Thomas Henry Huxley

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THOMAS

HENRY HUXLEY

MODERN ENGLISH WRITERS.

MATTHEW ARNOLD
R. L. STEVENSON .

JOHN RUSKIN .

ALFRED TENNYSON
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
THACKERAY
GEORGE ELIOT
BROWNING ....
FROUDE ....
DICKENS ....

. . Professor Saintsbury.

. . L. Cope Cornford.

. Mrs Meynell.

. Andrew Lang.

. Edward Clodd.

. . Charles Whibley.

. A. T. Quiller-Couch.

. C. H. Herford.

. . John Oliver Hobbes.

. W. E. Henley.

*.** Other Volumes will be announced in due course.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, Edinburgh and London.

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

BY

EDWARD CLODD

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

— Matthew Arnold.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MCMII

All Rights renewed

.

INSCRIBED TO

m R S HUXLEY

WITH DEEP RESPECT AND REGARD

PREFATORY NOTE.

I N the preparation of this book there have been
large drafts from the materials supplied by Mr
Leonard Huxley in the very admirable Life and
Letters of his father. The footnote references
to that work are sufficiently denoted by the
omission of its title.

For the convenience of readers who may not
possess the original editions of Huxley’s writings,
the references to them are, for the most part
cited from the Collected Essays.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

CHRONOLOGY . . . . . xi

I. THE MAN ...... I

II. THE DISCOVERER . . . . *57

III. THE INTERPRETER . . . . .86

IV. THE CONTROVERSIALIST .... 140

V. THE CONSTRUCTOR ..... 200

NOTE ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE UNKNOWABLE . 220

...... 223

INDEX

'

CHRONOLOGY.

1825. Born at Ealing (4th May)..

1841. Assistant to doctor at Rotherhithe.

1842. Student at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School.

1845. M.B. and Gold Medallist for Anatomy and Physiology at
University of London.

1845. Discovered membrane of human hair known as “ Huxley’s
layer.”

1846. Entered Naval Medical Service.

1846. Appointed assistant-surgeon of the surveying ship Rattle¬
snake.

1849. Published memoir on the Family of the Medusa.

1850. Returned to England : granted leave ashore to work out
results of voyage.

1851. Elected Fellow of the Royal Society.

1852. Received Gold Medal of Royal Society.

1853. Further leave ashore refused : struck off the Navy List.

1853. Published article on the Cell Theory.

1854. Appointed Professor of Natural Plistory and Palaeontology in
Royal School of Mines, and Curator of Fossils in Museum of
Practical Geology.

1855. Married Henrietta Anne Heathorn, of Sydney.

1856. Visited Switzerland with Tyndall.

1857. Published paper on The Structure and Motion of Glaciers.

1857. Appointed Examiner in Physiology and Comparative Ana¬
tomy in University of London.

Xll

HUXLEY.

1857. Appointed Fullerian Professor of Comparative Anatomy at
the Royal Institution.

1858. Appointed Croonian Lecturer.

1859. Published Croonian lecture on Origin of the Vertebrate
Skull.

1859. Reviewed the Origin of Species in the Times (26th December).

1859. Appointed Secretary of the Geological Society.

1859. Published Oceanic Hydrozoa.

1860. Attended British Association Meeting at Oxford (debate with
Bishop Wilberforce).

1861. Lectured on Relation of Plan to the rest of the Animal
Kingdom at Edinburgh and London.

1862. Elected Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of
Surgeons.

1863. Published Plan’s Place in Nature.

1864. Appointed on Royal Commission on Sea Fisheries

Note. — Huxley served between 1862 and 1884 on ten Royal Commissions
on Fisheries, Scientific Education, & c.

1866. Received degree of LL.D. Edinburgh.

1866. Published Lessons in Elementary Physiology.

1868. Elected President of the Ethnological Society.

1868. Lectured on the Physical Basis of LAfe.

1868. Published memoirs on the Classification of Birds and on
Intermediate Animals between Birds and Reptiles .

1869. Elected President of the Geological Society.

1869. Joined the Metaphysical Society.

1869. Published Introduction to the Classification of Animals.

1870. Elected President of British Association Meeting at Liver¬
pool.

1S70. Elected member of the first School Board for London.

1870. Published Lay Sermons.

1871. Appointed Secretary of the Royal Society.

1871. Broke down in health ; visited Egypt.

1872. Elected Lord Rector of Aberdeen University.

1873. Published Critiques atid Addresses.

1874. Lectured on Animals as Automata at British Association
Meeting, Belfast.

1874. Lectured on Natural History as deputy to Sir Wyville
Thomson at Edinburgh.

1875. Took active part in controversy on Vivisection.

1875. Published Practical Instruction in Elementary Biology.

CHRONOLOGY.

Xlll

1876. Visited America.

1877. Published American Addresses; Physiography ; and a
Manual of the Anatomy of Invert ebrated Animals.

1878. Published Hume .

1879. Received degree of LL.D. Cambridge.

1880. Lectured on The Coming of Age of the '‘Origin of Species' at
the Royal Institution.

1880. Published The Crayfish; an Introduction to the Science of
Zoology ; and Introductory Science Primer.

1881. Appointed Inspector of Salmon Fisheries.

1881. Became, on departmental changes at the School of Mines,
Professor of Biology and Dean of the Royal College of Science.
1881. Published Science and Cultzire.

1883. Elected President of the Royal Society.

1883. Delivered the Rede Lecture at Cambridge (on The Pearly
Nautilus and Evolution ).

1884. Further breakdown in health.

1S85. Received degree of D.C.L. Oxford.

1S85. Retired on pension from all official appointments.

1886. Began series of papers on Evolution of Theology.

1888. Elected a Trustee of the British Museum.

1888. Received Copley Medal of the Royal Society.

1889. Removed to Eastbourne.

1891. Published Social Diseases and Worse Remedies.

1892. Published Essays on Controverted Questions.

1892. Made a Privy Councillor.

1893. Delivered Romanes Lecture at Oxford (on Evolution and
Ethics).

1893-94. Reissued, with rearrangement, the articles and lectures in
Lay Sermons, &c., in nine volumes entitled Collected Essays.

1894. Received Darwin Medal of the Royal Society.

1894. Attended British Association Meeting, Oxford.

1895. Died 29th June. Buried at Finchley, 4th July.

HUXLEY.

i.

THE MAN.

Thomas Henry Huxley, the seventh and youngest
child of George and Rachel Huxley, was born on the
4th May 1825, at Ealing, then a village separated by
stretches of open country from London. His father,
who was assistant-master in a semi-public school there, is
described by him as a man “ rather too easy-going for
this wicked world,” yet with a certain tenacity of charac¬
ter which, since he inherited it, Huxley dryly says,
“ unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy.” This,
together with a faculty for drawing, constituted the
father’s legacy to the son. It is of his mother that he
declares himself “ physically and mentally ” the child,
“ even down to peculiar movements of the hands ” ; her
agile mind, with its rapid arrival at conclusions, re¬
mained, he says, the perilous but most prized part of

A

2

HUXLEY.

his “ inheritance of mother-wit.” His love for her was
a passion.

But his boyhood was a cheerless time. Reversing
Matthew Arnold’s sunnier memories : —

No “ rigorous teachers seized his youth,

And purged its faith, and tried its fire,

Shewed him the high, white star of truth,

There bade him gaze, and there aspire.”

He told Charles Kingsley that he was “ kicked into
the world a boy without guide or training, or with
worse than none,” 1 and, contrasting Herbert Spencer’s
happier lot, says that he “had two years of a Pande¬
monium of a school (between eight and ten), and
after that neither help nor sympathy in any intellectual
direction till he reached manhood.”2 On the dreary
week-days he was flung among boys of low type, and
on the drearier Sundays he was taken to church,
where the preacher’s allusions to infidels left on his
mind the impression that “ such folks belonged to the
criminal classes.” When he was about ten, the break¬
up of the Ealing school sent the family, literally, to
Coventry, where, in the irony of fate, the shiftless
father became manager of a savings’ bank. The
daughters took to school-keeping, and the boys were
left free to browse among the remnants of the home
library. Huxley was possessed of that love of read¬
ing which, in Gibbon’s famous words, he “ would not
have exchanged for the treasures of India.” From

1 I. 220.

2 II. 145-

THE MAN.

3

boyhood to old age his tastes were omnivorous, rang¬
ing from science and philosophy to the last new fiction.
Dr Johnson said that Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
took him out of bed two hours before his usual time ;
Hutton’s Geology kept Huxley in it, with blanket
pinned round his shoulders. At twelve he had read
Hamilton’s essay On the Philosophy of the Uncon¬
ditioned , with the result, he tells us, of stamping on
his mind “ the strong conviction that on even the
most solemn and important of questions, men are apt to
take cunning phrases for answers.” Carlyle’s translations
from the German moved him to teach himself a lan¬
guage knowledge of which was to be of the utmost
service in his life-work. Of the influence which Sartor
Resartus had upon him, he says, “ It led me to know
that a deep sense of religion was compatible with the
entire absence of theology.” 1

During this formative period his interests ranged from
speculations on the absolute basis of matter and the
crystallisation of carbon to the injustice of compelling
Dissenters to pay church rates. In the boy’s quotation
from Lessing, “ I hate all people who want to found
sects,” there is the spirit of the man who said that
“ science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.” In
a scheme for a “classification of all knowledge” written
in a fragmentary journal, kept from his fifteenth to his
seventeenth year, there was the expression of that
passion for general principles, for search after unity at

1 I. 220.

4

HUXLEY.

the core of things, which ruled all his observation and
speculation, and which is the salvation of a man from
the evil of specialism.

“ Thus to be a Seeker is to be of the best sect next to
a Finder,” said Oliver Cromwell ; and of himself
Huxley, who at fifty-three learned Greek that he might
read Aristotle in the original, wrote three years before
his death, “ I have always been, am, and propose to
remain a mere scholar.” So wrote Michael Angelo in
old age, “Imparo ancora ” — I am learning still.

Huxley’s bent, like that, it may be added, of both
Herbert Spencer and the late W. B. Carpenter, was
towards mechanical engineering, and this was manifest
in his life-work. For his interest centred in the “ archi¬
tectural part ” of organisms, in the adaptation of
apparatus to function, and in whatever evidenced
“unity of plan in the thousands and thousands of
diverse living constructions.”1 Whatever he worked
at, he “visualised clearly” by diagram or map or
picture.

He paid a lifelong penalty for his curiosity about the
mechanism of the human body. When he was fourteen
he was taken by some student friends to a post-mortem,
the result of which was an attack of blood-poisoning.
To this he attributed the “hypochondriacal dyspepsia”
which afflicted him to the end of his life. Although
engineering was his hobby, medicine, at the start, was
his destiny. At sixteen, on the removal of his family

1 I. 7-

THE MAN.

5

to Rotherhithe, he was placed as assistant to a Dr
Chandler as a preliminary to “walking the hospitals.”
Many of the patients were in more need of food than
physic, a condition of things which set Huxley wonder¬
ing “ why the masses did not sally forth and get a few
hours’ eating and drinking and plunder to their heart’s
content before the police could stop and hang a few of
them.”1

This early contact with the grim realities of the social
problem gave him authority to be heard upon the
economic and educational questions in which his in¬
terest deepened with his years, and to indicate to the
people how they may alone work out their own
salvation.

I believe in the fustian [he said], and can talk to it better
than to any amount of gauze and Saxony. ... I want the
working classes to understand that Science and her ways
are great facts for them — that physical virtue is the base of
all other, and that they are to be clean and temperate and
all the rest— not because fellows in black with white ties tell
them so, but because these are plain and patent laws of
nature which they must obey under penalties.2

Leaving Mr Chandler, he was apprenticed to his
brother-in-law, Dr Scott (Huxley’s two sisters had mar¬
ried doctors), and began study for the matriculation
examination of the University of London. He failed in
this, but had compensation in winning the silver medal
of the Pharmaceutical Society, while the standard

1 I. 16.

a !• US*

6

HUXLEY.

reached by his brother James and himself secured them
free scholarships in the medical school of Charing Cross
Hospital. In 1845 he passed his M.B. at the Univer¬
sity of London and made his first discovery in detecting
a hitherto unknown membrane at the root of the
human hair. It is known as “ Huxley’s layer.” The
next year he acted on the suggestion of a fellow-student,
Mr (now Sir Joseph) Fayrer, and applied to Sir William
Burnet, then Director of the Medical Service, for a
naval appointment. Sir William returned his visiting
card “with the frugal reminder” that he might “prob¬
ably find it useful on some other occasion,” but the
interview gained him entry on the books of Nelson’s old
ship, the Victory, for duty at Haslar Hospital. Then
came a turn of the tide which, not without ebb, led on to
fortune, at least to the fortune — never, despite the dis¬
creditable insinuation in Punch j1 a commercial one —
which Huxley coveted.

Owen Stanley, son of the Bishop of Norwich and
brother of Dean Stanley, was in command of the
Rattlesnake, a 28-gun frigate commissioned to survey
the intricate passages within the barrier-reef skirting the
eastern shores of Australia, between which colony and
the mother country a shorter sea-passage was demanded
by the growing trade. Captain Stanley wanted an
assistant- surgeon, and on the recommendation of Sir
John Richardson, the famous Arctic explorer, Huxley
was given the post. It was the best possible appren-

1 II. 26.

THE MAN.

7

ticeship for the work which lay, unsuspected, before
him — the solution of the problems of organology, and
the indicating of their far-reaching significance. Life
had its origin in water, and therein the biologist finds his
most suggestive material. Darwin and Joseph Hooker
had passed through a like curriculum — the one in 1831,
the other in 1839.

The Rattlesnake left Plymouth on the 12 th December
1846, two years before Bates and Wallace sailed for
exploration of the Amazons. It was a time of prepara¬
tion, each only vaguely knowing to what ends he worked,
but in his measure contributing answer to the question
whether species were mutable or permanent.

The conditions on board the Rattlesnake contrasted
ill with the luxurious equipment of exploring ships since
her time. She was a man-of-war of the old class ; her
seams were leaky ; the berths swarmed with cock¬
roaches, and the biscuits with weevils. The Admiralty
refused to supply any books, and in the absence of
proper apparatus for sifting the contents of the dredge,
Huxley had to adapt a wire meat-cover. The ship
carried an official naturalist, whose chief care was to
collect objects for museums, leaving to Huxley’s willing
hands the dissection and examination of the specimens
brought up from the deep sea.

The first long stay was made at Sydney, where
Huxley met his future wife, Henrietta Annie Heathorn.
For her he was “to serve longer and harder than Jacob
thought to serve for Rachel,” of whom, in immortal

8

HUXLEY.

words, the poet-chronicler says, “seven years seemed
unto him but a few days for the love he had to her.” 1
Huxley had his reward in forty years of the closest and
most helpful fellowship.

The nature and import of the work accomplished
by him during the voyage, which came to an end in
November 1849, will be dealt with in the next chapter.
Here it suffices to say that while sundry reports on
marine creatures, which were sent to the Linnean
Society, were pigeon-holed, better fortune attended a
paper on the Medusae or jelly-fish family, transmitted
to the Royal Society through Bishop Stanley, whose
admirable History of Birds has survived his episcopal
charges. It was promptly published, and was the
warrant of Huxley’s election into the Society at the
early age of twenty-six. Thus far he could have no
quarrel with bishops.

Back in England, “ equipped as a perfect zoologist
and keen-sighted ethnologist” (the words are Virchow’s),
Huxley obtained for a time the privilege of appointment
for “particular service,” which enabled him to work out
on shore the results of the voyage. But nearly five
years of suspense and struggle were to pass before he
secured a permanent appointment of ^200 per annum
one-half of the modest maximum he desired. Writing
to his sister in 1850 he says : —

I have no ambition, except as means to an end, and that
end is the possession of a sufficient income to marry upon.

1 Genesis xxix. 20.

THE MAN.

9

. . . A worker I must always be — it is my nature — but if I
had ^400 a-year I would never let my name appear to any¬
thing I did or ever shall do. It would be glorious to be
a voice working in secret, and free from all those personal
motives that have actuated the best.1

He was in the front rank of anatomists; in 1852 his
society conferred upon him the Royal Medal, which,
for the jQ 50 worth of gold therein, he sold eleven years
after, to assist a brother’s widow ; he was deluged with
invitations to dinners and soirees while not earning
enough to pay his cab-fare. He kept fragile body and
self-reliant soul together by writing, lecturing, and trans¬
lating. Toronto, Aberdeen, Cork, King’s College, each
in turn rejected him as he sought a professorship of
natural history, and he had thoughts of trying his luck
as a doctor in Australia, if only to be near his sweet¬
heart. Domestic cares, his mother’s death, and his
father’s serious illness, added to the gloom of these five
dreary years. But though his circumstances ran low,
his ideals soared high. In the letter of 1850 to his
sister he says : —

I don’t know and I don’t care whether I shall ever be
what is called a great man. I will leave my mark some¬
where, 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.2

1 I. 62.

IO

HUXLEY.

At the end of 1853 the Admiralty commanded him
to join the ship Illustrious ; he refused, and paid the
penalty in being struck off the Navy List. But, as he
cheerily said, “ there is always a Cape Horn in one’s
life,” and, “ not without a good deal of damage to spars
and rigging,” he rounded it. In July 1854, on the
transfer of his friend Edward Forbes to Edinburgh, he
was appointed Professor of Natural History at the
School of Mines with a salary of ^200, which, soon
after, was doubled on his becoming naturalist to the
Geological Survey. The next year Miss Heathorn’s
parents brought her to England. Her health was so
bad that a famous doctor gave her only six months
to live. But the faculty differed ; Huxley took the
brighter view, and wrote thus to Hooker on the nth
July

I terminate my Baccalaureate and take my degree of
M.A.trimony (isn’t that atrocious?) on Saturday, July 21.

When he was appointed to the School of Mines he
told Sir Henry De la Beche that he “ didn’t care for
fossils,” the mechanism of the living animal alone in¬
teresting him. But it came to pass that during his
thirty-one years’ tenure of his post the larger part of
his work was palaeontological. And well that this so
happened, because, when the battle over organic evolu¬
tion was fought, Huxley was able to adduce out of his
treasury of knowledge a mass of evidence from the
fossil-yielding rocks which, supplemented by the evi-

THE MAN.

I I

dence from embryology, put the theory of “ descent
with modification ” on a foundation which cannot be
shaken.

Routine work leaves little, if any, time for original
investigation. Administrative detail filled the larger
part of each day with Huxley ; his heart was centred
in schemes for the diffusion of science ; the arrange¬
ment and cataloguing of the contents of the Jermyn
Street Museum was a labour of years ; he gave, un¬
grudgingly, help in forming other public as well as
private collections, which, in his own words,

should be large enough to illustrate the most important
truths of natural history, but not so extensive as to weary
and confuse ordinary visitors.

But with Huxley this, although an essential, was a
secondary, part of the business ; with the organising
of materials there went pari passu instruction in their
nature and meaning, involving courses of lectures and
series of articles, both technical and popular, while
other public appointments made their inroads on his
time. This would seem enough to exhaust the day,
and when it is remembered that all which he undertook,
paid and unpaid alike, was done despite frequent break¬
down from dyspepsia and allied troubles, the marvel
grows that he found a moment for original research,
or for the wide and varied reading which, fortifying him
on every side, enabled him “to put to flight the armies”
of the obscurantists in science, ethics, and theology.

Work was his passion, method was his salvation ; he

12

HUXLEY.

took care of the minutes and the hours took care of
themselves. And yet, like Gibbon, who wrote —

While every one looks on me as a prodigy of application, I
know myself how strong a propensity I have to indolence,

we find Huxley accusing himself of an ingrained lazi¬
ness.1

On the last night of 1856, while waiting for the birth
of his first child, he made this entry in his journal : —

1856-7-8 must still be “Lehrjahre” to complete training
in principles of Histology, Morphology, Physiology, Zool¬
ogy, and Geology by Monographic Work in each depart¬
ment. i860 will then see me well grounded and ready for
any special pursuits in either of these branches. ... In
i860 I may fairly look forward to fifteen or twenty years’
“ Meisterjahre ” ; and with the comprehensive views my
training will give me, I think it will be possible in that time
to give a new and healthier direction to all Biological Science.
To smite all humbugs, however big, to give a nobler tone to
science ; to set an example of abstinence from petty personal
controversies, and of toleration for everything but lying ; to
be indifferent as to whether the work is recognised as mine
or not, so long as it is done : are these my aims ? i860 will

show.

Half-past ten at night. Waiting for my child. I seem to
fancy it the pledge that all these things shall be.

Born five minutes before twelve. Thank God. New-
Year’s Day, 1857. 2

On the 20th September i860, a year that was to
“ show ” so much, there was made the last entry in the
journal, telling what lifelong sorrow fell upon a great
and tender soul.

1 I. 268.

2 I. 151-

THE MAN.

13

And the same child, our Noel, our first-born, after being
for nearly four years our delight and our joy, was carried off
by scarlet fever in forty-eight hours. This day week he and
I had a great romp together. On Friday his restless head,
with its bright blue eyes and tangled golden hair, tossed all
day upon his pillow. On Saturday night, the fifteenth, I
carried him here into my study, and laid his cold still body
here where I write. Here too, on Sunday night, came his
mother and I to that holy leave-taking.

My boy is gone ; but in a higher and better sense than
was in my mind when I wrote four years ago what stands
above, I feel that my fancy has been fulfilled. I say heartily,
and without bitterness — Amen, so let it be.1

In a very remarkable letter, written at this time to
Charles Kingsley in reply to one setting forth the war¬
rant for belief in immortality, the attitude of Huxley
from his youth upwards towards the current theology
is shown clearly.2 He sees no justification for the
belief ; the arguments in its favour are to his mind
“delusive and mischievous,” and there, since his was
not the spirit which denies, he leaves the matter. The
letter contains the already-quoted remark that Sa?ior
Resartus led him to knowledge of the non-dependence
of religion on theology, religion meaning, as he says
elsewhere, simply the reverence and love for the ethical
ideal, and the desire to realise that ideal in life, which
every man ought to feel.3 He adds : —

Science and her methods gave me a resting-place inde¬
pendent of authority and tradition. Love opened up to me
a view of the sanctity of human nature, and impressed me
with a deep sense of responsibility.

1 I. 152.

2 I. 217-222.

3 Collected Essays, v. p. 249.

14

HUXLEY.

In the chapter on “The Everlasting No” in Sartor ,
Carlyle had said : —

After all the nameless woes that Inquiry, which for me,
what it is not always, was genuine love of Truth, had
wrought me, I nevertheless still loved Truth and bate no
jot of my allegiance to her.

In that allegiance Huxley never wavered : —

If wife and child, and name and fame were all lost to me,
one after another, still I would not lie. . . . The longer I
live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of
a man’s life is to say and to feel, “ I believe such and such to
be true.” All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest
penalties of existence cling about that act. The universe is
one and the same throughout ; and if the condition of my
success in unravelling some little difficulty of anatomy or
physiology is, that I shall rigorously refuse to put faith in
that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot
believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid
open to me on other terms.1

Huxley summed up the whole matter in his Rec¬
torial Address to the students of Aberdeen University :
“ Veracity is the heart of morality.” His references to the
formative influences on his life in the letter to Kingsley
are prefaced by the statement that his neglected boyhood
had been followed by a profligate manhood. His words
are, “ I confess to my shame that few men have drank
deeper of all kinds of sin than I.” Commenting on
this in his review of the Life and Letters , Sir W. Thiselton-
Dyer says, “ Frankly, I do not believe a word of it.”

1 I. 217.

THE MAN.

15

And those who knew Huxley in any degree of intimacy
will agree with him. Sir W. Thiselton-Dyer adds : —

In a rather serious conversation I once had with him, he
spoke of a period in his life when he might have taken to
evil courses ; but he did not give me the smallest reason to
suppose that in the retrospect he saw more than the
existence of a possible crevasse in his path into which he
might have fallen.1

The truth is that we have here the language of exag¬
geration born of the desolation of the moment ; the
“ troops of follies and errors ” 2 of youth refracted through
the medium of tears. It is the language of Augustine’s
Confessions ; of Bunyan’s Grace Abounding ; and of the

many excellent persons whose moral character from boy¬
hood to old age has been free from any stain discernible to
their fellow-creatures, who have, in their autobiographies 01-
diaries, applied to themselves, and doubtless with sincerity,
epithets as severe as could be applied to Titus Oates or Mrs
Brownrigg.3

In acknowledging a birthday letter from one of his
daughters, Huxley hopes that his own imperfections may
make him deal the more gently with those of others.
He adds that he has little toleration for the “just man
who needed no repentance,” and whose smugly correct
family circle “ was perhaps as the interior of an ice-pail.” 4
Walter Bagehot remarks that “ in the greatest cases
scientific men have been calm men. There is a cold¬
ness in their fame. We think of Euclid as of pure ice ;

1 Nature , 13th June 1901, p. 146. 2 II. 330.

3 Macaulay’s Essays, “John Bunyan,” iv. p. 407. 4 II. 331

i6

HUXLEY.

we admire Newton as we admire the Peak of Teneriffe.” 1
The statement is too sweeping ; it has no application to
Huxley, in whom was neither coldness nor detachment.
He was hot-tempered ; now and again he was austere to
a degree approaching severity : he had, as with all strong
individualities, strong likes and dislikes.2 But the
anger and the austerity were passing moods ; they were
the price which he and others paid for abiding virtues ;
for the “ woman’s element ” 3 in him which made him
cling to wife and children ; for the quick response to
every call of duty or affection ; for the generous applica¬
tion of great powers to noble and unselfish ends. Of
him may be said what Lowell has said of Lessing : “ No
biographical chemistry is needed to bleach spots out of
his reputation.” 4 His home was “a focus of the best
affections not less than of intellectual light.” 5 He loved
anniversaries ; the devotion of his children warmed him
“better than the sun,” and when his gifted daughter
Marian died in the flower of womanhood, he confessed,
in the depth of his grief, that “ man is not a rational
animal, especially in his parental capacity.” Where he
hated, the scorn and loathing were deserved, for they
were manifest only against the insincere and the evasive ;
if he could not brook contradiction, it was only where
ignorance or folly vaunted their assurance and their

1 Literary Studies , ii. p. 222. 2 II. 409.

3 “ I have a woman’s element in me.” — I. 61.

4 The English Poets and other Essays , p. 278.

5 Leslie Stephen, on “ Huxley,” Nineteenth Cent7oy, Dec. 1900,
p. 917.

THE MAN.

17

blunders ; if he could not suffer bores gladly, by what
right did they compel a waste of time ungrudgingly
given where counsel or information were honestly asked,
no matter by whom ? For, like all men who loom large
in the public eye, he had to make enforced acquaint¬
ance with that aggravated variety of the species known
as the crank. Circle - squarers and earth - flatteners
pestered him with pamphlets ; four-paged letters pray¬
ing for his conversion, or, more often, for his damna¬
tion, as an atheist of the most mischievous type, were
sent to him ; bulky manuscripts, crammed with mad
theories, which he was asked to revise and get pub¬
lished, were left at his house. Sometimes the comic
side of the matter appealed to him, as witness this
note to his friend Sir John Donnelly : —

I had a letter from a fellow yesterday morning who must
be a lunatic, to the effect that he had been reading my
essays, thought I was just the man to spend a month with,
and was coming down by the five o’clock train, attended by
his seven children and his mother-in-law /

Frost being over, there was lots of boiling water ready for
him, but he did not turn up !

Wife and servants expected nothing less than as¬
sassination ! 1

The entry in his journal, “ i860 will show,” had deeper
significance than Huxley dreamed when he made it. In
1858, he had delivered a lecture on the origin of the
vertebrate skull, in which he demolished a theory pro¬
pounded by Oken, supported by Goethe, and indorsed

1 II. 372.

B

i8

HUXLEY.

by Owen. At that time the influence of Owen in bio¬
logical science was supreme and unchallenged, and it
needed no small courage to tell so high an authority
that even he might sometimes be in error. Moreover,
the task was not easier when, as experience showed,
Owen was no fair fighter, and given to sacrificing truth
to expediency.

As Huxley cared nothing for authority, and every¬
thing for truth, it is not surprising that the result was
an “internecine feud” between them. The breach was
widened on the publication of the Origin of Species ;
an event which, in Huxley’s words, “ marks the Hejira
of Science from the idolatries of special creation to
the purer faith of Evolution.”1 In a paper on the
Characters , Principles of Division , and Primary Groups
of the Class Mammalia, read by Owen before the
Linnean Society in 1859, he referred to certain cerebral
structures as “peculiar to the genus Homo,” and added
that the “peculiar mental powers associated with this
highest form of brain ” warranted the placing of man in
a distinct sub-class of the Mammalia.

At the meeting of the British Association at Oxford
on 28th June i860, Owen emphasised the statement
that “ the brain of the gorilla presented more differences,
as compared with the brain of man, than it did when
compared with the brains of the very lowest and most
problematical of the Quadrumana.” To this Huxley, in

1 Review of Haeckel’s Anthropogenic. Academy , 2nd January

1875-

THE MAN.

19

polite English, gave the lie direct, and pledged himself
to f 4 justify that unusual procedure elsewhere.”1 Two
days after, by mere chance, he was present at the
reading of a paper by Dr Draper On the Intellectual
Development of Europe considered with reference to the
views of Mr Darwin. In the discussion which followed,
Bishop Wilberforce, throwing a glance at Huxley, ended
a suave and superficial speech by asking him “as to his
belief in being descended from an ape. Is it on his
grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side that the ape an¬
cestry comes in ? ” Huxley did not rise till the meeting
called for him ; then he let himself go.2 “ The Lord
hath delivered him into mine hands,” he said in under¬
tone to Sir Benjamin Brodie. After showing how ill-
equipped was the Bishop for controversy upon the
general question of organic evolution, although it was
an open secret that Owen had primed him for the con¬
test, Huxley said: “You say that development drives
out the Creator, but you assert that God made you ;
and yet you know that you yourself were originally a little
piece of matter, no bigger than the end of this gold
pencil-case?” Then followed the famous retort: —

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 success in his own sphere of

1 Mads Place in Nature, p. 114 (1863 edition).

2 Letter to F. Darwin, i. p. 187.

20

HUXLEY.

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.1

The rebuke was supplemented in an article in the
Natural History Review , January 1861, on the “Zoo¬
logical Relation of Man with the Lower Animals,”
wherein Huxley redeemed his promise to refute Owen,
and proved that “the brains of the lower true apes and
monkeys differ far more widely from the brain of the
orang than the brain of the orang differs from that of
man. z

Whether [he says], as some think, man is, by his origin,
distinct from all other living beings, or whether, on the other
hand, as others suppose, he is the result of the modification
of some other mammal, his duties and his aspirations must,
I apprehend, remain the same. The proof of his claim to
independent parentage will not change the brutishness of
man’s lower nature ; nor, except to those valet souls who
cannot see greatness in their fellow because his father was a
cobbler, will the demonstration of a pithecoid pedigree one
whit diminish man’s divine right of kingship over nature ;
nor lower the great and princely dignity of perfect manhood,
which is an order of nobility, not inherited, but to be won by
each of us, so far as he consciously seeks good and avoids
evil, and puts the faculties with which he is endowed to their
fittest use.3

Notwithstanding “ the crushing evidence from original
dissections of numerous apes’ brains ” adduced by Rol-

1 There is a good portrait of Huxley at this time in Reminiscences
of Oxford, by Rev. W. Tuckwell.

2 P. 84.

3 Id., p. 67.

THE MAN.

21

leston, Flower, and other comparative anatomists, Owen
repeated and never retracted the thing which he must
have known to be false : the question between Huxley
and himself therefore became one of “ personal veracity,”
and led to a permanent rupture. Moreover, Owen was
known to have written an adverse notice of the Origin
of Species in the Edinburgh Review of April i860, and
to have inspired Wilberforce in the preparation of his
article upon the book in the Quarterly Revieiv of the
following July, an article of which Huxley said —

It is a production which should be bound up in good stout
calf, or better, asses’ skin, if such material is to be had, by
the curious book-collector, together with Brougham’s attack
on the undulatory theory of light when it was first propounded
by Young.

The outcome of all this was his first, and, in many
respects, his most important book, Evidence as to Man’s
Place in Nature, which, based upon lectures delivered
to working men in London, and at the Philosophical
Institution of Edinburgh, was published in 1863. He
was no superficial student of his kind ; he was anthro¬
pologist as well as anatomist ; he had studied in the
book of the world more than in the world of books.
As he told an audience in 1882, it had been his fate

to be familiar with almost every form of society, from the
uncivilised savage of Papua and Australia and the civilised
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.1

1 Coll. Essays, iii. p. 164.

22

HUXLEY.

He saw with Herbert Spencer and Darwin (who had
been content to throw out a bare hint at the end of his
book) that if the processes of what is called the law of
Evolution are applicable anywhere, they are applicable
everywhere ; that when once the fundamental relation
of man to the lower animals, so far as his bodily struc¬
ture and functions are concerned, is proven, inquiry into
the relation of his mental apparatus and faculties to
theirs must follow, and, with this, the study of his in¬
tellectual and spiritual development, and of his progress
from the selfishness of the primitive horde to the comity
of nations. Hence, as he says in the second division
of the book —

The question of questions for mankind — the problem which
underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any
other — is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies
in nature and of his relation to the universe of things.
Whence our race has come ; what are the limits of our
power over nature and of nature’s power over us ; to what
goal we are tending ; are the problems which present them¬
selves anew and with undiminished interest to every man
born into the world.1

While, however, this interest in ultimate problems,
evidenced in the journal of his boyhood, grew with his
years, it absorbed no undue proportion of his time.
Man in his relation to his fellows had more interest for
him, and explains Huxley’s activities in all things affect¬
ing the body politic, and the social progress of his kind.
Needless to say that he who was all for truth was like-

1 P. 56.

THE MAN.

23

wise all for freedom. In 1862, when the Civil War in
America was raging, and when Gladstone was telling us
that Jefferson Davis had “ made a nation,” Huxley never
doubted that slavery was doomed. Not that he believed
in the negro ; he knew how permanent are the natural
inequalities of races, and how hopeless, except in the
rarest cases, it is to look for any elevation of the sensu¬
ous and volatile black, charged as he is with animal
instincts accumulated beneath the tropical suns of un¬
numbered years. But he was for the North, because
“ slavery means bad political economy, bad social
morality, and a bad influence upon free labour and
freedom all over the world.” 1 Two years later, he
joined the Jamaica Committee, formed to prosecute
Governor Eyre for the execution of the negro Gordon,
because “ English law does not permit good persons as
such to strangle bad persons, as such.” 2

He was in favour of the emancipation of women,
of the removal of every obstacle in the way of their
intellectual advancement and development.3 Writing
to Miss Jex Blake about her difficulty in obtaining a
medical education, he said

that he was at a loss to understand on what grounds of
justice or public policy, a career which is open to the weakest
and most foolish of the male sex should be forcibly closed to
women of vigour and capacity.

1 I. 252. In like manner, Darwin, writing at this time to Asa
Gray, says : “ Great God ! how I should like to see the greatest
curse on earth — slavery — abolished ! Life and Letters , ii. p. 375.

2 I. 280. 3 I. 212.

24

HUXLEY.

They should, if they so pleased,

become merchants, barristers, politicians. Let them have
a fair field, but let them understand, as the necessary correla¬
tive, that they are to have no favour. Let Nature alone sit
high above the lists, “rain influence and judge the prize.”

But the prize, he was sure, would not be theirs, since the
most Darwinian of theorists will not venture to propound the
doctrine that the physical disabilities under which women
have hitherto laboured in the struggle for existence with men
are likely to be removed by even the most skilfully conducted
process of educational selection.1

Strongly convinced, as the most pronounced indi¬
vidualist 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, he
made his practical protest against the liberty-infringing
Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill in approving the union of
one of his daughters with the husband of her late sister
Marian. And while knowing, as few knew so well,
what an “immense amount of remediable misery exists
among us,” misery which, “ if not effectually dealt with,
will destroy modern civilisation,” he opposed the means
adopted by the Salvation Army to cope with it, not
because of its “ Corybantic Christianity” and coarse
dogmas, but because a fanatical despotism controls it.

Few social evils are of greater magnitude than unin¬
structed and unchastened religious fanaticism ; no personal
habit more surely degrades the conscience and the intellect
than blind and unhesitating obedience to unlimited autho-

1 Lay Sermons , p. 22.

THE MAN.

25

rity. Undoubtedly, harlotry and intemperance are sore
evils, and starvation is hard to bear, or even to know of ;
but the prostitution of the mind, the soddening of the con¬
science, the dwarfing of manhood, are worse calamities.1

By the time that Evidence as to Mads Place in
Nature was written, Huxley had command of a style
which, in the judgement of Sir Spencer Walpole, — a
judgement with which few will be found to disagree, —
“made him the greatest master of prose of his time.” 2
Apt in application to him is Caxton’s tribute to
Chaucer, “ for he writeth no void words, but all his
matter is full of high and quick sentence.” Yet with a
great price bought he this freedom of ready speech and
pen. Those who heard, and, hearing, can never forget,
his wonderful discourse On the Coming of Age of the
Origin of Species, at the Royal Institution in 1880, when,
without notes, he told the story of that epoch-making
book in clear and forceful English which held his audi¬
ence spellbound, may learn with surprise that his early
essays upon the platform boded ill for his success.
But he, who all the days of his life was at school,
profited by criticism of the kind which came from a
local institute, begging “not to have that young man
again ” ; from working men ; and from members of the
Royal Institution. As a writer, he had served a useful
apprenticeship in reviewing and popular “ pot-boiling,
whereby there is acquired the art of condensation and
simplification of a subject ” ; while a retentive memory

1 Coll. Essays , ix. p. 244.

2 II. 25.

2 6

HUXLEY.

utilised the stores of years of miscellaneous reading in
his own and other languages for example and allusion.

But all this would have availed little in the absence
of that mother-wit which gave him quick insight into
things ; and of that passion for logical symmetry
whereby he made clear to others what he saw clearly
himself. He followed methods, not models ; he “doubted
the wisdom of attempting to mould one’s style by any
other process than that of striving after the clear and
forcible expression of definite conceptions.” In com¬
mending the study of Hobbes for dignity, of Swift for
concision and clearness, and of Defoe and Gold¬
smith for simplicity,1 he commended the qualities with
which his own work is charged. Ars est celare artem ,
and deftly enough has he effaced the traces of the
labour which the preparation of his lectures and his
writing cost him. In i860 he wrote to Hooker, “It
becomes more and more difficult to me to finish things
satisfactorily ” ; 2 and thirty years after, in a letter to
M. de Varigny, he says : —

I have a great love and respect for my native tongue [that
“ noble instrument of thought,” he elsewhere calls it], 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.” 3

The nine volumes of Collected Essays bear evidence
throughout to Huxley’s supreme skill as an interpreter,

1 II. 284 ; and see Coll. Essays , vi. p. xii.

2 I. 215. 3 II. 291.

THE MAN.

27

and to his genius for constructing while he demolished.
Miscellaneous as are their contents, they have the unity
which is inspired by a central idea. With the exception
of a verbal correction, and of a slightly qualifying foot¬
note, here and there, each stands as it was originally
written. Revision could only have impaired their
stately, lucid, and sonorous prose, while to their
main subject - matter all subsequent additions to
knowledge have brought only confirmation.

As for his letters, with which his son has, wisely,
largely filled his biography, even where traces of hurry
may be noted, there is never a slovenly sentence ;
the gist of an essay is often packed in a few lines, and
the passion to put things in such a way that the mean¬
ing may be seen at a glance is as apparent as in the
more elaborate compositions. And the humorous
touches, sparsely, but always effectively, applied in
these, are, in the letters to friends and familiars,
thrown in freely, with a boy-like enjoyment of the
fun.

In the limits of a sketch which permits only of an
attempt to portray the salient features of Huxley’s
character, and to indicate his attitude towards the
burning questions of his time, confusion rather than
clearness would result from import of details of the
less eventful years. Hence the sometimes abrupt
passage from one period to another, leaving the
blanks to be filled up by reference to the brief
chronological table which precedes this outline.

28

HUXLEY.

In 1870, perhaps the busiest year of Huxley’s busy
life, he was urged to offer himself as a candidate for
the newly-formed School Board for London. His many
commitments made him hesitate to stand, but he con¬
sented, because the position gave him a coveted chance
of helping to put into practice the theories of education
which he had long advocated. The opportunity was
given him ; he came out second on the poll. His
views upon the subject are scattered through many
lectures and essays, but their consistency permits brief
presentment. He contended that education should be
“free and equal”; the business of the school boards
being the provision of “ a ladder reaching from the
gutter to the university, along which every child in the
three kingdoms should have the chance of climbing as
far as he was fit to go.” 1 That the race is to the swift
and the battle to the strong, was added reason for
according equality of opportunity : Nature might be
depended upon to let the incompetent find their level.
In physical training, drill and the simpler kind of gym¬
nastics should be taught, the importance of this being
paramount in the case of town-bred children who, shut
up in sunless alleys, have to amuse themselves with
“ marbles and chuck-farthings instead of cricket or hare-
and-hounds.” He would have girls taught the elements
of household work, if a supply of competent servants and
of thrifty housewives is to be maintained. In mental
training, after the “three R’s,” reading being taught so

1 Coll. Essays , iii. p. 424.

THE MAN.

29

as to make it a pleasure and incentive, foremost place
should be given to some one or more of the natural
sciences, because these bring the faculties of observation
and inquiry into play, and because, in teaching a child
the nature and properties of things, he is shown that
the method of reaching knowledge of these is to be
applied to every other branch of knowledge.

Let every child be instructed in those general views of
the phenomena of Nature for which we have no exact
English name. The nearest approximation to a name for
what I mean, and which we possess, is “ physical geo¬
graphy.” 1 The Germans have a better, Erdkunde (“earth
knowledge” or “geology” in its etymological sense), that is
to say, a general knowledge of th'e earth, and what is on it,
in it, and about it. The child asks, “What is the moon,
and why does it shine?” “What is this water, and where
does it run?” “What is the wind?” “What makes the
waves in the sea ? ” “ Where does this animal live, and

what is the use of that plant?” And if not snubbed and
stunted by being told not to ask foolish questions, there is
no limit to the intellectual craving of a young child ; nor
any bounds to the slow, but solid, accretion of knowledge
and development of the thinking faculty in this way. To all
such questions, answers which are necessarily incomplete,
though true as far as they go, may be given by any teacher
whose ideas represent real knowledge and not mere book¬
learning ; and a panoramic view of Nature, accompanied by
a strong infusion of the scientific habit of mind, may thus
be placed within the reach of every child of nine or ten.2

Huxley deemed it necessary for everybody, whether

1 The more inclusive, but somewhat indefinite, term “physio¬
graphy,” has since come into use.

2 Lay Sermons , p. 55.

30

HUXLEY.

for a longer or shorter period, to learn to draw — a thing
quite feasible, since everybody can be taught to write,
and writing is a form of drawing. The value of this
cannot be

exaggerated, because it gives the means of training the
young in attention and accuracy, the two things in which
all mankind are more deficient than in any other mental
quality whatever.1

Among scientific topics he would include the

elements of the theory 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, taught, not as a mere
chronicle of reigns and battles, not as evidence that Provi¬
dence has always been on the side of the Whigs or Tories,
but as a chapter in the development of the race, and the
history of civilisation.2

Literature should have a large place, because

an exclusively scientific training will bring about a mental
twist as surely as an exclusively literary training. For
literature is the greatest of all sources of refined pleasure,
and there is scope enough for the purposes of liberal educa¬
tion in the study of the rich treasures of our own language
alone. ... 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 Shakespeare, 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 models of English writing of such varied and
wonderful kind as we possess, and, what is still more im-

1 Coll. Essays , iii. p. 183.

2 lb ., iii. p. 184.

THE MAN.

31

portant, and still more neglected, the habit of using that
language with precision, with force, and with art.1

These, together with translations of the best ancient
and modern works, where time or circumstance do not
permit of the learning of foreign languages, Huxley
counted among the essentials. The law of propor¬
tion, non mu ltd , sed multum , must be observed if there
is to be any thoroughness in education, and if the
freshness and vigour of body and mind are to be
maintained, as they can be only by avoidance of “the
educational abomination of desolation of the present
day — the stimulation of young people to work at high
pressure by incessant competitive examinations.” 2

A generation has passed since these words were
written, and things remain as they were. Education,
whether in public or elementary school, is as bad as it
can be. It belies its name. There is no “drawing-
out,” but only a cramming-in ; no cultivation of observ¬
ation, of reasoning, or reflection ; only the teaching of
a crowd of facts without making clear their relation,
and hence no incitement to independent thought.

Technical training, the importance of which Huxley
enforced in a remarkable essay on ‘The Struggle for
Existence in Human Society,’ 3 he left to the workshop,
“as the only real school for a handicraft.”

In moral training ; since each child is

a member of a social and political organisation of great

1 Coll. Essays , iii. pp. 109, 185.

3 /A, ix. pp. 223-225.

2 lb ., iii. p. 410.

32

HUXLEY.

complexity, and has, in future, to fit himself into that organ¬
isation, or be crushed by it, it is needful not only that boys
and girls should be made acquainted with the elementary
laws of conduct, but that their affections should be trained
so as to love with all their hearts that conduct which tends
to the attainment of the highest good for themselves and
their fellow - men, and to hate with all their hearts that
opposite course of action which is fraught with evil.1

Lacking this, intellectual training may be as productive
of harm as of good ; reading, writing, and ciphering may
equip a youth for forgery, and training in mechanics make
him an expert burglar. In the year before his election
on the School Board, Huxley thus summed up what in
his judgement is comprised in a liberal education : —

That man, 1 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 the knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of
nature and of the laws of her operations ; one who, no
stunted ascetic, is full of fire and life, 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 com¬
pletely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He will
make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on

1 Coll. Essays , iii. p. 393.

THE MAN.

33

together rarely : she as his ever beneficent mother ; he
as her mouthpiece, her conscious self, her minister and
interpreter.1

In moral training, or the application of knowledge to
conduct, Huxley would accord no place to theology.
If the various denominations, whether Church or Dis¬
senting, choose to start and maintain schools in which
their several tenets are to be taught, that is their affair.
They pay the piper, and they may call the tune. But
schools established and maintained by the community
depart from their proper functions when they train
‘‘either hands for factories or congregations for
churches.” 2 They are to hold no brief for any sect.
The ethics which they teach must have relation to life,
and therefore must be neither technical nor speculative.
Theology is both, and cannot be otherwise. Moreover,
where order is present, it imports confusion ; it, and it
alone, is the apple of discord, and its dogmas, on many
of which no two sects are agreed, bring “ not peace,
but a sword.” The teaching of the ascertained facts
of history, astronomy, geology, and other branches of
science ; the inculcation of the duties of cleanliness and
temperance ; of self-respect and self-restraint ; of con¬
sideration for others ; of kindness to animals ; and of
honesty and truthfulness in all the relations of life — all
which, enforced by example and illustration, can be
brightly conveyed, — these run smoothly enough and
arouse no bitterness. It is over the disputable creed and

1 Lay Sermons , p. 30. 2 I. 351.

C

34

HUXLEY.

dogma; over the unproven — nay, as the well-informed
among clergy and laity know, the disproved — that the
precious time of youthhood is wasted, and the battle for
capture of the schools is waged. “ By their fruits y.e
shall know them.” And if the moral tone of the
generation which has been brought up on the creeds
and the catechism satisfies the teachers as to the prac¬
tical influence of these on the lives of the taught, it is
clear that a low standard contents them.

Knowing Huxley’s antagonistic attitude towards
orthodox beliefs, both cleric and secularist were be¬
wildered when the “great Agnostic,” as the Spectator
called him, pronounced himself in favour of the use of
the Bible in Board Schools. That his decision was
ruled by the highest motives va sans dire , but, as he
came to see, it was none the less deplorable. On the
eve of the election he explained his position as fol¬
lows : —

When the great mass of the English people declare that
they want to have the children in the elementary schools
taught the Bible, and when it was plain from the terms of
the Act that it was intended that such Bible-reading should
be permitted, unless good cause for prohibiting it could be
shown, I do not see what reason there is for opposing that
wish. Certainly, I, individually, could with no shadow of
consistency oppose the teaching of the children of other
people that which my own children are taught to do. And
even if the reading of the Bible were not, as I think it is,
consonant with political reason and justice, and with a desire
to act in the spirit of the education measure, I am disposed
to think it might still be well to read that book in the
elementary schools.

THE MAN.

35

I have always been strongly in favour of secular education,
in the sense of education without theology ; but I must con¬
fess I have been no less seriously perplexed to know by what
practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essen¬
tial basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present
utterly chaotic state of opinion, without the use of the Bible.
The Pagan moralists lack life and colour, and even the noble
Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, is too high and refined for an ordi¬
nary child. Take the Bible as a whole : make the severest
deductions which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings
and positive errors ; eliminate, as a sensible lay- teacher
would do, if left to himself, all that it is not desirable for
children to occupy themselves with ; and there still remains
in this old literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and
grandeur. And then consider the great historical fact that,
for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of
all that is best and noblest in English history ; that it has
become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to
noble and simple, from John-o’-Groat’s House to Land’s End,
as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians ; that it is
written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in
exquisite beauties of mere literary form ; and, finally, that it
forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be
ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilis¬
ations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest
limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of
what other book could children be so much humanised and
made to feel that each figure in that vast historical proces¬
sion fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the
interval between two eternities ; and earns the blessings or
the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and
hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for
their work ?

On the whole, then, I am in favour of reading the Bible,
with such grammatical, geographical, and historical ex¬
planations by a lay -teacher as may be needful, with rigid
exclusion of any further theological teaching than that con-

36

HUXLEY.

tained in the Bible itself. And in stating what this is, the
teacher would do well not to go beyond the precise words of
the Bible ; for if he does, he will, in the first place, under¬
take a task beyond his strength, seeing that all the Jewish
and Christian sects have been at work upon that subject for
more than two thousand years, and have not yet arrived, and
are not in the least likely to arrive, at an agreement ; and, in
the second place, he will certainly begin to teach something
distinctively denominational, and thereby come into violent
collision with the Act of Parliament.1

As is well known, the so - called Cowper -Temple
clause in the Act, which is itself an unsatisfactory com¬
promise, prescribes that “ no religious catechism or
religious formulary which is distinctive of any particular
denomination shall be taught in the school and Huxley
believed that, in the words of W. E. Forster, no attempt
would be made to cram into the children’s “poor
little minds theological dogmas which their tender age
prevents them from understanding.” 2 He mistrusted
the clergy; but he had faith that, in lay hands, “the
teaching of that ‘ venerable record of ancient life, mis¬
called a book,’ 3 would be gradually modified into
harmony with common-sense.” But in his belief that
his opponents would abide by the compact, he assumed
that their standard of honour and integrity was not
lower than his own. He was mistaken. The bargain
has not been kept by the clerical party, and attempt
after attempt has been, and is being, made to reduce
the Cowper-Temple clause to a nullity. Theological
1 Coll. Essays, iii. pp. 397-399.

2 I. 344-

3 II. 123.

THE MAN

37

bias, or fear of retarded promotion, have made many of
the teachers puppets in the hands of the parsons. The
Bible is not interpreted, as Jowett said it should be,
“ like any other book,” and this to the grievous impair¬
ment of its value, since appreciation of it is deepened in
the degree that it is freed from the shackles of theories
of inspiration. Its miscellaneous contents, many of them
of uncertain authorship and of disputed meaning, are
presented as constituting one harmonious supernatural
document ; its myths are still taught as history ; and the
Ten Commandments are put on the same high ethical
plane as the Beatitudes.

Not very long before his death Huxley was asked to
take part in opposing the tactics known as “ Rileyism.”
To this he replied : —

I feel very strongly about the attempt to capture
elementary education on the part of the orthodox sects,
in spite of the clear pledges given by Forster, and the
understanding arrived at by the first School Board. Un¬
fortunately, I am entangled in several undertakings, which
I did not bargain for, and could not refuse, and which will
occupy all my scanty working powers for some months to
come. So I must really keep out of the melee. Indeed, I
am not sure but that the best policy is to let these Christian
pagans have their way. The axe is laid to the root of
the tree, and when it falls they will be crushed the more
effectually for their short success.1

1 Westminster Gazette , 1st July 1895 ; and see I. 343 (note). In
his Bible in School , p. 12, Mr Allanson Picton says that shortly
before his death Huxley expressed regret that he had not voted with
Mr Picton for the exclusion of the Bible from elementary schools.

38

HUXLEY.

While “ ecclesiastically- minded persons,” not content
with absorbing one entire day in the week, and some
portion of other days, clamoured for more, Huxley
retorted by asking them to surrender a portion of the
Sunday

for the purpose of instructing those who have no other
leisure in a knowledge of the phenomena of Nature, and of
man’s relation to Nature. I should like to see a scientific
Sunday-school in every parish, not for the purpose of
superseding any existing means of teaching the people the
things that are for their good, but side by side with them.
I cannot but think that there is room for all of us to work in
helping to bridge over the great abyss of ignorance which
lies at our feet.1

As late as 1893 he planned-out a series of working
men’s lectures on the Bible, “ in which he should
present to the unlearned the results of scientific study
of the documents, and do for theology what he had
done for zoology thirty years before ”; and although this
scheme, the outline of which Mr Leonard Huxley copies
from his father’s notebook, was never carried out, “ it
was constantly before Huxley’s mind during the two
years left to him.” 2 Before leaving the subject of his
general influence as an educational reformer, it should
be noted that he worked with an apostolic fervour to
improve the quality of the teachers as the only security
for thorough education of the taught. He established
regular classes for the training of “ scientific mission¬
aries,” 3 as he described them ; pressed his views on

1 Lay Sermons , p. 61.

2 II. 345-

3 I- 377-

THE MAN.

39

technical education on the City guilds and other influ¬
ential bodies, and kept before his students, as the mark
of their “ high calling,”

the cultivation of that enthusiasm for truth, that fanaticism
of veracity which is a greater possession than much learning,
a nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge ; by so
much greater than these as the moral nature of man is
greater than the intellectual.1

Owing to a serious breakdown in health, Huxley was
compelled, after fourteen months’ service on the School
Board, to resign his membership. “ A wealthy friend
wrote to him in the most honourable and delicate terms,
begging him, on public grounds, to accept ^400 a-year
to enable him to continue his work on the Board. He
refused the offer as simply and straightforwardly as it
was made ; his means, though not large, were sufficient
for his present needs.” 2 Some, who had no personal
knowledge of him, thought that his desire to secure a
seat on the School Board indicated an intention to enter
Parliament. But he had neither taste nor ambition for
politics.

At a Royal Society dinner in 1892, Mr Shaw Lefevre
expressed his regret that Huxley’s abilities had never
been placed at the service of the House of Commons.
In his reply, reminiscences of youth and of controversies
in recent years found a place. He told the company
that, when he was a very young man, a lawyer in good
practice, believing that he saw in him qualities that

1 Coll. Essays, iii. p. 205. 2 I. 353.

40

HUXLEY.

would ensure success at the bar, offered to advance
him an income for a certain number of years until he
could repay the amount from the fees which he was sure
to earn. He declined, because, as he dryly said,

so far as I understand myself, my faculties are so entirely
confined to the discovery of truth, that I have no sort of
power of obscuring it.

In 1870, Huxley’s defence of Dr Brown-Sequard at
the Liverpool meeting of the British Association brought
him into collision with the opponents of vivisection, and
the battle went on, in intermittent fashion, for some
seven years. Experiments had been carried on, chiefly
in France, without regard to animal suffering, and also
for the wholly needless purpose of further demonstrating
well-known facts in physiology and pathology. Hence
an agitation which, within limits, commanded the sym¬
pathy of all humanely minded folk, and the appointment
of a committee by the Association to consider what steps
should be taken to reduce to its minimum the suffering
entailed by legitimate inquiry. The committee recom¬
mended that there should be no experiments without
the use of anaesthetics ; or for the purpose of illustrat¬
ing truths already known ; or for practice in manual
dexterity ; and these provisions, with others of undue
stringency, were embodied in “An Act to amend the
law relating to Cruelty to Animals,” passed in 1876.
Huxley held that “ the wanton infliction of pain on man
or beast is a crime,” 1 and that the vivisectionist is justi-

1 I. 436.

THE MAN.

41

fied only when his aim is the discovery of the origin
and nature of disease with a view to the alleviation or
removal of the suffering which it causes. In this he
has rendered incalculable service to mankind, and also
to the lower animals, since “ not a single one of all the
great truths of modern physiology has been established
otherwise than by experiments on living things.” 1

In defending a practice which by one successful
experiment on an animal rendered insensible to pain
might save numberless lives from some fell disease,
Huxley had to meet a frontal attack, whose chief
weapon, wielded by fanaticism, was misrepresentation
and slander. He was charged by one of the so-called
“ religious ” papers with advocating the practice of vivi¬
section before children, and the charge was repeated in
the House of Lords. It was necessary to publicly deny
what had been thus publicly asserted ; he quoted chapter
and verse from his Elementary Physiology in refutation,
adding that “ personally and constitutionally” the per¬
formance of experiments upon living and conscious
animals was “ so extremely disagreeable ” to himself
that he had “ never followed any line of investigation
in which such experiments were required.” But he said
that, as a teacher of physiology, he could not

consent to be prohibited from showing the circulation in a
frog’s foot, because the frog is made slightly uncomfortable
by being tied up for that purpose ; nor from showing the
fundamental properties of nerves, because extirpating the

1 I- 434-

42

IIUXLEV.

brain of the same animal inflicts one - thousandth part of
the prolonged suffering which it undergoes when it makes
its natural exit from the world by being slowly forced down
the throat of a duck, and crushed and asphyxiated in that
creature’s stomach.1

He had small stock of patience for the “ sentimental
hypocrisy ” which evidenced its lack of sincerity in not
abstaining from eating the flesh of creatures put to death
in lingering torture, both in the slaughter-house and on
the moors, or in destroying rats, mice, and other “ sen¬
tient vermin ” ; and when the Act of 1876, on the Royal
Commission concerning which he was a member, was
passed, he showed how it exemplified the old adage
that “ one man may steal a horse while the other may
not look over the hedge.”

While, as a member of a late Royal Commission, I did
my best to prevent the infliction of needless pain for any
purpose, I think it is my duty to take this opportunity of
expressing my regret at a condition of the law which permits
a boy to troll for pike or set lines with live-frog bait for idle
amusement, and at the same time lays the teacher of that
boy open to the penalty of fine and imprisonment if he uses
the same animal for the purpose of exhibiting one of the
most beautiful and instructive of physiological spectacles —
the circulation in the web of the foot.

So it comes about that in this year of grace 1877, two
persons may be charged with cruelty to animals. One has
impaled a frog, and suffered the creature to writhe about in
that condition for hours ; the other has pained the animal no
more than one of us would be pained by tying strings round
his fingers and keeping him in the position of a hydropathic

1 I. 432*

THE MAN.

43

patient. The first offender says, “ I did it because I find
fishing very amusing”; and the magistrate bids him depart
in peace, nay, probably wishes him good sport. The second
pleads, “ I wanted to impress a scientific truth with a dis¬
tinctness attainable in no other way on the minds of my
scholars,” and the magistrate fines him five pounds.1

From 1870 onward, the time which Huxley had been
able to snatch from public and private demands for
biological research grew less and less. “ For eight
years he was continuously on one Royal Commission
after another. His administrative work on learned
societies continued to increase; in 1869-70 he held
the presidency of the Ethnological Society (which,
chiefly by his efforts, became merged in the Anthropo¬
logical Institute) ; he was elected president of the
Geological Society in 1872; and for nearly ten years,
from 1871 to 1880, he was Secretary of the Royal
Society, an office which occupied no small portion of
his time and thought.” 2 Little wonder, therefore, that
his dyspepsia became chronic, compelling a lengthy
absence, which, through the generosity of friends, was
spent along the Mediterranean seaboard as far as Egypt.3
Returning thence bronzed and bearded, but only patched
up, he perforce took life a little easier. In 1874 he
followed -up Tyndall’s famous Presidential Address at
the Belfast meeting of the British Association with a
lecture on “ Animal Automatism,” which underwent
the usual misinterpretation attending any presentment

1 Coll. Essays, iii. pp. 301-302. 2 I. 324.

3 I. 367.

44

HUXLEY.

of psychical activity in mechanical terms. In 1870,
when lecturing before the Cambridge Young Men’s
Christian Society, Huxley had made the life and philo¬
sophy of Descartes the text of insistence on the duty
of doubt as a condition of reaching certainty ; and
now, before a presumably more scientific audience, he
showed what significant contributions that master-mind
had made to our knowledge of the physiology of the
nervous system. The resulting intrusion of the biologist
into the domain of metaphysics, which theology had so
long annexed, aroused the old antagonism, and Huxley
had again to combat the passion and prejudice which
his famous “ lay sermon,” on “ The Physical Basis of
Life,” had aroused in Edinburgh in 1868.

The summer of 1875 found him in that city lecturing on
Natural History on behalf of Sir (then Professor) Wyville
Thomson, who was absent on the Challenger expedition.
In a letter which Huxley received from Thomson in
August, doubts were thrown on Huxley’s theory of the
organic character of a viscid, granular substance which
had been dredged from the bottom of the Atlantic in
1868. He had expressed the opinion that this deposit
was a living form of very low type, and in this faith, and
as a compliment to Haeckel, had named it Bathybius
Haeckelii} But it turned out that what seemed to
belong to the group of simplest living things was only a
precipitate, probably due to its having been preserved
in spirit.2 There was an impression, confined, however,

1 Scientific Memoirs, iii. p. 337. 2 I. 295, 446; II. 5, 160.

THE MAN.

45

to superficial critics, that Huxley had regarded Bathy-
bius as a hitherto missing link between the living and
the not-living, and they rejoiced doubly ; first, in his
discomfiture as possibly weakening his authority, and
next, in the blow dealt, as they hoped, to the theory
of the unity of the cosmos. But, as he told them, when
admitting the error,

that which interested me in the matter was the apparent
analogy of Bathybius with other well-known forms of lower
life. . . . Speculative hopes and fears had nothing to

do with the matter ; and if Bathybius were brought up alive
from the bottom of the Atlantic to-morrow, the fact would
not have the slightest bearing, that I can discern, upon Mr
Darwin’s speculations, or upon any of the disputed problems
of biology. It would merely be one elementary organism
the more added to the thousands already known.1

Misrepresentation, whose roots were in animus rather
than in ignorance, went on, and as late as 1890 Mr
Mallock revived the “ Bathybius myth ” in the Nine¬
teenth Century , upon which Huxley commented, with
warrantable irritation : —

Bathybius is far too convenient a stick to beat this dog
with to be ever given up, however many lies may be need¬
ful to make the weapon effectual. I told the whole story in
my reply to the Duke of Argyll, but of course the pack give
tongue just as loudly as ever. Clerically-minded people
cannot be accurate, even the liberals.2

In 1876 he paid a long-cherished visit to America.
The newspapers, confusing him with Tyndall, recently

1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 154.

2 II. 160.

46

HUXLEY.

married to a daughter of the aristocratic house of
Hamilton, reported that he was bringing with him his
“ titled bride,” who, needless to say, had long been the
joyful mother of many children. The trip interested
and invigorated him ; his progress from place to place
was almost royal. But that with which his hosts
thought to impress him most impressed him least.
Their energy won his admiration ; watching the mass of
moving craft in New York harbour, he said, “ If I were
not a man, I think I should like to be a tug.” But, in
his lecture before the John Hopkins University at
Baltimore, he said : —

I am not in the slightest degree impressed by your big¬
ness or your material resources, as such. Size is not
grandeur ; territory does not make a nation. The great
issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of
overhanging fate, is — “ What are you going to do with all
these things ? ” . . . The one condition of success, your
sole safeguard, is the moral worth and intellectual clear¬
ness of the individual citizen.

He was deeply interested in the fossil remains in the
Yale College museum which Professor Marsh had un¬
earthed from the Tertiary beds of the Far West. They
demonstrated what was new to him — the evolution of
the horse on the American continent, “and for the first
time indicated the direct line of descent of an existing
animal.” The fascinating story of the series of discov¬
eries, linking the one-toed genus Equus of to-day with a
five-toed ancestor common to it and other hoofed
quadrupeds, is told, with the added charm which

THE MAN.

47

Huxley’s power of clear exposition imparts, in his
American Addresses. The subject will have fuller treat¬
ment in the next chapter.

In the following six years Huxley published as many
books, among which, and of enduring value, were his
monographs on the anatomy and physiology of the
Crayfish and on the philosophy of Hume, — subjects
seemingly diverse enough, but alike in the problems
which they suggest concerning Nature as “ nowhere inac¬
cessible, and everywhere unfathomable.” 1 In 1881, con¬
currently with the absorption of the School of Mines in
what was then called the Normal School, Huxley became
Professor of Biology and Dean of the Royal College of
Science, claiming thereby, as he jocosely reminded his
friends, the title of “The Very Reverend”; and in the
same year he accepted an Inspectorship of Fisheries,
which had the advantage of taking him into the fresh air.

In 1883 he received the highest honour which his
fellow-savants could bestow in being elected President
of the Royal Society. But the dignity, which he ac¬
cepted with reluctance, was, on account of bad health,
surrendered in November 1885. He had become more
and more the invalid ; holidays had given him only
fillips, and the little store of energy which they added
was quickly dissipated ; deafness troubled him, bringing
its dreaded isolation, and in the previous May, having
reached his sixtieth year, an age at which he had often
jocosely said that men of science should be pole-axed,

1 The Crayfish , p. 3.

48

HUXLEY.

lest through ossification of mind they become arrestors
of progress, he resigned all his appointments, paid and
unpaid, and retired upon a pension of ^1200 a-year,
which, shortly afterwards, was supplemented by a Civil
List pension of ^300 a-year.

But resignation of offices meant not retirement from
work. During the ten years of life that remained to him
he was more in evidence than ever. He had never
permitted his official position to curb his freedom of
speech, and now that his time was all his own, that
freedom could have larger play. In a retrospect of
life, summing-up the part he had played in what he
called the “ New Reformation,” he said that the objects
which he had pursued were “ 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 strength¬
ened with my strength, that there is no alleviation for the
sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of
action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is, when
the garment of make-belief by which pious hands have
hidden its uglier features is stripped off. It is with this
intent that I have subordinated any reasonable or unreason¬
able ambition for scientific fame which I may have permitted
myself to entertain to other ends : to the popularisation of
science ; to the development and organisation of scientific
education ; to the endless series of battles and skirmishes
over evolution ; and to untiring opposition to that ecclesi¬
astical spirit, that clericalism which in England, and every¬
where else, and to whatever denomination it may belong,
is the deadly enemy of science.1

1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 17.

THE MAN.

49

The “ battles and skirmishes over evolution ” were
now resolved by Huxley into a well-conceived plan of
campaign in which all the forces that come of the
widest knowledge and most varied experience were to
be used in applying the doctrine of evolution to the
demolition of beliefs which, in the degree that they
are untrue, must be mischievous. But he was not
merely critical and destructive : he razed only that he
or others might raise. In the Prologue to his Essays
on Controverted Questions he says that —

The present incarnation of the spirit of the Renascence
differs from its predecessor in the eighteenth century, in
that it builds up, as well as pulls down. That of which
it has laid the foundation, of which it is already raising the
superstructure, is the doctrine of Evolution, ... a doctrine
which is no speculation, but a generalisation of certain facts
which may be observed by any one who will take the
necessary trouble.” 1

Hence the inclusion therein of all that is of deepest
import to man. Hence the inevitable, however tardy,
supersession of theology as a body of speculative dogma
by a religion having correspondence with the constitu¬
tion and needs of human nature ; and the gradual dis¬
placement of ethics resting on ancient and shifting
codes and conventions by ethics founded on what, after
ages of sore testing, man has proven to be best for the
welfare of society, and, therefore, as a social being, for
himself.

Huxley’s health, however, remained so indifferent
1 Coll. Essays , v. pp. 41, 42.

D

50

HUXLEY.

that he needed stimulus to work. It came in unusual
form from an article in the Nineteenth Century of No¬
vember 1885, in which Mr Gladstone made a review of
Dr Reville’s Prolegomena to the History of Religions the
vehicle of obsolete arguments in support of harmony
between the Mosaic cosmogony and the theory of or¬
ganic evolution. Re-stated by a man whose high autho¬
rity in matters political had led many (for the logical
faculty is, as yet, in the embryonic stage in the majority
of minds) to accept him as an authority upon everything
else, these arguments, refuted, as they had been, over
and over again, had to be dealt with once more.1
Huxley was the man for the task. The article, “ he
used humorously to say, so stirred his bile as to set his
liver right at once ; ” indeed, stagnation making him
“ unendurable to himself and everybody else,” he said
that he was thankful to “ Providence ” for specially
devolving on Gladstone, Gore, & Co. the function of
keeping “ £ ’ome ’appy ’ for him.” 2

The controversies thus involved, together with essays
on philosophical and social questions, filled the time
between long intervals of broken health, and of sojourns
on Alpine summits. Arolla made him feel young again :

“ Balm floating on thy mountain air
And healing sights to see

but, eager to return to active life, he was “ glad to see
one’s own dear native mud again. There is no foreign
mud to come near it.”3 London, however, with its
1 II. 425. 2 II. 269. 3 II. 103.

THE MAN.

51

social beguilements, had long ceased to attract him, and
the old home in Marlborough Place (charge-d for many
a guest with delightful memories of Sunday evenings,
with their conversation grave and gay), where he had
lived since 1872, was given up, and Eastbourne fixed
upon. There, through a timely legacy, he was able to
build himself a house which he called Hodeslea, the
ancestral form of the family name. There he lived
from 1890 until his death, dividing his time between
his books, his garden, and his grandchildren. He left
it only at short and rare intervals to discharge the
remnants of duties devolving upon him as honorary
Dean of the Royal College of Science and as a Trustee
of the British Museum. One notable journey was made
in 1892. Fifteen years before then, Lord Salisbury had
invited Huxley’s opinion as to a “ formal recognition of
distinguished services in science, literature, and art by
the granting of titles.” Against this Huxley expressed
himself strongly.1 But when the dignity of a Privy
Councillorship was offered him, he accepted it, because,
as he wrote to Sir J. Donnelly —

I have always been dead against orders of merit and the
like, but I think that men of letters and science who have
been of use to the nation (Lord knows if I have) may fairly
be ranked among its nominal or actual councillors.2

So, in August 1892, he went to kiss hands at Osborne,
remembering, as he passed the old Victory, “ that six-
and-forty years ago he went up her side to report him-

1 I. 359- 2 n. 323.

52

HUXLEY.

self on appointment as a poor devil of an assistant-
surgeon.” In the following October he was present at
Tennyson’s funeral, and but for a biting wind, would
have been at Owen’s in the following December. His
“ opinion of the man’s character ” never altered ; but
death “ ends all quarrels,” and at the request of Owen’s
grandson and biographer he contributed a chapter on
“ Owen’s Place in Anatomical Science,” which enabled
him to pay honest tribute to the value and importance
of Owen’s work in that branch of biology. Friends
were falling out of the ranks: in the autumn of 1893
Jowett, Tyndall, and Sir Andrew Clark passed away,
bringing home the thought that “ one should always
be ready to stand at attention when the order to march
comes.” 1

Oxford had seen little of Huxley since the day of his
famous duel with its bishop in i860. Ten years later,
Pusey and his party had prevented the conferring of the
degree of D.C.L. on Owen — although he was persona
grata to the Episcopal bench — as well as on Froude
and Huxley. But, tardily following the sister and other
universities, Oxford reversed the decision in 1885.
Eight years later, Huxley revisited the “ home of lost
causes ” to deliver the Romanes Lecture on Evolution
and Ethics. The occasion may rank as historic.

The Sheldonian Theatre was thronged before he appeared
upon the platform, a striking presence in his D.C.L. robes,

1 II. 368.

THE MAN.

53

and looking very leonine with his long silvery grey hair
sweeping back in one long wave from his forehead, and the
rugged squareness of his features tempered by the benignity
of an old age which has seen much and overcome much.
He read the lecture from a printed copy, not venturing, as he
would have liked, upon the severe task of speaking it from
memory, considering its length and the importance of
preserving the exact wording.1

In August 1894 the temptation offered by the meeting
of the British Association at Oxford to renew a visit was
too strong to be resisted, if only for the contrast of feel¬
ings which the occasion would awaken. Huxley might
aptly have applied to himself the ancient words with
which he ended his lecture On the Coming of Age oj
the Origin of Species : “ The stone which the builders
rejected the same is become the head of the corner.”
Lord Salisbury was president, and in his address, while
admitting that Darwin had, “as a matter of fact, disposed
of the doctrine of the immutability of species,” he raised
a number of disingenuous objections to the general theory
of what he ironically called the “ comforting word, Evolu¬
tion,” objections evidencing the “ biassed amateur ” and
the “ representative of ecclesiastical conservatism and
orthodoxy.” Huxley had consented to second the vote
of thanks to the president, and although “the old Adam,
of course, prompted the tearing of the address to pieces,
which would have been a very easy job,” he had per¬
force to content himself with “ conveying criticism in
the shape of praise.” 2 However, he dealt with the

1 II. 356.

2 II. 379-

54

HUXLEY.

“ polemical dexterity ” of the Marquis and gave him
“a Roland for his Oliver” in an article on “Past and
Present” in Nature , ist November 1894. In that
month the Royal Society put its final seal to Huxley’s
life-work in awarding him the Darwin medal ; and in his
speech at the anniversary dinner acknowledging the
compliment, a speech whose impressiveness can never
fade from the memory of those who heard it, he also
set the “ seal to his ministry ” in emphasising his belief

that the views which were propounded by Mr Darwin thirty-
five years ago may be understood hereafter as constituting
an epoch in the intellectual history of the human race. They
will modify the whole system of our thought and opinion,
our most intimate convictions.

With the exception of a hurried visit to London in
January 1895 to join as spokesman in a deputation to
Lord Salisbury on a cause near his heart, that of Lon¬
don University Reform, he never left Eastbourne again.
The last thing which he wrote was a criticism of Mr
Balfour’s “quaintly-entitled” (the happy phrase is Mr
Leslie Stephen’s) Foundations of Belief. 1 He had to
deal with the same vagueness, elusiveness, and want
of insight into the position travestied which is the
feature of Mr Gladstone’s polemics, and which make
Mr Balfour, trained as he is in the same atmosphere
of obscuration of the truth and of dialectical fencing,
the intellectual representative of that master of the art
of mystification. In returning the proofs of the first

1 See infra , p. 204.

THE MAN.

55

part of the article to the editor of the Nineteenth
Century , Huxley wrote : —

My estimation of Balfour, as a thinker, sinks lower and
lower the farther I go. God help the people who think his
book an important contribution to thought ! The Giga-
dibsians 1 who say so are past divine assistance.2 . . . A. B.
is the incarnation of Gigadibs. I should call him Giga-
dibsius Optimus Maximus?

The second part was never published ; its incompletion
has curious parallel in the following extract from a
letter written by Huxley to Tyndall in 1854: —

The poor fellow vanished in the middle of an unfinished
article, which has appeared in the last Westminster , as his
forlorn Vale ! to the world. After all, that is the way to die,
■ — better a thousand times than drivelling off into eternity
betwixt awake and asleep in a fatuous old age.4

From March onwards old complications were aggravated
by influenza, and although he threw this off, it left him
weaker for the struggle, yet hopeful of the issue. On
the 26th June he wrote in cheerful tone to his old
friend Hooker ; but on the afternoon of the 29th he
passed away, “the Fates,” as he had prayed, leaving
him “clear and vigorous mind”5 to the end.

It has become a fashion to more or less burden a

1 “You Gigadibs who, thirty years of age,

Believe you see two points in Hamlet’s soul
Unseized by the Germans yet — which view you’ll print.”

— Bishop Blougram s A pology — Brown i no.
(Quoted by Huxley, Nineteenth Century ,
March 1895, p. 528.

2 IT. 400. 3 II. 430. 4 I. 121. 5 II. 361.

56

HUXLEY.

man’s biography with tributes to his worth from his
friends. Such “ appreciations,” as these witnesses to
character are called, weaken rather than strengthen,
since their presence implies their possible necessity.
Of these credentials Huxley stands in no need. He is
his own witness in the work which he did, and in the
spirit which informed it. Those who knew him best
loved him most, and none came into touch with his
eager, sympathetic, breezy, and altogether beautiful
nature without receiving an impulse to higher aims.
Of spotless integrity in every relation, and single-minded
in every purpose, he went on from strength to strength,
because each step made the rightness of the path which
he had chosen more manifest. One “ who never turned
his back, but marched breast forward ” ; unswayed by
motives of worldly prudence ; undeterred by authority
which could produce no valid warrant of its claims ;
governed by “morality touched by emotion,” and
guided by reason within limits which none have defined
so well, — he remains alike an example and an inspiration
to all men for all time.

57

II.

THE DISCOVERER.

In the preface to the eighth volume of his Collected
Essays Huxley says : —

It must be admitted that the popularisation of science,
whether by lectures or by essays, has its drawbacks. Suc¬
cess in this department has its perils for those who succeed.
The “people who fail” take their revenge by ignoring all
the rest of a man’s work, and glibly labelling him a mere
populariser. If the falsehood were not too glaring, they
would say the same of Faraday, and Helmholtz, and Kelvin.1

They said it of Huxley. In a recent compilation
entitled One Hundred and One Great Writers , issued
under the editorship of so well-equipped a scholar as
Dr Richard Garnett, Huxley’s work is described as
“that of the populariser; the man who makes few
original contributions to science or thought, but states
the discoveries of others better than they could have
stated them themselves.” And, doubtless, that is a
very common impression about a man the titles of

1 P. vii.

58

HUXLEY.

whose original scientific papers1 fill ten pages of the
appendix to his biography.2 The fact is, he loomed so
large in the public eye as the most luminous expositor
of the theory of organic evolution, as the proclaimer of
its significance, and as the protagonist in the great
revolution which it has brought about, that the im¬
portance of his discoveries in biology is obscured. And
there is further explanation, which is given by Mr
Chalmers Mitchell in his admirable monograph, Thomas
He?iry Huxley : a Sketch of his Life and Work. He
says : —

The years that have passed since 1850 have seen not only
the most amazing progress in our knowledge of comparative
anatomy, but almost a revolution in the methods of studying
it. Huxley’s work has been incorporated in the very body
of science. A large number of later investigators have
advanced upon the lines he laid down ; and just as the
superstructures of a great building conceal the foundations,
so later anatomical work, although it has only amplified and
extended Huxley’s discoveries, has made them seem less
striking to the modern reader. The present writer, for
instance, learned all that he knows of anatomy in the last
ten years, and until he turned to it for the purpose of this
volume he had never referred to Huxley’s original paper.
[Mr Chalmers Mitchell is here speaking of the Memoir on
the Medusae.] When he did so, he found from beginning to
end nothing that was new to him, nothing that was strange ;
all the ideas in the memoir had passed into the currency of
knowledge, and he had been taught them as fundamental
facts. It was only when he turned to the text-books of

1 Now collected in four volumes under the editorship of Sir
Michnel Foster and Professor E. Ray Lankester.

2 II. 460-470.

THE DISCOVERER.

59

anatomy and natural history current in Huxley’s time that
he was able to realise how the conclusions of the young
ship-surgeon struck the President and F ellows of the Royal
Society as luminous and revolutionary ideas.1

And again : —

Huxley’s work upon birds, like his work in many other
branches of anatomy, has been so overlaid by the investiga¬
tions of subsequent zoologists that it is easy to overlook its
importance. His employment of the skeleton as the basis of
classification was succeeded by the work of others who made
a similar use of the muscular anatomy, of the intestinal canal,
of the windpipe, of the tendons of the feet, and many other
structures which display anatomical modifications in dif¬
ferent birds. . . . Huxley’s anatomical work was essentially
living and stimulating, and too often it has become lost to
sight simply because of the vast superstructures of new facts
to which it gave rise.2

The centring of Huxley’s interest in the apparatus
and functions of living things has been named, as also
the opportunity for exercise of this which his voyage in
the Rattlesnake supplied. The dredge brought him
strange dwellers of the deep sea — fantastic in form,
delicate in structure, and exquisite in colour. These
he sketched with his facile pencil, dissected, and, when¬
ever chance offered, compared, giving special attention
to the family of the Medusae, his memoir on which laid
the foundation-stone of his scientific fame. It should be
noted that that memoir was written in 1848, eleven

1 Pp. 34, 35-

2 lb ., p. 137. The third, fifth, and eighth chapters of Mr Chalmers
Mitchell’s book are to be strongly commended for the clear and
accurate account of Huxley’s original work which they furnish.

6o

HUXLEY.

years before the publication of the Origin of Species ,
because in determining the value of any scientific, and,
especially, of biological work, its chronological place
must be taken into account. In science the Old and the
New Dispensation may be severally defined as the Pre-
Darwinian and the Post-Darwinian, and perhaps a brief
survey of what advance towards knowledge of the
fundamental unity of living things had been reached
during the Old Dispensation may make clearer the
bearing of Huxley’s discoveries, and explain why their
significance was not apparent even to himself.

The great name of Aristotle is associated with the
earliest attempt at a classification of animals. This was
based, in the main, on likenesses of external structure,
and was accepted, without fundamental variation, for
the long period of eighteen hundred years. The first
step towards any important revision was taken, in the
seventeenth century, by Ray, “ the father of modern
zoology.” In the eighteenth century Boerhaave’s ex¬
periments proved that all living things are built up of
the same materials, while Hunter demonstrated the
likenesses in animal structure. Towards the close of
that century, Linnaeus had completed his great scheme
of classification of plants and animals, dividing the
latter into six classes : the V ertebrates into mammals ,
birds , amphibians (including reptiles), and fishes ; and
the Invertebrates into bisects and worms. Aristotle had
conceived of life as a ladder whose steps represented
the several animals in ascending scale : Lamarck (to

THE DISCOVERER.

6 1

whom Huxley pays high tribute 1), with genuine insight,
depicted it as a many-branched tree, and therefore, as
interrelated and interdependent. Cuvier reduced Lin¬
naeus’s six divisions to four : Vertebrata , or backboned
(fishes to men) ; Mollusca , or soft-bodied (snails, oysters,
&c.) ; Articulately or jointed (spiders, bees, ants, &c.),
and Radiata , or rayed (jelly-fish, polyps, sea-anemones).

Meanwhile, the microscope, by which, in the middle
of the seventeenth century, Malpighi had made pioneer
discoveries, was becoming more and more the important
instrument of examination of the internal structure of
living things, and hence opening the way to inquiry into
their origin and history. The study of anatomy advanced
to comparison of the structures and of the several cor¬
responding organs in divers plants and animals, and of
the functions discharged by those organs ; hence the
rise of the comparative method, with its demonstration
of fundamental relations between living things. Schleiden
discovered that the cell is the unit of plant - life ; and
Schwann proved that the same is true of animals.
Harvey’s formula of development, “ All life comes from
an egg ” ( omne vivum ex ovo ), gave place to the doctrine
of oimiis cellula e cellula. The lowest animals are one-
celled, or, sometimes, a loosely connected cluster of
cells ; all other animals are built-up of a number of cells,
whence tissues and organs are developed. In 1844,
five years after Schwann’s demonstration, Von Mohl
showed that each cell contains a viscous, granular-look-

1 II. 59-

6 2

HUXLEY.

ing, highly active substance, the result of a very com¬
plex union of carbon (to which Haeckel assigns the
chief activity), hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. This
substance is known as protoplasm, and is, in Huxley’s
familiar phrase, “the physical basis of life.” Some
years before this, Von Baer had observed that the em¬
bryos of birds, dogs, fish, and other backboned animals,
including man, are all alike during their earlier stages.
It is concerning Von Baer’s writings that Huxley said
none had made so great an impression on him down to
the publication of the Origin of Species 1 ; and it was in
Von Baer’s Law of Development that Mr Spencer found
hints and evidence supporting his own theory of ad¬
vance from the simple to the complex as applied to
the cosmos.

The effect of these discoveries was to produce an
unsettled feeling as to the truth of the doctrine of the
fixity of species. Lamarck was the most prominent,
but not the only, naturalist of the eighteenth century to
suggest that the various species had not been separately
created, but had been developed by sundry causes,
operating through long ages, from a few simple forms.
It was a perilous step in those days of the long-reaching
secular arm to throw doubt on the account of the
creation contained in a document which God Himself
was believed to have inspired ; but the doubt once
harboured, a mass of facts telling against the orthodox

1 I. 175, and cf. 163.

THE DISCOVERER.

63

view came into unwonted significance. Every scheme of
classification hitherto propounded had assumed the im¬
mutability of the several groups ; the conception of any
fundamental relation of the several types to a common
primitive type was unborn ; and the most superficial
comparison between the vertebrates, in which some
structural resemblances were obvious, and the loose
and confused medley covered by the term invertebrate,
was sufficient to negative any idea of an underlying
unity that might be broached.

The illustrious Cuvier regarded the several groups as
the outcome of a preordained plan of the Creator, and
believed that each successive annihilation of plants and
animals was followed by a fresh creative fiat. His most
distinguished pupil, Owen, likewise explained the suc¬
cession of species as the operation of “ a continuously
creational law.” But, nevertheless, facts were pouring
in which could not be thus interpreted. The fossil-
yielding rocks, whose contents both these great
anatomists were arranging, making the dry bones tell
the story of a long and connected life-history, and of
the descent of certain existing animals along well-
marked ancestral lines, were to prove the most sure
foundation on which the doctrine of organic evolution
rests. Lyell’s Principles of Geology raised the question,
“ If natural causation is competent to account for the
not-living part of the globe, why should it not account
for the living part ? ” Herbert Spencer was asking

64

HUXLEY.

which was the more rational theory to account for the
existence of millions of species : —

Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of
special creations ; or is it most likely that by continual modi¬
fications, due to change of circumstances, ten millions of
varieties have been produced as varieties are being produced
still?1

The answer to that question — an answer which
involved the putting of more momentous questions —
was not forthcoming for another seven years. As for
Huxley’s position in the matter, he says, in the chapter
“ On the Reception of the Origin of Species,” which he
contributed to Darwin’s Life and Letters, that he was
“ not brought into serious contact with the ‘ species ’
question until after 1850.” He had “long done with
the Pentateuchal cosmogony,” and he rejected all
theories of “ archetypal ideas,” “perfecting principles,”
and the like ; but the frequent discussions which he had
with Mr Spencer from 1852 onwards failed to drive
him from his “agnostic position.” His difficulties were
twofold : —

Firstly, that up to that time the evidence in favour of
transmutation was wholly insufficient ; and secondly, that
no suggestion respecting the causes of transmutation
assumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate
to explain the phenomena. Looking back at the state of
knowledge at that time, I really do not see that any other
conclusion was justifiable.2

1 Leader, 20th March 1852.

2 Darwin’s Life and Letters, ii. p. 188.

THE DISCOVERER. 65

He sums up his attitude in two words, as that of
“ critical expectancy.”

“ Wandering between two worlds : one dead,

The other powerless to be born.”

At his first interview with Darwin he expressed, “ with all
the confidence of youth and imperfect knowledge,” his be¬
lief in the sharpness of the lines of demarcation between
natural groups, and in the absence of transitional forms.

I was not aware, at that time, that he had been many
years brooding over the species question ; and the humour¬
ous smile which accompanied his gentle answer, that such
was not altogether his view, long haunted and puzzled me.1

The incident may have recalled to his mind an interview
with Faraday in the old student days at Charing Cross
Hospital, of which he tells in one of his letters from
the Rattlesnake. He had made one of the manifold
attempts to realise perpetual motion, and, having put
his scheme on paper, took it to the Royal Institution,
at the door of which he ran against “ a little man in a
brown coat.” The “ little man ” was Faraday, who,
although he knew nothing of Huxley, at once looked
at the plan which he had drawn, and then asked him if
he “ was acquainted with mechanism, what we call the
laws of motion ? ”

I saw that all was up with my poor scheme, so after trying
a little to explain, in the course of which I certainly failed in
giving him a clear idea of what I would be at, I thanked him
for his attention, and went off as dissatisfied as ever.2

1 Darwin’s Life and Letters , ii. p. 196. 2 I. 22.

E

66

HUXLEY.

Needless to say, as with himself and Darwin, the two
were to meet in very different relations in a few years,
when Huxley’s sense of humour would impel him to
remind Faraday of the lesson learned from him.

The more important of Huxley’s original contributions
to biological science may now be set forth, with as much
freedom from technical terms as the subjects permit.

The discoveries of Schleiden and Schwann in cell-
structure, as well as those of Von Baer in comparative
embryology, were known to Huxley when, “ with micro¬
scope lashed to the mast,” he examined the fragile
organisms, “as the sand of the sea-shore innumerable.”
To those discoveries he made an important addition in
detecting that the Medusas are built up of two cell-layers,
or “ foundation-membranes,” enclosing a stomach-cavity.
From the outer layer the skin and nervous system (as to
the existence of which latter, since proven, Huxley was
at the time doubtful) are developed ; and from the inner
layer the alimentary and other organs are developed. He
also found that the reproductive organs are external, and
that all the Medusae have thread-cells wherewith poison
is discharged at their prey. He then made search for
the presence of these several features in other families
of the Hydrozoa, and found unity of plan throughout.
In modem classification, there are three grades of
animals : the Protozoa, which embrace only the one-
celled ; and the Coelenterata and Coelomata, grouped as
many-celled, under the term Metazoa. Even this
scheme is under modification — the animals known as

THE DISCOVERER.

67

sponges being now assigned a separate place as “ an
independent and sterile branch of the tree of life,” a
branch, perhaps, in direct descent from the one-celled
organism.1 The Medusae, hydra, and sea-anemones are
grouped under Coelenterata, or hollow-bodied, comprising
all two -layered animals. The Coelomata comprise all
animals in which a third foundation-membrane has been
developed, and which possess a coelom, or true stomach,
with blood-vessels. They embrace every animal from a
worm to a man.

Huxley’s next step was to compare the two foundation-
membranes of the Coelenterata with the serous and
mucous layers of the embryos of vertebrates ; and here,
although he then guessed it not, he made a contribution
of the highest importance to the doctrine of descent.
Von Baer had shown the resemblances between all back¬
boned animals in their passage from the embryo to the
adult state, and Huxley showed that, in still earlier stages
of their development, they exhibited the two foundation-
membranes of the Coelenterata, thus recording, as it were,
the history of their evolution from those lower organisms.
It is easy enough to us, looking back, to see what a key
to the proof of the fundamental unity of living things
this supplied ; but even the prevision of Huxley, shown
so markedly in many ways, was obscured by the domin¬
ance of the notion of fixity outside certain well-marked
lines. For in 1853 he writes that “there is no pro-

1 A Treatise on Zoology. Part II. The Porifera and Coelenterata.
Edited by E. Ray Lankester, F.R.S.

68

HUXLEY.

gression from a lower to a higher type, but merely a
more or less complete evolution of one type.” Never¬
theless, his acute comparison between the Coelenterata
and the Coelomata was destined to supply proof of the
progression which he questioned. His discovery, says
Professor Allman,

that the body of the Medusae is essentially composed of two
membranes, an outer and an inner, and his recognition of
these as the homologues of the two primary germinal leaflets
in the vertebrate embryo, is one of the greatest claims of his
splendid work on the recognition of zoologists. This dis¬
covery stands at the very base of a philosophical zoology, and
of a true conception of the affinities of animals. It is the
ground on which Haeckel has founded his famous Gastraea-
theory, and without it Kowalesky could never have announced
his great discovery of the affinity of the Ascidians and Verte¬
brates, by which zoologists have been startled.1

Noting, by the way, that before Huxley sailed in the
Rattlesnake, he had made the interesting discovery that
the composition of the blood of the lancelet, a very low
vertebrate, approached that of the blood of the higher
vertebrates, we find his work on the Medusae followed
by a further contribution to knowledge of organic rela¬
tion in an examination of the structure of the sea-
squirts, or Ascidians, so called from their resemblance
to a double-necked bottle (Greek askidion , a small
bottle). These animals are found singly, and also
in clusters, and interest in them, as hinted in the quota¬
tion from Professor Allman, has deepened since the

1 I. 40.

THE DISCOVERER.

69

discovery that they are in the line of the development
from invertebrate to vertebrate which ends in man him¬
self. Still feeling his way towards the great central
doctrine of unity, denial of which is the only heresy
from which a man need pray to be delivered, Huxley
made Schwann’s cell-theory the basis of examination into
the identity of structure in plants and animals. He
showed — and this with luminous skill in the famous
“lay sermon” on “The Physical Basis of Life” — that
the cell is the unit of structure, and not the unit of
function ; that, in technical terms, it is morphological,
not physiological, the “ protoplasm ” being the funda¬
mental element. “ Although,” remarks Professor Ray
Lankester —

it is forty years since the “ Review of the Cell Theory '’ was
published, and although our knowledge of cell-structure has
made immense progress during those forty years, yet the main
contention of that article — viz., that cells are not the cause
but the result of organisation, in fact are, as Huxley says,
to the tide of life what the line of shells and weeds on the
sea-shore is to the tide of the living sea — is even now being
reasserted, and, in a slightly modified form, is by very many
cytologists admitted as having more truth in it than the
opposed view and its later outcomes, to the effect that the
cell is the unit of life in which and through which alone
living matter manifests our activities.1

The contents of the Scientific Memoirs show that in
all the papers which Huxley contributed to the Royal
Society and other learned bodies, his researches were

1 I. 140.

70

HUXLEY.

ruled not so much by the desire to classify and label
specimens as to establish affinities between organisms,
and to supersede the ill-assorted jumble, which, for
example, lumped crabs and bees together under one
heading, by an orderly and demonstrable classification.
Down to 1854, when he succeeded Forbes at the School
of Mines, his studies had been restricted to invertebrates ;
but from that period, fossil forms, for which, as already
remarked, he had no taste,1 were to occupy a main por¬
tion of his time. They appeared to take him off the
main track that might lead to a great generalisation : he
saw no solution of the problem of transmutation save in
study of the living thing ; there was, as he said in a
lecture at the Royal Institution in 1855, “no real
parallel between the successive forms assumed in the
development of the life of the individual at present, and
those which have appeared at different epochs in the
past.” But, so complete was the revolution effected by
the Origin of Species, that in 1878 he wrote: —

On the evidence of palaeontology, the evolution of many
existing forms of animal life from their predecessors is no
longer an hypothesis but an historical fact.2

While, in an address to the British Association at
York two years afterwards, he said : —

If the doctrine of evolution had not existed, palaeontol¬
ogists must have invented it, so irresistibly is it forced
upon the mind by the study of the remains of the Tertiary
Mammalia which have been brought to light since 1859.3

1 Ante , p. id. 2 Coll. Essays, ii. p. 226. 8 II. 241.

THE DISCOVERER.

71

Huxley soon found that extinct animals also afforded
play for his favourite inquiry into the architecture and
affinities of organisms, and hence, in his hands, the fossil
became, as it were, a living thing, bringing a message
from the past. His inquiry into the character of some
supposed fish - shields from the Downton sandstone,
near Ludlow, led to the revolutionising of old theories
concerning the earliest fishes. He showed that the
huge creatures named, from the complex structure of
their teeth, Labyrinthodonts, are allied to fishes, am¬
phibians, and reptiles ; and if the intermediate forms
between birds and reptiles are not so clearly traceable as
he and others then held, his demonstration of the affinity
between the two was one of his most brilliant successes.

One great consequence of these researches was that science
was enriched by a clear demonstration of the many and close
affinities between reptiles and birds, so that the two hence¬
forth came to be known under the joint title of Sauropsida,
the Amphibia being at the same time distinctly more separated
from the reptiles, and their relations to fishes more clearly
signified by the joint title of Ichthyopsida. At the same time
proof was brought forward that the line of the descent of the
Sauropsida clearly diverged from that of the Mammalia, both
starting from some common ancestry. And besides this great
generalisation, the importance of which, both from a classi-
ficatory and from an evolutional point of view, needs no com¬
ment, there came out of the same researches numerous lesser
contributions to the advancement of morphological know¬
ledge, including among others an attempt, in many respects
successful, at a classification of birds.1

1 “Obituary Notice of T. H. Huxley,” by Sir Michael Foster,
Proc. Royal Society , vol. lix.

72

HUXLEY.

But what will, perhaps, make closer appeal to the
general inquirer, is the story of the fulfilment of
Huxley’s prophecy as to the discovery of the pedigree
of the horse, which, down to 1870, had been traced
to a three-toed ancestor.

The ungulate or hoofed quadrupeds are divided into
the odd-toed and the even-toed, the toes never exceed¬
ing, except in the case of monstrosities, five on each
limb. The horse, whose nearest allies in descent are
the tapir and the rhinoceros, belongs to the odd-toed
or Perissodactyla (Greek, perissos , uneven, and daktulos ,
finger). In the horse of to-day the toes have become
absorbed, so that what is called its “ knee ” corresponds
to the position of a man’s wrist ; the metacarpus, or
“cannon-bone,” answers to the third or middle finger
of the human hand ; the “ pastern,” “ coronary,” and
“coffin” bones answer to the joints of that finger, and
the hoof to its nail. The smaller, or “ splint bones,”
represent our second and fourth fingers, and some small
bony prominences at the bases of these probably re¬
present our first and fifth fingers.1

Fossil remains of horses of the existing type are
found as far back as the later Tertiary period; in the
later Miocene or middle Tertiary beds, horse -like
animals with three toes, the middle one of which
touched the ground, have been discovered, while the
early Miocene deposits have yielded an animal with

1 On the general structure and modifications see The Horse , by
Sir W. H. Flower, chaps, iii., iv.

THE DISCOVERER.

73

horse-like characters having three complete toes. Here
the European evidence comes to an end, and in
summarising it in his presidential address to the Geo¬
logical Society in 1870, Huxley said that —

if the expectation raised by the splints of the horses that, in
some ancestors of the horses, these splints would be found
to be complete digits, has been verified, we are furnished
with very strong reasons for looking for a no less complete
verification of the expectation that the three-toed Plagi-
olophus-X\X;z. “ avus ” of the horse must have been a five-toed
“atavus” at some early period.1

In 1876, when visiting America, he was shown by
Professor Marsh the remarkable fossil found, among
others, in the Eocene formations of North America, to
which the name Orohippus was given, and which was
then the oldest known “ member of the equine series.”
It had four complete toes on the front limb, and three
toes on the hind limb, besides other features linking it
with the chain of equine ancestry. The discovery
evidenced that the accepted theory of the European
origin of the horse must be abandoned in favour of
America, into which continent that animal, having
become extinct, was imported by the Spaniards.

In commenting on this wonderful “find,” in a lecture
given at New York in September 1876, Huxley repeated
the prophecy uttered six years before : —

The knowledge we now possess justifies us completely in
the anticipation that, when the still lower Eocene deposits,

1 Coll. Essays, viii. p. 361.

7 4

HUXLEY.

and those which belong to the Cretaceous period, have
yielded up their remains of ancestral equine animals, we shall
find, first, a form with four complete toes and a rudiment of
the fifth digit in the hind foot ; while, in the older forms, the
series of digits will be more and more complete until we
come to the five-toed animals in which, if the doctrine of
evolution is well-founded, the whole series must have taken
its origin.1

The prophecy was fulfilled two months afterwards in
Professor Marsh’s discovery of complete skeletons of a
five-toed animal in the early Eocene deposits at Wasatch
in North America. The existence of the fossil form,
which is named Phenacodus, was known to Professor
Cope three years before by its teeth alone. The un¬
earthing of it, with all the bones in due place, the
terminal bones of the toes showing that they were
encased in hoofs, enabled palaeontologists to assign it a
place in the ungulate group, the type, as shown by the
size of the brain-pan, being extremely low. “This,”
remarks Sir W. H. Flower, “ is exactly in accord with
what is now generally knowm of the progressive diminu¬
tion of the size of the brain in all groups of animals
the farther back we pass from the present time.” 2

Reference has been made already to the famous book
in which Huxley demonstrates the physical and psychical
identity of man and the higher apes with a completeness
never before attempted, but the consideration of some
of the effects of that demonstration will have more
fitting place in the next chapter.

1 American Addresses, p. 89. 2 The Horse, p. 22.

THE DISCOVERER.

75

Omitting any account of Huxley’s minor discoveries,
the last one of importance to be noted takes us back
to 1878. In that year, while he was Fullerian Pro¬
fessor at the Royal Institution, he delivered a lecture on
the origin of the skull in vertebrates.1 In 1806, Oken,
a German naturalist of somewhat dreamy type, when
walking in the Hartz Forest, picked up the dried skull
of a sheep, and the idea struck him that it was an
expanded vertebral column. The priority of idea was,
apparently with justice, claimed by Goethe, who saw in
it a correlate to his theory of the “ transformation of
plants ” — ■/.£., that every part of a plant is made up of
stem and leaf, modified for the particular function it has
to perform. But what secured unquestioned belief in
the view that the skull “ is formed of a series of ex¬
panded vertebrae moulded together,” was the support
given to it by Owen, “ who was at that time the leading
vertebrate anatomist in England,” and whose indorse¬
ment may be in some measure explained by the seeming
accordance of the theory with his belief in “archetypal
ideas.”

Huxley, ever acting on his own maxim, “ to regard
the value of authority as neither greater nor less than as
much as it can prove itself to be worth,” was by no
means convinced of the truth of the vertebral theory,
since it lacked such confirmation as comparative em¬
bryology might be expected to supply. After examin¬
ing a number of skulls of fishes, beasts, and men, he

1 Ante , p. 17.

76

HUXLEY.

was satisfied that each skull is built upon a common
plan, and that the primitive skull in the lowest or car¬
tilaginous fishes, where traces of the original vertebrae
might be expected, “ is an unsegmented gristly brain-
box, and that in higher forms the vertebral nature of
the skull cannot be thought of for a moment, since
many of the bones, for example, those along the top of
the skull, arise in the skin. ... It may be true to say
that there is a primitive identity of structure between
the spinal or vertebral column and the skull, but it is
no more true that the adult skull is a modified vertebral
column than it would be to affirm that the vertebral
column is a modified skull.” This demolition of a
hitherto unchallenged theory added to the strain on the
relations between Owen and Huxley, but that minor
result was of no moment to the latter, the larger issue of
whose labours lay in the “ marking an epoch in England
in vertebrate morphology,” and in “ enunciating views
which, if somewhat modified, are still, in the main, the
views of the anatomists of to-day.” 1

Linnaeus says that “ fossils are not the children, but
the parents, of rocks,” and the interest aroused in the
contents of the fossil-yielding rocks when Huxley went
to the School of Mines was extended to the rocks them¬
selves. During his more official connection with the
Geological Society as Deputy-President in 1862, and as
President in 1869 and 1870, he delivered three ad-

1 Sir Michael Foster, “Obituary Notice of T. H. Huxley,”
Proc. Royal Society , vol. lix.

THE DISCOVERER.

77

dresses, each of which holds matter of permanent value.
As already shown, the latest of these, which was entitled
“ Palaeontology and the Doctrine of Evolution,” dealt
with the ancestry of the horse ; but it embraced the
more general question of the evidence as to intermediate
links between species supplied by the fossiliferous rocks.
This involved a revision of opinions expressed in the
address of 1862, and the clear deliverance that Huxley
entertained “ no sort of doubt that the Reptiles, Birds,
and Mammals of the Trias are the direct descendants of
Reptiles, Birds, and Mammals which existed in the
latter part of the Palaeozoic epoch, but not in any area
of the present dry land which has yet been explored by
the geologist.” In the 1862 address reference was
made to the two facts established by palaeontology : 1.
That one and the same area of the earth’s surface has
been successively occupied by very different kinds of
living beings ; 2. That the order of succession estab¬
lished in one locality holds good, approximately, in all.

The inference which geologists had drawn from this
was that wherever rocks containing the same kind of
fossils are found in widely separated parts of the globe,
they were formed at the same time. Correspondence in
succession came to be looked upon as correspondence
in age. Huxley, on the other hand, argued that the
presence of fossils identical in type in distant rock-
formations pointed to an opposite conclusion. On the
theory of special creation the appearance of the same
animal remains in the same order of strata in different

7 8

HUXLEY.

zones was explicable. But on the theory of evolution
considerable periods of time must have elapsed to
permit of the migration of animals from place to
place. Therefore, Huxley suggested that the am¬
biguous and misleading term “synchronism” should
be discarded in favour of the term “ homotaxial,” as
indicating that the presence of certain fossils in the
same relative position in the succession of strata indi¬
cated a similarity of order, but not an identity of date.

In the 1869 address he discussed the interesting
question of the age of the earth as determining the
length of time which elapsed before it became cool
enough to be the abode of life. On this question the
physicists and the biologists were at issue.

At the outset the earth was a mass of glowing, incan¬
descent gas, hurled-off, like its fellow-planets, from the
vast nebula which was to condense into the solar
system. Passing, under the continuous loss of heat,
from the gaseous through the liquid and viscous to the
solid state, it reached a degree of temperature which
permitted of the existence of life upon its surface. The
first living things were plants, and the carbon, which is
an essential element in their structure, could not be
detached from the atmosphere except at a temperature
“ somewhat above the freezing-point, and somewhat less
than half-way to the boiling-point of water.” Hence
the question, At what period of its history did our
globe, or that portion of it on which life first appeared
(probably, as Buffon suggested, the polar area, as this

THE DISCOVERER.

79

would be the earliest to cool), arrive at that temperature ?
To this the mathematical physicists, at the head of whom
stands Lord Kelvin, essayed answer, the data for which
were supplied — i, by the rate at which the earth parted
with its store of heat ; 2, by the decrease in the length
of its day; and 3, by the time that the sun, as the source
of life, has illuminated the earth. Of these, only the
briefest summary is here possible. As to the first,
Lord Kelvin (then Sir William Thomson) assumed that
the matter of which the globe is made up is uniform
throughout, and, therefore, that the rate at which it has
parted with its heat is uniform. After hesitating be¬
tween the statement that “ the consolidation cannot
have taken place less than twenty million years ago,
nor more than four hundred million years ago,” Lord
Kelvin agreed that “ some such period of time as one
hundred million years ago ” might be taken as a safely
approximate estimate. As to the second, when the
earth and moon were very near each other, the rotation
was enormously quickened, and, as the moon retreated,
the earth’s rotation slowed, involving the gradual length¬
ening of the day. The retardation is due to the frictic.n
of the tides, which, under the pull of sun, and, in far
greater degree, of moon, act as a brake upon the globe,
increasing the day by about twenty-two seconds of time
in every century. The period of the earth’s habitability
was reached when the day was approximately what it is
now, permitting of the alternations of light and darknessj
heat and cold, and other conditions now prevailing.

So

HUXLEY.

Lord Kelvin estimates “ that the centrifugal force at the
time of solidification cannot have been more than three
per cent greater than it is at present, and, therefore,
having regard to the known rate of retardation of the
earth’s rotation, this event occurred not more than one
hundred million years ago.”

As to the third, physicists are agreed that the main¬
tenance of the sun’s energy is to be explained as due
to the heat generated by the falling-in and resulting
collision of the particles of matter of which he is com¬
posed, involving the shrinkage of his diameter at the
rate of two hundred and twenty feet yearly, or four
miles per century. Lord Kelvin, admitting that “ the
estimates are necessarily very vague,” is of opinion that
“ the sun may have already illuminated the earth for as
many as one hundred million years ; but it is almost
certain that he has not illuminated the earth for five
hundred million years.”

Commenting on the indefiniteness of these and the
foregoing estimates, Huxley aptly remarks that —

Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite work¬
manship, which grinds you stuff in any degree of fineness,
but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you
put in ; and as the grandest mill in the world will not
extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will
not get a definite result out of loose data.1

But although some mathematicians of lesser calibre
thought that Lord Kelvin had conceded too long a

1 Lay Sermons, p. 216.

THE DISCOVERER.

8 1

period, there was sufficient accord between them to
make the biologists feel themselves in a tight place.
Reckoning, from the rate at which materials, through
the agency of rivers, are being deposited on ocean-
bottoms, how long a time was necessary for the forma¬
tion of the sedimentary rocks, and of rocks presumably
within the life-period, the aggregate thickness of which
is estimated at about fifty miles, they found the years
allowed by the mathematicians wholly insufficient.
Darwin was much concerned. Writing to Wallace in
1869, he says: “Thomson’s views of the recent age of
the world have been for some time one of my sorest
troubles;” and again, in 1871, “I can say nothing
more about missing links than what I have said. I
should rely much on pre-Silurian times ; but then comes
Sir W. Thomson, like an odious spectre.” Huxley was
in no wise disturbed.

Biology [he said] takes her time from geology. The only
reason we have for believing in the slow rate of the change
in living forms is the fact that they persist through a series
of deposits which, geology informs us, have taken a long
while to make. If the geological clock is wrong, all the
naturalist will have to do is to modify his notions of the
rapidity of change accordingly. And I venture to point out
that when we are told that the limitation of the period dur¬
ing which living beings have inhabited this planet to one,
two, or three hundred million years requires a complete
revolution in geological speculation, the onus probcmdi rests
on the maker of the assertion, who brings forward not a
shadow of evidence in its support.1

1 Lay Sermons , p. 213.

82

HUXLEY.

Meantime, occasion was given to eager adversaries to
say, “ Behold how good and how pleasant a thing it is
to see this discord ! ” and it is not surprising that the
hope was nurtured in the minds of many that so serious
a disagreement would in some way wreck the doctrine of
evolution. That reluctant convert to the theory of the
mutability of species, Lord Salisbury, did not fail to
press home the difficulty in his Presidential Address
to the British Association. After referring to the
“penurious spirit” shown by Professor Tait in cutting
down Lord Kelvin’s estimate of one hundred million
years to ten million years, he chaffed their opponents
with revelling in the prodigality of the ciphers which
they put at the end of the earth’s hypothetical life.

Long cribbed and cabined within the narrow bounds of the
popular chronology, they have exulted wantonly in their new
freedom. They have lavished their millions of years with
the open hand of a prodigal heir indemnifying himself by
present extravagance for the enforced self-denial of his youth.
But it cannot be gainsaid that their theories require at least
all this elbow-room. If we think of that vast distance over
which Darwin conducts us from the jelly-fish lying on the
primeval beach to man as we know him now ; if we reflect
that the prodigious change requisite to transform one into
the other is made up of a chain of generations, each advanc¬
ing by a minute variation from the form of its predecessor,
and if we further reflect that these successive changes are so
minute that in the course of our historical period — say three
thousand years — this progressive variation has not advanced
by a single step perceptible to our eyes, in respect to man or
the animals and plants with which man is familiar, we shall
admit that for a chain of change so vast, of which the smallest

THE DISCOVERER.

83

link is longer than our recorded history, the biologists are
making no extravagant claim when they demand at least
many hundred million years for the accomplishment of the
stupendous process. Of course, if the mathematicians are
right, the biologists cannot have what they demand. If, for
the purposes of their theory, organic life must have existed
on the globe more than a hundred million years ago, it must,
under the temperature then prevailing, have existed in a state
of vapour. The jelly-fish would have been dissipated in steam
long before he had had a chance of displaying the advan¬
tageous variation which was to make him the ancestor of the
human race. I see, in the eloquent discourse of one of my
most recent and most distinguished predecessors in this chair,
Sir Archibald Geikie, that the controversy is still alive. The
mathematicians sturdily adhere to their figures, and the
biologists are quite sure the mathematicians must have made
a mistake. I will not get myself into the line of fire by inter¬
vening in such a controversy. But until it is adjusted the
laity may be excused for returning a verdict of “ not proven”
upon the wider issues the Darwinian school has raised.1

Lord Salisbury unwittingly helped the cause which
his instincts prompted him to hinder. With that pre¬
vision of the seer in combination with the skill of the
discoverer, which is the possession only of the rarer
spirits of our kind, Huxley had pierced the core of the
matter when he asked, “ Is the earth nothing but a
cooling mass, ‘ like a hot-water jar, such as is used in
carriages,’ or ‘ a globe of sandstone,’ and has its cooling
been uniform ? ” And incited thereto by Lord Salisbury’s
Address, provocative as it was of discussion on so many
sides, Professor Perry, who held the common opinion
that it was “ hopeless to expect that Lord Kelvin should

1 Times , 9th August 1894.

?4

HUXLEY.

have made an error in calculation,” examined the sub¬
ject, not “ to substitute a more correct age for that
obtained by Lord Kelvin, but rather to show that the
data from which the true age could be calculated are
not really available.” The result of that examination
was to challenge Lord Kelvin’s assumption of a uniform
state of the materials of the globe, and to show that “ its
interior may be of better conducting material than the
surface rock,” whereby the cooling of that surface to a
habitable condition would be enormously quickened,
and the life-period pushed back to the four hundred
million years required by the geologists and biologists.
The details of the process by which Professor Perry
arrived at his conclusions are too technical and lengthy
for reproduction here,1 and, moreover, it suffices to quote
Lord Kelvin’s admission that his estimate may be in¬
sufficient. “ I thought,” he says in a letter to Nature ,
“ my range from twenty millions to four hundred millions
was probably wide enough ; but it is quite possible that I
should have put the superior limit a good deal higher,
perhaps four thousand instead of four hundred.” 2 Apropos
of Professor Perry’s results, Huxley wrote in a private
letter, under date of 6th November 1894: “I am so
much out of the world now that I had not heard of the
‘ rift within the lute ’ of the mathematicians. But that a
big crack would show itself sooner or later I have never
doubted.”

1 For these, see Nature. 3rd January 1895 ; 24th September 1896.

2 Nature, 3rd January 1895.

THE DISCOVERER.

85

It would be easy to fill many pages of this little
volume with a summarised account of Huxley’s original
work in biology alone, but the examples chosen may be
taken to constitute his chief claim to the title of dis¬
coverer. They may suffice to show, in the words of the
tribute paid to him by Sir Michael Foster and Professor
E. Ray Lankester in their preface to the collection of his
Scientific Memoirs , that, “ apart from the influence exerted
by his popular writings, the progress of biology during
the present century was largely due to labours of his of
which the general public knew nothing, and that he was
in some respects the most original and most fertile in
discovery of all his fellow-workers in the same branch of
science.” 1

1 Vol. I. p. vi. (1S98).

86

III.

THE INTERPRETER.

In an essay on the Origin of Species , written in i860,
Huxley admits that two years before then “ the position
of the supporters of the special creation theory seemed
more impregnable than ever, if not by its own in¬
herent strength, at any rate by the obvious failure of
all the attempts which had been made to carry it.” 1 If
it was discarded, there was nothing to replace it ; hence,
like institutions for the reform or abolition of which the
time is not ripe, it existed on sufferance. Emphasis of
this fact is necessary for full understanding of the
revolution whereby old things passed away and all
things became new.

Huxley was a boy of twelve when Darwin, on his
return to England, opened his “first note-book for
facts in relation to the origin of species,” speculation
about the possible modification of which had been
incited by his observations on past and present life-
forms on the South American continent. Fifteen

1 Coll. Essays , ii. p. 69.

THE INTERPRETER. 87

months afterwards, in October 1838, he read for amuse¬
ment Malthus on Population , and he says : —

Being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence
which everywhere goes on, from long-continued observations
of the habits of plants and animals, it at once struck me that
under these circumstances favourable variations would tend
to be preserved, and unfavourable ones destroyed. The
result of this would be the formation of new species.1

In 1842 he put his theory into shape, then enlarged
his manuscript from time to time, and with that un¬
paralleled patience which controlled all his researches,
went on collecting masses of facts and weighing the
evidence deducible from them, not venturing to make
known, save to his most intimate friends, his convic¬
tions as to the mutability of species. It seemed “like
confessing a murder/’ he said. And so the matter drifted
until 1858, when there came to him from Dr Alfred
Russel Wallace, who was living at Ternate, an island in
the Malay Archipelago, a communication in which his
own theory was propounded, and in such coincidence of
terms that Darwin told Lyell if Wallace had had his
MS. sketch of 1842, “he could not have made a better
short abstract.”2 To complete the parallel, Wallace
also was led to think of “positive checks” by reading
Parson Malthus. After conferring with Hooker and
Lyell, both of whom had seen Darwin’s abstract some
years before, it was arranged that Wallace’s paper and a
precis of Darwin’s manuscript should be read at a meet-

1 Darwin’s Life and Letters , i. p. 83. 2 Lb ., ii. p. 116.

88

HUXLEY.

ing of the Linnean Society, which was held on ist July
1858.1 Hooker says that the interest excited was in¬
tense, but no discussion, only desultory talk, “with
bated breath,” followed the reading, and the matter
caused no commotion outside a limited circle.

Huxley does not appear to have been present, and it
is doubtful if he knew aught of the proceedings save by
hearsay. For, writing to Hooker on 5th September
1858, he says, “Wallace’s impetus seems to have set
Darwin going in earnest, and I am rejoiced to hear we
shall learn his views in full, at last. I look forward
to a great revolution being effected.” 2 And, in his
lecture “ On the Persistent Types of Animal Life,”
delivered at the Royal Institution on 3rd June 1859,
there is no reference to the Darwin -Wallace theory,
only allusion to the

hypothesis which supposes the species of living beings living
at any time to be the result of the gradual modification of
pre-existing species — a hypothesis which, though unproven
and sadly damaged by some of its supporters, is yet the only
one to which physiology lends any countenance.3

He was not a convert till the book appeared. “ What
will Huxley say ? ” is the burden of Darwin’s letters.
“ I am intensely curious to hear Huxley’s opinion of my
book.” “If I can convert Huxley I shall be content.”

1 An excellent abstract of the joint Memoir is given by Professor
E. B. Poulton in his Charles Darwin , pp. 65-78.

2 I. 159. 3 Scient. Memoirs , ii. p. 90.

THE INTERPRETER

89

“ I long to hear what Huxley thinks.” 1 Ten days after
this, in a letter dated 23rd November 1859, Huxley, to
whom an advance copy had been sent, tells Darwin that
he is “prepared to go to the stake, if requisite,” for the
doctrine of natural selection, and, scenting the battle
from afar, adds : “ I am sharpening up my claws and
beak in readiness for defence of the ‘noble book.’”
Darwin was made happy. He had converted the
chief of doubters, to whom he replied : “ Like a good
Catholic who has received extreme unction, I can
now sing ‘Nunc dimittis.’ I should have been more
than contented with one quarter of what you have
said.” 2

Huxley was satisfied that Darwin “ had demonstrated
a true cause for the production of species.” In a
course of lectures to working men delivered in 1863,
he said : —

I really believe that the alternative is either Darwinism
or nothing, for I do not know of any rational conception
or theory of the organic universe which has. any scientific
position at all beside Mr Darwin’s. . . . Whatever may
be the objections to his views, certainly all other theories
are absolutely out of court.3

But doubting, as was his wont, “ whatever could
be doubted,” he was not satisfied that the evidence

1 Life and Letters , ii. pp. 176, 221, 225. What Huxley did think,
after mastering the central idea of the book, was, “ How extremely
stupid not to have thought of that !” — Lb. , p. 197.

2 lb ., p. 232. 3 Coll. Essays , ii. p. 467.

90

HUXLEY.

was in all respects complete. He held that full proof
would be obtained only when experiments in selective
breeding from a common stock resulted in the pro¬
duction of varieties more or less infertile with one
another. In his article on the “ Origin of Species ”
in the Westminster Revieiv of April i860, he says: —

After much consideration, and with assuredly no bias
against Mr Darwin’s views, it is our clear conviction that,
as the evidence stands, it is not absolutely proven that a
group of animals, having all the characters exhibited by
species in nature, has ever been originated by selection,
whether artificial or natural. Groups having the morpho¬
logical character of species — distinct and permanent races,
in fact — have been so produced over and over again ; but
there is no positive evidence at present that any group of
animals has, by variation and selective breeding, given rise
to another group which was even in the least degree in¬
fertile with the first. Mr Darwin is perfectly aware of this
weak point, and brings forward a number of ingenious and
important arguments to diminish the force of the objection.
We admit the value of these arguments to their fullest
extent — nay, we will go so far as to express our belief that
experiments conducted by a skilful physiologist (“ instead
of by a mere breeder,” he adds in a letter to Darwin1)
would very probably obtain the desired production of mutu¬
ally more or less infertile breeds from a common stock in a
comparatively few years. But still, as the case stands at
present, this “little rift within the lute” is not to be dis¬
guised or overlooked.2

Twenty-seven years afterwards, Huxley referred to
the insecurity of the logical foundation as remaining
in the absence of experiments with the results de-

1 I. 195 ; and cf. ib., 239. 2 Coll. Essays , ii. p. 75.

THE INTERPRETER.

91

manded ; nevertheless, in the last speech which he
delivered in public, a few months before his death,
he expressed his unshaken belief in the theory

propounded by Mr Darwin thirty-four years ago as the
only hypothesis at present put before us which has a
sound scientific foundation.1

It may not be out of place to quote some suggestive
observations on Huxley’s contention from an article
on the Life and Letters in a recent number of his
whilom antagonist, but now appreciative, if not whole¬
hearted, disciple, the Quarterly Review —

It is not difficult to understand the mutual sterility of
natural species as an incidental result of their separation
for an immense period of time. In the process of fertilisa¬
tion a portion of a single cell-nucleus from one individual
fuses with a portion from another individual, the two com¬
bining to form the complete nucleus of the first cell of the
offspring, from which all the countless cells of the future
individual will arise by division. Each part-nucleus con¬
tains the whole of the hereditary qualities received from and
through its respective parent, and must therefore be of
inconceivable complexity. We can only speak in gener¬
alities of processes of which so little is known ; but we
cannot be wrong in assuming that sterility is sometimes
due to the fact that the complexity of the one part-nucleus
fails in some wray to suit the complexity of the other. . . .
The length of time required for mutual sterility to be com¬
plete may be inferred from the fact that entirely distinct, but
closely related, species are still partially fertile in that they
can produce hybrid offspring. When our domestic breeds of
pigeons have been entirely prevented from interbreeding for

1 II. 389-

92

HUXLEY.

some immense period of time, we may expect that they too
will only produce sterile hybrids, and, later still, not even
these. At present the majority of these breeds are not
everywhere rigidly prevented from interbreeding, so that an
approximation to natural species -formation has not even
begun. There are others, however, such as the most widely
different breeds of dogs, in which the divergence in size is
so extreme that interbreeding has probably been a mechan¬
ical impossibility for some considerable time.1

Huxley’s letters express dissent from the so-called
“ Neo-Lamarckian ” school, represented by Mr Herbert
Spencer, which contends that the use and disuse of
organs, together with the action of surroundings, pro¬
duce modifications of structure which are transmitted
to offspring. There are no specific references to Pro¬
fessor Weismann’s Essays in Heredity (1883), in which,
representing the so-called “ Neo- Darwinian ” school,
natural selection, acting on favourable variations, is
held to be all-sufficient for the production of new
species; but, in June 1886, Huxley wrote to Mr
Spencer as follows : —

Mind, I have no a priori objection to the transmission of
functional modifications whatever. In fact, as I told you,
I should rather like it to be true.

But I argued against the assumption (with Darwin, as I
do with you) of the operation of a factor which, if you will
forgive me for saying so, seems as far off support by trust¬
worthy evidence now as ever it was.2

To Mr Platt Ball he wrote in 1890 : —

I absolutely disbelieve in use-inheritance as the evidence

1 January 1901, pp. 269, 271.

2 II. 1 33.

THE INTERPRETER.

93

stands. Spencer is bound to it a priori — his psychology
goes to pieces without it.1

Huxley’s researches in palaeontology and embryology
strengthened his conviction that “ if all the concep¬
tions promulgated in the Origin of Species which are
peculiarly Darwinian were swept away, the theory of
evolution of plants and animals would not be in the
slightest degree shaken.” 2 For him the importance of
that book lay in its influence beyond the limits of its
theory, which dealt only with living things. This is put
with his usual clearness and vigour in his chapter on its
reception in Darwin’s Life and Letters , and explains his
place as foremost champion : —

The oldest of all philosophies was bound hand and foot,
and cast into utter darkness, during the millennium of theo¬
logical scholasticism. But Darwin poured new life-blood
into the ancient frame ; the bonds burst, and the revivified
thought of ancient Greece has proved itself to be a more
adequate expression of the universal order of things than
any of the schemes which have been accepted by the
credulity, and welcomed by the superstition, of seventy
later generations of men.

To any one who studies the signs of the times, the
emergence of the philosophy of Evolution, in the attitude
of claimant to the throne of the world of thought, from the
limbo of hatred, and, as many hoped, forgotten things, is
the most portentous event of the nineteenth century. But
the most effective weapons of the modern champions of
Evolution were fabricated by Darwin ; and the 0?'igin of
Species has enlisted a formidable body of combatants,

1 II. 268.

2 Nature, 1st Nov. 1894.

94

HUXLEY.

trained in the severe school of Physical Science, whose
ears might have long remained deaf to the speculations of
a priori philosophers.1

In this same chapter Huxley makes a short refer¬
ence, as to a storm whose tumult has long been stilled,
leaving only a ground - swell, to the “ years which had
to pass away before misrepresentation, ridicule, and de¬
nunciation ceased to be the most notable constituents
of the majority of the multitudinous criticisms of the
Origin of Species .” What he touches upon with brevity
need not be amplified here. It would fail to interest
an age which, lightly valuing the intellectual freedom
won for it, but not by it, is without enthusiasm, with¬
out aspiration, save as these are moved by ignoble lust
of empire or by enervating craving after luxury ; an age
in which “ the coarsest political standard is undoubt-
ingly and finally applied over the whole realm of human
thought, ... in which the souls of men have become
void, while into the void have entered in triumph the
seven devils of Secularly.” 2

But the remnant who care to know through what
tribulation the fighters in the sixties entered the kingdom
of the free may be told that the battle was the fiercer by
reason of divisions in the camp of science, whereas the
theologians were a solid phalanx. True it is that one of
the earliest converts to Darwinism was a clerical ornithol-

1 II. p. 180; and cf. Coll. Essays , i. p. 43; ix. p. 104. “ Classical

history is a part of modern history : it is medieval history which
is ancient.” — Bagehot’s Physics and Politics , p. 169.

2 On Compromise , by John Morley, pp. 14, 37.

THE INTERPRETER.

95

ogist, Canon Tristram (still with us), who applied the
theory of natural selection to explanation of the colours
of birds of the Sahara. Charles Kingsley, too, was
sympathetic; but these were as men “born out of due
time.” Owen’s malignant attitude has had reference;
Sir John Herschel said that natural selection was “the
law of higgledy-piggledy,” the exact meaning of which,
Darwin confessed, puzzled him, as well it might ; Adam
Sedgwick read parts of the book with “absolute sorrow,
as false and grievously mischievous.” But he hoped to
meet Darwin “ in heaven.” WhewelPs opposition took
the form of refusing the Origin of Species a place in the
library of Trinity College ; Lyell at first, and Carpenter,
with others, throughout, accepted with reservations ; while
the tone of the more intellectual organs was reflected in
the Athenceum , for long years an anti-Darwinian journal.
Touching on the theological issues involved, it committed
Darwin “ to the tender mercies of the Divinity Hall, the
College, the Lecture-room, and the Museum.”

On both sides of the Atlantic the drum ecclesiastic
was beaten in pulpits where, needless to say, vituperative
rhetoric did duty for argument ; preachers in cathedrals
and little Bethels were at one in condemnation of a
“brutal philosophy” whose success meant the denial
of Scripture and the dethronement of God ; while Epis¬
copacy voiced itself through the Bishop of Oxford’s
philippic in the Quarterly Review , which, albeit inspired
by Owen, exhibited “ preposterous incapacity ” in dealing
with elementary biology.

96

HUXLEY.

There was only one man qualified to take up the
gauntlet. Huxley’s prominence as the most capable
interpreter and best-equipped defender of the Darwinian
theory dates from the British Association Meeting of
i860. Apropos of some friction with Owen in 1852, he
said, in a letter to his sister, that he was “ quite ready to
fight half-a-dozen dragons.” He was then writing for
his living, and, referring to his jealous rival’s “ bitter
pen,” he adds, “ I flatter myself that, on occasion, I can
match him in that department.” 1 Eight years after, the
serious issues between himself and the anti-Darwinians
added to his eagerness for the fray unguibus et ?'ost?v.
This was gratified by the opportunity for exercise of a
pen never dipped in malice. By a happy chance the
columns of the Times were opened to him for a review
of the Origin of Species. The book had been sent to
Mr Lucas, a member of the staff, who “was as innocent
of any knowledge of science as a babe,” and who, at the
suggestion of a friend, passed-on the copy to Huxley,
stipulating only that he should preface the article with a
few sentences. The review appeared on 26th December
1859, and thereby Huxley secured the aid of the then
influential paper in “ giving the book a fair start with
the multitudinous readers of the leading journal ” — “ the
educated mob who derive their ideas from the Times,”
as he said in a letter to Hooker.2 The review is re¬
printed in the second volume of Collected Essays , in
which, under the title “ Darwiniana,” are included allied
1 I. 98. 2 I. 177.

THE INTERPRETER.

97

articles expository of the doctrine of natural selection,
which had appeared in serials or were based upon
popular lectures. They were needed, since “ exposition
was not Darwin’s forte , and his English is sometimes
wonderful.” 1

The Origin of Species is not easy reading. Thirty
years after its publication, when Huxley, of all men,
might have been expected to have mastered it from title
to colophon, he said in a letter to Hooker, “ It is one
of the hardest books to understand thoroughly that I
know of.”2

Darwin, recluse by temperament and frail health, con¬
tent, in the quiet of his Kentish home, to continue his
work of collecting and verifying, was no controversialist.
Hence the preaching of the new doctrine and the fighting
for it fell to “ my general agent,” 3 as he called Huxley ;
to “ Darwin’s bull - dog,” as Huxley called himself.4
Not returning railing for railing, but fact-supported argu¬
ment for epithet ; albeit sometimes answering “ a fool
according to his folly,” Huxley made it his chief business
to enlarge to the full the hint which, at the end of the
Origin of Species , Darwin threw out in a brief sentence :
“ Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and
his history.” Darwin’s desire not to unduly prejudice
the minds of readers to whom his theory was wholly
new by too plain an indication of its bearing, and his
anxiety to advance no statement without complete in-

1 II. 190.

3 Darwin’s Life and Letters , ii. p. 251.

G

2 II. 192.
4 I- 363.

98

HUXLEY.

vestment of fact, explain his reticence. But it needed
no great acuteness on the part of a critical reader to see
that the subject could not be thus selvedged. The
Descent of Man was the logical supplement to the Origin
of Species ; but it was not published until 1871. Ex¬
plaining in 1894 the position which he took up in i860,
Huxley says : —

Among the many problems which came under my con¬
sideration, the position of the human species in zoological
classification was one of the most serious. Indeed, at that
time it was a burning question, in the sense that those who
touched it were almost certain to burn their fingers severely.
. . . Even among those who considered man from the point
of view, not of vulgar prejudice, but of science, opinions lay
poles asunder. Linnaeus had taken one view, Cuvier another ;
and among my senior contemporaries, men like Lyell, re¬
garded by many as revolutionaries of the deepest dye, were
strongly opposed to anything which tended to break down
the barrier between man and the rest of the animal world.

Huxley then refers to his own hesitation upon the
matter, until Owen’s assertion as to certain fundamental
differences of structure in the brain of man and ape1
led him to reinvestigate the subject, with the result
that he was satisfied as to the structures in question
not being peculiar to man, “ but shared by him with
all the higher, and many of the lowe? apes.”

Matters were at this point when the Origin of Species
appeared.

The weighty sentence, “ Light will be thrown on the
origin of man and his history,” was not only in full harmony

1 Ante, p. t8.

THE INTERPRETER.

99

with the conclusions at which I had arrived, but was strongly
supported by them. And inasmuch as Development and
Vertebrate Anatomy were not among Mr Darwin’s many
specialities, it appeared to me that I should not be intruding
on the ground he had made his own if I discussed this part
of the general question. In fact, I thought that I might
probably serve the cause of Evolution by doing so.1

In the spring of 1861 he gave a course of weekly
lectures to working men, “ On the Relation of Man to
the rest of the Animal Kingdom.” This was followed
by an invitation from the Philosophical Institution of
Edinburgh to deliver two lectures upon the same subject.
As “ it was only a few years since that the electors to th-e
Chair of Natural History in a famous northern university
had refused to invite a very distinguished man to occupy
it because he advocated the doctrine of the diversity of
species of mankind,” Huxley was not prepared for the
applause with which the Edinburgh audience greeted the
statement that he entertained “ no doubt of the origin of
man from the same stock as the apes.” But there were
shouts of dissent outside the lecture hall. The local
press was furious at the reception accorded to that
“ anti-scriptural and most debasing theory, . . . standing
in blasphemous contradiction to Biblical narrative and
doctrine.” There should have been deep resentment at
this “ foul outrage committed upon them individually
and upon the whole species as ‘ made in the likeness of
God,’ by deserting the hall in a body, or using some
more emphatic form of protest against the corruption of

1 II. 178.

IOO

IIUXLEY.

youth by the vilest and beastliest paradox ever vented in
ancient or modern times amongst Pagans or Christians.”1
Thus wrote the Witness , invective, as usual, doing duty
for argument; while the Scotsman , as Huxley told Darwin,
was “ more scurrilously personal, and more foolish.”

The two sets of lectures formed the basis of Evidence
as to Mads Place in Nature, published in 1863. The
third section of the book dealt with the question of
fossil human remains, concerning which Lyell had asked
for information when preparing his Antiquity of Ma?i.
Well anathematised by the reviewers, the “old stupid
Athenceumf as Darwin called it, telling its readers that
“ Lyell’s object is to make man old, Huxley’s to degrade
him,” the book had an immediate success. It remains
a classic on the subject, because, as Mr Chalmers
Mitchell remarks, “ the advance of knowledge has only
added to the details of the argument ; it has not made
any reconstruction of it necessary.” 2

An outline of the chapter describing the manlike
apes, and explaining the likenesses and differences be¬
tween them and man, may help to make clear how
inevitable was a controversy in which Huxley took
the chief part.

It is obvious that, in any classification of animals
founded on external resemblances, both empiric and
expert would agree in grouping the monkeys, those
“blurred copies,” often caricatures, of man, with him.
And “the great law -giver of systematic zoology,”
1 I. 194. 2 Thomas Henry Huxley, p. 165.

THE INTERPRETER.

IOI

Linnaeus, places man and the four anthropoid or man¬
like apes — the chimpanzee, gorilla, orang-utan, and
gibbon — at the head of the Primates, the name given
by him to the highest members of the Vertebrate
class. The chimpanzee and gorilla are sometimes
grouped as of the same genus, but the orang-utan and
gibbon are undoubtedly distinct genera. They are
found only in the old world — the chimpanzee and
gorilla inhabiting tropical Africa, and the orang-utan
and gibbon south-eastern Asia and the Malay Archi¬
pelago. They are tailless, semi-erect, long-armed, the
aperture of the nostrils pointing downwards, whence the
term catarrhine ; they are arboreal in their habits, and,
mainly, vegetarians.

The Chimpanzee is about five feet in height, nearly
black, like the negro, has arms which reach below the
knee, and a slightly curved backbone. (The S-like
shape of man’s backbone is one of the co-operating
causes of his erect position, stability being thereby given
to the structure, so that nine times as great a vertical
force is required to bend it as if it had been straight.
The backbone of the savage is less curved than that of
civilised man.) The chimpanzee has one pair of ribs
more than man. The feet are flat-soled, and shorter
than the hands, and have an opposable toe, which, in
all the anthropoids, acts as a thumb, the feet being used
for climbing and grasping. The fingers of the hand are
long and powerful, but the thumb is smaller than that
of a man, with the lines and furrows on whose hand

102

HUXLEY.

those on the hand of the ape correspond. The im¬
postors who ply the trade of palmistry may note this
fact, either for the purpose of reading the fate and
fortune of the anthropoids, or, what would be equally
reasonable in the case of their dupes, determining the
future of these from the creases in their trousers.
The skull of the chimpanzee approximates nearest
among the anthropoids to man’s, and the brain, which
is half the size of his, has the same ridges or convolu¬
tions, although, in proportion, these are simpler and
larger. The number of teeth in man and the manlike
apes is the same, but in the latter the canines are longer.
The chimpanzee makes its nest in trees, swinging from
branch to branch to a great distance, and leaping with
astonishing agility. “It is not unusual to see the £ old
folks ’ sitting under a tree regaling themselves with fruit
and friendly chat, while their ‘ children ’ are leaping
around them, and swinging from tree to tree with
boisterous merriment.”1

The Gorilla is the largest and most savage of the
four. It is about five feet and a half in height; its
body is massive and powerful, and covered with coarse
black hair. The arms reach to the middle of the leg,
and, of all the anthropoids, the feet and hands most
approximate to those of man. It has very long canine
teeth, although these are relatively smaller than in the
primitive mammal. Its ponderous body renders it less
agile for arboreal life, hence it dwells chiefly on the

1 Dr Savage, quoted in Mails Place in Nature , p. 43 (1863).

THE INTERPRETER.

103

ground, resting its arms on the knuckles of the hands
as it shambles along in a half-swinging motion. The
gorillas live in bands, but are not so numerous as the
chimpanzees : the females generally exceed the males in
number. “ My informants all agree in the assertion that
but one adult male is seen in a band ; that when the
young males grow up a contest takes place for mastery,
and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others,
establishes himself as the head of the community.” 1
The Ora?ig-utan is about four feet in height. Its
body is bulky and powerful, and reddish - brown in
colour, like that of the Malay native. The backbone
is slightly curved ; the feet are longer than the hands,
and the arms reach to the ankles. Its brain approxi¬
mates nearest of all the anthropoids to that of man in
structure and appearance. It is a slow and cautious
climber, but on all -fours it can, for a time, outstrip
a man in running. Like the gorilla, it defends itself
with its hands. It is wholly arboreal, making nests for
itself and family, the young remaining for some time
under the mother’s protection. In reading Dr Alfred
Russel Wallace’s account of a baby orang-utan, the late
John Fiske was struck by the fact that it had an infancy
which is a great deal longer than that of some lower
mammals, but which was very brief compared with
that of the period of human infancy. Twenty-five
centuries ago Anaximander remarked that “ while other
animals quickly find food for themselves, man alone
1 Alan’s Place in Nature , p. 49.

104

HUXLEY.

requires a prolonged period of suckling.” Looking at
this fact under the light of evolution, the theory sug¬
gested itself to Mr Fiske that the comparatively long
duration of human infancy is a condition of human
intelligence, the period, moreover, being longer in the
civilised man than in the savage. While in all other
animals, in descending scale, little remains to be de¬
veloped after birth, in man it is precisely the reverse.
The period during which he remains helpless or de¬
pendent upon others fills a large portion of his life.
Puppies, kittens, and colts are born fully equipped with
all the nervous apparatus by which they can shift for
themselves : they have nothing to learn from, or to
add to, the stock of inherited qualities. One generation
succeeds another in unprogressive monotony. Whereas,
in man, the period during which the nerve-connections
and their correlative associations necessary for self¬
maintenance are being formed lengthens as intelligence
becomes more complex. From this much of great
import follows. For it is this long, helpless period
of human infancy, involving dependence on the parents,
which begets the solicitude, the sympathy, and the
self-denial of which the strands of family life are woven.
Carried further, there is the development of those re¬
gardful feelings for others, and of that self-restraint,
which results in the extension of the family unit to
the social unit, all which lie at the base of ethics.

The Gibbon , smallest and gentlest of the four, is
about three feet in height. Its arms touch the ground

THE INTERPRETER.

105

when it is erect ; the soles of the feet turn inward, a
feature explained by their arboreal functions, and con¬
cerning which Professor Osborn reports a droll remark
of Huxley’s. He said, “ When a fond mother calls
upon me to admire her baby, I never fail to respond ;
and while cooing appropriately, I take advantage of any
opportunity to gently ascertain whether the soles of its
feet turn in, and tend to support my theory of arboreal
descent.” 1 The chest of the gibbon approximates nearest
to that of man’s, and it has callosities or sitting-pads on
the buttocks. It can run for some distance on its
feet, but it lives in tall trees, and is a rapid leaper,
springing as much as forty feet from tree to tree. Like
the chimpanzee, it fights with its teeth.

In contrast and resemblance to these four anthropoid
apes is man , “erect and featherless biped,” between
whom and his semi-erect and hairy congeners there is
no fundamental differences in structure, the variations
being no greater than in any other allied group of
animals. It is true that no anatomist could mistake
the bones of a man for those of a gorilla; but the
differences between the one and the other are less than
those between a gorilla and the lowest Primates, say,
a lemur. Like all other animals, the Primates originate
from a fertilised egg-cell ; the primordial germ of a
man, a dog, a bird, a fish, a beetle, a snail, and a
polyp being in no essentially structural respects dis¬
tinguishable. Like all other vertebrates, the Primates

1 II. 424.

io6

HUXLEY.

pass through a period of embryonic development, in
which the resemblances to one another are so closely
the same both in outward and inward form and essen¬
tials of structure

that the differences between them are inconsiderable, while,
in their subsequent course, they diverge more and more
widely from one another. And it is a general law, that the
more closely any animals resemble one another in adult
structure, the longer and the more intimately do their
embryos resemble one another ; so that, for example, the
embryos of a Snake and of a Lizard remain like one another
longer than do those of a Snake and of a Bird ; and the
embryos of a Dog and of a Cat remain like one another for a
far longer period than do those of a Dog and of a Bird, or
of a Dog and an Opossum, or even than those of a Dog
and a Monkey.

Thus the study of development affords a clear test of close¬
ness of structural affinity, and one turns with impatience to
inquire what results are yielded by the study of the develop¬
ment of Man. Is he something apart? Does he originate
in a totally different way from Dog, Bird, Frog, and Fish,
thus justifying those who assert him to have no place in
nature and no real affinity with the lower world of animal
life ? Or does he originate in a similar germ, pass through
the same slow and gradually progressive modification —
depend upon the same contrivances for protection and
nutrition, and finally enter the world by the help of the same
mechanism ? The reply is not doubtful for a moment, and
has not been doubtful any time these thirty years. Without
question, the mode of origin and the early stages of the
development of man are identical with those of the animals
immediately below him in the scale : without a doubt, in
these respects, he is far nearer the Apes than the Apes are
to the Dog. . . .

Identical in the physical processes by which he originates

THE INTERPRETER.

107

— identical in the early stages of his formation — identical in
the mode of his nutrition, before and after birth, with the
animals which lie immediately below him in the scale — Man,
if his adult and perfect structure be compared with theirs,
exhibits, as might be expected, a marvellous likeness of
organisation. He resembles them as they resemble one
another — he differs from them as they differ from one
another. And though these differences and resemblances
cannot be weighed and measured, their value may be readily
estimated, the scale or standard of judgment, touching that
value, being afforded and expressed by the system of classi¬
fication of animals now current among zoologists.1

In his general organisation man is most nearly allied
to the Chimpanzee or the Gorilla (in mental capacity
the Chimpanzee appears to be the nearer), and for the
purposes of comparison, Huxley chose the Gorilla as “ a
brute now so celebrated in prose and verse ” that “ all
must have formed some conception of his appearance.”
In dealing with the most important points of differ¬
ence between Man and Gorilla, he also contrasted
the differences which separate the Gorilla from other
Primates.

The differences in the body and limbs of Man and
Gorilla at once strike the eye. The trunk of the latter
is larger, the lower limbs shorter, the upper limbs
longer, and the brain-case smaller, than in Man. In the
“ nobler and more characteristic organ,” the skull, the
differences are “ immense.” The face of the Gorilla
has massive jaw - bones and predominates over the
brain-case ; in Man these proportions are reversed. The
1 Man's Place in Nature , pp. 67, 68.

io8

HUXLEY.

surface of the human skull is comparatively smooth, the
brow prominences or ridges project very little ; in the
Gorilla “vast crests are developed upon the skull, and
the brow-ridges overhang the cavernous orbits like great
pent-houses. The smallest cranium observed in any
race of Man measures 63 cubic inches; while the most
capacious Gorilla skull measures not more than 34^2
cubic inches. Striking as are these differences, their
force is somewhat impaired in view of the differences
between men themselves. The difference in the volume
of the cranial cavity of the various races of mankind is
far greater, absolutely, than that between the lowest
Man and the highest Ape, while, relatively, it is about
the same. For the largest human skull contained 114
cubic inches — that is to say, had very nearly double the
capacity of the smallest — while its absolute preponder¬
ance of 5 1 cubic inches is far greater than that by which
the lowest adult male human cranium surpasses the
largest of the gorillas. After making all due allowance
for difference of size, the cranial capacities of some of
the lower apes fall nearly as much, relatively, below
those of the higher apes as the latter fall below man.
Thus, even in the important matter of cranial capacity,
Men differ more widely from one another than they do
from the Apes : while the lowest Apes differ as much,
in proportion, from the highest, as the latter does from
Man.”1 “What is true of these leading characteristics
of the skull holds good, as may be imagined, of all
1 Man's Place in Nature , p. 78.

THE INTERPRETER

109

minor features ; so that for every difference between the
Gorilla’s skull and the Man’s, a similar constant differ¬
ence of the same order (that is to say, consisting in
excess or defect of the same quality) may be found
between the Gorilla’s skull and that of some other Ape.
So that, for the skull, no less than for the skeleton in
general, the proposition holds good, that the differences
between Man and the Gorilla are of smaller value than
those between the Gorilla and some other Apes.”1

Reference has been made more than once to Owen’s
assertion that certain cerebral structures — the posterior
lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor
— are peculiar to man, and to the evidence adduced by
Huxley, Flower, and other comparative anatomists in
disproof of this, and if any justification of Huxley’s
denial of Owen’s contention was needed, this will be
found in Professor D. J. Cunningham’s address to the
Anthropological section of the British Association meet¬
ing of 1901. He says : —

To us, at the present time, it is difficult to conceive how it
was ever possible to doubt that the occipital lobe was a dis¬
tinctive character of the simian brain as well as of the human
brain, and yet at successive meetings of the Association
(i860, 1861, and 1862) a discussion, which was probably one
of the most heated in the course of its history, took place on
this very point. In the light of our present knowledge we
could fully understand Professor Huxley closing the dis¬
cussion by stating that the question had “become one of
personal veracity.” Indeed, the occipital lobe, so far from

1 Man's Place in Nature , p. 81.

1 10

HUXLEY.

being absent, was developed in the ape to a relatively greater
extent than in man. and this constituted one of the leading
positive distinctive characters of the simian cerebrum.1

The advance in degree of complexity of brain-structure
is traceable along the whole series of animals. In the
Invertebrates the brain is a mass of nerve-ganglia near
the head end of the body; in the lowest Vertebrate, the
fish, it is very small, compared with the spinal cord ; in
reptiles its mass increases ; and in birds it is still more
marked. “ The brain of the lowest Mammals, such as the
duck-billed Platypus and the Opossums and Kangaroos,
exhibits a still more definite advance in the same direc¬
tion.” A step higher in the scale, among the placental
Mammals, the cerebral structure acquires a vast modifica¬
tion in the appearance of a new structure between the
two halves of the brain, connecting them together.

In the lower and smaller forms of placental Mammals the
surface of the cerebral hemispheres is either smooth or evenly
rounded, or exhibits a very few grooves, which are technically
termed “sulci,” separating ridges or “convolutions” of the
substance of the brain, and the smaller species of all orders
tend to a similar smoothness of brain. But, in the higher
orders, and especially the larger members of these orders,
the grooves or sulci become extremely numerous, and the
intermediate convolutions proportionately more complicated
in their meanderings, until, in the Elephant, the Porpoise,
the higher Apes, and Man, the cerebral surface appears a
perfect labyrinth of tortuous foldings.2 . . . The surface of
the brain of a monkey exhibits a sort of skeleton map of
man’s, and in the manlike apes the details become more
and more filled in until it is only in minor characters, such

1 Times, Sept. 14, 1901.

2 Man's Place in Nat tire, p. 96.

THE INTERPRETER.

1 1 1

as the greater excavation of the anterior lobes, the constant
presence of fissures usually absent in man, and the different
disposition and proportions of some convolutions that the
Chimpanzee’s or the Orang’s brain can be structurally
distinguished from Man’s.1

It must not be overlooked, however, that there is a very
striking difference in absolute mass and weight between the
lowest human brain and that of the highest ape, a difference
which is all the more remarkable when we recollect that a
full-grown Gorilla is probably pretty nearly twice as heavy as
a Bosjes man, or as many a European woman. It may be
doubted whether a healthy human adult brain ever weighed
less than 31 or 32 ounces, or that the heaviest gorilla
brain has exceeded 20 ounces. This is a very note¬
worthy circumstance, and doubtless will one day help to
furnish an explanation of the great gulf which intervenes
between the lowest man and the highest ape in intellectual
power; but it has little systematic value for the simple reason
that, as may be concluded from what has been already said
respecting cranial capacity, the difference in weight of brain
between the highest and the lowest men is far greater, both
relatively and absolutely, than that between the lowest man
and the highest ape. The latter, as has been seen, is
represented by, say, 12 ounces of cerebral substance abso¬
lutely, or by 32 : 20 relatively ; but as the largest recorded
human brain weighed between 65 and 66 ounces, the former
difference is represented by more than 33 ounces absolutely,
or by 65 : 32 relatively. Regarded systematically, the cerebral
differences of man and apes are not of more than generic
value — his family distinction resting chiefly on his dentition,
his pelvis, and his lower limbs.

Thus, whatever system of organs be studied, the compari¬
son of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and
the same result — that the structural differences which separate
Man from the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee are not so great
as those which separate the gorilla from the lower apes.2

1 Man's Place in Native, p. 100.

2 lb., p. 103.

1 12

HUXLEY.

After thus showing that no line of separation can be
drawn between man and the animals beneath him,
structurally considered, Huxley added his “ belief that
the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally
futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling
and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of
life.” 1

For, in all the higher mammals, the structure and
functions of the nervous system are, fundamentally, the
same ; in the minutest microscopical details, the sense-
organs, the nerves, the spinal cord, and the brain of a
dog, an elephant, and an ape correspond to the same
organs in man. If any part of the mental apparatus is
injured or thrown out of gear, the result is the same in
each case — functional disturbance or suspense. The
dog and the horse behave as we behave ; nor can this
be otherwise, since their sense-organs report, of course
with vast differences of result, to their central nervous
systems the messages that are transmitted by like ap¬
paratus to ours, and, within the limits of their conscious¬
ness, they are affected as we are affected, and their
actions are ruled accordingly. “ If there is no ground
for believing that a dog thinks, neither is there any for
believing that he feels.” To those familiar with the
ways of animals, there is no need to labour the point,
and, “ in short,” as Huxley says —

It seems hard to assign any good reason for denying to the

1 Man's Place in Nature, p. 109.

THE INTERPRETER.

1 13

higher animals any mental state, or process, in which the
employment of the vocal or visual symbols of which language
is composed is not involved ; and comparative psychology
confirms the position in relation to the rest of the animal
world assigned to man by comparative anatomy. As com¬
parative anatomy is easily able to show that, physically, man
is but the last term of a long series of forms which lead, by
slow gradations, from the highest mammal to the almost
formless speck of living protoplasm which lies on the shadowy
boundary between animal and vegetable life ; so compara¬
tive psychology, though but a young science, and far short
of her elder sister’s growth, points to the same conclusion.1

Nevertheless, the gulf which separates the man from the
ape, and from animals whose intelligence excels that of
the ape, is vast and impassable. Its vastness prevents
some among the qualified few, and of course the majority
of the prejudiced or ill-informed, from accepting the fact
of a common origin of animal and human mental facul¬
ties. Among those who walked one mile with Darwin,
but refused to go “ twain,” the most notable is Dr Alfred
Russel Wallace, the co-propounder of the theory of
natural selection. He contends that man’s spiritual and
intellectual nature “ must have had another origin,
and for this origin we can only find adequate cause in
the unseen universe of spirit.” In like manner, the late
Professor St George Mivart, while admitting that man’s
body “ was evolved from pre-existing material,” asserted
that “ his soul was created in quite a different way . . .
by the direct action of the Almighty.” 2 And in a
lecture on the functions of the brain, the late Sir James
1 Coll. Essays , vi. p. 125. 2 Genesis of Species, p. 325.

H

HUXLEY.

1 14

Paget contended that man’s possession of reason and
conscience

establish between him and the brutes a great difference, not
in degree alone, but in kind. The spirit differs from all the
faculties in its independence of our organisation, for it is
exercised best in complete abstraction from all that is sen¬
sible : it is wholly independent of the organisation of the
brain, wholly independent also of the education of the
understanding.1

This was written in 1854, when psychology was at the
level represented by Dr Carpenter, who was satisfied
that —

There is an entity wherein man’s nobility essentially con¬
sists, which does not depend for its existence on any play of
physical or vital forces, but which makes these forces sub¬
servient to its determination.2

That Dr Wallace accepts, with astounding credulity,
the genuineness of the tricks of “ spiritualist ” charlatans
of the Eusapio Paladino type ; that St George Mivart died,
despite his treatment at the hands of his Church, a pro¬
fessed Catholic ; that Sir James Paget accepted, with never
a doubt, the dogmas of orthodoxy ; and that Dr Carpenter
was a Unitarian, — \ oes far to explain the attitude of each.
But, surely, these opponents of the doctrine of continuity,
by which Evolution stands or falls, had they made the
effort, must have found it difficult to envisage the moment
of supernatural intervention in the history of man when
he passed from the mortal to the immortal ; when the
“ entity ” which was not of him was injected into him.

1 Memoir, by his Son, p. 175. 2 Mental Physiology , p. 27.

THE INTERPRETER.

”5

There is an inevitable vagueness in the words of each
writer; but it must be assumed that they all reject the
old “ preformation ” theory of Leibnitz and Haller, and
agree as to the importation of a separate “ens,” or
“ being,” into every man of woman born, whereby the
individual becomes “ a living soul.” That being so, it
is permissible to ask at what stage of gestation or of
subsequent development the supernatural act of special
creation, for that is what it comes to, was effected ? It
must be admitted that, prior to this, man must be at
least potentially, if not, by reason of his slow develop¬
ment, actually, an animal of highly equipped intelligence.
There is no need, in the common phrase, to “ pause for
a reply,” because no reply is possible. A few words of
Huxley’s will, as usual, clear the atmosphere of verbal
fog : —

No one who is cognisant of the facts of the case nowadays
doubts that the roots of psychology lie in the physiology of
the nervous system. What we call the operations of the
mind are functions of the brain, and the materials of con¬
sciousness are products of cerebral activity. Cabanis may
have made use of crude and misleading phraseology when he
said that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile ;
but the conception which that much - abused phrase em¬
bodies is, nevertheless, far more consistent with fact than
the popular notion that the mind is a metaphysical entity
seated in the head, but as independent of the brain as a tele¬
graph operator is of his instrument.

It is hardly necessary to point out that the doctrine just
laid down is what is commonly called materialism. But it
is, nevertheless, true that the doctrine contains nothing
inconsistent with the purest idealism. For as Hume re-

HUXLEY

1 16

marks (as indeed Descartes had observed long before):
“’Tis not our body we perceive when we regard our limbs
and members, but certain impressions which enter by the
senses ; so that the ascribing a real and corporeal existence
to these impressions, or to their objects, is an act of the mind
as difficult to explain as that [the external existence of
objects] which we examine at present.” Therefore, if we
analyse the proposition that all mental phenomena are the
effects or products of material phenomena, all that it means
amounts to this : that whenever those states of consciousness
which we call sensation, or emotion, or thought come into
existence, complete investigation will show good reason for
the belief that they are preceded by those other phenomena
of consciousness to which we give the names of matter
and motion. All material changes appear, in the long-run,
to be modes of motion ; but our knowledge of motion is
nothing but that of a change in the place and order of our
sensations ; just as our knowledge of matter is restricted to
those feelings of which we assume it to be the cause.1

Were it not, as Huxley says, that “ the ignorance of
the so-called educated classes is colossal,” there might
be need for apology in restatement of the fact that man
is not descended from the ape. The relationship be¬
tween them is lateral, not lineal, both being offshoots
of the same stock, but each remaining, of course in
very different degrees of development, isolated groups
of mammals. The blood-relationship of the two has
naturally prompted the question as to the missing link.
A pertinent question, which has partial answer in
the fact that all intermediate forms are, in virtue of
their transitional character, the least likely to survive,

1 Coll. Essays , vi. pp. 94, 95.

THE INTERPRETER.

II 7

and in the further fact that the chances against the
preservation of any remains of the progenitor of man
and ape are as manifold as those against the preserva¬
tion of any fossils of animals of correspondingly small
size. Even in the period when rudely-fashioned stone
tools and weapons of undoubted human origin abound,
the occurrence of fragments of human skeletons is
rare. In the section on “ Fossil Remains of Man ” in
Man's Place in Nature Huxley discusses the value of the
evidence supplied by skulls found in various bone-
caverns of Western Europe, discoveries to which
several important additions have been made since
1863. Comparing these with the skulls of the lowest
savages extant, notably the Australian aborigines, he
considered that we are not taken “ appreciably nearer
to that lower pithecoid form, by the modification of
which man has, probably, become what he is.” Where,
then, he asks, “ must we look for primeval Man ? Was
the oldest Homo sapiens pliocene or miocene, or yet
more ancient? In still older strata do the fossilised
bones of an Ape more anthropoid, or a Man more
pithecoid, than any yet known, await the researches of
some unborn palaeontologist ? Time will show.”

Time has not yet shown. But in 1892 Dr Eugene
Dubois found in the upper Pliocene beds at Trinil, on
the banks of the river Bengavan, in Java, a calvaria or
portion of skull, two molar teeth, and a thigh-bone,
which he assumed belonged to an animal named by
him Pithecanthropus erectus , or “upright ape-man.”

1 1 8

HUXLEY.

The forehead was low and narrow, the inner surface of
the skull bore impressions of convolutions, and M.
Dubois estimated that the brain was about twice as
large as that of the brain of the largest anthropoid.
Although the shape of the thigh-bone warranted the
inference that the creature walked erect, it also
indicated adaptation to a tree-climbing habit absent in
the human thigh-bone. Siam and Java may, in the
upper Tertiary period, have been joined to the main¬
land ; and these remains of the “upright ape-man”
occur in a region where it is highly probable that man
and ape became differentiated.

When Huxley published his book he had to meet
the objection that the belief in the common origin of
man and brute involved the brutalisation and degrada¬
tion of the former. But, he asks —

Is this really so? Could not a sensible child confute, by
obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would force
this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true that the Poet,
or the Philosopher, or the Artist, whose genius is the glory
of his age, is degraded from his high estate by the un¬
doubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he
is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage,
whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little
more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dan¬
gerous than the Tiger ? Or is he bound to howl and
grovel on all-fours because of the wholly unquestionable fact
that he was once an Egg, which no ordinary power of dis¬
crimination could distinguish from that of a Dog? Oris
the philanthropist or the saint to give up his endeavour to
lead a noble life because the simplest study of man’s nature
reveals at its foundations all the selfish passions and fierce

THE INTERPRETER.

IIQ

appetites of the merest quadruped? Is mother-love vile
because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs
possess it?

The common-sense of the mass of mankind will answer
these questions without a moment’s hesitation. Healthy
humanity, finding itself hard pressed to escape from real sin
and degradation, will leave the brooding over speculative
pollution to the cynics and the “ righteous overmuch,” who,
disagreeing in everything else, unite in blind insensibility to
the nobleness of this visible world, and in inability to ap¬
preciate the grandeur of the place Man occupies therein.

Nay more, thoughtful men, escaped from the blinding in¬
fluences of traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock
whence man has sprung, the best evidence of the splendour
of his capacities ; and will discern in his long progress
through the Past a reasonable ground of faith in his attain¬
ment of a nobler Future.1

Several causes united to give man his pre-eminence
and distinctive place in the “ files of time.” The slow
acquirement of the erect position led to the flattening of
the feet ; to projection of the heel as support ; and to the
altered position of the skull with the added weight of
brain which went on pari passu with new functions, the
skull becoming nicely balanced on the spine, which be¬
came more curved, and, therefore, a better support.
The bipedal position set free the arms from the work of
locomotion, enabling man to use them as organs for
grasping things, whereby their nature was ascertained,
and for the manifold purposes which the struggle for
life compelled. Interaction of brain and hand, to¬
gether with increased modification of the thumb as
1 Man's Place in Nature , pp. no, in.

120

HUXLEY.

opposable, went on ; while the gregarious instinct,
more and more developed, bound the members to¬
gether in ever enlarging groups, whose mutual de¬
pendence led to their permanence, and to the survival
of the strongest.

To these purely natural factors is to be added the
enormous part played by the evolution of articulate
speech. “ Much water has flowed under the bridges ”
since David Hartley, a pioneer-anthropologist of the
eighteenth century, of whom Huxley had high apprecia¬
tion, expressed the opinion that, owing to the shortness
of the time which has elapsed since the Flood, both
language and writing must have been given by direct
miraculous agency.1 Small blame to the philosophers
of that time ; but not to those who, in our own, would
place the faculty of speech among the supernatural en¬
dowments of man. For modern physiology has not only
demonstrated that the cortex, or layer of grey cellular
substance, which covers the cerebrum, is the organ of
the mind ; it has localised the psychic centres to
which the several sensory nerves telegraph their reports
from the outer world, and it has also determined the place
of the motor centre of articulate speech. In discussing
the structural changes in the brain which have made pos¬
sible the associated movement required for that “ price¬
less gift,” Professor D. J. Cunningham, in the address
already referred to, shows by what slow processes of

1 Hartley, Prop, lxxxiii., quoted by Leslie Stephen, History of
English Thought in the Eighteenth Century , i. p. 193.

THE INTERPRETER.

1 2 1

natural growth it must have been acquired. The more
intelligent of the lower animals communicate with one
another and express their feelings by various sounds,
and the progenitors of man acted likewise. The actual
germs of language existed in a few formless roots, most
of these being natural sounds, whether in the tumbling of
waters or the song of birds, and it is in the imitation
of these sounds that the large number of words known
as onomatopoetic, and the enormous number of words
derived from them, have their rise. All sounds were
supplemented by gestures and postures, which, among
some races, still play a great part in communication.
And it is to a physical and sensible source that our most
abstract and metaphysical terms are traceable. For ex¬
ample, when we “ apprehend ” a thing, we “ lay hold ”
of it ; when we “ apply ” ourselves we bend “ towards ” ;
when we “transfer” we “carry”; to “concrete” is to
combine particles together, while to “ abstract ” is to
remove them ; and few of us remember that in calling
any one “ supercilious ” we mean, literally, that he raises
his eyebrows. The choice and currency of this and
that sound obviously lay in the aptness with which it
conveyed the meaning in the mind of the speaker to
that of the listener. Here we may use the terms of
“natural selection” and say that the fittest for the pur¬
pose survived, and passed into the vocabulary, becoming
the parent of a great group of words.

Without question, the acquisition of speech became
a dominant factor in determining the high develop-

122

HUXLEY.

ment of the human brain. To quote Professor Cun¬
ningham : —

The first word uttered expressive of an external object
marked a new era in the history of our early progenitors.
At this point the simian or brute-like stage in their develop¬
mental career came to an end, and the human dynasty,
endowed with all its intellectual possibilities, began. The
period in the evolution of man at which this important step
was taken was a vexed question, and one in the solution of
which we had little solid ground to go upon beyond the
material changes produced in the brain, and the considera¬
tion of the time that these might reasonably be supposed to
take in their development. . . . The structural characters
which distinguish the human brain in the region of the
speech-centre constitute one of the leading peculiarities of
the human cerebral cortex ; they are totally absent in the
brain of the anthropoid ape, and of the speechless micro-
cephalic idiot. Further, it was significant that in certain
anthropoid brains a slight advance in the same direction
might occasionally be faintly traced, whilst in certain human
brains a distinct backward step is sometimes noticeable.
The path which had led to this special development was thus
in some measure delineated. These structural additions to
the human brain were no recent acquisition by the stem-
form of man, but were the result of a slow evolutionary
growth, a growth which had been stimulated by the laborious
efforts of countless generations to arrive at the perfect co¬
ordination of all the muscular factors which were called into
play in the production of articulate speech.1

“It goes without saying” that in his all-round
application of the doctrine of evolution Huxley came
to close quarters with those who demand the exclusion
1 Times , September 14, 1901.

TIIE INTERPRETER.

123

of the psychical nature of man from its operations. In
one of the last papers that he wrote he contended, with
rigorous logic, that “ if man has come into existence by
the same process of evolution as other animals ; if his
history, hitherto, is that of a gradual progress to a higher
thought and a larger power over things ; if that history
is essentially natural, the frontiers of the new world,
within which scientific method is supreme, will receive
such a remarkable extension as to leave little but cloud-
land for its rival.” 1

The discoveries of the astronomer since the time of
Copernicus had compelled momentous changes in old
conceptions of the relation of the earth to the other
bodies of space ; those of the geologists, from the time
of Hutton and Lyell, had modified ideas concerning its
age and the processes moulding its surface ; and those
of the palaeontologists, from the time of Cuvier, had
revolutionised theories of the origin of death as due to
the original sin of Adam. A yet more profound revolu¬
tion was set afoot when* the rude tools and weapons of
ancient river - gravels and bone-caverns brought their
witness to man’s high antiquity and primitive savagery,
since therein was the further refutation of the doctrine
of his fall on which the scheme of his redemption rests.
To these witnesses were added those supplied by students
of comparative mythology as to the origin of the Creation,
Paradise, and other legends, evidencing these to be the
1 Nature , November 1, 1894.

124

HUXLEY.

product of pre-scientific periods, when myths, gathering
sanctity with age, became the unquestioned explanations
of phenomena.

Hence, the old positions, one by one, have been aban¬
doned on the advance of solid phalanxes of facts, until the
defenders, strong in faith in its ultimate impregnability,
have made their last stand within the citadel of Mansoul.
But all in vain. The venerable walls, mounted with the
old weapons of obscurantism, ignorance, and misrepre¬
sentation, have been stormed by the resistless forces of
truth, and although the opening of the gates to the
victor be delayed, his triumph is assured. But of this
conflict — the Jehad of Science — in which Huxley was
“gladiator-general” and inspirer, more anon.

Meanwhile, to return to his work as interpreter, it
must be borne in mind that, hitherto, his exposition of
the theory of evolution had been limited to the organic.
Thus far he followed Darwin, the Origin of Species not
being concerned with the evolution of the inorganic, nor
with the problem of the origin of life, nor with the rela¬
tion of the living to the not-living. As already noted,
speculations on these high matters had their rise in
Ionia five or six centuries before Christ, and, after an
arrest of a thousand years, due to political and theo¬
logical changes, had made a new start some three
hundred years ago. But it was not until the last
century was well advanced that any attempt to co¬
ordinate the several branches of knowledge into a
harmonious theory of development wa6 possible, and for

THE INTERPRETER.

125

the achievement of this the world is indebted to Mr
Herbert Spencer, whose “ Synthetic Philosophy,” dealing
with evolution as an all-inclusive process, begins with
the condensation of vaporous stuff into cosmic systems,
and ends with the development of human society. He
explains all phenomena, from suns to souls, as the
necessary results of the persistence of force under its
forms of matter and motion, both indestructible, both
ever changing, that which thus persists being “ an
unknown and unknowable ” power, which we are
obliged to recognise as without limit in space and with¬
out beginning or end in time. Thus, in endless rhythm,
are the changes rung on Evolution and Dissolution from
eternity to eternity. Huxley did “ not very much care
to speak of anything as ‘ unknowable,’ and regrets that
he made the mistake of wasting a capital ‘ U ’ upon it.” 1
What he was sure about was that there were many
things concerning which he knew nothing, and which,
so far as he could see, were out of reach of human
faculties.

Whether these things are knowable by any one else is
exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge,
though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the
probabilities of the case. Relatively to myself, I am quite
sure that the region of uncertainty — the nebulous country in
which words play the part of realities — is far more extensive
than I could wish.2

But his indorsement of Mr Spencer’s contention as to

1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 31 1 ; and see Note, infra , p. 220.

2 lb., p. 31 1.

126

HUXLEY

the fundamental unity of the organic and the inorganic
was emphatic. In an address to the International
Medical Congress in 1881 he says: —

In nature, nothing is at rest, nothing is amorphous ; the
simplest particle of that which men in their blindness are
pleased to call “brute matter” is a vast aggregate of mo¬
lecular mechanisms performing complicated movements of
immense rapidity, and sensitively adjusting themselves to
every change in the surrounding world.

And living matter differs from other matter in degree and
not in kind ; the microcosm repeats the macrocosm ; and
one chain of causation connects the nebulous original of
suns and planetary systems with the protoplasmic founda¬
tion of life and organisation.1

Thirteen years earlier he had said the same thing on a
Sunday evening in November to an Edinburgh audience.
Like his wonderful discourse on “ Animal Automatism,”
delivered before the British Association at Belfast, his
Edinburgh “ lay sermon” on “ The Physical Basis of Life”
was spoken without dependence on note or reference,
and afterwards written out from memory for publication.
Following on the demonstration of the identical consti¬
tution of protoplasm as the raw stuff which builds up the
cell as the structural foundation of every living thing,
Huxley showed that the protoplasm itself is built up of
certain compounds, and that “ a threefold unity — namely,
a unity of power or faculty, a unity of form, and a
unity of substantial composition — pervades the whole
living world.”

1 Coll. Essays, iii. p. 371,

THE INTERPRETER.

127

In whatever form protoplasm is manifest, whether, as
in the very lowest plant or animal, without a nucleus,
or, as in the higher organisms, nucleated, there are
found four of the elementary substances, carbon,
hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in very complex union.
These non-living materials the plant, and the plant
alone, by some mysterious alchemy, converts into a
living thing, and upon this the animal sustains life.
It is not easy to determine where the plant ends and
where the animal begins, since some organisms exhibit
the characters of both, but, broadly speaking, the fact
abides that the animal depends on the vegetable. And,
clearly, the vegetable depends, plus the energy of the
sun, on the mineral. Each of the four elements of
which protoplasm is made up is, by itself, ineffective
to produce the organic ; united, they are stirred by
complex movements of astounding rapidity which con¬
stitute the phenomena of life at its simplest ; life whose
“ hidden bond connects the flower which a girl wears
in her hair with the blood which courses through her
youthful veins,” and the “brightly coloured lichen,
which so nearly resembles a mere mineral incrustation
of the bare rock on which it grows, with the painter,
to whom it is instinct with beauty, and the botanist,
whom it feeds with knowledge.” 1

The dependence of the highest upon the lowest
living things, and, to a certain extent, the close re¬
lation between them, is too obvious to be questioned ;

1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 13 1.

128

HUXLEY.

but so great is the reluctance to push things to con¬
clusions involving collision with traditionally - received
ideas, that this admission does not affect the common
belief in a difference of kind, say, between the standing
corn and the man who reaps it for his daily bread.
Still stronger is the feeling that life itself, whether in
the weed or the philosopher, is an “ entity ” in matter,
but not of it ; the view which, as has been seen, Dr
Alfred Russel Wallace and others hold concerning the
introduction of a spiritual faculty into man at some
stage of his development being extended, in the popular
mind, to the introduction of life on the globe as due to
the direct action of the Almighty. Huxley’s assertion,
that “ living matter differs from other matter in degree
and not in kind,” is, therefore, a hard saying, and few
there be who accept it. It seems to shatter “ the
mighty hopes that make us men.” The theory that
man has descended, in an unbroken chain, like all the
other higher animals, from simple life-forms, offends his
“ pride of life ” ; but the theory that there is no differ¬
ence in kind between him and the dust on which he
treads excites his repugnance, and stirs him to revolt.
It was repellent enough to make him one with the tardy
snail and the immobile oyster, for the question of his
immortality seemed thereby involved with that of theirs ;
but to make him one with the lifeless earth seemed the
very “ superfluity of naughtiness,” and the outcome of a
diabolical materialism.

Huxley knew that this cry would be raised when

THE INTERPRETER.

129

he went to Edinburgh. And although, as will be seen,
he made “ a protest, from the philosophical side, against
what is commonly called ‘ materialism,’ ” he found him¬
self “generally credited with having invented ‘proto¬
plasm ’ in the interests of ‘ materialism.’ ” 1 But he pro¬
ceeded to justify his words by the following comparison,
the design of which was to show that the ultimate
nature of matter is as fully a mystery as that of mind,
and that the terms in which we speak of the one are
equally applicable to the other.

Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, when brought
together under certain conditions, give rise to the com¬
plex stuff, protoplasm, which manifests what is known as
life. When two of these elements, oxygen and hydrogen,
are mixed in a certain proportion, and an electric spark
is passed through them, they disappear, and the result
is water. In the one case we talk of a “ vital force ”
having stirred the dead elements into living matter ; but
in the other case we do not talk of a something called
“aquosity” having blended the two invisible gases into
visible water. Is not the one process as mysterious as
the other?

Does anybody quite comprehend the modus opera?idi of
an electric spark, which traverses a mixture of oxygen and
hydrogen ?

What justification is there, then, for the assumption of the
existence in the living matter of a something which has no
representative or correlative in the not-living matter which

1 Lay Sermons, Preface, p. vii.

I

130

HUXLEY.

gave rise to it? What better philosophical status has
“vitality” than “aquosity”? ... If the phenomena ex¬
hibited by water are its properties, so are those presented
by protoplasm, living or dead, its properties. If the pro¬
perties of water may be properly said to result from the
nature and disposition of its component molecules, I can find
no intelligible ground for refusing to say that the properties
of protoplasm result from the nature and disposition of its
molecules. . . .

It may seem a small thing to admit that the dull vital
actions of a fungus or a foraminifer are the properties of
their protoplasm, and are the direct results of the nature of
the matter of which they are composed. But if their proto¬
plasm is essentially identical with, and most readily converted
into, that of any animal, I can discover no logical halting-
place between the admission that such is the case and the
further concession that all vital action may, with equal pro¬
priety, be said to be the result of the molecular forces of the
protoplasm which displays it. And if so, it must be true, in
the same sense and to the same extent, that the thoughts
to which I am now giving utterance, and your thoughts
regarding them, are the expression of molecular changes
in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital
phenomena.1

The origin of life remains, and will doubtless remain,
an unsolved problem, if for no other reason than the
absolute effacement of the primitive forms, the fragility
of which is to be inferred from all that is known of the
lowest organisms. But the problem of the origin of
water, without which life could not have been, also
remains unsolved. The chemist can both decompose
and produce water ; but, as Huxley asks, who can com¬
prehend the modus operandi of the electric spark ?

1 Coll. Essays, i. pp. 152, 154.

THE INTERPRETER.

131

Chemistry has also succeeded in manufacturing nearly
two hundred organic compounds from dead matter ;
Professor Britschli has even produced a substance which
simulates protoplasm, — but the arcana vittz remains
hidden. Nevertheless, noting what advances have been
made in organic chemistry, in molecular physics, and
in physiology, Huxley thinks that “it would be the
height of presumption for any man to say that the
conditions under which matter assumes the properties
we call 1 vital ’ may not be artificially brought together.”
The manifest intimate connection between vital and
electrical phenomena is a further reason against dog¬
matism on the subject. And since the “ scientific use
of the imagination ” has been the handmaid of progress,
it is permissible to speculate, as does Huxley, on the
possible mode of the beginning of life, whose “vital
spark,” once kindled, has, like the fire on the altar of
Vesta, known no extinguishment.

To say that, in the admitted absence of evidence, I have
any belief as to the mode in which the existing forms of life
have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense.
But expectation is permissible where belief is not ; and if it
were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically
recorded time to the still more remote period when the
earth was passing through physical and chemical condi¬
tions which it can no more see again than a man can
recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the
evolution of living protoplasm from not-living matter.

I should expect to see it appear under forms of great
simplicity, endowed, like existing fungi, with the power of
determining the formation of new protoplasm from such

132

HUXLEV.

matters as ammonium carbonates, oxalates, and tartrates,
alkaline and earthy phosphates, and water without the aid
of light. That is the expectation to which analogical
reasoning leads me ; but I beg you once more to recollect
that I have no right to call my opinion anything but an
act of philosophical faith.1

The success which has attended the search after
fundamental likeness between the earth and its living,
as well as not-living, contents, has followed all observa¬
tion into the nature and constitution of the system of
which the earth is one of the lesser members. While
the conditions prevailing in the sun and planets make
it certain that life, as we know it, cannot be present in
them, the differences between them and our globe are
only, using the term in its chemical sense, quantitative.
They are made of the same stuff as the globe itself.
So, broadly speaking, are the stars. The year 1859 is
memorable in science, not only for the publication of
the Origi?i of Species, but for the triumphant researches
of Kirchhoff and Bunsen into the chemistry of the
sun.

In 1802, one hundred and thirty years after Newton
had refracted a sun-ray on a prism, and shown that
light is made up of differently coloured rays, Wollaston,
using a thin slit to admit the ray, observed that it was
crossed by a few dark lines. In 1814 Fraunhofer
succeeded, by means of yet finer apparatus, in detecting
nearly six hundred of these lines. He, and following
observers, made shrewd guesses as to their meaning,

1 Coll. Essays , viii. p. 256.

THE INTERPRETER.

133

but another forty-five years passed before the riddle was
read. The details of its solution are given in popular
books on astronomy ; and here it must suffice to say
that the lines, which are now counted in their thousands,
reveal the secret of the chemical constitution of the sun,
and tell us that not only are iron, sodium, and some
thirty other elements present in his atmosphere, the
spectrum of iron alone numbering above two thousand
lines, but that the raw materials of protoplasm, notably
its most important constituent, carbon, are present also.1
Kirchhoff’s discovery was followed by Sir William
Huggins’s analysis of the light from stars and nebulae,
which proved that the former are made of like materials
as the sun, himself a star of no high magnitude, and
that the latter are gaseous, the vagrant comets having a
spectrum which is a compound of carbon and hydrogen.
The same astronomer also ingeniously discovered that
a minute displacement of the lines of their spectra
gave a key to the direction of the movements of the
stars in space, while their colours indicate whether they
are in the stages of youth, maturity, or decay.

It is a far cry from the apelike man to the nebula,
and yet, in the foregoing rapid summary of cosmic
processes, no warrant can be found for assumption of any
break in causal relations. Nevertheless, when Huxley
made the naked statement that there is no difference in
kind between living and not-living matter; and when

1 On the apparent absence of oxygen and nitrogen in the solar
atmosphere, see my Pioneers of Evolution, p. 165.

134

HUXLEY.

Tyndall, decking the same in rhetorical garb, said that
“all our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, all
our art — Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael —
are potential in the fires of the sun,” 1 2 there can be
little wonder that charges of the kind made by the
Presbytery of Belfast, that they “ignored the existence
of God, and advocated pure and simple materialism,”
were levelled against them.

Huxley anticipated this ; and in his Edinburgh
lecture, as later, more elaborately, in Hume and Helps
to the Study of Berkeley? he deals with subjects which
bring us face to face with the ultimate problems of
philosophy. He was no tyro in these : from his early
boyhood, when, reading Sir William Hamilton, he
found only “ cunning phrases for answers,” 3 his interest
in metaphysics had been deep and constant. He had
only scorn for the logomachies of the

“ pure metaphysicians,” who attempt to base the theory of
knowing upon supposed necessary and universal truths, and
assert that scientific observation is impossible unless such
truths are already known and implied, which to those who are
not “ pure metaphysicians ” seems very much as if one should
say that the fall of a stone cannot be observed unless the law
of gravitation is already in the mind of the observer.4

The roots of every system of philosophy lie deep among
the facts of physiology. No one can doubt that the organs
and the functions of sensation are as much a part of the
province of the physiologist as are the organs and functions

1 Fragments of Science, p. 453.

2 These fil-1 the sixth volume of Collected Essays.

2 Ante, p. 3. 4 Coll. Essays , vi. p. 62.

THE INTERPRETER.

135

of motion or those of digestion ; and yet it is impossible to
gain an acquaintance with even the rudiments of the
physiology of sensation without being led straight to one of
the most fundamental of all metaphysical problems. In fact,
the sensory operations have been, from time immemorial, the
battle-ground of philosophers.1

Wherefore, in the preface to the latest edition of
Hume , he caustically advises those “ who desire to
discourse fluently and learnedly about philosophical
questions to begin with the Ionians and to work
steadily through to the latest speculative treatise”; while
for those who “are animated by the much rarer desire
for real knowledge,” and who want to get a clear con¬
ception of the “ deepest problems set before the intellect
of man,” he sees no need to travel outside “ the limits
of the English tongue.” For this purpose “three
authors will suffice, namely, Berkeley, Hume, and
Hobbes.” To which select company there may be
added himself, with advice to master the sixth volume
of Collected Essays and the papers on Descartes.2

A materialist, as commonly understood, holds that
the universe is made-up of matter, of which all forms of
activity, whether mechanical or spiritual, are products.
The substance called matter is thus the substance of all
things. This shallow view Huxley wholly repudiated,
but not without protest against the vulgar idea of matter
entertained by the majority of persons. In an appendix
to a paper on the “ Metaphysics of Sensation ” he shows
that what is loosely and ignorantly spoken of as dead or
1 Coll. Essays , vi. p. 291. 2 lb ., i. pp. 166-250.

HUXLEY.

!36

inert and altogether base — a notion due to Platonists
and to theologians, both of the East and West — throbs
with rhythmic movements of incredible rapidity, and is
charged with that element of true mystery wherein
wonder has its abiding source.

The handful of soil is a factory thronged with swarms of
busy workers ; the rusty nail is an aggregation of millions of
particles moving with inconceivable velocity in a dance of
infinite complexity, yet perfect measure ; harmonic with like
performances throughout the solar system. If there is good
ground for any conclusion, there is such for the belief that
the substance of these particles has existed, and will exist,
that the energy which stirs them has persisted, and will
persist, without assignable limit, either in the past or in the
future. . . . Those who are thoroughly imbued with this view
of what is called “matter” find it a little difficult to under¬
stand why that which is termed “mind” should give itself
such airs of superiority over the twin sister, to whom, so far
as our planet is concerned, it might be hazardous to deny
the right of primogeniture.

Accepting the ordinary view of mind, it is a substance the
properties of which are states of consciousness, on the one
hand, and energy of the same order as that of the material
world (or else it would not be able to affect the latter) on the
other hand. It is admitted that chance has no more place
in the world of mind than it has in that of matter. Sensa¬
tions, emotions, intellections are subject to an order as strict
and inviolable as that which obtains among material things.1

The question follows, “ What can we know of what we
call matter or of what we call mind ? ” And the answer
is, So far as the ultimate nature of either is concerned,
nothing. Our knowledge of both is inferential ; it is

1 Coll. Essays , vi. p. 285.

THE INTERPRETER.

137

limited to the impressions conveyed by the senses to
the brain : in Huxley’s words, “ our knowledge is
restricted to those feelings of which we assume external
phenomena to be the cause.”

The senses are the gateways of knowledge, and we
assume that impulses vibrating from without enter these,
and are conveyed by the nerves to the central nervous
system — the seat of consciousness, or of knowledge of
what goes on in the mind. We see, we smell, we hear,
we taste, we touch ; but the colour, the scent, the sound,
the flavour, the hardness or softness, the warmth or cold¬
ness, are not in the things which we assume to be the
cause of these sensations. They are in what is called
“ states of consciousness.” How the passage is effected
from the nerve-cells to consciousness we have no means
of knowing. The thing is an insoluble mystery. The
mutual dependence of what we call the body and what
we call the mind is certain. We know nothing of mind
apart from matter. We know that the brain is the organ
of thought, and we cannot conceive of changes in the
nerve-cells being produced by consciousness, so that the
psychical seems wholly subordinate to the physical.
Every feeling, every thought, is accompanied by molec¬
ular changes, and Huxley expressed the belief, which
the “new psychology” may justify, that “we shall,
sooner or later, arrive at a mechanical equivalent of
consciousness, just as we have arrived at a mechanical
equivalent of heat.” 1 That marvellous faculty by which

1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 19 1.

HUXLEY.

things are remembered appears to be due to molecular
changes “ which give rise to a state of consciousness,
leaving a more or less persistent structural modification,
through which the same molecular changes may be re¬
generated by other agencies than the cause which first
produced them.” 1

Of course no sane person doubts the existence of an
external world, or cosmos, built up, in Lord Kelvin’s
phrase, “ of coarse-grained matter.” Atoms are not, as
Professor Rucker skilfully argued in his Presidential
Address on the “Fundamental Concepts of Physics”
to the British Association at Glasgow in 1901, “merely
helps to puzzled mathematicians, but physical realities,”
probably made up of simpler parts, modifications of
one prima materia. And in respect of force, the
several modes of motion are explicable only on the
assumption that particles of matter are being moved.
Hence the atomic theory, despite recent attacks, holds
the field.2 Concerning these things, the common con¬
sciousness of mankind brings the same report, but the
fact no less remains that we can only assume the exist¬
ence of beings with minds like our own. For they are
a part of the phenomena whose ultimate nature, as was
said above, we cannot know. There is “ only one
abstract certainty possible to man — namely, that at any
given moment the feeling which he has exists. All

1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 215.

2 For Professor Rucker’s Address, see Times , September 1,
1901.

THE INTERPRETER. 1 39

other so-called certainties are beliefs of greater or less
intensity.” 1 The poet-astronomer of Naishapur stretches
“ lame hands ” across the ages to the modern psycho¬
logist : —

“ We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-Shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show.”

But, as Huxley points out, although it is of small conse¬
quence whether we speak of the phenomena of matter
in terms of spirit, or of those of spirit in terms of matter,
since matter may be regarded as a form of thought, and
thought may be regarded as a property of matter, there
is every reason for using the materialistic terminology —

For it connects thought with the other phenomena of the
universe, and suggests inquiry into the nature of those
physical conditions, or concomitants of thought, which are
more or less accessible to us, and a knowledge of which
may help us to exercise the same kind of control over the
world of thought as we already possess in respect of the
material world : whereas the alternative, or spiritualistic,
terminology is utterly barren, and leads to nothing but
obscurity and confusion of ideas. . . . But the man of
science who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry,
slides from these formulae and symbols into what is com¬
monly understood by materialism, seems to me to place
himself on a level with the mathematician who should mis¬
take the xJs and y’s with which he works his problems for
real entities, and with this further disadvantage, as com¬
pared with the mathematician, that the blunders of the
latter are of no practical consequence, while the errors of

1 II. 262.

140

HUXLEY.

systematic materialism may paralyse the energies and
destroy the beauty of a life.1

In his repudiation of the coarser materialistic views
of the universe, and in his recognition of what insoluble
mystery attends the connection between the thoughts of
a man and the organ of those thoughts, Huxley was
under no delusion that he had disarmed old prejudices,
or secured any deserters from the orthodox camp. For,
in place of conceding anything, he had only made clearer
his hostility towards the supernatural explanations in
which alone his opponents found rest and satisfaction.
And seeing to what narrow dimensions the region once
covered by those explanations had shrunk before the
advance of the forces of natural knowledge, he pressed
on to conquest of what remained.

1 Coll. Essays i. pp. 164, 165.

i4i

IV.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

In a letter to his wife, written at Baden, in 1873,
Huxley says : —

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
there is nothing new in the ideas which lie at the bottom of
the movement, nor is any reconcilement possible between
free thought and traditional authority. One or other will
have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration,
which will have as side issues vast political and social
troubles. I have no more doubt that free thought will win
in the long-run than I have that I sit here writing to you, or
that this free thought will organise itself into a coherent
system, embracing human life and the world as one
harmonious whole. 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 delusions. I may be able to help a little in this
direction — perhaps I may have helped already.1

Until his retirement, twelve years afterwards, that
help was, perforce, rendered only fitfully ; but, once

1 I- 397-

142

HUXLEY.

master of his time, Huxley said that whether it was
long or short, he should devote it to the work outlined
in the papers on the “ Evolution of Theology.” 1 There
was to be no truce with “ that ecclesiastical spirit, that
clericalism, which is the deadly enemy of science.”
The battle had gone on, intermittently, for a quarter
of a century. A fortnight after the famous duel with
Wilberforce, when writing to Hooker about a proposed
scientific quarterly, Huxley jocosely said that its tone
would be “mildly episcopophagous,” 2 and in 1889 he
asks Professor Ray Lankester if he sees “ any chance of
educating the white corpuscles of the human race to de¬
stroy the theological bacteria which are bred in parsons.” 3
The author of Lay Sermons , let it be said, had the mak¬
ing of a preacher in him. In the fragment of auto¬
biography reprinted in the first volume of the Collected
Essays , he tells how in early childhood he turned his
pinafore wrong side forwards to represent a surplice,
and held forth to his mother’s kitchenmaids. And
the impression of his homiletic gifts has sly reference
in Bishop ThirlwalFs Letters to a Friend ,4 when, speak¬
ing of the Metaphysical Society (founded in 1869), he
says that “among the contributors to its proceedings
have been Archbishop Huxley and Professor Manning.”

Polemics, as Huxley said, “are always more or less
an evil.” But the lukewarmness which lets error and
corruption pursue their baneful course is a greater evil.
And in the questions at issue between the exponents of
1 Coll. Essays, iv. chap. viii. 2 I. 210. 3 II. 234. 4 P. 317.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

143

the doctrine of Evolution and the defenders of ortho¬
doxy and privilege there was no place for indifference
or compromise. It was guerre a outrance . The
supremacy of clericalism involves the thraldom of the
mind, because its submission to an authority claiming
supernatural origin, and, therefore, one not to be
questioned, save at the soul’s peril, was demanded. In
ordinary matters, the claimant to authority submits his
credentials, on the verification of which his claim is
admitted or rejected. And in matters of such high
import as the beliefs which rule a man’s life, it would
seem that the same method should apply. Yet the
notion is widespread, even among intelligent persons,
that the credentials required in mundane things are
not to be demanded in what are deemed higher things.
The spiritual “ powers that be ” — bishops, priests, and
deacons — “are ordained of God,” and the documents
on which their claims are based are exempt from
scrutiny. The prevalence of such a notion is explicable
only by the fact that the majority of people govern
their workaday lives on principles different from those
which operate in the creeds which they profess. They
rely, in lazy acquiescence, upon the assurances of the
official defenders of the faith that the “ Church’s one
foundation ” remains unshaken. “ Their faith,” in the
words of Professor W. James, “is faith in some one
else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most
the case.” For inquiry involves effort, and there is
ease in travelling along the line of least resistance.

144

HUXLEY.

In opposition, wide as the poles asunder, to this,

the improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to
acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the
highest of duties ; blind faith the one unpardonable 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 them, not because their verity is
testified by portents and wonders ; but because his experience
teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convic¬
tions into contact with their primary source, Nature — when¬
ever 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.1

And it was because clericalism demanded acceptance
of its claims in “ blind faith ” that Huxley would
make no terms with it.

“ I am very glad,” he writes to a correspondent, “ that
you see the importance of doing battle with the clericals.
I am astounded at the narrowness of view of many of our
colleagues on this point ! They shut their eyes to the ob¬
stacles which clericalism raises in every direction against
scientific ways of thinking, which are even more important
than scientific discoveries.

“ I desire that the next generation may be less fettered by
the gross and stupid superstitions of orthodoxy than mine has
been.” 2

He observed that the conversion of a man into a
“ clerk in holy orders” was not attended with any addi-
1 Coll. Essays, i. pp. 40, 41. 2 II. 234.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

145

tion to his intelligence. On the contrary, it leads to the
cramping of his intellect, since at a fluent period of life,
when he is on the threshold of its problems, he is re¬
quired to stunt the further development of his mind by
declaring that he accepts certain beliefs as final.1 Nor
does the clothing him with a shovel-hat, apron, and
gaiters “ in the smallest degree augment such title to
respect as his opinions may intrinsically possess.” 2 The
emphasising of this in the case of bishops was the more
necessary because the degree of importance with which
the lay mind invests any statement by a cleric is regu¬
lated by his position in the Church. Huxley’s “episco-
pophagy ” took humorous form in the story of a country
school lad who came near the boundary - line in an
examination, one of his blunders consisting in putting
the mitral valve, so-called from its resemblance to a
mitre, on the right side of the heart instead of on the
left side. “ On appeal, Huxley let him through, ob¬
serving, 1 Poor little beggar, I never got them [the
valves] correctly myself until I reflected that a bishop
was never in the right.’ ” 3

In opening the campaign, Huxley did not waste

1 “ If the clergy are bound down, and the laity unbound ; if the
teacher may not seek the Truth, and the taught may ; if the Church
puts the Bible in the hand of one as a living spirit and in the hand
of the other as a dead letter — what is to come of it ? I love the
Church of England. But what is to become of such a monstrous
system, such a Godless lie as this?” (To Professor Dawkins, 1862.)
— Letters of (the then Rev.) John Richard Green, p. no.

2 Coll. Essays , i. p. 249 ; and see Morley’s Diderot , ii. p. 50

(note). 3 II. 415.

K

146

HUXLEY.

powder and shot on that irreconcilable enemy of
knowledge and the liberty which is its fruit, the Roman
Catholic Church, “the one great spiritual organisation
which is able to resist, and must, as a matter of life and
death, resist the progress of science and modern civilisa¬
tion.” 1 He divided the clergy of the Established Church
into three sections : “ an immense body who are ignorant,
and speak out ; a small proportion who know and are
silent ; and a minute minority who know and speak ac¬
cording to their knowledge.” Only with the last-named
had he anything in common ; but his intellectual honesty
caused him to sympathise less with the “half-and-half
sentimental school,” represented by divines of the type
of Dean Farrar, than “with thoroughgoing orthodoxy,”
as represented by the late Mr Spurgeon. Of one and
all of them it may be said that his thoughts were not
their thoughts, nor his ways their ways. He dealt with
facts; they played with phrases. They acted as if “the
analysis of terms is the right way of knowledge, and
mistook the multiplication of propositions for the dis¬
covery of fresh truth.” 2 And he thought them lacking
in straightforwardness. His conversation was “Yea,
yea,” or “ Nay, nay ” ; theirs was evasive, or qualifying,
when a direct question was put to them. To him they
seemed to confuse much and to explain nothing. And
he felt that if men of science have not lightened our
darkness concerning many things, theologians have

1 Coll. Essays , iii. p. 120.

2 Rousseau , by John Morley, ii. p. 338.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST-

147

only deepened it. To mix with them was to inhale
a relaxing air wherein the fibres of veracity were
loosened.

Some time before his death, the decay of dogmatic
theology, which a changed intellectual atmosphere had
brought about, was followed by a revival of sacerdotal¬
ism, the force of which has increased rather than abated.
The result is a general materialising of “ aids to faith.”
Churches and services are more ornate ; the sensuous
stimuli of music, incense, and colour are brought into
play ; greater stress is laid on the importance of bap¬
tismal and other sacramental rites, with the consequent
aggrandisement of the sacerdotalist as their divinely
authorised administrator. The emotions have unwhole¬
some excitation ; the reason is drugged. A sermon — if
it be not a sleeping-draught — makes appeal to the in¬
tellect ; it may convert, or it may fail to convince. But
a rite requires unquestioning acceptance of its super¬
natural obligation and nature as the condition of its
efficacy. To partake in it demands no mental effort.
This thaumaturgy in religion has its correlatives in the
pseudo-mysticism of the present day, as in the spurious
remedies of “Christian Science” for diseases; in the
trickeries of spiritualism, whose phenomena, were they
true, would, as Huxley said, “ furnish an additional
argument against suicide”;1 in the charlatanry of
palmistry, astrology, and other quackeries, evidencing
how superficial are the changes in human nature. “ So
1 I. 420; and see Coll. Essays , v. pp. 341, 342.

148

HUXLEY.

little trouble,” says Thucydides, “ do men take in search
after truth ; so readily do they accept whatever comes
first to hand.” 1

Huxley was well equipped in historical knowledge.
When Dr St George Mivart cited Suarez and other
schoolmen in his criticisms on the Origin of Species , he
found his match in Huxley. The outlines of the course
of events following the death of Jesus, which he gives in
his essays on the “ Evolution of Theology,” show that he
knew ecclesiastical history better than many ecclesiastics
themselves, for these too often know it only in the
idealised or partisan forms presented by orthodox
historians. No thoughtful student of the past, with all
its cross-currents and complexities, will make the shame¬
ful story of religious wars and persecutions an occasion
of reproach against the Churches of to-day. Humanity
has a terrible indictment against theology, but the charge
cannot be laid at the door of our contemporaries. Never¬
theless, in the degree that the Church has not purged
herself of the old Adam of the anti-progressive spirit,
she stands condemned before the modern world, and
with no such plea as antiquity might offer. Her con¬
demnation is complete. Taking history no farther back
than the last century, it will be found that there was not
a movement, political, social, or intellectual, having as
its aim the bettering of the condition of the people,
which she did not oppose tooth and nail. She lifted no
voice against the barbaric criminal code under which.

1 I. 20 (Jowetl’s trans.)

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

149

well within the nineteenth century, two hundred offences
were punishable with death ; 1 her bishops opposed the
measures for the abolition of theological tests for public
offices, for the removal of disabilities on Roman Catholics,
Jews, and Dissenters ; in the abolition of slavery in
British possessions, and in the reform of the incredibly
horrible state of prisons, and of the inhuman treatment
of lunatics in this kingdom, she took no initiative ; she
fought against unsectarian elementary education ; she
still wages bitter war to enforce the teaching of her dis¬
credited dogmas ; and, to her even greater shame, fans
and fosters the spirit of militarism in temples on whose
walls are inscribed, “ On earth peace, and goodwill
towards men.” And, withal, trading on the ignorance
of the multitude, her ministers have the audacity to
claim credit for the removal of unjust and brutal
measures from the statute-book of the realm, and for
the general spread of humanitarianism ; whereas it is
solely to the development of sympathy born of know¬
ledge that these are due. The Church has tardily
followed where these have led. For these reasons,
written clear on the page of history, Huxley called the
“ ecclesiastical spirit the deadly enemy of science.”

But for the confusion which men make between the

1 Old Bailey. — William Keep, a lad of fourteen years of age,
was indicted for stealing a Bank of England note out of a letter
which had come into his possession in consequence of his having
been employed in the General Post Office as a sorter of letters. . . .
The jury found the prisoner — Guilty — Death. — Times , Nov. I, 1801.
The death-sentences were sometimes commuted.

HUXLEY.

150

letter and the spirit it should be needless to say that
Huxley had no quarrel — who can have ? — with religion,
defining this as “ a consciousness of the limitations of
man and a sense of an open secret which is impene¬
trable,” 1 and as “the reverence and love for an ethical
ideal, and the desire to realise that ideal in life which
every man ought to feel.” 2 The ideal will be low or
high according to the standard reached by a community,
but, whatever that standard may be, it represents the
attitude towards unseen or envisaged powers which
affect men deeply and constantly. No religion, how¬
ever repellent it may be to refined natures, has taken
root which did not adjust itself to, and answer, some
need of the human heart. And the measure of our
knowledge of the various faiths of mankind will be the
measure of our sympathy. What quarrel the evolu¬
tionist may have is with the letter of theology, “ which
killeth,” not with the spirit of religion, which “giveth
life.” As Huxley says —

The antagonism between science and religion, about
which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factiti¬
ous — fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious
people who confound a certain branch of science, theology,
with religion ; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted
scientific people who forget that science takes for its province
only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual compre¬
hension. . . . The antagonism of science is to the heathen
survivals and the bad philosophy under which religion
herself is often wellnigh crushed. And I trust that this

1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 33.

2 lb., v. p. 250.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

1 5 1

antagonism will never cease ; but that, to the end of time,
true science will continue to fulfil one of her most beneficent
functions, that of relieving men from the burden of false
science, which is imposed upon them in the name of
Religion.1

Superfluous to add, therefore, that Huxley was no
iconoclast : no man who is imbued with the spirit of
the doctrine of evolution, which links us to the past
as its products and finds a warrant for all that yet
has been, can be that. Regulation, not suppression,
of human nature, was his aim. Pie was as anxious as
any defender of the faith can be that religion should
“bring forth the peaceable fruits of righteousness”; his
care was to afford it free play by the removal of the
accretions which make it unlovely and a reproach
before the world. In an address delivered as far back
as 1871, he said that he could

conceive the existence of an Established Church which
should be a blessing to the community. A Church in which,
week by week, services should be devoted, not to the itera¬
tion of abstract propositions in theology, but to the setting
before men’s minds of an ideal of true, just, and pure living;
a place in which those who are weary of the burden of daily
cares should find a moment’s rest in the contemplation of
the higher life which is possible for all, though attained by
so few ; a place in which the man of strife and of business
should have time to think how small, after all, are the
rewards he covets compared with peace and charity.
Depend upon it, if such a Church existed, no one would
seek to disestablish it.2

1 Coll. Essays, iv. pp. 160, 163.

2 lb., i. p. 284.

152

HUXLEY.

And he not only looked with no favour upon criticism
that is wholly destructive ; he demurred, “ both as a
matter of principle and one of policy, to a great deal of
what appears as c free thought ’ literature.”

Heterodox ribaldry disgusts me, I confess, rather more
than orthodox fanaticism. It is at once so easy ; so stupid ;
such a complete anachronism in England, and so thoroughly
calculated to disgust and repel the very thoughtful and
serious people whom it ought to be the great aim to attract.
Old Noll knew what he was about when he said that it was
of no use to try to fight the gentlemen of England with
tapsters and serving-men. It is quite as hopeless to fight
Christianity with scurrility. We want a regiment of
Ironsides.1

The mode of attack thus rightly censured is well-
nigh obsolete. The old fatuous alternatives, which pre¬
sented Jesus as a divine being or an impostor, and the
Bible as an inspired book or a forgery, rarely enter into
modern methods of controversy. The age may not be
very earnest, but it is not flippant, in these matters.
Beliefs are no longer only attacked, they are explained.
Religions are no longer treated as wholly true or as
wholly false, as the inventions of designing priests or
as of supernatural origin ; but as the product of man’s
crude speculations concerning himself and his surround¬
ings, and of his spiritual needs, no matter in what repul¬
sive form these are satisfied. And a survey shows how
each one, with its outcome in creed and ritual, falls into
line with the processes of evolution : how, like organ-

1 II. 321.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

153

isms, all spring from common elements; how, like these,
they bear within themselves the traces of their stages of
development ; how natural selection acts upon them,
their survival depending on their power of adaptation,
and how, this failing, they perish and become fossilised
in the strata of obsolete creeds.

Beyond the general remark that religion arises, “ like
all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action and
interaction of man’s mind with that which is not in
man’s mind, and takes the intellectual coverings of
Fetichism or Polytheism ; of Theism or Atheism, of
Superstition or Rationalism,” 1 Huxley refrained from
speculations as to the particular primary impulses which
gave this or that shape to it. All such speculations —
and history, both past and present, has seen many of
them — are foredoomed to failure, because the “Naturall
seed of Religion ,” as Hobbes calls it,2 is the product of
roots that lie too deep down for discovery. They are
intertwined with man’s psychical development ; they are
fed from the same sources whence arise the psychical
faculties of animals ; and as the student of comparative
mythology and comparative theology must take counsel
with the anthropologist and folk-lorist, so must all of
them take counsel with the comparative psychologist
and the comparative physiologist.

In such spirit, then, Huxley advanced to an exam¬
ination of the “ venerable record of ancient life, miscalled

1 Coll. Essays , i. p. 138.

2 Leviathan : “Of Man,” ch. xii. pt. i.

154

HUXLEY.

a book/’1 on which clericalism rests its claims and its
creeds. A quarter of a century earlier there had been
talk about prosecuting Jowett for the heretical article in
j Essays and Reviews wherein he laid down what seemed
the irreverent canon, “ Interpret the Scripture like any
other book.” 2 It would be difficult to say in what other
way the Bible could be interpreted, and, since i860, the
comparative method, which has yielded valuable results
in all departments of research, has been applied un¬
challenged to the sacred text : —

From my present point of view [said Huxley, in the open¬
ing pages of his essays on the “ Evolution of Theology ”],
theology is regarded as a natural product of the operations
of the human mind, under the conditions of its existence, just
as any other branch of science, or the arts of architecture,
or music, or painting, are such products. Like them, the¬
ology has a history. Like them also, it is to be met with
in certain simple and rudimentary forms ; and these can be
connected by a multitude of gradations, which exist, or have
existed, among people of various ages and races, with the
most highly developed theologies of past and present
times.

We are all likely to be more familiar with the theological
history of the Israelites than with that of any other nation.
We may therefore fitly make it the first object of our studies ;
and it will be convenient to commence with that period which
lies between the invasion of Canaan and the early days of
the monarchy, and answers to the eleventh and twelfth
centuries B.c., or thereabouts. The evidence on which any
conclusion as to the nature of Israelitic theology in those
days must be based is wholly contained in the Hebrew

1 Coll. Essays , iv. p. 289.

2 P. 377 (1861 edition).

the controversialist.

155

Scriptures — an agglomeration of documents which certainly
belong to very different ages, but of the exact dates and
authorship of any one of which (except perhaps a few of the
prophetical writings) there is no evidence, either internal or
external, so far as I can discover, of such a nature as to
justify more than a confession of ignorance, or, at most, an
approximate conclusion. In these we have the stratified
deposits (often confused, and even with their natural order
inverted) left by the stream of the intellectual and moral life
of Israel during many centuries. And, embedded in these
strata, there are numerous remains of forms of thought
which once lived, and which, though often unfortunately
mere fragments, are of priceless value to the anthropologist.
Our task is to rescue these from their relatively unimportant
surroundings, and by careful comparison with existing forms
of theology to make the dead world which they record live
again. In other words, our problem is palaeontological, and
the method pursued must be the same that is employed in
dealing with other fossil remains.1

From these rich deposits of ancient life-forms Huxley
chose that which occurs in the twenty-eighth chapter of
the first book of Samuel, and which tells the story of
Saul’s visit to the witch of Endor.

On the eve of a decisive battle between the Israelites
and the Philistines, Saul, in despair because Jahveh had
“answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor
by prophets,” sought counsel (despite his having banished
wizards and their kin) of a woman “ that had a familiar
spirit,” literally, “a woman mistress of Ob,” which word
means primitively a leather bottle, such as a wrine-skin,
and is applied alike to the necromancer and to the spirit
evoked. It may be compared with the sacred snake-
1 Coll. Essays , iv. pp. 288, 289.

156

HUXLEY.

skin bags or the magic drums which form part of the
apparatus of the Red Indian medicine-men or sorcerers,
the use of Ob being probably suggested “ by the like¬
ness of the hollow sound emitted by a half-empty skin
when struck to the sepulchral tones in which the
oracles of the evoked spirits were uttered by the
medium.” 1 Disguising himself, Saul sought the woman,
who, at his request, called up the prophet Samuel from
Sheol, the under-world. The apparition is visible to
her, but invisible to the king (who had thrown off his
disguise), to whose inquiry she replies, “ I see Elohim
(god or gods) coming up out of the earth.” A conver¬
sation, through the woman as medium, follows between
Saul and Samuel, who, reproaching the king for dis¬
quieting him, says, “ Jahveh will deliver Israel also with
thee into the hands of the Philistines, and to-morrow
shalt thou and thy sons be with me ” in Sheol).

The story throws a flood of light upon ancient
Israelitic belief in necromancy and other forms of
magic, and in the abode of the dead. This last had
nothing in common with the elaborate conception of
a future state of rewards and punishments which was
incorporated into Hebrew eschatology during the Cap¬
tivity. The belief in Sheol may be equated with that
of the Greek belief in Hades, both these being survivals
of barbaric ideas about the fate of the departed. “ The
small and great are there, and the servant is free from

1 Coll. Essays , iv. p. 295. For various meanings of Ob see Art.
“ Divination” in Encyclopedia Biblica.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

157

his master.” The ancient Israelites thought that a man
consists of body and soul, and that after death the soul
continued to exist as a ghost in the under-world, whence
it could be summoned by the art of the necromancer,
retaining, on its appearance, some shadowy outline in
form and feature by which it could be identified. As
for Elohim, a term translated “ god ” (in contrast to
Jahveh or Jehovah, translated “Lord”), that word,
as was seen above, is applied to ghosts, and also to
various grades of gods. Its use by the woman is of
importance, as showing that the ghost had become in
some degree deified, a process of apotheosis which marks
the beginnings of ancestor-worship. The existence of
this widespread cult among the Israelites is evidenced
by the rude human images known as Teraphim. The
reference to Urim shows the prevalence of divination.
The Urim and Thummim appear to have been lots
which were carried by the high priest in the pocket of
his “ breastplate,” worn on the ephod. Besides these,
there are evidences of other modes of ascertaining the
will of heaven, as by rods,1 pointless arrows,2 and dreams,3
while the important part played by sacrifices, usually
burnt-offerings, in old Israelitic ritual, is too well known
to need more than allusion here.

The theological system thus outlined offers to the anthro¬
pologist no feature which is devoid of a parallel in the
known theologies of other races of mankind, even of those

1 Hosea iv. 12. 2 Ezekiel xxi. 23.

3 Genesis xx. 3, xxxi. 24 ; Judges vii. 13, &c.

158

HUXLEY.

who inhabit parts of the world most remote from Palestine.
And the foundation of the whole, the ghost-theory, is exactly
that theological speculation which is the most widely spread
of all, and the most deeply rooted among uncivilised men.1

There is nothing new in the foregoing to readers of
Kuenen’s great work on the Religion of Israel , nor to
those who have compared the archaic elements in the
Bible with the details of belief and ritual among the
lower races given in books of the type of Tylor’s
Primitive Culture and Frazer’s Golden Bough. But,
apart from the need of restating the obvious, Huxley’s
purpose and skill were shown in his focussing one or
more salient features of the old Israelite theology for
comparison with active beliefs among lower races of
whom he knew something at first hand, or concerning
whom he had cogent testimony. For the first of these
he drew on his Rattlesnake experiences. In December
1848 that vessel was anchored off Mount Ernest, an
island in Torres Straits. Huxley and a shipmate,
whom he calls B., went ashore, and in course of time
became intimate with an old native named Paouda.
The old man took to B. because he believed him to be
his father-in-law.

His grounds for that singular conviction were very re¬
markable. We had made a long stay at Cape York hard
by : and in accordance with a theory which is widely
spread among the Australians, that white men are the in¬
carnated spirits of black men, B. was held to be the
ghost of a certain Mount Ernest native, one Antarki, who
had lately died, on the ground of some real or fancied

1 Coll Essays , iv. p. 317.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

159

resemblance to the latter. Now Paouda had taken to wife
a daughter of Antarki’s, named Domani, and as soon as
B. informed him that he was the ghost of Antarki, Paouda
at once admitted the relationship and acted upon it. For,
as all the women on the island had hidden away in fear of
the ship, and we were anxious to see what they were like,
B. pleaded pathetically with Paouda that it would be very
unkind not to let him see his daughter and grandchildren.
After a good deal of hesitation and the exaction of pledges
of deep secrecy, Paouda consented to take B., and myself
as B.’s friend, to see Domani and the three daughters,
by whom B. was received quite as one of the family, while I
was courteously welcomed on his account. This scene made
an impression upon me which is not yet effaced. It left no
question on my mind of the sincerity of the strange ghost-
theory of these savages, and of the influence which their
belief has on their practical life.1

For the second, Huxley cites Mariner’s Accouiit of the
Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean,
published in 1816. When he was quite a youth William
Mariner joined the Port-au-Prince, a private ship of war
commissioned to cruise for prizes in certain latitudes,
and, failing success in that, to search for whales.2 Her
fate was to be boarded, plundered, and destroyed by the
natives of Lafooga, one of the Tonga islands, where
Mariner, to whom Finow, the chief, had taken a fancy,
spent four years before making his escape. He learned
the language and lived the life of the islanders, familiar¬
ising himself with their beliefs and customs. Concerning
their theology, he says —

The human soul, after its separation from the body, is
1 Coll. Essays , iv. pp. 317, 31 S. * Introd. to Mariner , i. p. xxv.

1 60

HUXLEY.

termed a hotooa (a god or spirit ; hotooa is the same as the
better-known atua ), and is believed to exist in the shape of
the body ; to have the same propensities as during life, but
to be corrected by a more enlightened understanding, by
which it readily distinguishes good from evil, truth from
falsehood, right from wrong ; having the same attributes as
the original gods, but in a minor degree, and having its
dwelling for ever in the happy regions of Bolotoo, holding
the same rank in regard to other souls as during this life :
it has, however, the power of returning to Tonga to in¬
spire priests, relations, or others, or to appear in dreams to
those it wishes to admonish ; and sometimes to the external
eye in the form of a ghost or apparition ; but this power
of reappearance at Tonga particularly belongs to the souls
of chiefs than of matabooles (a kind of “clients” in the
Roman sense, as Huxley explains in a footnote).1

The “atuas” include gods good and evil, home and
foreign, as well as the souls of men, so that they “are
exactly equivalent ” to the “ Elohim ” of the old
Israelites, while the description of the incidents attend¬
ing the “inquiry of” an atua, as the paroxysm and
excitation of the priest, correspond “ with the manifesta¬
tions of abnormal mental states among ourselves, and
furnish a most instructive commentary upon the story
of the witch of Endor.” Bolotoo answers to Sheol ;
among the several hundred gods recognised by “ the
Tongan theologians” one was greater than all, as among
the Israelites Jahveh was “god of gods.” And both in
Palestine and the Pacific Ocean the anger of the deities
was believed to be manifest as strongly in the case of

1 Coll. Essays , iv. p. 323 ; and Mariner , ii. p. 99 ff. (1827
edition).

THE CONTROVERSIALIST

161

neglect of ritual as for offences against the moral law.
The result of these and other comparisons noted in the
“ Evolution of Theology ” is to show how little is left to
choose between them.

One may read from the beginning of the book of Judges
to the end of the books of Samuel without discovering that
the old Israelites had a moral standard which differs, in any
essential respect (except perhaps in regard to the chastity of un¬
married women) from that of theTongans. Gideon, Jephthah,
Samson, and David are strong-handed men, some of whom
are not outdone by any Polynesian chieftain in the matter
of murder and treachery. . . . But it is surely needless to
carry the comparison further. Out of the abundant evidence
at command I think that sufficient has been produced to
furnish ample grounds for the belief that the old Israelites
of the time of Samuel entertained theological conceptions
which were on a level with those current among the more
civilised of the Polynesian islanders, though their ethical
code may possibly, in some respects, have been more
advanced.1

Therefore, to whatever high spiritual altitudes the
Israelites attained, and however distinctive may have
been their genius for religion, — a genius which shaped
their traditions, whether native or borrowed, in accord¬
ance with their belief in their special mission as instru¬
ments and witnesses of Jehovah among mankind, and
which inspired their prophets to utterances unsurpassed
in grandeur of expression and in loftiness of moral tone,
— the documents of their religion evidence that they
passed through stages of development corresponding to
those of other races ; stages of crude and coarse con-
1 Coll. Essays, iv. pp. 340, 345.

L

\62

HUXLEY.

ceptions of the gods, attended by a bloody ritual and a
low morality.

While Huxley was busy over this subject, there
appeared the article by Mr Gladstone, to the in¬
vigorating effects of which reference was made on page
50. In his notice of M. Reville’s book Mr Gladstone
took exception to the statement that while the Creation
story and other narratives in the Pentateuch “possess a
value of the highest order, they are not to be regarded
as other than a venerable fragment, well deserving atten¬
tion, of the great genesis of mankind.” This was re¬
ducing them to the level of ordinary secular history,
and hence Mr Gladstone sought to prove that, instead
of “ merely a lofty poem or a skilfully constructed
narrative,” we have, in the Hebrew cosmogony and
all that follows it, “a revelation of truth from God,”
and the “great foundation-chapter of the entire Scrip¬
tures, New as well as Old.” After defending the
astounding theory of the creation of something out
of nothing, he contended that the fourfold order of
the appearance of living things set forth in the Hebrew
cosmogony is confirmed by “ natural science.” He
cited a few antiquated authorities, the greatest among
these being Cuvier. But, as Huxley pointed out —

Cuvier has been dead more than half a century; and the
palaeontology of our day is related to that of his very much
as the geography of the sixteenth century is related to that
of the fourteenth. Since 1832, when Cuvier died, not only
a new world but new worlds of ancient life have been dis¬
covered, and those who have most faithfully carried on the

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

I63

work of the chief founder of palaeontology have done most
to invalidate the essentially negative grounds of his specu¬
lative adherence to tradition. If Mr Gladstone’s latest
information on these matters is derived from the famous
discourse prefixed to the “ Ossemens Fossiles” I can under¬
stand the position he has taken up ; if he has ever opened
a respectable modern manual of palaeontology or geology, I
cannot. For the facts which demolish his whole argument
are of the commonest notoriety.1

Concerning the controversy, “ It was not,” Sir Mount-
stuart Grant-Duff said, “ so much a battle as a mas¬
sacre.” Nevertheless, after annihilation, as it seemed to
the onlooker, by Huxley’s intellectual dynamite, Mr
Gladstone reappeared, as if never disturbed therefrom,
on the Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, as he called
it. In that book he reaffirmed, in ingenious variation of
phrase, all that Huxley had disproved concerning the suc¬
cession of life-forms, and, passing from the organic to the
inorganic, contended that “ the nebular theory supplies
a new and remarkable establishment of accord between
natural science on the one hand (so far as its reasoning
has proceeded) and the Book of Genesis on the other.” 2
Mr Gladstone had no sympathy with the invertebrate theo¬
logians who would transfer Christianity from a historical
to a psychological base. “We are,” he says, “ professors
of a religion which rests not so much on abstract prin¬
ciples as on matters of fact, inseparable from the revela-

1 Coll. Essays, iv. p. 144.

2 Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture , chap, vi., “ On Recent
Corroborations of Scripture from the Regions of History and
Natural Science.”

164

HUXLEY.

tion itself.” Such physical facts are the Creation, the
Incarnation, the Resurrection.1 As to the validity of
these, no doubt had ever possessed him. He writes as
a man of apparently open mind, but throughout life
every avenue had been shut against the admission of
anything telling against preconceptions which were
theological to the core. Mr George Russell wrote a
pamphlet on “ Mr Gladstone’s Religious Development.”
It should have been issued in blank, for Mr Gladstone
never had any such development. He was in the
nineties what he was in the thirties, save that with ad¬
vancing years he attached greater importance to ritual
observances. One evidence of this is his resignation of
membership of the Folklore Society in 1896, when the
Presidential Address of that year, dealing with the signi¬
ficance of that portion of Dr Frazer’s Golden Bough
which treats of the large body of barbaric rites con¬
nected with “ eating the god,” pointed out the relation
of these to the sacrament. His whilom colleague and
brother-Churchman, Lord Selborne, said of him that “ he
was too readily influenced by opinions which fell in with
his own wishes or feelings, and by the men who held
them, and was impatient of the dry light of facts when
facts told the other way. He could see into millstones
farther than other men, and, on the other hand, he had
a wonderful power of not seeing what he did not like.” 2

1 Impregnable Rock of Holy ScripHire , chap. ii. , “The Creation
Story.”

■ Memorials: Personal and Political, 1865-1895.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

165

The facts of natural science were accepted by him
only in so far as they were shown to be in accord with
the statements of Scripture ; and, as they could not be
ignored, the instruments of ambiguity and evasiveness,
which perform their disingenuous work in political con¬
troversy, were employed to bring these facts into seem¬
ing harmony with revelation. Hence the serious limita¬
tions to which Mr John Morley bore witness when
unveiling a statue to Mr Gladstone at Manchester in
October last year.

Something [he says] was left out in the wide circle of his
interests ; natural science in all its speculations and exten¬
sions and increase of scientific truth, extension of scientific
methods — all that no doubt constitute the central activities,
the intellectual activities of England and Europe during the
last forty years of his life — to all that he was not entirely open.1

I remember once going with him one Sunday afternoon to
pay a visit to Mr Darwin. It was in the seventies. As I
came away I felt that no impression had reached him that
that intellectual, modest, single-minded lover of truth — that
searcher of the secrets of nature — was one who from his
Kentish hill-top was shaking the world. But the omission of
scientific interest was made up for. The thought with which
he rose in the morning and went to rest at night was of the
universe as a sublime moral theatre, on which the Omni¬
potent Dramaturgist used kingdoms and rulers, laws and
policies, to exhibit a sovereign purpose for good, to light up
what I may call the prose of politics with a ray from the
Diviner Mind, and exalted his ephemeral discourses in a sort
of visible relation to the counsels of all time.

1 “Of natural science he was strangely ignorant.” — Mr Bryce,
“On some Traits of Mr Gladstone,” Fortnightly Review , January
1902, p. 13.

HUXLEY.

1 66

While Mr Gladstone, as wellnigh the last of the old
school of reconcilers, was renewing the hopeless attempt
to harmonise, by verbal legerdemain, Genesis and
Geology, contending, for example, that the six days
meant “ six chapters in the history of the creation,”
liberal theologians were surrendering belief in the
historical character of the so - called “ Mosaic ”
writings.

“ I cannot deny,” said Canon Bonney, speaking at the
Church Congress held in 1895 at Norwich, “that the increase
of scientific knowledge has deprived parts of the earlier books
of the Bible of the historical value which was generally attrib¬
uted to them by our forefathers. The story of the creation
in Genesis, unless we play fast and loose either with words
or with science, cannot be brought into harmony with what
we have learned from geology. Its ethnological statements
are imperfect, if not sometimes inaccurate. The stories of
the flood and of the Tower of Babel are incredible in their
present form. Some historical elements may underlie many
of the traditions in the first eleven chapters of that book, but
this we cannot hope to recover.”

In his essay on “ Hebrew Authority ” in Authority
and Archaeology ^ Dr Driver, Regius Professor of Hebrew
in the University of Oxford, and sitting, therefore, in
the chair of Pusey, says that

the general result of the archaeological and anthropological
researches of the past half-century has been to take the
Hebrews out of the isolated position which, as a nation, they
seemed previously to hold, and to demonstrate their affinities
with, and often their dependence upon, the civilisations by
which they were surrounded. . . . The civilisation which, in
spite of the long residence of the Israelites in Egypt, left its

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

167

mark, however, most distinctly upon the culture and litera¬
ture of the Hebrews was that of Babylonia. It was in the
East that the Hebrew traditions placed both the cradle of
humanity and the more immediate home of their own an¬
cestors ; and it was Babylonia which, as we now know,
exerted during many centuries an influence, once unsus¬
pected, over Palestine itself. . . . Thus the beliefs (of the
Hebrews) about the origin and early history of the world,
their social usages, their code of civil and criminal law,
their religious institutions, can no longer be viewed, as was
once possible, as differing in kind from those of other nations,
and determined in every feature by a direct revelation from
Heaven ; all, it is now known, have substantial analogies
among other peoples, the distinctive character which they
exhibit among the Hebrews consisting in the spirit with
which they are infused, and the higher principles of which
they are made the exponent. Their literature, moreover,
it is now apparent, was not exempt from the conditions to
which the literature of other nations was subject ; it embraces,
for instance, narratives relating to what we should term the
prehistoric age, similar in character and scope to those oc¬
curring in the literature of other countries. There are many
representations and statements in the Old Testament which
only appear in their proper perspective when viewed in the
light thrown upon them by archaeology. And in some cases
it is not possible to resist the conclusion that they must be
interpreted in a different sense from that in which past
generations have commonly understood them.1

The Creation-story, with which the book of Genesis
opens, can no longer be regarded “ as possessing any
value as a scientific exposition of the past history of the
earth.” There is now no question whatever that it was
derived from the Babylonian epic, the grotesque poly-

1 Pp. 7, 8-

HUXLEY.

1 68

theism of which is, in the Hebrew variant, superseded
by “ a severe and dignified monotheism.” The Sabbath
is, in all probability, an institution ultimately of Baby¬
lonian origin, not then as a rest-day for man, but “a day
when the gods rested from their anger.” Among the
Hebrews it was made subservient to human needs and
religious purposes ; but “ its sanctity is explained un-
historically, and ante-dated.”

Instead of the Sabbath, closing the week, being sacred,
because God rested upon it after His six days’ work of Crea¬
tion, the work of Creation was distributed among six days,
followed by a day of rest ; because the week, ended by the
Sabbath, already existed as an institution, and the writer
wished to adjust artificially the work of Creation to it. In
other words, the week determined the “days” of Creation,
not the “days” of Creation the week.1

The story of Paradise and the Fall, on the validity of
which a fundamental part of Christian dogma rests,
“ exhibits also points of contact with Babylonia, though
not so definite or complete as those presented by the
first Creation-story.” “ Eden itself,” remarks Professor
Sayce, “ is the Babylonian Eden or Chaldean ‘ plain ’ ;
its garden with the Tree of Knowledge is celebrated in
an old Babylonian poem (and depicted on Assyrian
monuments), and two of the rivers that water it are the
Tigris and Euphrates.” 2 The cherubim are “clearly no
native Hebrew conception,” and are probably derived

1 Authority and Archeology, p. 18.

2 The Temple Bible , Introd. p. xiv.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST. 169

either from the Hittite griffin or the Babylonian divine
winged bulls.1

In the story of the Flood “ we have a direct and
interesting parallel from Babylonia,” the original of which
was discovered in 1872. Canon Driver supplies an
admirable resume of the epic, whose subject is the
exploits of the hero Gilgamesh, told in twelve cantos.
The Deluge-story forms the eleventh of these cantos.

There are of course differences ; the Biblical account of
the Deluge was not, any more than the Biblical account of
Creation, transcribed directly from a Babylonian source ;
but by some channel or other — we can but speculate by
what — the Babylonian story found its way into Israel;
details were forgotten or modified : it assumed, of course, a
Hebrew complexion, being adapted to the spirit of Hebrew
monotheism, and made a vehicle for the higher teaching of
the Hebrew religion ; but the main outline remained the
same, and the substantial identity of the two narratives is
unauestionable.2

X

As for the historical existence of the “ Father of the
Faithful ” and other ancestors of Israel, Canon Driver
animadverts as follows on the assumptions of pseudo-
concessionists of the type of Professor Sayce : —

Mr Tomkins and Professor Sayce have produced works
on The Age of Abraham and Patriarchal Palestine , full
of interesting particulars, collected from the monuments,
respecting the condition, political, social, and religious, of

1 Encyclopedia Biblica , Art. “ Cherubim.”

2 Authority and Archeology , p. 27 ; and see Coll. Essays, iv.
pp. 239-286.

170

HUXLEY.

Babylonia, Palestine, and Egypt, in the centuries before the
age of Moses ; but neither of these volumes contains the
smallest evidence that either Abraham or the other patri¬
archs ever actually existed. Patriarchal Palestme , in fact,
opens with a fallacy. Critics, it is said, have taught “ that
there were no Patriarchs and no Patriarchal age, but, the
critics notwithstanding, the Patriarchal age has actually
existed,” and “it has been shown by modern discovery to
be a fact.” Modern discovery has shown no such thing.
It has shown, indeed, that Palestine had inhabitants before
the Mosaic age, that Babylonians, Egyptians, and Canaan-
ites, for instance, visited it, or made it their home ; but that
the Hebrew patriarchs lived in it there is no tittle of monu¬
mental evidence whatever. They may have done so ; but
our knowledge of the fact depends at present entirely upon
what is said in the Book of Genesis. Not one of the many
facts adduced by Professor Sayce is independent evidence
that the Patriarchs visited Palestine — or even that they
existed at all.1

Canon Driver will find materials for stronger criticism
of Professor Sayce in the Introduction contributed by
the latter to the Temple Bible , wherein not only Abraham,
but Adam and Noah, are said “ to form successive links
in the chain of Divine education, which with each fresh
starting-point becomes less general and more personal.”2
In the third of his Yale Lectures on Modern Criticism
and the Preaching of the Old Testament , Professor G.
A. Smith is in agreement with Canon Driver : —

While archaeology has richly illustrated the main outlines
of the Book of Genesis from Abraham to Joseph, it has
not one whit of proof to offer for the personal existence or
characters of the Patriarchs themselves. This is the whole

1 Authority and Archccology , p. 149.

2P. 15-

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

171

change archaeology has wrought : it has given us a back¬
ground and an atmosphere for the stories of Genesis ; it
is unable to recall or to certify their heroes.

The legendary character of the patriarchal age, which
may be compared with the heroic age in Greece, was
demonstrated by Kuenen, Knappert, and other Con¬
tinental scholars thirty years ago. “ Actual ancestors
are never distinctly traceable.” says Dillmann, a sound
statement pushed to extremes by Goldziher, who, follow¬
ing the late Professor Max Muller’s philological methods,
resolved Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob into sun and sky
myths, Jacob’s twelve sons being the moon and eleven
stars. Steinthal, with more warrant, converted Samson,
the “shining one,” into a solar hero whose labours
correspond to those of Hercules. But such specula¬
tions are of slight importance, since the major fact of
the unhistorical foundation of the early Hebrew narra¬
tives is admitted. Canon Driver represents the views
accepted by every modern scholar having claim to
authority. They are adopted by the contributors to
the Encyclopedia Biblica 1 — a work in which Huxley
would have found the justification of all for which he
contended ; they are in course of adoption in text¬
books, and will, at no long interval, be quietly admitted
into “ Bible helps ” and suchlike manuals issued by
the orthodox publishing societies. In the preface to the
most recent History of the Hebrews , its author, the Rev.

1 Edited by Canon Cheyne, Oriel Professor of the Interpretation
of Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford, and J. Sutherland
Black, LL.D.

172

HUXLEY.

R. L. Ottley, says : “ It is well to recognise the fact that
the patriarchal period is described to us in narratives
which were compiled in their present form about a
thousand years later than the events they describe, and
of which, therefore, as Professor G. A. Smith truly
observes, ‘ it is simply impossible for us at this time
of day to establish the accuracy.’ ”

When the source of the cosmogonic and other legends
was discovered, it was assumed that their presence in
the Old Testament was due to the contact of the Jews
with Babylonian ideas during the Exile. But this did
not account for the very great modifications which the
legends had undergone before their adoption into the
final redaction of the Pentateuch — modifications involv¬
ing long processes of elimination of polytheistic elements.
Happily, the discovery of a number of cuneiform tablets
at Tel-el-Amarna in Egypt in 1887 throws light upon
the difficulty. They show that, at about 1400 b.c.,

Palestine and the neighbouring countries formed an Egyp¬
tian province under the rule of Egyptian governors, stationed
in the principal towns, and (what is more remarkable) com¬
municating with their superiors in the Babylonian language,
thus affording conclusive evidence that for long previously
Canaan had been under Babylonian influence.1

It is therefore in the highest degree probable that the
Babylonian legends had been imported into Canaan
before the fifteenth century b.c., and that on the settle¬
ment of the Israelites in that country, they incorporated

1 Authority and Archaology, p. 72.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

173

these legends into their stock of traditions. Down to
the eighth century b.c., the materials of Israelitic history
existed only in fragmentary and unsettled form, made up
of songs celebrating the deeds and prowess of heroes ;
of scraps of law ; and of legendary and actual history
gathered from different sources and spread over many
centuries. To these inchoate materials priestly and
prophetic hands gave shape, the one laying stress
on the ceremonial law, the other laying stress on
the moral law, but both emphasising the supremacy
of Jahveh, who, after slow emergence from the nature-
stage as a mountain -god, manifest in fire and burn¬
ing-bush, had become invested with an awful holi¬
ness. Every song and saga was adapted to “the law,
the prophets, and the writings,” and charged with the
conviction of the mission of Israel as the chosen nation ;
and hence its religion must be studied in the light of
its history, and its history in the light of its religion.
Despite these admissions, of which sufficing examples
have been given, we find Canon Driver and his brother
theologians still justifying Huxley’s gravamen in devoting
themselves

to the end of keeping the name of “ Inspiration ” to suggest
the divine source, and consequent infallibility, of more or
less of the Biblical literature, while carefully emptying the
term of any definite sense. For “plenary inspiration ” we
are asked to substitute a sort of “inspiration with limited
liability,” the limit being susceptible of indefinite fluctuation
in correspondence with the demands of scientific criticism.
When this advances that at once retreats.

HUXLEY.

174

This Parthian policy is carried out with some dexterity ;
but, like other such manoeuvres in the face of a strong foe,
it seems likely to end in disaster. It is easy to say, and
sounds plausible, that the Bible was not meant to teach
anything but ethics and religion, and that its utterances on
other matters are mere obiter dicta : it is also a specious
suggestion that inspiration, filtering through human brains,
must undergo a kind of fallibility contamination ; and that
this human impurity is responsible for any errors, the exist¬
ence of which has to be admitted, however unwillingly.

But how does the apologist know what the Biblical
writers intended to teach, and what they did not intend
to teach ? And even if their authority is restricted to
matters of faith and morals, who is prepared to deny that
the story of the fabrication of Eve, that of the lapse of
innocence effected by a talking snake, that of the Deluge
and demonological legends, have exercised, and still exercise,
a profound influence on Christian theology and Christian
ethics ? 1

Here Huxley again reaches the core of the matter.
There was a consistency in the old theory of verbal
inspiration ; there is none in the theory of a divine and
human element in the Scriptures, since there is no
possible test by which the one can be distinguished
from the other. And the decision as to what is, and as
to what is not, revelation, would hardly have been left
by the Holy Spirit to the creed-makers and the critics.
When Canon Driver speaks of the “ spirit of the legend
of the Creation being changed in the light of revela¬
tion,” and of the Israelite writer as “gifted by the Holy
Spirit ” ; when Professor Sayce says that “ the language

1 Coll. Essays , iv. p. viii.

TITE CONTROVERSIALIST.

175

of Genesis rises to the height of the revelation it con¬
tains,” and when Mr Ottley talks of the “ inspiration
which we justly attribute to the Old Testament writers,”
they are each playing with names to which there are no
correspondent realities. As Professor Goldwin Smith
puts it —

If it was from the Holy Spirit that these narratives emanated,
how can the Holy Spirit have failed to let mankind know
that in reality they were allegories ? How could it allow
them to be received as literal truths, to mislead the world
for ages, to bar the advance of science, and, when science at
last prevailed, to discredit revelation by the exposure?
Besides, to maintain the symbolical truths of Genesis is
almost as hard as to maintain its literal truth.1

Obviously, the effort to retain the saving clause of a
revelation in a miscellaneous collection of writings of
uncertain date and authorship, and of disputed mean¬
ing, is due to the fact that the Christian doctrine
of the Atonement is bound up with the story of the
Fall. The legend of Eden is the keystone of the arch
which supports the whole Christian scheme of redemp¬
tion, and the evidence of palaeontology has disproved
the Pauline teaching that “ death came into the world
by sin.”

But, in the meantime, while the learned among them
still hesitate to follow facts to their only possible con¬
clusion, the great mass of the unlearned clergy will have
warrant for the indiscriminate reading of the legends of
a talking ass ; an arrested sun ; of the stories of Simeon
1 Guesses at the Riddle of Existence, p. 55.

176

HUXLEY.

and Levi’s treachery and Jehu’s butcheries ; of the high
ethical teaching of the Prophets ; and of the beatitudes
on the meek, the peacemakers, and the pure in heart —
as equally integral parts of writings inspired “ by the
Holy Spirit.” Every Sunday in thousands of churches
their congregations are still told that “God Himself
spake all these words, saying, In six days the Lord
made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is,
and rested the seventh day : wherefore the Lord blessed
the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.” 1 Thus, as Emerson
says, “ a vast carcass of tradition is exhibited every year
with as much solemnity as a new revelation.”

Criticism was not to be arrested by the blank page
which separates Malachi from Matthew ; but opprobrium
greeted the critic.2

Destroy the foundation of most forms of dogmatic Christi¬
anity contained in the second chapter of Genesis, if you
will ; the new ecclesiasticism undertakes to underpin the
structure, and make it, at any rate to the eye, as firm as
ever; but let him be anathema who applies exactly the
same canons of criticism to the opening chapters of
“ Matthew” or of “ Luke.” School children may be told that

1 The clergy “are either propagating what they may easily know,
and therefore are bound to know, to be falsities ; or, if they use
the words in some non-natural sense, they fall below the moral
standard of the much-abused Jesuit.” — Coll. Essays, ii. p. 146.

2 Bishop (then Canon) Gore admits that the same criticism must
be applied to the New Testament as is applied to the Old, but he
qualifies this with the cryptic remark that “because the historical
and literary conditions in the two cases are in general very different,
the result also will be in general very different.” — Pilot, 10th Aug.
1901.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

177

the world was by no means made in six days, and that
implicit belief in the story of Noah’s Ark is permissible
only, as a matter of business, to their toymakers ; but they
are to hold for the certaintest of truths, to be doubted only
at peril of their salvation, that their Galilean fellow-child
Jesus, nineteen centuries ago, had no human father.1

In treating the Old Testament “like any other book,”
Huxley chose as a test case the interview of Saul with
the ghost of Samuel through the medium of a witch.
In treating the New Testament “like any other book,”
he chose as a test case the story of Jesus exorcising
demons from a man and permitting them to enter into
two thousand swine, “ to the great loss and damage of
the innocent Gadarene owners.” In both cases, there¬
fore, the question of the existence of spirits is raised.
His reason for the selection was that in the course of
discussions in the years 1889-1891 “it had been main¬
tained by the defenders of ecclesiastical Christianity that
the demonology of the books of the New Testament is
an essential and integral part of the revelation of the
nature of the spiritual world promulgated by Jesus of
Nazareth.” So far he was in agreement with them.

Belief in spirits, good and bad, guardian angels and
maliceful demons, beings filling an intermediate place as
lower than gods and greater than men, is a survival of
savage ideas as to the presence of innumerable spirits
everywhere, and an impulse in certain directions was
given to this belief among the Jews during the Exile.

1 Coll. Essays, v. p. xi.

M

I7S

HUXLEY.

The ancient Babylonian idea that disease is due to
demons (a belief common to barbaric peoples, among
whom disease and death are not regarded as natural
events), whose expulsion was the business of the exorcist,
struck root in Judaism, and hence we find that the
references to evil spirits are more frequent in the New
Testament than in the Old. “ Belief in possession is
distinctive of late Jewish times,” 1 as is that in angels,
who become the appointed “ messengers ” between
Jahveh and men ; on whose duties as servants before
the heavenly throne the prophets, notably Ezekiel and
Zechariah, enlarge ; and whose presence as attendants
on the “ Son of man ” at the Judgement-Day is dwelt
upon by Jesus.

It is plain as language can make it, that the writers of the
Gospels believed in the existence of Satan and the subordi¬
nate ministers of evil as strongly as they believed in that of
God and the angels ; and that they had an unhesitating
faith in possession and in exorcism. No reader of the first
three Gospels can hesitate to admit that, in the opinion of
those persons among whom the traditions out of which they
are compiled arose, Jesus held, and constantly acted upon,
the same theory of the spiritual world. Nowhere do we
find the slightest hint that he doubted the theory, or ques¬
tioned the efficacy of the curative operations based upon it.2

The writer of the article “ Demons ” in the Encyclopedia
Biblica says : “ There is no sign on the part of Jesus, any
more than on the part of the evangelists, of mere accom¬
modation to the current belief. It is true that ‘ Satan ’

1 Encyclopaedia Biblica : Art. “Demons.”

2 Coll. Essays, v. p. 193.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

179

is used metaphorically in the rebuke of Peter (Matt. xvi.
23) and that ‘unclean spirit’ is figurative in Matt. xii.
43. Acceptance of the current belief is clearly at the
basis of the argument of Jesus with the Pharisees (Luke
xi. 16-26); . . . and that he believed in the power of
others besides himself and his disciples to expel demons,
in some sense at any rate, seems clear in the presence of
such passages as Matt. xii. 27 and Luke xi. 19, where
he attributes the power to the disciples of the Pharisees.
He recognises also the fact that similar success was
attained by some who used his name without actually
following him (Mark ix. 38) or without being more than
professed disciples.” 1 And the author of Exploratio
Evangelicci says that “it is probable Jesus accepted
the hypothesis of demoniac possession as easily as he
accepted the hypothesis that the sun moves round the
earth.” 2 In the declaration that he cast out devils
(Luke xiii. 32), and his bestowal of the like power upon
his disciples (Luke ix. 1) ; in the story of the temptation ;
in the warning that the wicked would depart into ever¬
lasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels (“ the
doctrine of eternal damnation is a Judaistic survival of
grossly immoral character”5), no ingenuity can distort
the fact that Jesus shared the common demonological
belief of his time and people.

1 See quotation to the same effect, from Dr Alexander’s Bib/.
Cyclopedia , given in Coll. Essays , v. p. 217.

2 P. 225.

3 A Critical History of a Future Life. By R. H. Charles, D.D.,
p. 31 1.

i8o

HUXLEY,

And the issue which Huxley raised is as clear as it is
serious : —

When such a story as that about the Gadarene swine is
placed before us, the importance of the decision, whether it
is to be accepted or rejected, cannot be overestimated. If
the demonological part of it is to be accepted, the authority
of Jesus is unmistakably pledged to the demonological system
current in Judea in the first century. The belief in devils,
who possess men and can be transferred from men to pigs,
becomes as much a part of Christian dogma as any article of
the creeds. If it is to be rejected, there are two alternative
conclusions. Supposing the Gospels to be historically accu¬
rate, it follows that Jesus shared in the errors respecting the
nature of the spiritual world prevalent in the age in which he
lived, and among the people of his nation. If, on the other
hand, the Gospel traditions give us only a popular version of
the sayings and doings of Jesus, falsely coloured, and dis¬
torted by the superstitious imaginings of the minds through
which it had passed, what guarantee have we that a similar
unconscious falsification, in accordance with preconceived
ideas, may not have taken place in respect of other reported
sayings and doings? What is to prevent a conscientious
inquirer from finding himself at last in a purely agnostic
position with respect to the teachings of Jesus, and conse¬
quently with respect to the fundamentals of Christianity?1

The old argument that miracles are impossible, because
contrary to the order of nature, is no longer advanced,
since its force is limited to what we infer from our
experience of that order. The fact that a certain thing
has not happened within our knowledge is no proof that
it never happened in the past, or that it can never happen
in the future. Nothing, as Huxley points out, is to be

1 Coll . Essays , v. pp. 193, 194 ; and see p. 218.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

1 8 1

declared “ impossible,” except contradictions in terms,
as a round square, a present past, or the intersection of
two parallel lines. None of us have seen a centaur or a
griffin, but the existence of such monsters is conceivable ;
so with the miracles reported in the Old and New Testa¬
ments or in the Acta Sanctorum — they are conceivable
by the imagination, however repellent to the reason.
And the argument which alone has force against miracles
is, that as their alleged occurrence is an event lying out¬
side our experience of an unbroken uniformity of nature,
belief in them must be determined by the validity of the
evidence. And the more improbable the character of
the alleged miracle, the more cogent must be the evi¬
dence in its support. Dealing with the miracles narrated
in the Gospels, it would seem only reasonable, before
accepting the truth of the story, to expect that in the
case of documents for which inspiration is claimed
there should be no discrepancies in the record ; that
the Holy Spirit would have protected the revelation
from error and obscurity. Under this test the evidence
breaks down. An examination of a work published by
the Religious Tract Society, under the unconsciously
ironical title, Harmony of the Gospels , brings out the
discord between them. Upon a matter so momentous
in its assumed bearings on human destiny as the Virgin
Birth (to which the earliest of the Synoptics makes no
reference) there is no agreement ; while the accounts of
the character of the last supper, of the last hours of
Jesus on the cross, and of the events following his

HUXLEY.

182

alleged resurrection, vary irreconcilably. A recent
defender of the faith remarks that “ the tale of the
physical resurrection of Jesus belongs evidently to the
same circle of thought as that of the miraculous birth.
It shows a love of the marvellous ; is deeply tinged with
materialism ; and rests on a historical substruction which
falls to pieces on a careful examination.” 1 So with the
Gadarene story ; so with the story of the feeding of
several thousand with a few loaves, with the result that
“ the quantity of the fragments of the meal left over
amounted to much more than the original store ” : the
reports differ. The explanation, hitherto arrested and
darkened by theories of inspiration, is obvious. With
the abandonment of those theories every difficulty
vanishes. The Gospels are the handiwork of men who
lived in an age when any conception of the uniformity
of nature was foreign to the mind ; men in whom the
critical faculty of weighing of evidence was wholly lacking,
and who set down, each in his own fashion, stories of
events said to have happened many years before — stories
which had therefore filtered through many channels ;
fallible hearers repeating them to fallible writers, whose
honesty and sincerity are not doubted, but whose com¬
petency is questioned.

As Dr Sutherland Black says in his admirably com¬
pendious article on the “Gospels” in Chambers s Encyclo¬
pedia, “no one of them is a primary document in the
sense of having been written in its present form from
1 Exploratio Evangelic a, p. 255.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST. 1 83

direct personal knowledge ; and it is obvious that each
succeeding evangelist, in availing himself of the labours
of his predecessors, did so with a feeling of perfect
freedom, not claiming for himself, nor according to his
fellows, nor expecting for either from the church, any
title to authority as infallible.” That authority was
claimed for them by the framers of the Canon, fallible
men determining what is infallible ; men whose critical
capacity and materials for decision are hardly warrant
for the burden which they have for centuries, unchal¬
lenged, laid upon more competent judges. “ The times
of the first Church were times of excitement ; when the
appeal was not to the questioning, thinking understand¬
ing, but to unheeding, all-venturing emotion, to that
lower class 4 from whom faiths ascend ’ ; not to the cul¬
tivated class by whom they are criticised.” 1 Huxley’s
tribute to the service rendered to human kind by the
Bible (see ante , p. 34) adds emphasis to his protest
against the evil of which the doctrine of its infallibility
has been fruitful.

The pretension to infallibility, by whomsoever made, has
done endless mischief ; with impartial malignity it has
proved a curse alike to those who have made it and those
who have accepted it : and its most baneful shape is book
infallibility. For sacerdotal corporations and schools of
philosophy are able, under due compulsion of opinion, to
retreat from positions that have became untenable ; while
the dead hand of a book sets and stiffens, amidst texts and
formulae, until it becomes a mere petrifaction, fit only for the

1 Literary Studies. By Walter Bagehot, ii. p. 46.

184

HUXLEY.

function of stumbling-block which it so admirably performs.
Wherever bibliolatry has prevailed, bigotry and cruelty have
accompanied it. It lies at the root of the deep-seated, some¬
times disguised, but never absent, antagonism of all the
varieties of ecclesiasticism to the freedom of thought and
to the spirit of scientific investigation. For those who look
upon ignorance as one of the chief sources of evil, and hold
veracity, not merely in act but in thought, to be the one
condition of true progress, whether moral or intellectual, it is
clear that the Biblical idol must go the way of all other idols.
Of infallibility in all shapes, lay or clerical, it is needful
to iterate with more than Catonic pertinacity, Dele?ida est }

In the controversy over the Gadarene story, the
authenticity of which was defended by Dr Wace and
Mr Gladstone, Huxley raised the question whether
the ever - accumulating experience of mankind con¬
cerning the non - intrusion of the supernatural in the
sequence of phenomena was to be regarded as of no
account as against the story of demon-possessed pigs.
For history shows that all advance in knowledge has
caused recession of belief in miracle, and that the
farther back inquiry is pushed the more active is that
belief. And the argument that miracles ceased at a cer¬
tain stage, the date of which is a hotly debated question
among ecclesiastics, has no force if they were wrought as
signs and wonders to remove unbelief, since if that was
their purpose the need of them is greater than ever.
As was his wont, Huxley went straight to the point.

I am not more certain about anything than I am that the

1 Coll. Essays , iv. p. 10.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST. I 85

evidence tendered in favour of the demonology of which the
Gaderene story is a typical example is utterly valueless.1

Everything that I know of physiological and pathological
science leads me to entertain a very strong conviction that
the phenomena ascribed to possession are as purely natural
as those which constitute small-pox ; everything that I know
of anthropology leads me to think that the belief in demons
and demoniacal possession is a mere survival of a once uni¬
versal superstition, and that its persistence at the present
time is pretty much in the inverse ratio of the general
instruction, intelligence, and sound judgement of the popu¬
lation among whom it prevails. Everything that I know of
law and justice convinces me that the wanton destruction of
other people’s property is a misdemeanour of evil example.
Again, the study of history, and especially of the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, leaves no shadow of
doubt on my mind that the belief in the reality of possession
and of witchcraft, justly based, alike by Catholics and Prot¬
estants, upon this and innumerable other passages in both
the Old and New Testaments, gave rise, through the special
influence of Christian ecclesiastics, to the most horrible per¬
secutions and judicial murders of thousands upon thousands
of innocent men, women, and children. And when I reflect
that the record of a plain and simple declaration upon such
an occasion as this, that the belief in witchcraft and pos¬
session is wicked nonsense, would have rendered the long
agony of medieval humanity impossible, I am prompted to
reject, as dishonouring, the supposition that such declara¬
tion was withheld out of condescension to popular error.2

The Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse
assert the existence of the devil, of his demons and of hell,
as plainly as they do that of God and his angels and heaven.
It is plain that the Messianic and the Satanic conceptions of
the writers of these books are the obverse and the reverse of

1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 206.

2 lb., pp. 215, 216.

HUXLEY.

1 86

the same intellectual coinage. If we turn from Scripture to
the traditions of the Fathers and the confessions of the
Churches, it will appear that, in this one particular, at any
rate, time has brought about no important deviation from
primitive belief. From Justin onwards it may often be a
fair question whether God, or the devil, occupies a larger
share of the attention of the Fathers. It is the devil who
instigates the Roman authorities to persecute ; the gods and
goddesses of paganism are devils, and idolatry itself is an
invention of Satan ; if a saint falls away from grace, it is by
the seduction of the demon ; if heresy arises, the devil has
suggested it ; and some of the Fathers go so far as to chal¬
lenge the pagans to a sort of exorcising match, by way of
testing the truth of Christianity. Medieval Christianity is
at one with patristic, on this head. The masses, the clergy,
the theologians, and the philosophers alike, live and move
and have their being in a world full of demons, in which
sorcery and possession are everyday occurrences. Nor did
the Reformation make any difference. Whatever else Luther
assailed, he left the traditional demonology untouched ; nor
could any one have entertained a more hearty and un¬
compromising belief in the devil than he and, at a later
period, the Calvinistic fanatics of New England did.
Finally, in these last years of the nineteenth century, the
demonological hypotheses of the first century are, explicitly
or implicitly, held and occasionally acted upon by the
immense majority of Christians of all confessions.1

But although this be so with the loose adherents of
current creeds ; although the man who smiles when he
hears the story of the demons passing into the bodies of
terrified swine has a trembling of soul when he hears of
the temptation of Jesus by the devil, so that, feeling
scepticism to be somewhat perilous, he carries his belief

1 Coll. Essays , v. pp. 322, 323.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

IS/

in demonology to a “ suspense account,” Huxley added
that he ventured “to doubt whether, at this present
moment, any Protestant theologian who has a reputa¬
tion to lose will say that he believes the Gadarene
story.”

Dr Wace at once retorted that, so far as he was con¬
cerned, the doubt had no foundation. “ I repeat,” he
said, “ that I believe it, and that Mr Huxley has
removed the only objection to my believing it,” namely,
that to reject it would be denial of the veracity of Jesus.
While humorously disclaiming any responsibility for the
confirmation of Dr Wace’s belief that “ the spiritual
world comprises devils, who, under certain circum¬
stances, may enter men and be transferred from them
to four-footed beasts,” 1 Huxley could but admire the
courage, whatever might be the opinion he held of the
intelligence, of his opponent. “ Dr Wace,” he said,
“has raised for himself a monument cere perennius .”
Huxley was charitably silent as to the appropriate
inscription to be put on it.

In the attack upon agnosticism which led to the
controversy, Dr Wace accused the agnostics of thus
dubbing themselves to avoid the “ unpleasant signifi¬
cance” attaching to the term “infidel,” which, like
“freethinker,” strange as it may seem in this twentieth
century, still appears to convey reproach. And he
added, in minatory tartness, that “it is, and ought to
be, an unpleasant thing for a man to have to say

1 Coll. Essays , v. p. 415.

1 88

1IUXLEY.

plainly that he does not believe in Jesus Christ.” 1
Whatever vague threat the word “ unpleasant ” might
convey, whether hints of the secular arm, or social
ostracism, or eternal punishment, any possible penalty
was not likely to weigh with Huxley. He retorted
that the proposition

that “ it ought to be” unpleasant for any man to say anything
which he sincerely and, after due deliberation, believes, is,
to my mind, of the most profoundly immoral character. I
verily believe that the great good which has been effected in
the world by Christianity has been largely counteracted by
the pestilent doctrine on which all the Churches have in¬
sisted, that honest disbelief in their more or less astonishing
creeds is a moral offence, indeed a sin of the deepest dye,
deserving and involving the same future retribution as
murder and robbery. If we could only see, in one view, the
torrents of hypocrisy and cruelty, the lies, the slaughter, the
violations of every obligation of humanity, which have flowed
from this source along the course of the history of Christian
nations, our worst imaginations of hell would pale beside the
vision.2

As to the use of the term “agnostic,” Huxley says —

When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask
myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist ;
a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I
found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready
was the answer ; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that
I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations,
except the last. The one thing in which most of these
good people were agreed was the one thing in which I
differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained

1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 210.

2 lb., p, 241.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

189

a certain “gnosis,” — had, more or less successfully, solved
the problem of existence ; while I was quite sure I had not,
and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was
insoluble.1

At any rate, whatever explanation of the universe
there may be, Huxley was satisfied that theology had
not supplied it. Joining the Metaphysical Society, he
found in that “remarkable confraternity of antagonists”
every variety of philosophical and theological opinion
represented, most of the members being “ -ists of one
sort or another.” So, nameless himself, he “conceived
the appropriate title of “ agnostic.” “ It came,” he says,
“ into my head as suggestively antithetic to the c gnostic ’
of Church history, who professed to know so much
about the very things of which I was ignorant.” But,
as the word implies, it connotes neither confession of
faith nor doctrinal formula ; neither affirmation nor
denial. “And dares stamp nothing false where he
finds nothing sure.” 2

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the
essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single
principle. That principle is of great antiquity ; it is as old
as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, “Try all things,
hold fast by that which is good ” ; it is the foundation of the
Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every
man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in
him ; it is the great principle of Descartes ; it is the funda¬
mental axiom of modern science. Positively, the principle
may be expressed : In matters of the intellect, follow your
reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other

1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 238.

2 Matthew Arnold, Empedocles .

HUXLEY.

190

consideration. And negatively : In matters of the intellect
do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not
demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the
agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled,
he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face,
whatever the future may have in store for him.1

It was no bard matter to show that the vagueness was
on the other side. The phrase “belief in Jesus Christ”
has as many meanings as there are sects. The Episco¬
palian has one definition of it ; the Unitarian has
another. And Huxley showed what difficulty attends
any effort to construct a consistent portrait of Jesus
from the Synoptics and the gospel of John, and then
to reconcile this with the Jesus of the creeds. The New
Testament witnesses to disruptions on the question of
“ belief ” in him soon after his death. His immediate
followers were “ Nazarenes,” who acknowledged his
brother James as their head, and who conformed to the
Jewish law, differing from their copatriots only in believ¬
ing that the Messiah had already come in the person of
Jesus. The division of the disciples of the Master into
Nazarenes and Christians, which latter appellation is said
to have been first used at Antioch, arose through the
contention of Paul and Barnabas that the commands
regarding circumcision and abstinence from certain foods
were abrogated. So the “primitive Church,” around
whose story ecclesiastical historians have cast a halo,
was “ no dogmatic dovecot pervaded by the most
loving unity and doctrinal harmony.” Nazarenism
1 Coll. Essays , v. p. 245 ; and see ante, p. 40.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

191

became “ a damnable heresy, while the younger doctrine
throve and pushed out its shoots into that endless
variety of sects, of which the three strongest survivors
are the Roman and Greek Churches and modern Prot¬
estantism.” 1

A masterly summary of the rise and development of
Christianity, of the foreign influences which shaped it,
and of the mythologies, the pagan rites and ceremonies,
themselves of barbaric origin, which it incorporated, is
given in the essay on the “ Evolution of Theology.” 2
This should be read in conjunction with the prologue to
the fifth volume of Collected Essays (of which Huxley
wrote to a friend, “ It cost me more time and pains
than any equal number of pages I have ever written ” 3),
in which the history of the struggle between Naturalism
and Supernaturalism is outlined, and the evidence
on which the doctrine of Evolution rests, set forth.
Both papers will help to clear away the haze which
hangs round questions in the discussion of which the
spirit of the advocate rather than of the truth-seeker
is present. Strauss said that “ the true criticism of
dogma is its history,” because in this are to be found
the indictment of humanity against creeds between
which and the facts of life and nature there is no
correspondence, since they remain puzzles to the head
and strangers to the heart. As Emerson says, “ The
prayers and dogmas of our Church are like the zodiac
of Denderah and the astronomical monuments of the
1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 231. 2 lb., pp. 367-371. 3 II. 298.

192

HUXLEY.

Hindoos, wholly insulated from anything now extant in
the life and the business of the people.” 1

In place of the “tangled Trinities,” the logomachies
which only bewilder and perplex, Huxley asked the
Churches to revive “a conception of religion which,” he
says, “ appears to me as wonderful an inspiration of
genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle.
‘And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do
justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy
God ? ’ If any so-called religion takes away from this
great saying of Micah, I think it wantonly mutilates,
while, if it adds thereto, I think it obscures the perfect
ideal of religion.”2

All that is best in the ethics of the modern world, in so
far as it has not grown out of Greek thought or Barbarian
manhood, is the direct development of the ethics of old
Israel. There is no code of legislation, ancient or modern,
at once so just and so merciful, so tender to the weak and
poor, as the Jewish law; and if the Gospels are to be
trusted, Jesus of Nazareth himself declared that he taught
nothing but that which lay implicitly, or explicitly, in the
religious and ethical system of his people.

And the scribe said unto him, Of a truth, Teacher, thou
hast well said that he is one ; and there is none other but
he ; and to love him with all the heart, and with all the
understanding, and with all the strength, and to love his
neighbour as himself, is much more than all whole burnt
offerings and sacrifices (Mark xii. 32, 33).

Here is the briefest of summaries of the teaching of
the prophets of Israel of the eighth century ; does the
Teacher, whose doctrine is thus set forth in his presence,

1 “ The American Scholar.”

2 Coll. Essays , iv. p. 161,

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

193

repudiate the exposition? Nay; we are told, on the con¬
trary, that Jesus saw that he “answered discreetly,” and re¬
plied, “Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.”

So that I think that even if the creeds, from the so-called
“Apostles’” to the so-called “ Athanasian,” were swept into
oblivion ; and even if the human race should arrive at the
conclusion that, whether a bishop washes a cup or leaves it
unwashed, is not a matter of the least consequence, it will
get on very well. The causes which have led to the de¬
velopment of morality in mankind, which have guided or
impelled us all the way from the savage to the civilised
state, will not cease to operate because a number of ecclesi¬
astical hypotheses turn out to be baseless. And, even if
the absurd notion that morality is more the child of specu¬
lation than of practical necessity and inherited instinct had
any foundation ; if all the world is going to thieve, murder,
and otherwise misconduct itself as soon as it discovers that
certain portions of ancient history are mythical ; what is the
relevance of such arguments to any one who holds by the
Agnostic principle ? 1

Turning briefly to Mr Gladstone’s intervention in
the controversy, his chief concern was about Huxley’s
charge against Jesus as wantonly destroying other
people’s property. He was sceptical as to the pigs
numbering two thousand, and in a footnote to the
concluding chapter of the Impregnable Rock of Holy
Scripture suggests that “ so large a number may be due
to the error of a copyist, or very possibly a marginal
gloss, which afterwards crept into the text.” But as the
existence of demons was accepted by Mr Gladstone as a
matter of course, the statistics as to the pigs are of
minor importance, except as they may affect the ques-

1 Coll . Essays , v. p. 316.

N

194

HUXLEY.

tion of an inspired text. What he sought to prove was
that the keepers of the swine were Jews, and that there¬
fore they were justly punished for their breach of the
Mosaic law. Josephus is quoted as evidence. But
Huxley showed conclusively that Mr Gladstone had
misread Josephus, and he established beyond question
that Gadara was a Gentile, and not a Jewish city. All
in vain. Mr Gladstone stuck to his statements, and as
edition after edition of the Impregnable Rock was issued
without modification, there can be little wonder that
while in publicly criticising these methods Huxley called
them “peculiar,” in private correspondence he spoke of
the man who practised them as a “ copious shuffler,” 1
and bracketed him with Owen and Bishop Wilberforce
as belonging “to a very curious type of humanity, with
many excellent and even great qualities, and one fatal
defect — utter untrustworthiness.” 2 It is interesting to
note here that in a conversation with Mr Lionel Tolle-
mache, Mr Gladstone “ denied genius to Huxley, but
allowed it to Owen and Romanes ” ! 3

Among the outside criticisms which the controversy
provoked was that which suggested that both disputants
“ might be better occupied than in fighting over the

1 II. 122. In a letter to Colonel Ingersoll, written in March
1889, Huxley says : “Gladstone’s attack on you is one of the best
things he has written. I do not think there is more than fifty per
cent more verbiage than is necessary, nor any sentence with more
than two meanings.” — Literary Gtiide, December 1901.

2 IT. 34i. 3 Talks with Mr Gladstone.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

195

Gadarene pigs.” Upon this Huxley pertinently com¬
mented —

If these too famous swine were the only parties to the
suit, I, for my part, should fully admit the justice of the
rebuke. But, under the beneficent rule of the Court of
Chancery, in former times, it was not uncommon that a
quarrel about a few perches of worthless land ended in the
ruin of ancient families and the engulfing of great estates ;
and I think that our admonisher failed to observe the analogy
— to note the momentous consequences of the judgement
which may be awarded in the present apparently insignificant
action in re the swineherds of Gadara.

The immediate effect of such judgement will be the
decision of the question, whether the men of the nineteenth
century are to adopt the demonology of the men of the first
century, as divinely revealed truth, or to reject it, as degrad¬
ing falsity.1

Yet, complete as is the discomfiture of the current
theology in its conflict with historical criticism of its
documents, the Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture re¬
mains in demand, and Dr Wace is, we suppose, still a
power in the pulpit. The chains of custom and tradi¬
tion still bind, and indifference still paralyses, the souls
of men. In this, and not in active and deep conviction
of the truth of its creeds, the strength of orthodoxy lies.
It has made unto itself a more sure habitation in yield¬
ing to “the form and pressure” of the time; its official
representatives have never abandoned that defence of
privilege which is of greater moment than defence of
what is left of the faith, and the roots of ecclesiastical

1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 414.

196

HUXLEY.

institutions have become more closely intertwined with
those of the body politic, so that attack upon the one
is menace to the other.

Nevertheless, “wisdom is justified of her children.”
“ Much water has flowed under the bridges ” since
1864, when a number of clergymen, consistently enough,
formulated a declaration of faith that Jesus taught the
doctrine of everlasting punishment, and begged their
brethren to sign it “for the love of God”;1 or even
since 1891, when another group, who had not bowed
the knee to the Baal of modern scholarship, affirmed
their belief that “ the canonical scriptures of the Old
and New Testaments declare incontrovertibly the actual
historical truth in all records, both of past events and of
the delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled.” 2
In fact, the abrasion of incredible and inhuman dogmas
has gone on at so rapid a rate that belief in them might
be thought to be limited to the vulgar and illiterate,
were it not for restatements of the following order, which
is quoted from the widely circulated worldly and other¬
worldly British Weekly. In commenting on certain
articles in the Encyclopaedia Biblica the reader is advised
to “ take the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, and
erase from them as incredible everything that does not
affirm miracle. He will find that the narrative of
miracle is so welded with facts and words and in-

1 Life and Letters of Dean Stanley , ii. p. 158.

2 Coll. Essays, v. p. 23.

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

197

ferences, that to cut it out is to reduce the whole to a
rag-heap.” But these strident voices are softened in the
atmosphere of the new knowledge. Dogmas are dying
— very slowly — as other superstitions have died, because
they cannot adapt themselves to changed conditions.
They are explained, and their explanation is their
doom.

Truly, “ wisdom is justified of her children ” : wellnigh
all for which Huxley contended is conceded, and the
rest will follow in due time. The admissions as to the
unhistorical element in the Bible which are made by
modern theologians are not limited to the Old Testa¬
ment. The great Dictionary of the Bible, already re¬
ferred to, in which the best scholarship of Britain and
the Continent is embodied, and which has as its chief
editor “ the Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of
Holy Scripture at Oxford,” contains articles, as quota¬
tions have shown already (see p. 178), which a genera¬
tion ago would have given the Dean of Arches a busy
time over trials for heresy. In the article on “Jesus”
he is spoken of by the late Dr Bruce as “ the child of
his time and people”; and, concerning the Passion, the
same writer says, “ For modern criticism the story, even
in its most historic version, is not pure truth, but truth
mixed with doubtful legend,” although, “ when examined
with a critical microscope, not a few of the relative in¬
cidents stand the test.” In the article on the “Gospels”
Professor Schmiedel doubts “ whether any credible ele-

198

HUXLEY.

ments are to be found in them,” and from the entire
body of the reported sayings of Jesus he chooses five
passages which, it is suggested, may form “ foundation-
pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus,” in whom,
Professor Schmiedel adds, “we have to do with a com¬
pletely human being. The divine is to be sought in him
only in the form in which it is capable of being found
in a man.” Of the Fourth Gospel, which he places
towards the latter half of the second century, this esti¬
mate is given —

A book which begins by declaring Jesus to be the logos of
God, and ends by representing a cohort of Roman soldiers
as falling to the ground at the majesty of his appearance,
and by representing one hundred pounds of ointment as
having been used at his embalming, ought by these facts
alone to be spared such a misunderstanding of its true char¬
acter as would be implied in supposing that it meant to be
a historical work.

After such strong meat it would seem but the offering
of milk to babes for the writers to suggest that the
narrative of the blasting of the fig-tree by Jesus has
“ improbabilities which are obvious and cannot be ex¬
plained away,” or that in the Zaccheus incident “ there
are difficulties in the way of conceding more than an
ideal truth to this delightful story.”

From these concessions there is but a short step to
the larger concessions of the school of Schleiermacher,
revived by Sabatier, Gardner, and others, who base
Christianity on the facts of religious experience, trans-

THE CONTROVERSIALIST.

199

ferring, as the last-named writer explains, “ the support
of Christian doctrine from history to psychology, from
the history of facts to the history of ideas.” Upon
which the obvious comment is that the adherents of
every other religion may find equal validity for it in the
facts of their experience.

200

V.

THE CONSTRUCTOR.

In the prologue to his Controversial Essays Huxley
says, “ I have hitherto dwelt upon scientific Naturalism
chiefly in its critical and destructive aspect. But the
present incarnation of the spirit of the Renascence
differs from its predecessor in the eighteenth century in
that it builds up as well as pulls down.” 1 What the
structure should be is indicated in his controversy with
Mr Gladstone, and to this may be added a passage
from a letter to Mr Romanes : —

I have a great respect for the Nazarenism of Jesus — very
little for later “Christianity.” But the only religion that
makes appeal to me is prophetic Judaism. Add to it some¬
thing from the best Stoics, and something from Spinoza, and
something from Goethe, and there is a religion for men.
Some of these days I think I will make a cento out of the
works of these people.2

The Hebrew prophets made special appeal to him,
since, “ to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly
before thy God ” was to base religion on the stable found¬
ation of human relations. There would be no need to
1 Coll. Essays , v. p. 41. 2 II. 339.

THE CONSTRUCTOR.

20 T

omit the last words of that verse, because the doctrine
of evolution is not necessarily anti-theistic

It does not even come into contact with Theism, considered
as a philosophical doctrine. That with which it does collide,
and with which it is absolutely inconsistent, is the conception
of creation which theological speculators have based upon
the history narrated in the opening of the book of Genesis.
There is a great deal of talk and not a little lamentation
about the so-called religious difficulties which physical
science has created. In theological science, as a matter
of fact, it has created none. Not a solitary problem pre¬
sents itself to the philosophical Theist at the present day,
which has not existed from the time that philosophers began
to think out the logical grounds and the logical conse¬
quences of Theism. All the real or imaginary perplexities
which flow from the conception of the universe as a de¬
terminate mechanism, are equally involved in the assumption
of an Eternal, Omnipotent, and Omniscient Deity. The
theological equivalent of the scientific conception of order
is Providence ; and the doctrine of determinism follows as
surely from the attributes of foreknowledge assumed by the
theologian, as from the universality of natural causation
assumed by the man of science. The angels in ‘ Paradise
Lost ’ would have found the task of enlightening Adam
upon the mysteries of “ Fate, Foreknowledge, and Free-will”
not a whit more difficult, if their pupil had been educated
in a “ Real-schule,” and trained in every laboratory of a
modern university. In respect of the great problems of
philosophy the post-Darwinian generation is, in one sense,
exactly where the prae-Darwinian generation were. They
remain insoluble. But the present generation has the ad¬
vantage of being better provided with the means of freeing
itself from the tyranny of certain sham solutions.1

1 Huxley’s chapter in Darwin’s Life and Letters , ii. p. 203 ; and
cf. ii. p. 302.

202

HUXLEY.

What Renan says of Marcus Aurelius applies to
Huxley : “ He resolutely severed moral beauty from all
definite theology ; he did not permit duty to depend
on any metaphysical opinions concerning a First Cause.”
Hence his opposition to the theory of morals as innate,
and as of supernatural origin. Every man, it is held
by the intuitive school, is born with the faculty of
discerning right from wrong, while, superfluous as this
would seem, the declaration of what actions are right
and what actions are wrong is to be found in divinely
given codes, of which that of the Ten Words or Com¬
mandments is cited as an example. Hence springs the
wellnigh universal belief in the interdependence of morals
and dogma — the belief that to err in the one is to err in
the other. Hence, also, the historical accuracy of the
narrative being assumed, the belief that man’s power of
choice as a free agent between good and evil was first
exercised in Eden.1 Less momentous, according to
current theories of the consequence of Adam’s fall to
mankind, but more impressive, was the scene at the
foot of Mount Sinai, when Jahveh made known through
Moses that he would appear in “ a thick cloud,” so that
the people might hear him when he spoke to their
leader. And they beheld, the writer of Exodus narrates,
the descent of the god in fire upon the mountain, when

1 The essence of that which is improperly called the freewill
doctrine is that occasionally, at any rate, human volition is self-
caused, that is to say, not caused at all ; for to cause oneself one
must have anteceded oneself — which is, to say the least of it, difficult
to imagine. — Coll. Essay s, ix. p. 142.

THE CONSTRUCTOR.

203

“God spake all these words” of the Ten Command¬
ments, and wrote them with his own finger upon two
tables of stone. Thus, in a code, the legend of whose
divine origin is accepted throughout Christendom, the
making of images and murder, the breaking of the
seventh day of the week as a rest-day and theft, are
put upon the same plane of ethics, and the confusion
between sin against man and offences against ritual
emphasised.

Human nature being what it is, the supersession of
theories of ethical codes as integral parts of revelation
seems as far off as the Greek Kalends. Nevertheless,
some advance towards rational theories of morals is
being made, and in this matter Herbert Spencer, in
his Data of Ethics, and Huxley, in more fugitive form,
have done much. That death is not the penalty of sin
is proved by the indisputable evidence of the fossil-
yielding rocks ; but wrong-doing is still held to be an
infraction of divine law, and to involve pains and
penalties in a future state. As opposed to this, wrong¬
doing is held, under the doctrine of evolution, to be
an infraction of human law.

The actions we call sinful are as much the consequence of
the order of nature as those we call virtuous. They are all
part and parcel of the struggle for existence through which
all living things have passed, and they have become sins
because man alone seeks a higher life in voluntary as¬
sociation.1

We are in ignorance alike as to the beginnings of

1 II. 282.

204

HUXLEY.

consciousness and the beginnings of ethics. But as
we trace the evolution of the nervous system from
irritability in the lowest organisms to sensibility in its
ever-increasing complexity, till the higher we ascend the
more acute do we find the feelings associated with pain
and pleasure, so it is permissible to trace the germs of
morality, which lie in sympathy, among the social
animals. Into the marvels of their organisation, per¬
haps more astounding among invertebrates, as ants and
bees, than among the higher gregarious mammals, there
is neither need nor space to enter here ; enough that
the links in the chain of psychical life of man and the
creatures beneath him are unbroken. Moreover, the
evidences as to the social bases of ethics are contained
in human history.1 The terms “good” and “evil”
have no meaning till communal life begins. Where
there is no society there is no sin. A solitary man
on an uninhabited island can do no wrong, but when
Robinson Crusoe meets Friday, the question of be¬
haviour of one to the other arises ; and conduct is
ethic. Restraint on individual action begins ; and the

1 To whatever extent Mr Balfour may draw untenable inferences
from such premisses, the admission made in the new edition of his
Foundations of Belief is significant. He says that “ study of evolu¬
tion and modern anthropology is making us realise that the beginnings
of morality are lost among the self-preserving and race-prolonging
instincts which we share with the animal creation ; that religion in
its higher forms is a development of infantine and often brutal
superstitions ; and that in the pedigree of the noblest and most
subtle of our emotions are to be discerned .primitive strains of
coarsest quality.”

THE CONSTRUCTOR.

205

morality of the action is determined by circumstances ;
hence the relativity of morals, and the origin of arti¬
ficial codes which, ruled solely by conventions, make
a breach of etiquette a less pardonable offence than
the seduction of a woman.

Upon the general basis of ethics Huxley speaks with
no uncertain sound : —

Moral duty consists in the observance of those rules of
conduct which contribute to the welfare of society, and,
by implication, of the individuals who compose it.

The end of society is peace and mutual protection, so
that the individual may reach the fullest and highest life
attainable by man. The rules of conduct by which this end
is to be attained are discoverable — like the other so-called
laws of Nature — by observation and experiment, and only
in that way.

Some thousands of years of such experience have led to
the generalisations that stealing and murder, for example,
are inconsistent with the ends of society. There is no more
doubt that they are so than that unsupported stones tend
to fall. The man who steals or murders breaks his implied
contract with society, and forfeits all protection. He be¬
comes an outlaw, to be dealt with as any other feral creature.
Criminal law indicates the ways which have proved most
convenient for dealing with him.

All this would be true if men had no “moral sense” at all,
just as there are rules of perspective which must be strictly
observed by a draughtsman, and are quite independent of
his having any artistic sense.

The moral sense is a very complex affair — dependent in
part upon associations of pleasure and pain, approbation and
disapprobation, formed by education in early youth, but in
part also on an innate sense of moral beauty and ugliness
(how originated need not be discussed), which is possessed

20 6

HUXLEY.

by some people in great strength, while some are totally
devoid of it — just as some children draw, or are enchanted
by music while mere infants, while others do not know
“Cherry Ripe” from “Rule Britannia,” nor can represent
the form of the simplest thing to the end of their lives.1

Now for this sort of people there is no reason why they
should discharge any sort of moral duty, except from fear of
punishment in all its grades, from mere disapprobation to
hanging, and the duty of society is to see that they live
under wholesome fear of such punishment, short, sharp, and
decisive.

For the people with a keen innate sense of moral beauty
there is no need of any other motive. What they want is
knowledge of the things they may do and must leave
undone, if the welfare of society is to be attained. Good
people so often forget this that some of them occasionally
require hanging as much as the bad.

If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be (under due
limitations) obeyed, and why the few who are steered by it
move the mass in whom it is weak ? I can only reply by
putting another question, Why do the few in whom the sense
of beauty is strong — Shakespeare, Raffaele, Beethoven —
carry the less endowed multitude away? But they do, and
always will. People who overlook that fact attend neither to
history nor to what goes on about them.

Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, kindly man.

I have a great respect for him. The force of genial common-
sense respectability could no further go. George Fox was
the very antipodes of all this, and yet one understands
how he came to move the world of his day, and Franklin
did not.

As to whether we can all fulfil the moral law, I should say
hardly any of us. Some of us are utterly incapable of ful¬
filling its plainest dictates. As there are men born physically
cripples and intellectually idiots, so there are some who are

1 Cf. Coll. Essays , vi. p. 239.

THE CONSTRUCTOR.

207

moral cripples and idiots, and can be kept straight not even
by punishment. For these people there is nothing but
shutting-up, or extirpation.1

In the early stages of man’s history ethics had no
connection with theology.

With the advance of civilisation, and the growth of
cities and of nations by the coalescence of families and of
tribes, the rules which constitute the common foundation
of morality and of law become more numerous and com¬
plicated, and the temptations to break or evade many of
them stronger. In the absence of a clear apprehension
of the natural sanctions of these rules, a supernatural
sanction was assumed ; and imagination supplied the
motives which reason was supposed to be incompetent to
furnish. Religion, at first independent of morality, gradu¬
ally took morality under its protection ; and the super¬
naturalists have ever since tried to persuade mankind that
the existence of ethics is bound up with that of super¬
naturalism.2

It has been so much the worse for both. For if the
ethical code is low, the conception of the god who is
assumed to be its author suffers as the ethical ideal
advances ; and if the ethics are made dependent upon
a theology which becomes discredited, they stand or
fall with it. Doubtless, in rude and turbulent ages,
no small gain accrued through the association of a
humane code of conduct with supernatural dogmas, but
the engine of aggrandisement which this put into the
hands of sacerdotalism rendered the divorce imperative
as society advanced.

1 II. 305, 306. Coll. Essays , v. p. 53, and cf. iv. p. 361.

208

HUXLEY.

Theological apologists who insist that morality will vanish
if their dogmas are exploded, would do well to consider the
fact that, in the matter of intellectual veracity, science is
already a long way ahead of the Churches ; and that, in this
particular, it is exerting an educational influence on man¬
kind of which the Churches have shown themselves utterly
incapable.1

Moreover, a code of morals resting on the assumption
of supernatural authority seeks to enforce its decrees
by threats of penalties inflicted under supernatural con¬
ditions, threats which are found to be feebly operative
upon conduct. Discarding such assumption, the evolu¬
tionist appeals to more tangible motives ; to the fact
that actions make or mar other lives, and retard or
quicken the progress of mankind. He shows that the
law of causation operates in the moral sphere, and
that the consequences of our deeds are immediate, or,
in large degree, measurable. The brevity of life thus
becomes a sharper spur to duty, and the ultimate
destiny of the race, as predicted by science, a stimulus
to smooth its career.

It may, Huxley says,

be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspira¬
tion recorded in history was reached by a few ancient Jews —
Micah, Isaiah, and the rest— who took no count whatever
of what might or might not happen to them after death. It
is not obvious to me why the same point should not by-and-
by be reached by the Gentiles.2

This all-important question of social ethics filled much
1 Coll. Essays , v. p. 142. 2 II. 304.

THE CONSTRUCTOR.

209

of his thought from the old Rotherhithe days to the
end. It inspired the noble Romanes Lecture, con¬
cerning which he wrote to the founder, “ Of course I
will keep absolutely clear of theology. But I have long
had fermenting in my head some notions about the
relations of ethics and evolution (or rather the absence
of such as are commonly supposed) which, I think, will
be interesting to such an audience as I may expect.” 1
The discourse provoked much controversy and even
more misunderstanding, causing Huxley regret that he
did not remember Faraday’s useful precept to lecturers,
to assume that even “select and cultivated” listeners
knew nothing whatever of the subject.2

Some of Huxley’s audience took the lecture as a
senile recantation of the faith as it is in Evolution ;
while, since there is no logical halting-point between
Agnosticism and Catholicism, the late Professor St
George Mivart, whose fate it was to be excommunicated
by his Church because he refused to sign a monstrous
assent to everything in the Bible, welcomed the lecture
as indicating a possible reconciliation of Huxley with the
Vatican.3

Ethics and Evolution , to the preparation of which
Huxley gave the utmost care, and which will abide as
a masterpiece of sonorous English prose, was the ampli¬
fication of arguments used by him in various previous
utterances. It was an effort, he explained to more than

1 II- 35o- 2 Coll. Essays , ix. p. vii.

3 Nineteenth Century, Aug. 1893, P- 210.

O

210

HUXLEY.

one correspondent, “ to put the Christian doctrine, that
Satan is the Prince of this world, upon a scientific
foundation ” ! The main thesis was briefly sketched
in an essay, published five years previously (in 1888),
on the “Struggle for Existence in Human Society,” and
appropriately reprinted in the volume containing the
Romanes Lecture.

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 therefore 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 con¬
sidered as distinct 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 existence to the
bitter end, like any other animal ; the former devotes his
best energies to the object of setting limits to the struggle.

. . . 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 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 solely upon the

THE CONSTRUCTOR.

21 1

principle of moral evolution. For society not only has a
moral end, but, in its perfection, social life is embodied
morality.1

In 1890 Huxley writes : “Of moral purpose I see no
trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human
manufacture — and very much to our credit.2 George
Meredith gives rhythmic expression to that view in his
great poem on man’s relation to Nature : —

“ He may entreat, aspire,

He may despair, and she has never heed ;

She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need,

Not his desire.” 3

To the many the argument seemed paradoxical, for how,
it was asked, could ethical nature, as the offspring of
cosmic nature, be at enmity with it ? In a Prole¬
gomena,4 which is longer than the lecture, Huxley
contended that1 the seeming paradox is a truth.

Taking, as an example, the ground on which his
house was built, he shows how the industry of man has
converted a patch of weed-choked, economically unpro¬
ductive soil into a fruitful garden, and how, if the skill
and labour by which this has been done are withdrawn,
nature, whose action never pauses, will reassert sway,
and convert the place into a wilderness. The garden is
a work of art, as is the house which stands in it ; as is
everything that man has produced. And the effect of

1 Coll. Essays, ix. pp. 202, 205. 2 II. 268.

3 Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, p. 1 19.

4 Coll. Essays, ix. pp. 1-45.

212

HUXLEY.

all that he does is to oppose, and, for a time, arrest,
the cosmic process, limiting the area of ceaseless struggle
and competition. Applying this to human society,
which, “ at its origin, was as much a product of organic
necessity as that of the bees,” the “ape and tiger”
instincts are found dominant. It was based on selfish¬
ness. The race was to the swift, and the battle to the
strong. Even then, however, in the earliest grouping of
a few families into clans or gentes, the blood-tie, whose
source is in the parent, engendered a sympathy which
assured unity, and, therefore, some restraint on individual
assertion. For sympathy is the germ -plasm of ethics.
Knowledge, the only begetter of a wider sympathy,
breaks down tribal divisions, and with the obvious
advantage which co-operation secures, enlarges the
narrow borders of primitive altruism, limits the area
of conflict, and mitigates the horrors of a state of
warfare which, at the outset, was chronic. But the
cosmic process is checked only locally and inter¬
mittently. To this the state of mankind, after thou¬
sands of years of advance from the feral state,
witnesses, since only in the minority of all who
have ever lived has that advance been made, and
even among these there needs small provocation to
arouse the lightly sleeping “ tiger.” Hence, wherever
self-restraint is practised, there is checking of the cosmic
process of bitter struggle by the ethical, defined by
Huxley as the “ evolution of the feelings out of which
the primitive bonds of human society are so largely

TIIE CONSTRUCTOR.

213

forged into the organised and personified sympathy we
call conscience.” 1 Then comes into play the golden
rule of Jesus, of Confucius, and of Plato: “ May I do
to others as I would that they should do to me.” 2

If the ethical process is not a part of the cosmical
process, it must have been imported, and is therefore to
be referred to supernatural intervention. But as oppos¬
ing one action against another, it has its correspondences
in man’s checks upon the operation of natural selection,
and in the forces at play within the cosmos itself. For
the equilibrium towards which all things in the universe
are tending is arrested by the activity of the conflicting
agencies of repulsion and attraction ; and in all the
mechanical means whereby human life is strengthened
and lengthened, the action of natural selection is
retarded. And, as already observed, the rudiments of
ethics are found deep down in the animal world.
“ Among birds and mammals societies are formed of
which the bond in many cases seems to be purely
psychological — that is to say, it appears to depend upon
the liking of the individuals for one another’s company.
Love and fear come into play, and enforce a greater or
less renunciation of self-will.” 3

But “ the theory of evolution encourages no millennial
anticipations.” As the story of the formation and dis¬
solution of the solar system and kindred aggregations is
but a chapter in a history which had no beginning and

1 Coll. Essays , ix. p. 30. 2 Laivs, xi. 913 (Jowett’s trans.)

3 Coll. Essays, ix. p. 115.

214

HUXLEY.

will have no end, so life as a whole upon this globe is
but a brief chapter of that history, and the life of man a
momentary episode in the chapter.

Neither optimist nor pessimist in a world which he
confessed was “ a hopeless riddle,” 1 Huxley was no
dweller at ease in a scientific Zion. As in the intel¬
lectual sphere he had exercised the spirit of inquiry by
which alone advance in knowledge is possible, so in the
moral sphere he gave expression to the spirit of dis¬
content by which alone amelior ition is possible.

There are [he said] two things I really care about — one
is the progress of scientific thought, and the other is the
bettering of the condition of the masses of the people by
bettering them in the way of lifting themselves out of the
misery which has hitherto been the lot of the majority of
them. Posthumous fame is not particularly attractive to
me, but, if I am to be remembered at all, I would rather
it should be as “ a man who did his best to help the
people” than by any other title.

Even the best of modern civilisations appears to me to
exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies
any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability.
I do not hesitate to express my opinion that, if there is no
hope of a large improvement of the condition of the greater
part of the human family ; if it is true that the increase of
knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over Nature
which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows
on that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent
and the intensity of Want, with its concomitant physical
and moral degradation, among the masses of the people, I
should hail the advent of some kindly comet, which would
sweep the whole affair away, as a desirable consummation.

II. 134.

THE CONSTRUCTOR.

215

What profits it to the human Prometheus that he has
stolen the fire of heaven to be his servant, and that the
spirits of the earth and the air obey him, if the vulture of
pauperism is eternally to tear his very vitals and keep him
on the brink of destruction ? 1

Moved by these gloomy facts to “ work while it is yet
day,” Huxley found little, save for adverse criticism, in
the social reform schemes which “ have infested political
thought for centuries.” He had no belief in “ leaders ”
and “ saviours ” of society, or in the “ fanatical indi¬
vidualism of our time which attempts to apply the
analogy of cosmic nature to society, and seriously debates
whether the members of a community are justified in
using their strength to constrain one of their number to
contribute his share to the maintenance of it, or even to
prevent him from doing his best to destroy it,”2 and
which would limit the exercise of State rights to the
protection of its subjects from aggression.3 Here, once
more, he had stirred up a hornet’s nest of criticism from
various quarters, the argument often taking the usual
form of expletives. But, as he reminded his opponents,
his interest in these questions “ did not begin the day
before yesterday ” ; reflection and observation had only
deepened conviction, and the later essays on Govern¬
ment, Capital, and the Struggle for Existence, empha¬
sised the position which he had taken up a quarter
of a century earlier. Now, as then, he went to the
heart of the matter in insisting on the fundamental im-

1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 423 ; and cf. v. p. 256.

2 Coll. Essays, ix. p. 83. 3 lb ., i. p. 258.

21 6

HUXLEY.

portance of dealing with the population question, since
with short commons and lack of elbow-room there was
quick shunting of the ethical process.

For the effort of ethical man to work towards a moral
end by no means abolished, perhaps hardly modified, the
deep-seated organic impulses which impel the natural man
to follow his non-moral course. One of the most essential
conditions, if not the chief cause, of the struggle for exist¬
ence, 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 aiiimo obeyed by the great
majority of the human race. But, in civilised society, the
inevitable result of such obedience is the re-establishment,
in all its intensity, of that struggle for existence — the war of
each against all — the mitigation or abolition of which was
the chief end of social organisation.1

“ There is no discharge in that war,” and the struggle
has rather increased in force than lessened since Huxley
wrote these words. Competition becomes sharper ; and
the cry for protection is a return to the narrow ethics of
the tribe. The community that trusts to old repute and
disdains new methods, and that artificially reduces each
member of its industrial classes to a common level, will
be worsted in a battle where the wounded receive no
quarter, and where starvation is the penalty of surrender.
There survives in many parts of the globe, notably in
thickly-peopled China, the practice of partly meeting the
difficulty of excess of population over means of sub-

1 Coll. Essays, ix. p. 205.

THE CONSTRUCTOR.

217

sistence by infanticide ; while in former days, all the
world over, the ravages wrought by famine, war, and
pestilence were unchecked. But the progress of private
and public morality has steadily tended to remove the
effects of those scourges, and the finer spirits of the race
dream of a society where no man shall die of hunger,
and no family mourn a member slain in battle ; when
the Golden Age of ancient legend shall be fulfilled on
the earth.

Dealing with these islands, Huxley admits the justice
of the “ insolent reproach ” cast by Buonaparte. On a
soil which can feed less than half the population, we are
compelled to be “ a nation of shopkeepers.” The shop¬
keeping implies buying and selling, and if the goods
offered are inferior to those of competitors, a ruinous
reduction in exports will follow, leaving a large propor¬
tion of the population, whose only salvation is by work,
with nothing to eat. A further condition must be social
stability. There must be healthy homes, a cultivation
of thrift, the attainment of a fair standard of material
comfort, for where la misere reigns there is inefficiency
and handicapping of the worker. And in remarking
upon the absence of these conditions in many quarters
of great industrial centres from London downwards,
Huxley drives home the fact that here, suspending their
differences, “natural science and religious enthusiasm”
may work in concord towards one aim. He passes
from the importance of State-endowed education, into
which no theology shall intrude, to technical training,

218

HUXLEY.

the cost of which he suggests should be borne by the
districts benefited by it. But that is a detail, the im¬
portant thing being to catch the “small percentage of
the population which is born with that most excellent
quality, a desire for excellence, or with special aptitude
of some sort or another, and turn them to account for
the good of society,” whose highest aim should be the
making of men, not of millionaires ; the development
of character, not the equation of “ success ” with the
“accumulation of cash.” “For the increase of wealth
— that is, of the means of comfort — is not, necessarily,
good in itself ; everything depends on the way in which
the wealth is distributed and its effect on the moral
character of the nation.” 1

No man can say where they will crop up ; like their op¬
posites, the fools and the knaves, they appear sometimes in
the palace and sometimes in the hovel ; but the great thing
to be aimed at — I was almost going to say, the most im¬
portant end of all social arrangements — is to keep these
glorious sports of Nature from being either corrupted by
luxury or starved by poverty, and to put them into the posi¬
tion in which they can do the work for which they are
specially fitted.2

Throughout the papers on social subjects which fill
portions of the first, third, and ninth volumes of the
Collected Essays , criticism is followed by definite
suggestion. And so it was with all matters, both
practical and speculative, with which he dealt ; the

1 Letters from John Chinaman , p. 27.

2 Coll. Essays, ix. p. 210.

THE CONSTRUCTOR.

219

order of his mind was architectonic' To regard Huxley
as a compound of Boanerges and Iconoclast is to show
entire misapprehension of the aims which inspired
his labours. In Biology his discovery of the struc¬
ture of the Medusae laid the foundations of modern
zoology; his theory of the origin of the skull gave a
firm basis to vertebrate morphology ; and his luminous
exposition of the pedigree of man imported order where
confusion had reigned. In the more important matter
of Education he formulated principles whose adoption
would bring out the best that is in every scholar, and
inspire him with love of whatever “ is of good report ” ;
while his invention of the laboratory system of zoological
teaching has been adopted with the best results in every
school and university of repute. In Theology he separ¬
ated the accidental elements from the essential, leav¬
ing as residuum a religion that, co-ordinated with the
needs and aspirations of human nature, would find its
highest motive and its permanency in an ethic based
on sympathy.

220

NOTE ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE
UNKNOWABLE.

Since the passing of the foregoing pages through the
press, the following extracts from letters from Huxley
to Mr F. C. Gould, written in 1889, have appeared in
the Literary G?iide of January 1902. They are an
interesting addition to the remarks quoted on page
125 : —

As between Mr Spencer and myself, the question is not
one of “ a dividing line,” but of an entire and complete diverg¬
ence as soon as we leave the foundations laid by Hume,
Kant, and Hamilton, who are my philosophical forefathers.
To my mind, the “Absolute” philosophies were finally
knocked on the head by Hamilton ; and the “ Unknowable,”
in Mr Spencer’s sense, is merely the Absolute redivivus , a
sort of ghost of an extinct philosophy, the name of a
negation hocus-pocussed into a sham thing. If I am to
talk about that of which I have no knowledge at all, I pre¬
fer the good old word God , about which there is no scien¬
tific pretence.

• ••••••••

I have long been aware of the manner in which my views
have been confounded with those of Mr Spencer, though no
one was more fully aware of our divergence than the latter.
Perhaps I have done wrongly in letting the thing slide so
long, but I was anxious to avoid a breach with an old

DOCTRINE OF THE UNKNOWABLE.

221

friend. . . . Whether the Unknowable or any other Nou-
menon exists or does not exist, I am quite clear I have no
knowledge either way. So with respect to whether there is
anything behind Force or not, I am ignorant ; I neither
affirm nor deny. The tendency of the human mind to idol¬
atry is so strong that, faute de mieux , it falls down and
worships negative abstractions, as much the creation of the
mind as the stone idol of the hands. The one object of the
Agnostic (in the true sense) is to knock this tendency on the
head whenever or wherever it shows itself. Our physical
science is full of it.

INDEX.

Agnostic, 188.

Agnosticism, 189.

Allman, Professor, 68.

American Civil War, 23.
Amphibia, 71.

Anaximander, 103.
Ancestor-worship, 157.

Ape and man, 108, 112, 116.
Argyll, Duke of, 45.

Aristotle, 60.

Arnold, Matthew, 2, 189.
Articulate speech, 120.

Ascidian, 68.

Atomic theory, 138.

Authority, 144, 183.

Babylonia, 167, 178.

Backbone of man, 101.

Bagehot, Walter, 15, 94.

Balfour, Mr A. J., 54, 204.
Bathybius, 44.

Bible in Board Schools, 34.

ti Huxley’s tribute to, 34-36.
Biological time, 81.

Black, Dr Sutherland, 182.
Bonney, Canon, 166.

Brain structure, no.

u of man and ape, 18, 20, in.
British Association at —

Belfast, 43.

Glasgow, 109, 138.

Liverpool, 40.

Oxford, 18, 53, 96.

York, 70.

British Weekly , 196.

Britschli, Professor, 131.
Brown-S6quard, Dr, 40.

Bunsen, 132.

Canon, 183.

Carlyle, 3, 14.

Carpenter, Dr, 4, 95, 114.
Cell-unit, 61, 69.

Cherubim, 168.

Chimpanzee, 101.

Christianity, 191.

Church and reforms, 149.
Clericalism, 48, 144, 146.
Coelomata, 67.

Consciousness, 137, 204.
Copernicus, 123.

Cowper-Temple clause, 36.
Cranks, 17.

Creation story, 162, 167, 176.
Cunningham, Professor, 109, 120,
122.

Cuvier, 61, 63, 162.

Darwin, 7, 22, 23, 54, 64, 86, 96,
165.

Death sentences, 149.

Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill, 24.

De la Beche, Sir Henry, 10.
Deluge story, 169, 174.
Demonology, 177-180, 185.
Descartes, 44, 116, 135, 189.
Descent of Man, 98.

Donnelly, Sir J., 17.

Draper, Dr, 19.

Driver, Dr, 166, 169, 171, 173.

224

INDEX.

Dubois, Dr, 117.

Earth, age of the, 78.

Eden story, 168, 175, 202.
Edinburgh, 21.

Edinburgh Review , 21.

Education, 28-34, 218.

Elohim, 156, 160.

Embryology, vertebrate, 67.
Emerson, 176, 191.

Encyclopedia Biblica, 171, 178,
196.

Established Church, 151.

Ethics, bases of, 49, 104, 202, 204-
209.

Ethics and Evolution, 52, 209.
Evolution and Theism, 201.

Exile in Babylon, 172, 177.
Exploratio Evangelica, 179.

Faraday, 65.

Fayrer, Sir J., 6.

Fishes, fossil, 71.

Fiske, John, 103.

Flower, SirW. H., 74.

Forbes, Dr Edward, 10, 70.
Forster, W. E., 36.

Fossil man, 117.

Foster, Sir M., 58, 71, 85.

Fourth Gospel, 198.

Frazer, Dr, 158, 164.

Free will, 202.

Gadarene swine, 177, 180, 193, 195.
Garnett, Dr R., 57.

Geological time, 81.

Ghost-theory, 158, 160.

Gibbon, Edward, 2, 12.

Gibbon, the, 104.

Gladstone, Mr, 23, 50, 54, 162,
184, 193.

Goethe, 17, 75.

Gore, Bishop, 50, 176.

Gorilla, 102.

Gospels, 178, 182, 185, 196,

Greek speculation, 93.

Green, J. R., 145.

Hades, 156.

Haeckel, Ernst, 62, 168.

Hartley, David, 120.

Harvey, 61.

Heathorn, Miss, 7, xo.

Hebrews, 166, 169.

Hobbes, 26, 135, 153.

Hooker, Sir J., 7, 26, 55, 88, 96.
Horse, 46, 72-74.

Huggins, SirW., 133.

Hume, 115, 135.

“ Huxley’s layer,” 6.

I m pregnable Rock of Holy Scrip¬
ture, 163, 193.

Infancy, human, 103.

Infanticide, 217.

Inspiration, 173.

Israelites, 154, 173.

11 and Polynesians, 161.

n ethics of, 192, 200.

Jahveh (Jehovah), 155,160, 173, 202.
Jamaica Committee, 23.

Java, 1 1 8.

Jesus, 177-180, 186, 190, 193, 197.
Jex Blake, Miss, 23.

Jowett, Professor, 37, 148, 154.

Kelvin, Lord, 79, 82, 84, 138.
Kingsley, Charles, 2, 13, 95.
Kirchhoff, 132.

Kuenen, 158.

Labyrinthodonts, 71.

Lamarck, 62, 67.

Lancelet, 68.

Lankester, Professor Ray, 58, 69,
85, 142.

Lefevre, Mr Shaw, 39.

Leibnitz, 115.

Lessing, 3, 16.

Life, origin of, 131.

11 physical basis of, 44, 69, 126,
129.

Linnceus, 60, 76, 101.

Linnean Society, 88.

Literature and science, 30.

Lowell, J. R., 16.

Lyell, Sir Charles, 63, 87, 95, 100.

Mallock, MrW. H., 45.

Malpighi, 61.

Malthus, 87.

Man and ape, 106-114.

11 brute, 1 18.
it gorilla, 107.

Man's Place in Nature, 21, 25,
100, 1 17.

Mariner, William, 159.

INDEX.

225

Marsh, Professor, 73.

Materialism, 115, 129, 135.
Mathematics, 80.

Matter, 126, 128, 134, 136, 138.
Medusae, 8, 58, 66, 68, 218.

Mental apparatus, 112.

Meredith, George, 211.
Metaphysical Society, 142, 189.
Metaphysics, 134.

Micah, 192.

Miracles, 180, 184.

Mitchell, Mr Chalmers, 58, 100.
Mitral valve, 145.

Mivart, Dr St George, 113, 148,
209.

Morals, 202-216.

Morley, John, 94, 145, 146, 165.

Nazarenes, 190, 200.

Necromancy, 155.

Neo-Darwinism, 92.
Neo-Lamarckism, 92.

Nervous system, 115.

New Testament. See Gospels.
New York, 46.

Oken, 17, 75.

Orang-utan, 103.

Origin of Species, 18, 21, 60, 62,
70, 86, 93, 96, 124, 148.

Origin of Species , Corning of Age
of the, 25, 53.

Osborn, Professor, 105.

Owen, 18, 52, 63, 75, 96, 194.

11 and Huxley, 18, 21, 98, 109.
Oxford, 18, 52.

Oxford, Bishop of, 19, 21, 95, 194.

Paget, Sir James, 114.
Palaeontology, 70, 77.

Patriarchal age, 169-172.
Pentateuch, 64, 162, 166.

Perry, Professor, 83.

Picton, Mr Allanson, 37.
Pithecanthropus erectus, 1 17.
Population question, 216.
Preformation, 115.

Primates, xoi, 105.

Protoplasm, 62, 126, 129.
Psychical identities between man
and brute, 112.

Pusey, Dr, 52, 166.

Quarterly Review , 21, 91, 95.

Rattlesnake, 6, 59, 68, 158.
Religion and science, 150.

Reville, Dr, 50, 162.

Richardson, Sir J . , 6.

Riley ism, 37.

Rocks, age of, 81.

Romanes, Dr, 194, 200.

Romanes Lecture, 52, 209-213.
Royal College of Science, 47, 51.

11 Commissions, 43.

„ Society, 8, 39, 43, 47, 54, 69.
Russell, Mr George, 164.

Sabbath, 168.

Sacerdotalism, 147.

Salisbury, Lord, 51, 53, 82.
Salvation Army, 24.

Sartor Resartus, 3, 13, 14.

Saul, 155.

Sayce, Professor, 168, 170.
Schleiden, 66.

School Board for London, 28.
Schwann, 66, 69.

Science and religion, 150.

Science, training in, 5, 29.
Selborne, Lord, 164.
Sense-impressions, 137.

Sheol, 156, 160.

Skull, origin of, 17, 75, 218.
Slavery, 23.

Smith, Dr G., 175.

Solar heroes, 171.

Soul, origin of, 115.

Spencer, Herbert, 2, 4, 22, 63, 92,
125, 203, 220.

Spirit and matter. 139.

Spirits, belief in, 177.

Spiritualism, 147.

Stanley, Bishop, 6, 8.

11 Captain, 6.

Stars, constitution of, 133.
Stephen, Leslie, 54.

Style, 26.

Suarez, 132.

Sun’s age, 80.

11 constitution, 133.

Technical training, 31, 217.
Tel-el-Amarna, 172.

Ten Commandments, 202.
Teraphim, 157.

Theology, characteristics of, 33, 49.
Theology, Evolution of, 142, 148,
154. 191-

P

226

INDEX.

Theology in schools, 33.

Thirlwall, Bishop, 142.

Thisel ton -Dyer, Sir W. T., 14.
Thummim, 157.

Tidal friction, 79.

Titles, 51.

Tonga Islands, 159.

Tristram, Canon, 95.

Tyndall, 43, 45.

Unknowable, doctrine of the, 125,
220.

Urim, 155, 157.

Vertebrate skull, 17, 75.

Victory, the, 6, 51.

Virchow, Professor, 8.

Vivisection, 41-43.

Von Baer, 62, 66, 67.

Wace, Dr, 184, 187, 195.

Wallace, A. R., 81, 87, 103, 113,
128.

Weismann, 92.

Westminster Review , 90.
Whewell, Dr, 95.

Wilberforce, Bishop, 19, 21,95, 194.
Witchcraft, 185.

Witch of Endor, 155.

Women, emancipation of, 23.

Yale College, 46.

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