
but, in the case of technical schools and classes, I think
it is practically expedient that such a taxation should

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 109

be local. Our industrial population accumulates in par-
ticular towns and districts; these districts are those
which immediately profit by technical education; and it
is only in them that we can find the men practically en-
gaged in industries, among whom some may reasonably
be expected to be competent judges of that which is
wanted, and of the best means of meeting the want.

In my belief, all methods of technical training are
at present tentative, and, to be successful, each must be
adapted to the special peculiarities of its locality. This
is a case in which we want twenty years, not of "strong
government," but of cheerful and hopeful blundering;
and we may be thankful if we get things straight in
that time.

The principle of the Bill introduced, but dropped, by
the Government last session, appears to me to be wise,
and some of the objections to it I think are due to a
misunderstanding. The Bill proposed in substance to
allow localities to tax themselves for purposes of techni-
cal education — on the condition that any scheme for
such purpose should be submitted to the Science and Art
Department, and declared by that department to be in
accordance with the intention of the Legislature.

A cry was raised that the Bill proposed to throw
technical education into the hands of the Science and
Art Department. But, in reality, no power of initiation,
nor even of meddling with details, was given to that
Department — the sole function of which was to decide
whether any plan proposed did or did not come within
the limits of "technical education." The necessity for
such control, somewhere, is obvious. No legislature,
certainly not ours, is likely to grant the power of self-
taxation without setting limits to that power in some
way; and it would neither have been practicable to de-
vise a legal definition of technical education, nor com-

no THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

mendable to leave the question to the Auditor-General, to
be fought out in the law-courts. The only alternative was
to leave the decision to an appropriate State authority.
If it is asked what is the need of such control if the
people of the localities are the best judges, the obvious
reply is that there are localities and localities, and that
while Manchester, or Liverpool, or Birmingham, or Glas-
gow might, perhaps, be safely left to do as they thought
fit, smaller towns, in which there is less certainty of full
discussion by competent people of different ways of
thinking, might easily fall a prey to crocheteers.

Supposing our intermediate science teaching and our
technical schools and classes are established, there is yet
a third need to be supplied, and that is the want of
good teachers. And it is necessary not only to get them,
but to keep them when you have got them.

It is impossible to insist too strongly upon the fact
that the efficient teachers of science and of technology
are not to be made by the processes in vogue at ordinary
training colleges. The memory loaded with mere book-
work is not the thing wanted — is, in fact, rather worse
than useless — in the teacher of scientific subjects. It
is absolutely essential that his mind should be full of
knowledge and not of mere learning, and that what he
knows should have been learned in the laboratory rather
than in the library. There are happily already, both
in London and in the provinces, various places in which
such training is to be had, and the main thing at present
is to make it in the first place accessible, and in the
next indispensable, to those who undertake the business
of teaching. But when the well-trained men are sup-
plied, it must be recollected that the profession of
teacher is not a very lucrative or otherwise tempting one,
and that it may be advisable to offer special inducements
to good men to remain in it. These, however, are ques-

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE in

tions of detail into which it is unnecessary to enter
further.

Last, but not least, comes the question of providing
the machinery for enabling those who are by nature
specially qualified to undertake the higher branches of
industrial work, to reach the position in which they may
render that service to the community. If all our edu-
cational expenditure did nothing but pick one man of
scientific or inventive genius, each year, from amidst
the hewers of wood and drawers of water, and give him
the chance of making the best of his inborn faculties,
it would be a very good investment. If there is one
such child among the hundreds of thousands of our an-
nual increase, it would be worth any money to drag him
either from the slough of misery, or from the hotbed of
wealth, and teach him to devote himself to the service
of his people. Here, again, we have made a beginning
with our scholarships and the like, and need only follow
in the tracks already worn.

The programme of industrial development briefly set
forth in the preceding pages is not what Kant calls a
"Hirngespinnst," a cobweb spun in the brain of a
Utopian philosopher. More or less of it has taken
bodily shape in many parts of the country, and there
are towns of no great size or wealth in the manufactur-
ing districts (Keighley, for example) in which almost
the whole of it has, for some time, been carried out, so
far as the means at the disposal of the energetic and
public-spirited men who have taken the matter in hand
permitted. The thing can be done; I have endeavoured
to show good grounds for the belief that it must be
done, and that speedily, if we wish to hold our own in
the war of industry. I doubt not that it will be done,
whenever its absolute necessity becomes as apparent to

H2 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

all those who are absorbed in the actual business of in-
dustrial life as it is to some of the lookers on.

Perhaps it is necessary for me to add that technical
education is not here proposed as a panacea for social
diseases, but simply as a medicament which will help the
patient to pass through an imminent crisis.

An ophthalmic surgeon may recommend an operation
for cataract in a man who is going blind, without being
supposed to undertake that it will cure him of gout.
And I may pursue the metaphor so far as to remark that
the surgeon is justified in pointing out that a diet of
pork-chops and burgundy will probably kill his patient,
though he may be quite unable to suggest a mode of living
which will free him from his constitutional disorder.

Mr. Booth28 asks me, Why do you not propose some
plan of your own? Really, that is no answer to my argu-
ment that his treatment will make the patient very much
worse. [Note added in Social Diseases and Worse Reme-
dies, January, 1891.]

28 "General" William Booth was the leader of the Salvation
Army. His absolute power and the irresponsible administration
of the society's funds were the chief reasons for Huxley's criti-
cism of the work of the Salvation Army in the Letters to the
"Times" on the "Darkest England Scheme," Collected Essays,
IX: 237 ff.

SCIENCE AND CULTURE1

FROM the time that the first suggestion to introduce
physical science into ordinary education was timidly
whispered, until now, the advocates of scientific educa-
tion have met with opposition of two kinds. On the one
hand, they have been pooh-poohed by the men of busi-
ness who pride themselves on being the representatives
of practicality ; while, on the other hand, they have been
excommunicated by the classical scholars, in their ca-
pacity of Levites in charge of the ark of culture and
monopolists of liberal education.

The practical men believed that the idol whom they
worship — rule of thumb — has been the source of the
past prosperity, and will suffice for the future welfare
of the arts and manufactures. They are of opinion that
science is speculative rubbish; that theory and practice
have nothing to do with one another; and that the sci-
entific habit of mind is an impediment, rather than an
aid, in the conduct of ordinary affairs.

I have used the past tense in speaking of the practical
men — for although they were very formidable thirty
years ago, I am not sure that the pure species has not
been extirpated. In fact, so far as mere argument goes,
they have been subjected to such a feu d'enfer2 that it is

1 This address was delivered at the opening of Sir Josiah
Mason's Science College at Birmingham, October i, 1880. It
was published in Science and Culture, 1881, and in Science and
Education, Collected Essays, 111:134-159. I have omitted a few
paragraphs from the beginning of the address.

2 "Fire from hell."

H4 SCIENCE AND CULTURE

a miracle if any have escaped. But I have remarked that
your typical practical man has an unexpected resemblance
to one of Milton's angels. His spiritual wounds, such
as are inflicted by logical weapons, may be as deep as a
well and as wide as a church door, but beyond shedding a
few drops of ichor, celestial or otherwise, he is no whit
the worse. So, if any of these opponents be left, I will
not waste time in vain repetition of the demonstrative
evidence of the practical value of science; but knowing
that a parable will sometimes penetrate where syllogisms
fail to effect an entrance, I will offer a story for their
consideration.

Once upon a time, a boy, with nothing to depend upon
but his own vigorous nature, was thrown into the thick
of the struggle for existence in the midst of a great manu-
facturing population. He seems to have had a hard
fight, inasmuch as, by the time he was thirty years of
age, his total disposable funds amounted to twenty
pounds. Nevertheless, middle life found him giving proof
of his comprehension of the practical problems he had
been roughly called upon to solve, by a career of remark-
able prosperity.

Finally, having reached old age with its well-earned
surroundings of "honour, troops of friends," the hero of
my story bethought himself of those who were making a
like start in life, and how he could stretch out a helping
hand to them.

After long and anxious reflection this successful practi-
cal man of business could devise nothing better than to
provide them with the means of obtaining "sound, exten-
sive, and practical scientific knowledge." And he devoted
a large part of his wealth and five years of incessant work
to this end.

I need not point the moral of a tale which, as the

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 115

solid and spacious fabric of the Scientific College as-
sures us, is no fable, nor can anything which I could
say intensify the force of this practical answer to prac-
tical objections.

We may take it for granted then, that, in the opinion
of those best qualified to judge, the diffusion of thorough
scientific education is an absolutely essential condition
of industrial progress; and that the College which has
been opened to-day will confer an inestimable boon upon
those whose livelihood is to be gained by the practise
of the arts and manufactures of the district.

The only question worth discussion is, whether the
conditions, under which the work of the College is to
be carried out, are such as to give it the best possible
chance of achieving permanent success.

Sir Josiah Mason, without doubt most wisely, has
left very large freedom of action to the trustees, to whom
he proposes ultimately to commit the administration of
the College, so that they may be able to adjust its ar-
rangements in accordance with the changing conditions
of the future. But, with respect to three points, he has
laid most explicit injunctions upon both administrators
and teachers.

Party politics are forbidden to enter into the minds
of either, so far as the work of the College is concerned;
theology is as sternly banished from its precincts; and
finally, it is especially declared that the College shall
make no provision for "mere literary instruction and
education."

It does not concern me at present to dwell upon the
first two injunctions any longer than may be needful to
express my full conviction of their wisdom. But the
third prohibition brings us face to face with those other
opponents of scientific education, who are by no means

n6 SCIENCE AND CULTURE

in the moribund condition of the practical man, but
alive, alert, and formidable.

It is not impossible that we shall hear this express
exclusion of "literary instruction and education" from
a College which, nevertheless, professes to give a high
and efficient education, sharply criticised. Certainly the
time was that the Levites of culture would have sounded
their trumpets against its walls as against an educational
Jericho.

How often have we not been told that the study of
physical science is incompetent to confer culture; that
it touches none of the higher problems of life; and,
what is worse, that the continual devotion to scientific
studies tends to generate a narrow and bigoted belief
in the applicability of scientific methods to the search
after truth of all kinds? How frequently one has reason
to observe that no reply to a troublesome argument tells
so well as calling its author a "mere scientific specialist."
And, as I am afraid it is not permissible to speak of
this form of opposition to scientific education in the past
tense; may we not expect to be told that this, not only
omission, but prohibition, of "mere literary instruction
and education" is a patent example of scientific narrow-
mindedness?

I am not acquainted with Sir Josiah Mason's reasons
for the action which he has taken; but if, as I appre-
hend is the case, he refers to the ordinary classical course
of our schools and universities by the name of "mere
literary instruction and education," I venture to offer
sundry reasons of my own in support of that action.

For I hold very strongly by two convictions: The
first is, that neither the discipline nor the subject-
matter of classical education is of such direct value to
the student of physical science as to justify the expendi-
ture of valuable time upon either; and the second is,

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 117

that for the purpose of attaining real culture, an ex^l
clusively scientific education is at least as effectual asj
an exclusively literary education.

I need hardly point out to you that these opinions,
especially the latter, are diametrically opposed to those
of the great majority of educated Englishmen, influ-
enced as they are by school and university traditions.
In their belief, culture is obtainable only by a liberal
education; and a liberal education is synonymous, not
merely with education and instruction in literature, but
in one particular form of literature, namely, that of
Greek and Roman antiquity. They hold that the man~
who has learned Latin and Greek, however little, is
educated; while he who is versed in other branches of
knowledge, however deeply, is a more or less respectable
specialist, not admissible into the cultured caste. Thef
stamp of the educated man, the University degree, is
not for him.

I am too well acquainted with the generous catholicity
of spirit, the true sympathy with scientific thought,
which pervades the writings of our chief apostle of cuK
ture to identify him with these opinions; and yet one
may cull from one and another of those epistles to the
Philistines, which so much delight all who do not answer
to that name, sentences which lend them some support.

Mr. Arnold tells us that the meaning of culture is
"to know the best that has been thought and said in
the world." It is the criticism of life contained in litera-
ture. That criticism regards "Europe as being, for in-
tellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation,
bound to a joint action and working to a common result ;
and whose members have, for their common outfit, a
knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and
of one another. Special, local, and temporary advan-
tages being put out of account, that modern nation will

u8 SCIENCE AND CULTURE

in the intellectual and spiritual sphere make most prog-
ress, which most thoroughly carries out this programme.
And what is that but saying that we too, all of us, as
individuals, the more thoroughly we carry it out, shall
make the more progress?" 3

We have here to deal with two distinct propositions.
The first, that a criticism of life is the essence of cul-
ture; the second, that literature contains the materials
which suffice for the construction of such criticism.
_I think that we must all assent to the first proposition.
For culture certainly means something quite different
from learning or technical skill. It implies the posses-
•sion of an ideal, and the habit of critically estimating
the value of things by comparison with a theoretic stand-
ard. Perfect culture should supply a complete theory of
life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its possi-
bilities and of its limitations.

But we may agree to all this, and yet strongly dissent
from the assumption that literature alone is competent
to supply this knowledge. After having learnt all that
Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity have thought and
said, and all that modern literature have to tell us, it
is not self-evident that we have laid a sufficiently broad
and deep foundation for that criticism of life, which
constitutes culture.

Indeed, to any one acquainted with the scope of
physical science, it is not at all evident. Considering
progress only in the "intellectual and spiritual sphere,"
I find myself wholly unable to admit that either nations
or individuals will really advance, if their common out-
fit draws nothing from the stores of physical science.
I should say that an army, without weapons of precision
and with no particular base of operations, might more
hopefully enter upon a campaign on the Rhine, than a
3 Essays in Criticism, p. 37. [T. H. H.]

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 119

man, devoid of a knowledge of what physical science has
done in the last century, upon a criticism of life.

When a biologist meets with an anomaly, he instinc-
tively turns to the study of development to clear it up.
The rationale of contradictory opinions may with equal
confidence be sought in history.

It is, happily, no new thing that Englishmen should
employ their wealth in building and endowing insti-
tutions for educational purposes. But, five or six hun-
dred years ago, deeds of foundation expressed or im-
plied conditions as nearly as possible contrary to those
which have been thought expedient by Sir Josiah Mason.
That is to say, physical science was practically ignored,
while a certain literary training was enjoined as a means
to the acquirement of knowledge which was essentially
theological.

The reason of this singular contradiction between the
actions of men alike animated by a strong and disinter-
ested desire to promote the welfare of their fellows, is
easily discovered.

At that time, in fact, if any one desired knowledge
beyond such as could be obtained by his own observa-
tion, or by common conversation, his first necessity was
to learn the Latin language, inasmuch as all the higher
knowledge of the western world was contained in works
written in that language. Hence, Latin grammar, with
logic and rhetoric, studied through Latin, were the funda-
mentals of education. With respect to the substance of
the knowledge imparted through this channel, the Jewish
and Christian Scriptures, as interpreted and supple-
mented by the Romish Church, were held to contain a
complete and infallibly true body of information.

Theological dicta were, to the thinkers of those days,
that which the axioms and definitions of Euclid are to

120 SCIENCE AND CULTURE

the geometers of these. The business of the philosophers
of the middle ages was to deduce from the data furnished
by the theologians, conclusions in accordance with eccle-
siastical decrees. They were allowed the high privilege of
showing, by logical process, how and why that which the
Church said was true, must be true. And if their demon-
strations fell short of or exceeded this limit, the Church-
was maternally ready to check their aberrations; if need
were by the help of the secular arm.

Between the two, our ancestors were furnished with a
compact and complete criticism of life. They were told
how the world began and how it would end ; they learned
that all material existence was but a base and insignifi-
cant blot upon the fair face of the spiritual world, and
that nature was, to all intents and purposes, the play-
ground of the devil; they learned that the earth is the
centre of the visible universe, and that man is the cy-
nosure of things terrestrial, and more especially was it
inculcated that the course of nature had no fixed order,
but that it could be, and constantly was, altered by the
agency of innumerable spiritual beings, good and bad,
according as they were moved by the deeds and prayers
of men. The sum and substance of the whole doctrine
was to produce the conviction that the only thing really
worth knowing in this world was how to secure that
place in a better which, under certain conditions, the
Church promised.

Our ancestors had a living belief in this theory of
life, and acted upon it in their dealings with education,
as in all other matters. Culture meant saintliness —
after the fashion of the saints of those days; the educa-
tion that led to it was, of necessity, theological ; and the
way to theology lay through Latin.

That the study of nature — further than was requisite
for the satisfaction of everyday wants — should have any

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 121

bearing on human life was far from the thoughts of men
thus trained. Indeed, as nature had been cursed for
man's sake, it was an obvious conclusion that those who
meddled with nature were likely to come into pretty close
contact with Satan. And, if any born scientific investi-
gator followed his instincts, he might safely reckon upon
earning the reputation, and probably upon suffering the
fate, of a sorcerer.

Had the western world been left to itself in Chinese
isolation, there is no saying how long this state of things
might have endured. But, happily, it was not left to
itself. Even earlier than the thirteenth century, the
development of Moorish civilisation in Spain and the
great movement of the Crusades had introduced the
leaven which, from that day to this, has never ceased
to work. At first, through the intermediation of Arabic
translations, afterwards by the study of the originals,
the western nations of Europe became acquainted with
the writings of the ancient philosophers and poets, and,
in time, with the whole of the vast literature of antiquity.

Whatever there was of high intellectual aspiration or
dominant capacity in Italy, France, Germany, and Eng"
land, spent itself for centuries in taking possession of
the rich inheritance left by the dead civilisations of
Greece and Rome. Marvellously aided by the invention
of printing, classical learning spread and flourished.
Those who possessed it prided themselves on having at-
tained the highest culture then within the reach of man-
kind.

And justly. For, saving Dante4 on his solitary pin-
nacle, there was no figure in modern literature at the

4 Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote La Commedia, usually
called the Divine Comedy, a great allegory. The poem is a
vision of the next world, as it was then conceived, of hell, of
purgatory, and of paradise.

122 SCIENCE AND CULTURE

ime of the Renascence to compare with the men of an-
tiquity ; there was no art to compete with their sculpture ;
there was no physical science but that which Greece had
created. Above all, there was no other example of perfect
intellectual freedom — of the unhesitating acceptance of
reason as the sole guide to truth and the supreme arbiter
of conduct.

The new learning necessarily soon exerted a profound
influence upon education. The language of the monks
and schoolmen seemed little better than gibberish to
scholars fresh from Virgil and Cicero, and the study of
Latin was placed upon a new foundation. Moreover,
Latin itself ceased to afford the sole key to knowledge.
The student who sought the highest thought of antiquity,
found only a second-hand reflection of it in Roman lit-
erature, and turned his face to the full light of the Greeks.
And after a battle, not altogether dissimilar to that which
is at present being fought over the teaching of physical
science, the study of Greek was recognised as an essential
element of all higher education.

Then the Humanists, as they were called, won the
day; and the great reform which they effected was of
incalculable service to mankind. (But the Nemesis5 of all
reformers is finality; and the reformers of education, like
those of religion, fell into the profound, however com-
mon, error of mistaking the beginning for the end of the
work of reformation]

The representatives of the Humanists, in the nine-
teenth century, take their stand upon classical educa-
tion as the sole avenue to culture, as firmly as if we were
still in the age of Renascence. Yet, surely, the present
intellectual relations of the modern and the ancient
worlds are profoundly different from those which obtained
three centuries ago. Leaving aside the existence of a
5 The Greek divinity who dealt out retributive justice.

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 123

great and characteristically modern literature, of mod-
ern painting, and, especially, of modern music, there is
one feature of the present state of the civilised world
which separates it more widely from the Renascence,
than the Renascence was separated from the middle
ages.

This distinctive character of our own times lies in the
vast and constantly increasing part which is played by^t
natural knowledge. Not only is our daily life shaped
by it; not only does the prosperity of millions of men
depend upon it, but our whole theory of life has long
been influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the
general conceptions of the universe, which have been
forced upon us by physical science.

In fact, the most elementary acquaintance with the
results of scientific investigation shows us that they
offer a broad and striking contradiction to the opinion
so implicitly credited and taught in the middle ages.

The notions of the beginning and the end of the world
entertained by our forefathers are no longer credible.
It is very certain that the earth is not the chief body
in the material universe, and that the world is not sub-
ordinated to man's use. It is even more certain that
nature is the expression of a definite order with which
nothing interferes, and that the chief business of man-
kind is to learn that order and govern themselves ac-
cordingly. Moreover this scientific "criticism of life"
presents itself to us with different credentials from any
other. It appeals not to authority, nor to what anybody
may have thought or said, but to nature. It admits that
all our interpretations of natural fact are more or less
imperfect and symbolic, and bids the learner seek for «
truth not among words but among things. It warns
us that the assertion which outstrips evidence is not only
a blunder but a crime.

i24 SCIENCE AND CULTURE

The purely classical education advocated by the rep-
resentatives of the Humanists in our day, gives no ink-
ling of all this. A man may be a better scholar than
Erasmus,6 and know no more of the chief causes of the
present intellectual fermentation than Erasmus did.
Scholarly and pious persons, worthy of all respect, favour
us with allocutions upon the sadness of the antagonism
of science to their mediaeval way of thinking, which be-
tray an ignorance of the first principles of scientific
investigation, an incapacity for understanding what a
man of science means by veracity, and an unconsciousness
of the weight of established scientific truths, which is
almost comical.

There is no great force in the tu quoquc7 argument,
or else the advocates of scientific education might fairly
enough retort upon the modern Humanists that they
may be learned specialists, but that they possess no
such sound foundation for a criticism of life as deserves
the name of culture. And, indeed, if we were disposed to
be cruel, we might urge that the Humanists have brought
this reproach upon themselves, not because they are too
full of the spirit of the ancient Greek, but because they
lack it.

The period of the Renascence is commonly called that
of the "Revival of Letters," as if the influences then
brought to bear upon the mind of Western Europe had
been wholly exhausted in the field of literature. I think
it is very commonly forgotten that the revival of science,
effected by the same agency, although less conspicuous,
was not less momentous.

In fact, the few and scattered students of nature of

6 Desiderius Erasmus (1467-1536), a Dutch scholar, was prob-
ably the most important of the Renascence scholars. The Collo-
quia, 1509, a series of dialogues on social, religious, and educa-
tional subjects, was his greatest work.

7 "Thou too."

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 125

that day picked up the clue to her secrets exactly as it fell
from the hands of the Greeks a thousand years before.
The foundations of mathematics were so well laid by
them, that our children learn their geometry from a book
written for the schools of Alexandria two thousand years
ago.8 Modern astronomy is the natural continuation and
development of the work of Hipparchus and of Ptolemy ; 9
modern physics of that of Democritus and of Archi-
medes;10 it was long before modern biological science out-
grew the knowledge bequeathed to us by Aristotle, by
Theophrastus, and by Galen.11

We cannot know all the best thoughts and sayings of
the Greeks unless we know what they thought about
natural phenomena. We cannot fully apprehend their

8 Euclid's Elements of geometry was written in the third cen-
tury B.C. Euclid was a Greek scholar who lived in Alexandria
during the reign of Ptolemy I. Alexandria, though in Egypt,
was for a time the centre of Greek learning, and was noted for
the fine library founded by Ptolemy I.

9 Hipparchus (2nd century B.C.) was a Greek astronomer who
discovered the precession of the equinoxes, prepared a catalogue
of stars, founded astronomy, and invented the system of indi-
cating geographical positions by means of the circles of lati-
tude and longitude. Ptolemy was the famous Alexandrian as-
tronomer who gave his name to the system of astronomy which
first represented the earth as a globe and the planets as revolving
around it.

10 Democritus, a Greek physical philosopher of the fifth
century B.C., is chiefly known for the atomic theory which he
expounded. Archimedes (B.C. 287-212) is said to have discov-
ered the principles on which the theory of specific gravity is based,
the Archimedean screw, and various burning devices and hurling
engines used in ancient warfare.

11 Aristotle (B.C. 384-322) was a pupil of Plato and an im-
portant critic, logician, and moral and political philosopher. As
the creator of natural science he first divided the animal king-
dom into classes, and he came near discovering the circulation
of the blood. Theophrastus (B.C. 372-287) was a pupil of
Plato and Aristotle and was particularly interested in botany.
Claudius Galen (A.D. 130-200), a Greek physician, was regarded
until the sixteenth century as the greatest authority on anatomy
and physiology.

126 SCIENCE AND CULTURE

'criticism of life unless we understand the extent to which
that criticism was affected by scientific conceptions. We
falsely pretend to be the inheritors of their culture, un-
less we are penetrated, as the best minds among them
were, with an unhesitating faith that the free employ-
ment of reason, in accordance with scientific method, is
the sole method of reaching truth.

Thus I venture to think that the pretensions of our
modern Humanists to the possession of the monopoly of
culture and to the exclusive inheritance of the spirit of
antiquity must be abated, if not abandoned. But I
should be very sorry that anything I have said should
be taken to imply a desire on my part to depreciate the
/value of classical education, as it might be and as it
sometimes is. The native capacities of mankind vary
no less than their opportunities; and while culture is]
one, the road by which one man may best reach it is|
widely different from that which is most advantageous to
another. Again, while scientific education is yet in-
choate and tentative, classical education is thoroughly
well organised upon the practical experience of genera-
tions of teachers. So that, given ample time for learn- j
ing and estimation for ordinary life, or for a literary!
career, I do not think that a young Englishman in)
search of culture can do better than follow the course!
usually marked out for him, supplementing its deficiencies
by his own efforts.

But for those who mean to make science their serious
occupation; or who intend to follow the profession of
medicine; or who have to enter early upon the business
of life; for all these, in my opinion, classical education
is a mistake; and it is for this reason that I am glad
to see "mere literary education and instruction" shut out
from the curriculum of Sir Josiah Mason's College,
seeing that its inclusion would probably lead to the

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 127

introduction of the ordinary smattering of Latin and
Greek.

Nevertheless, I am the last person to question the im-1
portance of genuine literary education, or to suppose
that intellectual culture can be complete without it. An
exclusively scientific training will bring about a mental
twist as surely as an exclusively literary training. The
value of the cargo does not compensate for a ship's
being out of trim; and I should be very sorry to thin!;
that the Scientific College would turn out none but lop-
sided men.

There is no need, however, that such a catastrophe
should happen. Instruction in English, French, and
German is provided, and thus the three greatest litera- ;
tures of the modern world are made accessible to the
student.

French and German, and especially the latter lan-
guage, are absolutely indispensable to those who desire
full knowledge in any department of science. But even
supposing that the knowledge of these languages ac-
quired is not more than sufficient for purely scientific
purposes, every Englishman has, in his native tongue, an
almost perfect instrument of literary expression; and,
in his own literature, models of every kind of literary
excellence. If an Englishman cannot get literary culture
out of his Bible, his Shakespeare, his Milton, neither,
in my belief, will the profoundest study of Homer and
Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, give it to him.

Thus, since the constitution of the College makes suffi-
cient provision for literary as well as for scientific edu-
cation, and since artistic instruction is also contemplated,
it seems to me that a fairly complete culture is offered
to all who are willing to take advantage of it.

But I am not sure that at this point the "practical"
man, scotched but not slain, may ask what all this talk

128 SCIENCE AND CULTURE

about culture has to do with an Institution, the object
of which is defined to be "to promote the prosperity of
the manufactures and the industry of the country." He
may suggest that what is wanted for this end is not
culture, nor even a purely scientific discipline, but simply
a knowledge of applied science.

I often wish that this phrase, "applied science," had
never been invented. For it suggests that there is a
sort of scientific knowledge of direct practical use, which
can be studied apart from another sort of scientific
knowledge, which is of no practical utility, and which
is termed "pure science." But there is no more com-
plete fallacy than this. What people call applied science
is nothing but the application of pure science to par-
ticular classes of problems. It consists of deductions
from those general principles, established by reasoning
and observation, which constitute pure science. No one
can safely make these deductions until he has a firm
grasp of the principles; and he can obtain that grasp
only by personal experience of the operations of obser-
vation and of reasoning on which they are founded.

Almost all the processes employed in the arts and
manufactures fall within the range either of physics or
of chemistry. In order to improve them, one must
thoroughly understand them; and no one has a chance
of really understanding them, unless he has obtained
that mastery of principles and that habit of dealing with
facts, which is given by long-continued and well-directed
purely scientific training in the physical and the chemical
laboratory. So that there really is no question as to
the necessity of purely scientific discipline, even if the
work of the College were limited by the narrowest in-
terpretation of its stated aims.

And, as to the desirableness of a wider culture than
that yielded by science alone, it is to be recollected that

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 129

the improvement of manufacturing processes is only one
of the conditions which contribute to the prosperity of
industry. Industry is a means and not an end; and
mankind work only to get something which they want.
What that something is depends partly on their innate,
and partly on their acquired, desires.

If the wealth resulting from prosperous industry is
to be spent upon the gratification of unworthy desires, if
the increasing perfection of manufacturing processes is
to be accompanied by an increasing debasement of those
who carry them on, I do not see the good of industry
and prosperity.

Now it is perfectly true that men's views of what is
desirable depend upon their characters; and that the
innate proclivities to which we give that name are not
touched by any amount of instruction. But it does not
follow that even mere intellectual education may not,
to an indefinite extent, modify the practical manifesta-
tion of the characters of men in their actions, by sup-
plying them with motives unknown to the ignorant. A
pleasure-loving character will have pleasure of some sort ;
but, if you give him the choice, he may prefer pleasures
which do not degrade him to those which do. And this
choice is offered to every man, who possesses in literary
or artistic culture a never-failing source of pleasures,
which are neither withered by age, nor staled by custom,
nor embittered in the recollection by the pangs of self-
reproach.

If the Institution opened to-day fulfils the intention of
its founder, the picked intelligences among all classes of
the population of this district will pass through it. No
child born in Birmingham, henceforward, if he have the
capacity to profit by the opportunities offered to him,
first in the primary and other schools, and afterwards in
the Scientific College, need fail to obtain, not merely

130 SCIENCE AND CULTURE

the instruction, but the culture most appropriate to the
conditions of his life.

Within these walls, the future employer and the future
artisan may sojourn together for a while, and carry,
through all their lives, the stamp of the influences then
brought to bear upon them. Hence, it is not beside the
mark to remind you, that the prosperity of industry
depends not merely upon the improvement of manufac-
turing processes, not merely upon the ennobling of the
individual character, but upon a third condition, namely,
a clear understanding of the conditions of social life, on
the part of both the capitalist and the operative, and
their argument upon common principles of social action.
They must learn that social phenomena are as much
the expression of natural laws as any others; that no
social arrangements can be permanent unless they har-
monise with the requirements of social statics and dy-
namics; and that, in the nature of things, there is an
arbiter whose decisions execute themselves.

But this knowledge is only to be obtained by the ap-
plication of the methods of investigation adopted in
physical researches to the investigation of the phe-
nomena of society. Hence, I confess, I should like to
see one addition made to the excellent scheme of edu-
cation propounded for the College, in the shape of pro-
vision for the teaching of Sociology. For though we
are all agreed that party politics are to have no place
in the instruction of the College; yet in this country,
practically governed as it is now by universal suffrage,
every man who does his duty must exercise political
functions. And, if the evils which are inseparable from
the good of political liberty are to be checked, if the
perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and
despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-
restraining freedom; it will be because men will gradu-

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 131

ally bring themselves to deal with political, as they now
deal with scientific questions; to be as ashamed of undue
haste and partisan prejudice in the one case as in the
other; and to believe that the machinery of society is at
least as delicate as that of a spinning- jenny, and as
little likely to be improved by the meddling of those
who have not taken the trouble to master the principles
of its action.

In conclusion, I am sure that I make myself the
mouthpiece of all present in offering to the venerable
founder of the Institution, which now commences its
beneficent career, our congratulations on the completion
of his work; and in expressing the conviction, Chat the
remotest posterity will point to it as a crucial instance
of the wisdom which natural piety leads all men to
ascribe to their ancestors.

A LIBERAL EDUCATION1

SUPPOSE it were perfectly certain that the life and for-
tune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend
upon his winning or losing a game of chess. Don't you
think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty
to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces;
to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the
means of giving and getting out of check? Do you not
think that we should look with a disapprobation amount-
ing to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son, or

1 This definition is taken from one of Huxley's early addresses,
delivered to the South London Working Men's College, in 1.368,
entitled A Liberal Education: and where to find it. The whole
address was published in Macmillan's Magazine, in Lay Sermons,
and in Science and Education, Collected Essays, III: 76-110. The
address commences with a review of the reasons for the growing
interest in popular education and of its supposed aims. Huxley
then gives his view of education as a very practical preparation
for the business of living. The main part of the essay is de-
voted to a criticism of the whole English educational system, the
system that Huxley later helped to improve by his work with the
School Board.

Huxley's ideas about the value of science in education brought
him into a conflict more apparent than real with the educational
ideas of Matthew Arnold. A careful comparison of Huxley's
two addresses, A Liberal Education and Science and Art, with
Arnold's Literature and Science (Discourses in America, 1885),
will show that they were in closer agreement than they are usually
credited with being. Leonard Huxley seems to be defending his
father against the popular misapprehension of Arnold's views in
the following comment upon this address: "This is not a brief
for science to the exclusion of other teaching; no essay has in-
sisted more strenuously on the evils of a one-sided education,
whether it be classical or scientific; but it urged the necessity
for a strong tincture of science and her method, if the modern
conception of the world, created by the spread of natural knowl-

132

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 133

the state which allowed its members, to grow up with-
out knowing a pawn from a knight?

Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the
life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us,
and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do
depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a
game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess.
It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every
man and woman of us being one of the two players in a
game of his or her own. The chess-board is the world,
the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules
of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The
player on the other side is hidden from us. We know
that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also
we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake,
or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the
man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with
that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong
shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is
checkmated — without haste,, but without remorse.2

edge, is to be fairly understood. If culture is the 'criticism of
life,' it is fallacious if deprived of knowledge of the most im-
portant factor which has transformed the medieval into the mod-
ern spirit." Life and Letters, 1:320. It is perhaps unnecessary
to add that Arnold would no more have excluded knowledge of
either the results or the methods of modern science from a liberal
education than Huxley would have excluded knowledge of litera-
ture and languages.

2 This idea is impressively stated in the preface to Evolution
and Ethics, Collected Essays, IX:viii-ix. "The motive of the
drama of human life is the necessity, laid upon every man who
comes into the world, of discovering the mean between self-'
assertion and self-restraint suited to his character and his cir-
cumstances. And the eternally tragic aspect of the drama lies
in this: that the problem set before us is one the elements of
which can be but imperfectly known, and of which even an ap-
proximately right solution rarely presents itself, until that stern
critic, aged experience, has been furnished with ample justification
for venting his sarcastic humour upon the irreparable blunders
we have already made."

134

A LIBERAL EDUCATION

My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous
picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at
chess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking
fiend in that picture, a calm, strong angel who is playing
for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win —
and I should accept it as an image of human life.

Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules
of this mighty game. In other words, education is the
instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under
which name I include not merely things and their forces,,
but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affec-
tions and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to
move in harmony with those laws. For me education
means neither more nor less than this. Anything which
professes to call itself education must be tried by this
standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call
it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or
of numbers, upon the other side.

It is important to remember that, in strictness, there
is no such thing as an uneducated man. Take an ex-
treme case. Suppose that an adult man, in the full vigour
Grills' faculties, could be suddenly placed in the world,
as Adam is said to have been, and then left to do as he
best might. How long would he be left uneducated?
Not five minutes. Nature would begin to teach him,
I through the eye, the ear, the touch, the properties of
objects. Pain and pleasure would be at his elbow telling
* him to do this and avoid that; and by slow degrees the
man would receive an education, which, if narrow, would
be thorough, real, and adequate to his circumstances,
though there would be no extras and very few accom-
plishments.

And if to this solitary man entered a second Adam, or
better still, an Eve, a new and greater world, that of
social and moral phenomena, would be revealed. Joys

A LIBERAL EDUCATION 135

and woes, compared with which all others might seem
but faint shadows, would spring from the new relations.
Happiness and sorrow would take the place of the coarser
monitors, pleasure and pain; but conduct would still be
shaped by the observation of the natural consequences
of actions; or, in other words, by the laws of the nature
of man.

To every one of us the world was once as fresh and
new as to Adam. And then, long before we were sus-
ceptible of any other mode of instruction, Nature took
us in hand, and every minute of waking life brought its
educational influence, shaping our actions into rough ac-
cordance with Nature's laws, so that we might not be
ended untimely by too gross disobedience. Nor should
I speak of this process of education as past for any one,
be he as old as he may. For every man the world is as
fresh, as it was at the first day, and as full of untold
novelties for him who has the eyes to see them. And
Nature is still continuing her patient education of us in
that great university, the universe, of which we are all
members — Nature having no Test- Acts.3

Those who take honours in Nature's university, who
learn the laws which govern men and things and obey
them, are the really great and successful men in this
world. The great mass of mankind are the "Poll," 4 who
pick up just enough to get through without much dis-
credit. Those who won't learn at all are plucked; and
then you can't come up again. Nature's pluck means
extermination.

3 The Test Acts excluded from public office in England and
Scotland all persons who did not profess the established religion.
Similar religious tests were required in English universities until
1871.

4 At the University of Cambridge the "pass-degree," without
honours, is called the "poll-degree" and the term "poll" is said
to come from oiTroAAot, "the many, the common people."

136

A LIBERAL EDUCATION

Thus the question of compulsory education is settled
so far as Nature is concerned. Her bill on that question
was framed and passed long ago. But, like all com-
pulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and wasteful
in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful
disobedience — incapacity meets with the same punish-
ment as crime. Nature's discipline is not even a word
and a blow, and the blow first ; but the blow without the
word. It is left to you to find out why your ears are
boxed.

The object of what we commonly call education — that
education in which man intervenes and which I shall
distinguish as artificial education — is to make good these
Defects in Nature's methods; tpjprepare the child to re-
ceive Nature's education, neither incapably nor igno-
rantly, nor with wilful disobedience; and to understand
the preliminary symptoms of her displeasure, without
waiting for the box on the ear. In short, all artificial
education ought to be an anticipation of natural educa-
tion. And a liberal education is an artificial education,
which. has not only prepared a man to escape the great
evils of disobedience to natural laws, but has trained
him to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards, which
Nature scatters with as free a hand as her penalties.
/ That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who
has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready
servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all
the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose
intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts
of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready,
like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work,
and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of
the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of
the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the
laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is

A LIBERAL EDUCATION

137

full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to
come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender
conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether
of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect
others as himself.

Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal
education; for he is, as completely as a man can be, in
harmony with Nature. He will make the best of her,
and she of him. They will get on together rarely; she
as his ever beneficent mother ; he as her mouth-piece, her
conscious self, her minister and interpreter.

_ 1

ON SCIENCE AND ART IN RELATION
EDUCATION »
•t^«*4«*«vJUjU**'*A's<

''HEN a man is honored by such a request as that
which reached me from the authorities of your institu-
tion some time ago, I think the first thing that occurs
to him is that which occurred to those who were bidden
to the feast in the Gospel — to begin to make an excuse;
and probably all the excuses suggested on that famous
occasion crop up in his mind after the other, including
his "having married a wife," as reasons for not doing
what he is asked to do. But, in my own case, and on
this particular occasion, there were other difficulties of
a sort peculiar to the time, and more or less personal
to myself; because I felt that, if I came amongst you,
I should be expected, and, indeed, morally compelled,
to speak upon the subject of Scientific Education. And
then there arose in my mind the recollection of a fact,
which probably no one here but myself remembers;
namely, that some fourteen years ago I was the guest
of a citizen of yours, who bears the honoured name of
Rathbone, at a very charming and pleasant dinner given
by the Philomathic Society; and I there and then, and

1 This address was delivered before the members of the Liver-
pool Institute, 1882. It appears in Science and Education, Col-
lected Essays, III: 160-188. As Huxley says, he had spoken on
a similar subject at Liverpool in 1869, and he sums up the main
points of that speech in the beginning of this one. The notes
of this after-dinner speech were published in Macmillan's Maga-
zine and in Science and Education pp. 111-133.

138

ON SCIENCE AND ART 139

in this very city, made a speech upon the topic of Scien-
tific Education. Under these circumstances, you see,
one runs two dangers — the first, of repeating one's
self, although I may fairly hope that everybody has
forgotten the fact I have just now mentioned, except
myself; and the second, and even greater difficulty, is
the danger of saying something different from what one
said before, because then, however forgotten your pre-
vious speech may be, somebody finds out its existence,
and there goes on that process so hateful to members of
Parliament, which may be denoted by the term "Hans-
ardisation." 2 Under these circumstances, I came to the
conclusion that the best thing I could do was to take
the bull by the horns, and to "Hansardise" myself —
to put before you, in the briefest possible way, the three
or four propositions which I endeavoured to support on
the occasion of the speech to which I have referred; and
then to ask myself, supposing you were asking me,
whether I had anything to retract, or to modify, in them,
in virtue of the increased experience, and, let us chari-
tably hope, the increased wisdom of an added fourteen
years.

Now, the points to which I directed particular atten-
tion on that occasion were these: in the first place, that
instruction in physical science supplies information of a
character of especial value, both in a practical and a
speculative point of view — information which cannot
be obtained otherwise; and, in the second place, that,
as educational discipline, it supplies, in a better form
than any other study can supply, exercise in a special
form of logic, and a peculiar method of testing the
validity of our processes of inquiry. I said further, that,
even at that time, a great and increasing attention was

~ A comparison of a man's record. Luke Hansard (1752-1828)
was the official printer of British Parliamentary Records.

i4o ON SCIENCE AND ART

being paid to physical science in our schools and col-
leges, and that, most assuredly, such attention must go
on growing and increasing, until education in these
matters occupied a very much larger share of the time
which is given to teaching and training, than had been
the case heretofore. And I threw all the strength of
argumentation of which I was possessed into the support
of these propositions. But I venture to remind you,
also, of some other words I used at that time, and which
I ask permission to read to you. They were these:
"There are other forms of culture besides physical
science, and I should be profoundly sorry to see the
fact forgotten, or even to observe a tendency to starve
or cripple literary or aesthetic culture for the sake of
science. Such a narrow view of the nature of education
has nothing to do with my firm conclusion that a com-
plete and thorough scientific culture ought to be intro-
duced into all schools."

I say I desire, in commenting upon these various
points, and judging them as fairly as I can by the light
of increased experience, to particularly emphasise this
last, because I am told, although I assuredly do not
know it of my own knowledge — though I think if the
fact were so I ought to know it, being tolerably well
acquainted with that which goes on in the scientific
world, and which has gone on there for the last thirty
years — that there is a kind of sect, or horde, of scien-
tific Goths and Vandals, who think it would be proper
and desirable to sweep away all other forms of culture
and instruction, except those in physical science, and to
make them the universal and exclusive, or, at any rate,
the dominant training of the human mind of the future
generation. This is not my view — I do not believe that
it is anybody's view — but it is attributed to tho^ who,
like myself, advocate scientific education. I therefore

ON SCIENCE AND ART 141

dwell strongly upon the point, and I beg you to believe
that the words I have just now read were by no means
intended by me as a sop to the Cerberus3 of culture.
I have not been in the habit of offering sops to any
kind of Cerberus; but it was an expression of profound
conviction on my own part — a conviction forced upon
me not only by my mental constitution, but by the
lessons of what is now becoming a somewhat long ex-
perience of varied conditions of life.

I am not about to trouble you with my autobiog-
raphy; the omens are hardly favourable, at present, for
work of that kind. But I should like if I may do so
without appearing, what I earnestly desire not to be,
egotistical — I should like to make it clear to you, that
such notions as these, which are sometimes attributed to
me, are, as I have said, inconsistent with my mental
constitution, and still more inconsistent with the up-
shot of the teaching of my experience. For I can cer-
tainly claim for myself that sort of mental temperament
which can say that nothing human comes amiss to it.
I have never yet met with any branch of human knowl-
edge which I have found unattractive4 — which it would
not have been pleasant to me to follow, so far as I
could go; and I have yet to meet with any form of art
in which it has not been possible for me to take as
acute a pleasure as, I believe, it is possible for men to
take.

And with respect to the circumstances of life, it so
happens that it has been my fate to know many lands
and many climates, and to be familiar, by personal ex-

3 In his lines Of Poetry Jonathan Swift wrote of the king's
ministers when they descended to Hades:

"To Cerberus they give a sop,
His triple-barking mouth to stop."

4 An allusion to Terence's celebrated line, humani nihil a me
alienum puto, "I consider nothing human foreign to me."

142 ON SCIENCE AND ART

perience, with almost every form of society, from the
uncivilised savage of Papua and Australia and the civi-
lised savages of the slums and dens of the poverty-
stricken parts of great cities, to those who, perhaps, are
occasionally the somewhat over-civilised members of our
upper ten thousand. And I have never found, in any
of these conditions of life, a deficiency of something
which was attractive. Savagery has its pleasures, I
assure you, as well as civilisation, and I may even ven-
ture to confess — if you will not let a whisper of the
matter get back to London, where I am known — I am
even fain to confess, that sometimes in the din and
throng of what is called "a brilliant reception" the vision
crosses my mind of waking up from the soft plank which
has afforded me satisfactory sleep during the hours of
the night, in the bright dawn of a tropical morning,
when my comrades were yet asleep, when every sound
was hushed, except the little lap-lap of the ripples against
the sides of the boat, and the distant twitter of the
sea-bird on the reef. And when that vision crosses my
mind, I am free to confess I desire to be back in the
boat again. So that, if I share with those strange per-
sons to whose asserted, but still hypothetical existence
I have referred, the want of appreciation of forms of
culture other than the pursuit of physical science, all I
can say is, that it is, in spite of my constitution, and
in spite of my experience, that such should be my fate.
But now let me turn to another point, or rather to
two other points, with which I propose to occupy my-
self. How far does the experience of the last fourteen
years justify the estimate which I ventured to put for-
ward of the value of scientific culture, and of the share
— the increasing share — which it must take in ordi-
nary education? Happily, in respect to that matter, you
need not rely upon my testimony. In the last half-

ON SCIENCE AND ART 143

dozen numbers of the "Journal of Education," you will
find a series of very interesting and remarkable papers,
by gentlemen who are practically engaged in the busi-
ness of education in our great public and other schools,
telling us what is doing in these schools, and what is
their experience of the results of scientific education
there, so far as it has gone. I am not going to trouble
you with an abstract of those papers, which are well
worth your study in their fullness and completeness, but
I have copied out one remarkable passage, because it
seems to me so entirely to bear out what I have formerly
ventured to say about the value of science, both as to
its subject-matter and as to the discipline which the
learning of science involves. It is from a paper by Mr.
Worthington — one of the masters at Clifton,5 the repu-
tation of which school you know well, and at the head
of which is an old friend of mine, the Rev. Mr. Wilson —
to whom much credit is due for being one of the first,
as I can say from my own knowledge, to take up this
question and work it into practical shape. What Mr.
Worthington says is this:

"It is not easy to exaggerate the importance of the
information imparted by certain branches of science;
it modifies the whole criticism of life made in maturer
years. The study has often, on a mass of boys, a cer-
tain influence which, I think, was hardly anticipated, and
to which a good deal of value must be attached — an
influence as much moral as intellectual, which is shown
in the increased and increasing respect for precision of
statement, and for that form of veracity which consists
in the acknowledgment of difficulties. It produces a real
effect to find that Nature cannot be imposed upon, and
the attention given to experimental lectures, at first su-

3 Clifton College is one of the principal modern English pub-
lic schools. It is located near Bristol.

144 ON SCIENCE AND ART

perficial and curious only, soon becomes minute, serious,
and practical."

Ladies and gentlemen, I could not have chosen better
words to express — in fact, I have, in other words, ex-
pressed the same conviction in former days — what the
influence of scientific teaching, if properly carried out,
must be.

But now comes the question of properly carrying it
out, because, when I hear the value of school teaching
in physical science, disputed, my first impulse is to ask
the disputer, "What have you known about it?" and he
generally tells me some lamentable case of failure. Then
I ask, "What are the circumstances of the case, and how
was the teaching carried out?" I remember, some few
years ago, hearing of the head master of a large school,
who had expressed great dissatisfaction with the adop-
tion of the teaching of physical science — and that after
experiment. But the experiment consisted in this — in
asking one of the junior masters in the school to get
up science, in order to teach it; and the young gentleman
went away for a year and got up science and taught it.
Well, I have no doubt that the result was as disappoint-
ing as the head master said it was, and I have no doubt
that it ought to have been as disappointing, and far more
disappointing too; for, if this kind of instruction is to
be of any good at all, if it is not to be less than no good,
if it is to take the place of that which is already of some
good, then there are several points which must be at-
tended to.

And the first of these is the proper selection of topics,
the second is practical teaching, the third is practical
teachers, and the fourth is sufficiency of time. If these
four points are not carefully attended to by anybody
who undertakes the teaching of physical science in

ON SCIENCE AND ART 145

schools, my advice to him is, to let it alone. I will not
dwell at any length upon the first point, because there
is a general concensus of opinion as to the nature of the
topics which should be chosen. The second point —
practical teaching — is one of great importance, be-
cause it requires more capital to set it a-going, demands
more time, and, last, but by no means least, it requires
much more personal exertion and trouble on the part
of those professing to teach, than is the case with other
kinds of instruction.

When I accepted the invitation to be here this even-
ing, your secretary was good enough to send me the
addresses which have been given by distinguished per-
sons who have previously occupied this chair. I don't
know whether he had a malicious desire to alarm me;
but, however that may be, I read the addresses, and
derived the greatest pleasure and profit from • some of
them, and from none more than from the one given by
the great historian, Mr. Freeman, which delighted me
most of all ; and, if I had not been ashamed of plagiaris-
ing, and if I had not been sure of being found out, I
should have been glad to have copied very much of
what Mr. Freeman said, simply putting in the word
science for history. There was one notable passage:
"The difference between good and bad teaching mainly
consists in this, whether the words used are really clothed
with a meaning or not." And Mr. Freeman gives a
remarkable example of this. He says, when a little girl
was asked where Turkey was, she answered that it was
in the yard with the other fowls, and that showed she
had a definite idea connected with the word Turkey, and
was, so far, worthy of praise. I quite agree with that
commendation; but what a curious thing it is that one
should now find it necessary to urge that this is the be-all
rnrl end-all of scientific instruction — the sine mt.&

146 ON SCIENCE AND ART

the absolutely necessary condition, — and yet that it
was insisted upon more than two hundred years ago
by one of the greatest men science ever possessed in
this country, William Harvey.6 Harvey wrote, or at
least published, only two small books, one of which is
the well-known treatise on the circulation of the blood.
The other, the "Exercitationes de Generatione," is less
known, but not less remarkable. And not the least
valuable part of it is the preface, in which there occurs
this passage: "Those who, reading the words of authors,
do not form sensible images of the things referred to,
obtain no true ideas, but conceive false imaginations and
inane phantasms." You see, William Harvey's words
are just the same in substance as those of Mr. Freeman,
only they happen to be rather more than two centuries
older. So that what I am now saying has its application
elsewhere than in science; but assuredly in science the
condition of knowing, of your own knowledge, things
which you talk about, is absolutely imperative.

I remember, in my youth, there were detestable books
which ought to have been burned by the hands of the
common hangman, for they contained questions, and
answers to be learned by heart, of this sort, "What is
a horse? The horse is termed Equus caballus; belongs
to the class Mammalia; order, Pachydermata ; family,
Solidungula." Was any human being wiser for learning
that magic formula? Was he not more foolish, inas-
much as he was deluded into taking words for knowl-
edge? It is that kind of teaching that one wants to
get rid of, and banished out of science. Make it as
little as you like, but, unless that which is taught is
based on actual observation and familiarity with facts,
it is better left alone.

There are a great many people who imagine that ele-
8 See On Improving Natural Knowledge, p. 22.

ON SCIENCE AND ART 147

mentary teaching might be properly carried out by
teachers provided with only elementary knowledge. Let
me assure you that that is the profoundest mistake in
the world. There is nothing so difficult to do as to
write a good elementary book, and there is nobody so
hard to teach properly and well as people who know
nothing about a subject, and I will tell you why. If
I address an audience of persons who are occupied in
the same line of work as myself, I can assume that they
know a vast deal, and that they can find out the
blunders I make. If they don't it is their fault and not
mine; but when I appear before a body of people who
know nothing about the matter, who take for gospel
whatever I say, surely it becomes needful that I consider
what I say, make sure that it will bear examination,
and that I do not impose upon the credulity of those
who have faith in me. In the second place, it involves
that difficult process of knowing what you know so well
that you can talk about it as you can talk about your
ordinary business. A man can always talk about his
own business. He can always make it plain; but, if his
knowledge is hearsay, he is afraid to go beyond what he
has recollected, and put it before those that are ig-
norant in such a shape that they shall comprehend it.
That is why, to be a good elementary teacher, to' teach
the elements of any subject, requires most careful con-
sideration, if you are a master of the subject; and, if
you are not a master of it, it is needful you should
familiarise yourself with so much as you are called upon
to teach — soak yourself in it, so to speak — until you
know it as part of your daily life and daily knowledge,
and then you will be able to teach anybody. That is
what I mean by practical teachers, and, although the
deficiency of such teachers is being remedied to a large
extent, I think it is one which has long existed, and

148 ON SCIENCE AND ART

which has existed from no fault of those who undertook
to teach, but because, until the last score of years, it
absolutely was not possible for any one in a great many
branches of science, whatever his desire might be, to
get instruction which would enable him to be a good
teacher of elementary things. All that is being rapidly
altered, and I hope it will soon become a thing of the
past.

The last point I have referred to is the question of the
sufficiency of time. And here comes the rub. The teach-
ing of science needs time, as any other subject; but it
needs more time proportionally than other subjects, for
the amount of work obviously done, if the teaching is to
be, as I have said, practical. Work done in a laboratory
involves a good deal of expenditure of time without
always an obvious result, because we do not see anything
of that quiet process of soaking the facts into the mind,
which takes place through the organs of the senses. Cn
this ground there must be ample time given to science
teaching. What that amount of time should be is a
point which I need not discuss now; in fact, it is a
point which cannot be settled until one has made up
one's mind about various other questions.

All, then, that I have to ask for, on behalf of the
scientific people, if I may venture to speak for more
than myself, is that you should put scientific teaching
into what statesmen call the condition of "the most
favoured nation"; that is to say, that it shall have as
large a share of the time given to education as any other
principal subject. You may say that that is a very
vague statement, because the value of the allotment of
time, under those circumstances, depends upon the num-
ber of principal subjects. It is x the time, and an
unknown quantity of principal subjects dividing that,
and science taking shares with the rest. That shows

ON SCIENCE AND ART 149

that we cannot deal with this question fully until we
have made up our minds as to what the principal sub-
jects of education ought to be.

I know quite well that launching myself into this dis-
cussion is a very dangerous operation; that it is a very
large subject, and one which is difficult to deal with,
however much I may trespass upon your patience in the
time allotted to me. But the discussion is so funda-
mental, it is so completely impossible to make up one's
mind on these matters until one has settled the ques-
tion, that I will even venture to make the experiment.
A great lawyer-statesman and philosopher of a former
age — I mean Francis Bacon7 — said that truth came out
of error much more rapidly than it came out of con-
fusion. There is a wonderful truth in that saying. Next
to being right in this world, the best of all things is to
be clearly and definitely wrong, because you will come
out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right
and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out no-
where; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly and
persistently wrong, you must, some of these days, have
the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against
a fact, and that sets you all straight again. So I will
not trouble myself as to whether I may be right or wrong
in what I am about to say, but at any rate I hope to
be clear and definite; and then you will be able to judge
for yourselves whether, in following out the train of
thought I have to introduce, you knock your heads
against facts or not.

I take it that the whole object of education is, in the
first place, to train the faculties of the young in such a
manner as to give their possessors the best chance of
being happy and useful in their generation; and, in the
second place, to furnish them with the most important
7 See On Improving Natural Knowledge, p. 19.

150 ON SCIENCE AND ART

portions of that immense capitalised experience of the
human race which we call knowledge of various kinds.
I am using the term knowledge in its widest possible
sense; and the question is, what subjects to select by
training and discipline, in which the object I have just
denned may be best attained.

I must call your attention further to this fact, that
all the subjects of our thoughts — all feelings and propo-
sitions (leaving aside our sensations as the mere ma-
terials and occasions of thinking and feeling), all our
mental furniture — may be classified under one of two
heads — as either within the province of the intellect,
something that can be put into propositions and affirmed
or denied; or as within the province of feeling, or that
which, before the name was defiled, was called the
aesthetic side of our nature, and which can neither be
proved nor disproved, but only felt and known.

According to the classification which I have put before
you, then, the subjects of all knowledge are divisible into
the two groups, matters of science and matters of art;
for all things with which the reasoning faculty alone is
occupied, come under the province of science; and in
the broadest sense, and not in the narrow and technical
sense in which we are now accustomed to use the word
art, all things feelable, all things which stir our emotions,
come under the term of art, in the sense of the subject-
matter of the aesthetic faculty. So that we are shut up
to this — that the business of education is, in the first
place, to provide the young with the means and the
habit of observation; and, secondly, to supply the sub-
ject-matter of knowledge either in the shape of science
or of art, or of both combined.

Now, it is a very remarkable fact — but it is true of
most things in this world — that there is hardly any-
thing one-sided, or of one nature; and it is not immedi-

ON SCIENCE AND ART 151

ately obvious what of the things that interest us may
be regarded as pure science, and what may be regarded
as pure art. It may be that there are some peculiarly
constituted persons who, before they have advanced far
into the depths of geometry, find artistic beauty about
it; but, taking the generality of mankind, I think it may
be said that, when they begin to learn mathematics, their
whole souls are absorbed in tracing the connection be-
tween the premises and the conclusion, and that to them
geometry is pure science. So I think it may be said
that mechanics and osteology are pure science. On the
other hand, melody in music is pure art. You cannot
reason about it; there is no proposition involved in it.
So, again, in the pictorial art, an arabesque, or a "har-
mony in gray," touches none but the aesthetic faculty.
But a great mathematician, and even many persons who
are not great mathematicians, will tell you that they
derive immense pleasure from geometrical reasonings.
Everybody knows mathematicians speak of solutions and
problems as "elegant," and they tell you that a certain
mass of mystic symbols is "beautiful, quite lovely."
Well, you do not see it. They do see it, because the in-
tellectual process, the process of comprehending the
reasons symbolised by these figures and these signs,
confers upon them a sort of pleasure, such as an artist
has in visual symmetry. Take a science of which I
may speak with more confidence, and which is the most
attractive of those I am concerned with. It is what we
call morphology, which consists in tracing out the unity
in variety of the infinitely diversified structures of ani-
mals and plants. I cannot give you any example of
a thorough aesthetic pleasure more intensely real than
a pleasure of this kind — the pleasure which arises in
one's mind when a whole mass of different structures run
into one harmony as the expression of a central law.

152 ON SCIENCE AND ART

That is where the province of art overlays and embraces
the province of intellect. And, if I may venture to ex-
press an opinion on such a subject, the great majority
of forms of art are not in a sense what I just now de-
fined them to be — pure art; but they derive much of
their quality from simultaneous and even unconscious
excitement of the intellect.

When I was a boy, I was very fond of music, and I
am so now; and it so happened that I had the oppor-
tunity of hearing much good music. Among other
things, I had abundant opportunities of hearing that
great old master, Sebastian Bach. I remember per-
fectly well — though I knew nothing about music then,
and, I may add, know nothing whatever about it now —
the intense satisfaction and delight which I had in listen-
ing, by the hour together, to Bach's fugues. It is a
pleasure which remains with me, I am glad to think;
but, of late years, I have tried to find out the why and
wherefore, and it has often occurred to me that the
pleasure derived from musical compositions of this kind
is essentially of the same nature as that which is derived
from pursuits which are commonly regarded as purely
intellectual. I mean, that the source of pleasure is
exactly the same as in most of my problems in morph-
ology— that you have the theme in one of the old
master's works followed out in all its endless variations,
always appearing and always reminding you of unity in
variety. So in painting; what is called "truth to nature"
is the intellectual element coming in, and truth to nature
depends entirely upon the intellectual culture of the
person to whom art is addressed. If you are in Australia,
you may get credit for being a good artist — I mean
among the natives — if you draw a kangaroo after a
fashion. But, among men of higher civilisation, the
intellectual knowledge we possess brings its criticism into

ON SCIENCE AND ART 153

our appreciation of works of art, and we are obliged to
satisfy it, as well as the mere sense of beauty in colour
and in outline. And so, the higher the culture and in-
formation of those whom art addresses, the more exact
and precise must be what we call its "truth to nature."

If we turn to literature, the same thing is true, and you
find works of literature which may be said to be pure
art. A little song of Shakespeare or of Goethe is pure
art; it is exquisitely beautiful, although its intellectual
content may be nothing. A series of pictures is made
to pass before your mind by the meaning of words, and
the effect is a melody of ideas. Nevertheless, the great
mass of the literature we esteem is valued, not merely
because of having artistic form, but because of its in-
tellectual content; and the value is the higher the more
precise, distinct, and true is that intellectual content.
And, if you will let me for a moment speak of the very
highest forms of literature, do we not regard them as
highest simply because the more we know the truer they
seem, and the more competent we are to appreciate
beauty the more beautiful they are? No man ever under-
stands Shakespeare until he is old, though the youngest
may admire him, the reason being that he satisfies the
artistic instinct of the youngest and harmonizes with
the ripest and richest experience of the oldest.

I have said this much to draw your attention to what,
in my mind, lies at the root of all this matter, and at
the understanding of one another by the men of science
on the one hand, and the men of literature, and history,
and art, on the other. It is not a question whether one
order of study or another should predominate. It is a
question of what topics of education you shall select
which will combine all the needful elements in such due
proportion as to give the greatest amount of food, sup-
port, and encouragement to those faculties which enable

154 ON SCIENCE AND ART

us to appreciate truth, and to profit by those sources of
innocent happiness which are open to us, and at the
same time, to avoid that which is bad, and coarse, and
ugly, and keep clear of the multitude of pitfalls and
dangers which beset those who break through the natural
or moral laws.

I address myself, in this spirit, to 'the consideration of
the question of the value of purely literary education.
Is it good and sufficient, or is it insufficient and bad?
Well, here I venture to say that there are literary edu-
cations and literary educations. If I am to understand
by that term the education that was current in the great
majority of middle-class schools, and upper schools too,
in this country when I was a boy, and which consisted
absolutely and almost entirely in keeping boys for eight
or ten years at learning the rules of Latin and Greek
grammar, construing certain Latin and Greek authors,
and possibly making verses which, had they been Eng-
lish verses, would have been condemned as abominable
doggerel, — if that is what you mean by literary edu-
cation, then I say it is scandalously insufficient and
almost worthless. My reason for saying so is not from
the point of view of science at all, but from the point
of view of literature. I say the thing professes to be
literary education that is not a literary education at
all. It was not literature at all that was taught, but
science in a very bad form. It is quite obvious that
grammar is science and not literature. The analysis of
a text by the help of the rules of grammar is just as
much a scientific operation as the analysis of a chemical
compound by the help of the rules of chemical analysis.
There is nothing that appeals to the aesthetic faculty in
that operation; and I ask multitudes of men of my own
age, who went through this process, whether they ever
had a conception of art or literature until they obtained

ON SCIENCE AND ART 155

it for themselves after leaving school? Then you may
say, "If that is so, if the education was scientific, why
cannot you be satisfied with it?" I say, because al-
though it is a scientific training, it is of the most in-
adequate and inappropriate kind. If there is any good
at all in scientific education it is that men should be
trained, as I said before, to know things for themselves
at first hand, and that they should understand every
step of the reason of that which they do.

I desire to speak with the utmost respect of that
science — philology — of which grammar is a part and
parcel; yet everybody knows that grammar, as it is
usually learned at school, affords no scientific training.
It is taught just as you would teach the rules of chess
or draughts. On the other hand, if I am to understand
by a literary education the study of the literatures of
either ancient or modern nations — but especially those
of antiquity, and especially that of ancient Greece; if
this literature is studied, not merely from the point of
view of philological science, and its practical application
to the interpretation of texts, but as an exemplification
of and commentary upon the principles of art; if you
look upon the literature of a people as a chapter in the
development of the human mind, if you work out this
in a broad spirit, and with such collateral references to
morals and politics, and physical geography, and the
like as are needful to make you comprehend what the
meaning of ancient literature and civilisation is, — then,
assuredly, it affords a splendid and noble education.
But I still think it is susceptible of improvement, and
that no man will ever comprehend the real secret of the
difference between the ancient world and our present
time, unless he has learned to see the difference which
the late development of physical science has made be-
tween the thought of this day and the thought of that,

156 ON SCIENCE AND ART

and he will never see that difference, unless he has some
practical insight into some branches of physical science;
and you must remember that a literary education such
as that which I have just referred to, is out of the reach
of those whose school life is cut short at sixteen or
seventeen.

But, you will say, all this is fault-finding; let us hear
what you have in the way of positive suggestion. Then
I am bound to tell you that, if I could make a clean
sweep of everything — I am very glad I cannot because
I might, and probably should, make mistakes — but if
I could make a clean sweep of everything and start
afresh, I should, in the first place, secure that training
of the young in reading and writing, and in the habit
of attention and observation, both to that which is told
them, and that which they see, which everybody agrees
to. But in addition to that I should make it absolutely
necessary for everybody, for a longer or shorter period,
to learn to draw. Now, you may say, there are some
people who cannot draw, however much they may be
taught. I deny that in toto, because I never yet met
with anybody who could not learn to write. Writing
is a form of drawing; therefore if you give the same
attention and trouble to drawing as you do to writing,
depend upon it, there is nobody who cannot be made
to draw more or less well. Do not misapprehend me.
I do not say for one moment you would make an artistic
draughtsman. Artists are not made; they grow. You
may improve the natural faculty in that direction, but
you cannot make it; but you can teach simple drawing,
and you will find it an implement of learning of extreme
value. I do not think its value can be exaggerated,
because it gives you the means of training the young in
attention and accuracy, which are the two things in
which all mankind are more deficient than in any other

ON SCIENCE AND ART 157

mental quality whatever. The whole of my life has
been spent in trying to give my proper attention to
things and to be accurate, and I have not succeeded as
well as I could wish; and other people, I am afraid, are
not much more fortunate. You cannot begin this habit
too early, and I consider there is nothing of so great a
value as the habit of drawing, to secure those two de-
sirable ends.

Then we come to the subject-matter, whether scien-
tific or aesthetic, of education, and I should naturally
have no question at all about teaching the elements of
physical science of the kind I have sketched, in a prac-
tical manner; but among scientific topics, using the
word scientific in the broadest sense, I would also in-
clude the elements of the theory of morals and of that
of political and social life, which, strangely enough, it
never seems to occur to anybody to teach a child. I
would have the history of our own country, and of all
the influences which have been brought to bear upon it,
with incidental geography, not as a mere chronicle of
reigns and battles, but as a chapter in the development
of the race, and the history of civilisation.

Then with respect to aesthetic knowledge and disci-
pline, we have happily in the English language one of
the most magnificent storehouses of artistic beauty and
of models of literary excellence which exists in the world
at the present time. I have said before, and I repeat it
here, that if a man cannot get literary culture of the
highest kind out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakes-
peare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley,
to mention only a few of our illustrious writers — I say,
if he cannot get it out of those writers, he cannot get it
out of anything; and I would assuredly devote a very
large portion of the time of every English child to the
careful study of the models of English writing of such

158 ON SCIENCE AND ART

varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what is
still more important and still more neglected, the habit
of using that language with precision, with force, and
with art. I fancy we are almost the only nation in the
world who seem to think that composition comes by
nature. The French attend to their own language, the
Germans study theirs; but Englishmen do not seem to
think it is worth their while. Nor would I fail to in-
clude, in the course of study I am sketching, transla-
tions of all the best works of antiquity, or of the modern
world. It is a very desirable thing to read Homer in
Greek; but if you don't happen to know Greek, the
next best thing we can do is to read as good a transla-
tion of it as we have recently been furnished with in
prose. You won't get all you would get from the
original, but you may get a great deal; and to refuse
to know this great deal because you cannot get all,
seems to be as sensible as for a hungry man to refuse
bread because he cannot get partridge. Finally, I would
add instruction in either music or painting, or, if the
child should be so unhappy, as sometimes happens, as
to have no faculty for either of those, and no possibility
of doing anything in any artistic sense with them, then
I would see what could be done with literature alone;
but I would provide, in the fullest sense, for the develop-
ment of the aesthetic side of the mind. In my judgment,
those are all the essentials of education for an English
child. With that outfit, such as it might be made in the
time given to education which is within the reach of
nine-tenths of the population — with that outfit, an
Englishman, within the limits of English life, is fitted
to go anywhere, to occupy the highest positions, to fill
the highest offices of the State, and to become distin-
guished in practical pursuits, in science* or in art. For,
if he have the opportunity to learn all those things, and

ON SCIENCE AND ART 159

have his mind disciplined in the various directions the
teaching of those topics would have necessitated, then,
assuredly, he will be able to pick up, on his road through
life, all the rest of the intellectual baggage he wants.

If the educational time at our disposition were suffi-
cient there are one or two things I would add to those
I have just now called the essentials; and perhaps you
will be surprised to hear, though I hope you will not,
that I should add, not more science, but one, or, if
possible, two languages. The knowledge of some other
language than one's own is, in fact, of singular intellec-
tual value. Many of the faults and mistakes of the
ancient philosophers are traceable to the fact that they
knew no language but their own, and were often led
into confusing the symbol with the thought which it
embodied. I think it is Locke who says that one-half of
the mistakes of philosophers have arisen from questions
about words; and one of the safest ways of delivering
yourself from the bondage of words is, to know how
ideas look in words to which you are not accustomed.
That is one reason for the study of language; another
reason is, that it opens new fields in art and in science.
Another is the practical value of such knowledge; and
yet another is this, that if your languages are properly
chosen, from the time of learning the additional lan-
guages you will know your own language better than
ever you did. So, I say, if the time given to education
permits, add Latin and German. Latin, because it is
the key to nearly one-half of English and to all the
Romance languages; and German, because it is the key
to almost all the remainder of English, and helps you
to understand a race from whom most of us have sprung,
and who have a character and a literature of a fateful
force in the history of the world, such as probably has
been allotted to those of no other people, except the

i6o ON SCIENCE AND ART

Jews, the Greeks, and ourselves. Beyond these, the
essential and the eminently desirable elements of all
education, let each man take up his special line — the
historian devote himself to his history, the man of
science to his science, the man of letters to his culture
of that kind, and the artist to his special pursuit.

Bacon has prefaced some of his works with no more
than this: Franciscus Bacon sic cogitavit; let sic cogi-
tavis be the epilogue to what I have ventured to address
to you to-night.

8 "Thus Francis Bacon thought"; "thus I thought."

THE END

Q

171

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Physical &
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Huxley, Thomas Henry
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