The scope of this controversy was enlarged by the intervention in the January "Nineteenth Century" of the Duke of Argyll, to whom he devoted the concluding paragraphs of his March article. But it was scarcely well under way when another, accompanied by much greater effusion of ink and passion, sprang up in the columns of the "Times". His share in it, published in 1891 as a pamphlet under the title of "Social Diseases and Worse Remedies," is to be found in "Collected Essays" 9 237.]

I have a new row on hand in re Salvation Army! [he writes on December 2]. It's all Mrs. —'s fault; she offered the money.

[In fact, a lady who was preparing to subscribe 1000 pounds to "General" Booth's "Darkest England" scheme, begged Huxley first to give her his opinion of the scheme and the likelihood of its being properly carried out. A careful examination of "Darkest England" and other authorities on the subject, convinced him that it was most unwise to create an organisation whose absolute obedience to an irresponsible leader might some day become a serious danger to the State; that the reforms proposed were already being undertaken by other bodies, which would be crippled if this scheme were floated; and that the financial arrangements of the Army were not such as provide guarantees for the proper administration of the funds subscribed:—]

And if the thing goes on much longer, if Booth establishes his Bank, you will have a crash some of these fine days, comparable only to Law's Mississippi business, but unfortunately ruining only the poor.

[On the same day he writes to his eldest son:—]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, December 8, 1890.

Attacking the Salvation Army may look like the advance of a forlorn hope, but this old dog has never yet let go after fixing his teeth into anything or anybody, and he is not going to begin now. And it is only a question of holding on. Look at Plumptre's letter exposing the Bank swindle.

The "Times", too, is behaving like a brick. This world is not a very lovely place, but down at the bottom, as old Carlyle preached, veracity does really lie, and will show itself if people won't be impatient.

[No sooner had he begun to express these opinions in the columns of the "Times" than additional information of all kinds poured in upon him, especially from within the Army, much of it private for fear of injury to the writers if it were discovered that they had written to expose abuses; indeed in one case the writer had thought better of even appending his signature to his letter, and had cut off his name from the foot of it, alleging that correspondence was not inviolable. So far were these persons from feeling hostility to the organisation to which they belonged, that one at least hailed the Professor as the divinely-appointed redeemer of the Army, whose criticism was to bring it back to its pristine purity.

To his elder son:—]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, January 8, 1891.

Dear Lens,

It is very jolly to think of J. and you paying us a visit. It is proper, also, the eldest son should hansel the house.

Is the Mr. Sidgwick who took up the cudgels for me so gallantly in the "St. James'" one of your Sidgwicks? If so, I wish you would thank him on my account. (The letter was capital.) [Mr. William C. Sidgwick had written (January 4) an indignant letter to protest against the heading of an article in the "Speaker", Professor Huxley as Titus Oates." "To this monster of iniquity the "Speaker" compares an honourable English gentleman, because he has ventured to dissuade his countrymen from giving money to Mr. William Booth...Mr. Huxley's views on theology may be wrong, but nobody doubts that he honestly holds them; they do not bring Mr. Huxley wealth and honours, nor do they cause the murder of the innocent. To insinuate a resemblance which you dare not state openly is an outrage on common decency...] Generally people like me to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them, but don't care to take any share in the burning of the fingers.

But the Boothites are hard hit, and may be allowed to cry out.

I begin to think that they must be right in saying that the Devil is at work to destroy them. No other theory sufficiently accounts for the way they play into my hands. Poor Clibborn-Booth has a long—columns long—letter in the "Times" to-day, in which, all unbeknownst to himself, he proves my case.

I do believe it is a veritable case of the herd of swine, and I shall have to admit the probability of that miracle.

Love to J. and Co. from us all.

Ever your affectionate Pater.

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, January 11, 1891.

My dear Mr. Clodd,

I am very much obliged to you for the number of the "St. James's Gazette", which I had not seen. The leading article expresses exactly the same conclusions as those at which I had myself arrived from the study of the deed of 1878. But of course I was not going to entangle myself in a legal discussion. However, I have reason to know that the question will be dealt with by a highly qualified legal expert before long. The more I see of the operations of headquarters the worse they look. I get some of my most valuable information and heartiest encouragement from officers of the Salvation Army; and I knew, in this way, of Smith's resignation a couple of days before it was announced! But the poor fellows are so afraid of spies and consequent persecution, that some implore me not to notice their letters, and all pledge me to secrecy. So that I am Vice-Fontanelle with my hand full of truth, while I can only open my little finger.

It is a case of one down and t'other come on, just now. "—" will get his deserts in due time. But, oh dear, what a waste of time for a man who has not much to look to. No; "waste" is the wrong word; it's useful, but I wish that somebody else would do it and leave me to my books.

My wife desires her kind regards. I am happy to say she is now remarkably well. If you are this way, pray look in at our Hermitage.

Yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, January 30, 1891.

My dear Hooker,

I trust I have done with Booth and Co. at last. What an ass a man is to try to prevent his fellow-creatures from being humbugged! Surely I am old enough to know better. I have not been so well abused for an age. It's quite like old times.

And now I have to settle accounts with the Duke and the G.O.M. I wonder when the wicked will let me be at peace.

Ever yours affectionately,

T.H. Huxley.

[Other letters touch upon the politics of the hour, especially upon the sudden and dramatic fall of Parnell. He could not but admire the power and determination of the man, and his political methods, an admiration rashly interpreted by some journalist as admiration of the objects to which these political methods were applied. (See Volume 2.)]

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, November 26, 1890.

My dear Lecky,

Very many thanks for your two volumes, which I rejoice to have, especially as a present from you. I was only waiting until we were settled in our new house—as I hope we shall be this time next week—to add them to the set which already adorn my shelves, and I promise myself soon to enjoy the reading of them.

The Unionist cause is looking up. What a strange thing it is that the Irish malcontents are always sold, one way or the other, by their leaders.

I wonder if the G.O.M. ever swears! Pity if he can't have that relief just now.

With our united kind regards to Mrs. Lecky and yourself.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, November 29, 1890.

My dear Hooker,

I have filled up and sent your and my copies of entry for Athenaeum.

Carpenter has written the best popular statement I know of, of the results of criticism, in a little book called "The First Three Gospels", which is well worth reading. [See above.]

I have promised to go to the Royal Society dinner and propose Stokes' health on Monday, but if the weather holds out as Arctic as it is now, I shall not dare to venture. The driving east wind, blowing the snow before it here, has been awful; for ten years they have had nothing like it. I am glad to say that my little house turns out to be warm. We go in next Wednesday, and I fear I cannot be in town on Thursday even if the weather permits.

I have had pleurisy that was dangerous and not painful, then pleurisy that was painful and not dangerous; there is only one further combination, and I don't want that.

Politics now are immensely interesting. There must be a depth of blackguardism in me, for I cannot help admiring Parnell. I prophesy that it is Gladstone who will retire for a while, and then come back to Parnell's heel like a whipped hound. His letter was carefully full of loopholes.

Ever yours affectionately,

T.H. Huxley.

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, December 2, 1890.

My dear Hooker,

The question of questions now is whether the Unionists will have the sense to carry a measure settling the land question at once. If they do that, I do not believe it will be in the power of man to stir them further. And my belief is that Parnell will be quite content with that solution. He does not want to be made a nonentity by Davitt or the Irish Americans.

But what ingrained liars they all are! That is the bottom of all Irish trouble. Fancy Healy and Sexton going to Dublin to swear eternal fidelity to their leader, and now openly declaring that they only did so because they believed he would resign.

Ever yours affectionately,

T.H. Huxley.

Hodeslea, January 10, 1891.

My dear Foster,

I am trying to bring the Booth business to an end so far as I am concerned, but it's like getting a wolf by the ears; you can't let him go exactly when you like.

But the result is quite worth the trouble. Booth, Stead, Tillett, Manning and Co. have their little game spoilt for the present.

You cannot imagine the quantity of letters I get from the Salvation Army subordinates, thanking me and telling me all sorts of stories in strict confidence. The poor devils are frightened out of their lives by headquarter spies. Some beg me not to reply, as their letters are opened.

I knew that saints were not bad hands at lying before; but these Booth people beat Banagher.

Then there is — awaits skinning, and I believe the G.O.M. is to be upon me! Oh for a quiet life.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[But by February 17 the Booth business was over, the final rejoinder to Mr. Gladstone sent to press; and he writes to Sir J. Hooker:—]

Please the pigs, I have now done with them—wiped my month, and am going to be good—till next time.

But in truth I am as sick of controversy as a confectioner's boy of tarts.

I rather think I shall set up as a political prophet. Gladstone and all the rest are coming to heel to their master.

Years ago one of the present leaders of the anti-Parnellites said to me: "Gladstone is always in the hands of somebody stronger than himself; formerly it was Bright, now it is Parnell."

CHAPTER 3.8.

1890-1891.

[The new house at Eastbourne has been several times referred to. As usually happens, the move was considerably delayed by the slowness of the workmen; it did not actually take place till the beginning of December.

He writes to his daughter, Mrs. Roller, who also had just moved into a new house:—]

You have all my sympathies on the buy, buy question. I never knew before that when you go into a new house money runs out at the heels of your boots. On former occasions, I have been too busy to observe the fact. But I am convinced now that it is a law of nature.

[The origin of the name given to the house appears from the following letter:—]

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, October 15, 1890.

My dear Foster,

Best thanks for the third part of the "Physiology," which I found when I ran up to town for a day or two last week. What a grind that book must be.

How's a' wi' you? Let me have a line.

We ought to have been in our house a month ago, but fitters, paperers, and polishers are like bugs or cockroaches, you may easily get 'em in, but getting 'em out is the deuce. However, I hope to clear them out by the end of this week, and get in by the end of next week.

One is obliged to have names for houses here. Mine will be "Hodeslea," which is as near as I can go to "Hodesleia," the poetical original shape of my very ugly name.

There was a noble scion of the house of Huxley of Huxley who, having burgled and done other wrong things (temp. Henry IV.), asked for benefit of clergy. I expect they gave it him, not in the way he wanted, but in the way they would like to "benefit" a later member of the family.

[Rough sketch of one priest hauling the rope taut over the gallows, while another holds a crucifix before the suspended criminal.]

Between this gentleman and my grandfather there is unfortunately a complete blank, but I have none the less faith in him as my ancestor.

My wife, I am sorry to say, is in town—superintending packing up—no stopping her. I have been very uneasy about her at times, and shall be glad when we are quietly settled down. With kindest regards to Mrs. Foster.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[His own principal task was in getting his library ready for the move.]

Most of my time [he writes on November 16] for the last fortnight has been spent in arranging books and tearing up papers till my back aches and my fingers are sore.

[However, he did not take all his books with him. There was a quantity of biological works of all sorts which had accumulated in his library and which he was not likely to use again; these he offered as a parting gift to the Royal College of Science. On December 8, the Registrar conveys to him the thanks of the Council for "the valuable library of biological works," and further informs him that it was resolved:—

That the library shall be kept in the room formerly occupied by the Dean, which shall be called "The Huxley Laboratory for Biological Research," and be devoted to the prosecution of original researches in Biological Science, with which the name of Professor Huxley is inseparably associated.

Huxley replied as follows:—]

Dear Registrar,

I beg you convey my hearty thanks to the Council for the great kindness of the minute and resolution which you have sent me. My mind has never been greatly set on posthumous fame; but there is no way of keeping memory green which I should like so well as that which they have adopted towards me.

It has been my fate to receive a good deal more vilipending than (I hope) I deserve. If my colleagues, with whom I have worked so long, put too high a value upon my services, perhaps the result may be not far off justice.

Yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

In addition to the directly controversial articles in the early part of the year, two other articles on controversial subjects belong to 1891. "Hasisadra's Adventure," published in the "Nineteenth Century" for June, completed his long-contemplated examination of the Flood myth. In this he first discussed the Babylonian form of the legend recorded upon the clay tablets of Assurbanipal—a simpler and less exaggerated form as befits an earlier version, and in its physical details keeping much nearer to the bounds of probability.

The greater part of the article, however, is devoted to a wider question—How far does geological and geographical evidence bear witness to the consequences which must have ensued from a universal flood, or even from one limited to the countries of Mesopotamia? And he comes to the conclusion that these very countries have been singularly free from any great changes of the kind for long geological periods.

The sarcastic references in this article to those singular reasoners who take the possibility of an occurrence to be the same as scientific testimony to the fact of its occurrence, lead up, more or less, to the subject of an essay, "Possibilities and Impossibilities," which appeared in the "Agnostic Annual" for 1892, actually published in October 1891, and to be found in "Collected Essays", 5 192.

This was a restatement of the fundamental principles of the agnostic position, arising out of the controversies of the last two years upon the demonology of the New Testament. The miraculous is not to be denied as impossible; as Hume said, "Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstrative argument or abstract reasoning a priori," and these combinations of phenomena are perfectly conceivable. Moreover, in the progress of knowledge, the miracles of to-day may be the science of to-morrow. Improbable they are, certainly, by all experience, and therefore they require specially strong evidence. But this is precisely what they lack; the evidence for them, when examined, turns out to be of doubtful value.]

I am anxious [he says] to bring about a clear understanding of the difference between "impossibilities" and "improbabilities," because mistakes on this point lay us open to the attacks of ecclesiastical apologists of the type of the late Cardinal Newman.

When it is rightly stated, the Agnostic view of "miracles" is, in my judgment, unassailable. We are NOT justified in the a priori assertion that the order of nature, as experience has revealed it to us, cannot change. In arguing about the miraculous, the assumption is illegitimate, because it involves the whole point in dispute. Furthermore, it is an assumption which takes us beyond the range of our faculties. Obviously, no amount of past experience can warrant us in anything more than a correspondingly strong expectation for the present and future. We find, practically, that expectations, based upon careful observations of past events, are, as a rule, trustworthy. We should be foolish indeed not to follow the only guide we have through life. But, for all that, our highest and surest generalisations remain on the level of justifiable expectations; that is, very high probabilities. For my part, I am unable to conceive of an intelligence shaped on the model of that of men, however superior it might be, which could be any better off than our own in this respect; that is, which could possess logically justifiable grounds for certainty about the constancy of the order of things, and therefore be in a position to declare that such and such events are impossible. Some of the old mythologies recognised this clearly enough. Beyond and above Zeus and Odin, there lay the unknown and inscrutable Fate which, one day or other, would crumple up them and the world they ruled to give place to a new order of things.

I sincerely hope that I shall not be accused of Pyrrhonism, or of any desire to weaken the foundations of rational certainty. I have merely desired to point out that rational certainty is one thing, and talk about "impossibilities," or "violation of natural laws," another. Rational certainty rests upon two grounds; the one that the evidence in favour of a given statement is as good as it can be; the other, that such evidence is plainly insufficient. In the former case, the statement is to be taken as true, in the latter as untrue; until something arises to modify the verdict, which, however properly reached, may always be more or less wrong, the best information being never complete, and the best reasoning being liable to fallacy.

To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life, with due thought for the morrow, because no man can be sure he will be alive an hour hence. Such are the conditions imposed upon us by nature, and we have to make the best of them. And I think that the greatest mistake those of us who are interested in the progress of free thought can make is to overlook these limitations, and to deck ourselves with the dogmatic feathers which are the traditional adornment of our opponents. Let us be content with rational certainty, leaving irrational certainties to those who like to muddle their minds with them.

[As for the difficulty of believing miracles in themselves, he gives in this paper several examples of a favourite saying of his, that Science offers us much greater marvels than the miracles of theology; only the evidence for them is very different.

The following letter was written in acknowledgment of a paper by the Reverend E. McClure, which endeavoured to place the belief in an individual permanence upon the grounds that we know of no leakage anywhere in nature; that matter is not a source, but a transmitter of energy; and that the brain, so far from originating thought, is a mere machine responsive to something external to itself, a revealer of something which it does not produce, like a musical instrument. This "something" is the universal of thought, which is identified with the general logos of the fourth gospel. Moral perfection consists in assimilation to this; sin is the falling short of perfect revealing of the eternal logos.

Huxley's reply interested his correspondent not only for the brief opinion on the philosophic question, but for the personal touch in the explanation of the motives which had guided his life-work, and his "kind feeling towards such of the clergy as endeavoured to seek honestly for a natural basis to their faith."

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, March 17, 1891.

Dear Mr. McClure,

I am very much obliged for your letter, which belongs to a different category from most of those which I receive from your side of the hedge that, unfortunately, separates thinking men.

So far as I know myself, after making due deduction for the ambition of youth and a fiery temper, which ought to (but unfortunately does not) get cooler with age, my sole motive is to get at the truth in all things.

I do not care one straw about fame, present or posthumous, and I loathe notoriety, but I do care to have that desire manifest and recognised.

Your paper deals with a problem which has profoundly interested me for years, but which I take to be insoluble. It would need a book for full discussion. But I offer a remark only on two points.

The doctrine of the conservation of energy tells neither one way nor the other. Energy is the cause of movement of body, i.e. things having mass. States of consciousness have no mass, even if they can be conceded to be movable. Therefore even if they are caused by molecular movements, they would not in any way affect the store of energy.

Physical causation need not be the only kind of causation, and when Cabanis said that thought was a function of the brain, in the same way as bile secretion is a FUNCTION of the liver, he blundered philosophically. Bile is a product of the transformation of material energy. But in the mathematical sense of the word "function," thought may be a function of the brain. That is to say, it may arise only when certain physical particles take on a certain order.

By way of a coarse analogy, consider a parallel-sided piece of glass through which light passes. It forms no picture. Shape it so as to be bi-convex, and a picture appears in its focus.

Is not the formation of the picture a "function" of the piece of glass thus shaped?

So, from your own point of view, suppose a mind-stuff—logos—-a noumenal cosmic light such as is shadowed in the fourth gospel. The brain of a dog will convert it into one set of phenomenal pictures, and the brain of a man into another. But in both cases the result is the consequence of the way in which the respective brains perform their "functions."

Yet one point.

The actions we call sinful are as much the consequence of the order of nature as those we call virtuous. They are 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 association.

Therefore the instrument has never been marred; on the contrary, we are trying to get music out of harps, sacbuts, and psalteries, which never were in tune and seemingly never will be.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Few years passed without some utterance from Huxley on the subject of education, especially scientific education. This year we have a letter to Professor Ray Lankester touching the science teaching at Oxford.]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, January 28, 1891.

Dear Lankester,

I met Foster at the Athenaeum when I was in town last week, and we had some talk about your "very gentle" stirring of the Oxford pudding. I asked him to let you know when occasion offered, that (as I had already said to Burdon Sanderson) I drew a clear line apud biology between the medical student and the science student.

With respect to the former, I consider it ought to be kept within strict limits, and made simply a Vorschule to human anatomy and physiology.

On the other hand, the man who is going out in natural science ought to have a much larger dose, especially in the direction of morphology. However, from what I understood from Foster, there seems a doubt about the "going out" in "Natural Science", so I had better confine myself to the medicos. Their burden is already so heavy that I do not want to see it increased by a needless weight even of elementary biology.

Very many thanks for the "Zoological articles" just arrived.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Don't write to the "Times" about anything; look at the trouble that comes upon a harmless man for two months, in consequence.

[The following letter, which I quote from the "Yorkshire Herald" of April 11, 1891, was written in answer to some inquiries from Mr. J. Harrison, who read a paper on Technical Education as applied to Agriculture, before the Easingwold Agricultural Club.]

I am afraid that my opinion upon the subject of your inquiry is worth very little—my ignorance of practical agriculture being profound. However, there are some general principles which apply to all technical training; the first of these, I think, is that practice is to be learned only by practice. The farmer must be made by and through farm work. I believe I might be able to give you a fair account of a bean plant and of the manner and condition of its growth, but if I were to try to raise a crop of beans, your club would probably laugh consumedly at the result. Nevertheless, I believe that you practical people would be all the better for the scientific knowledge which does not enable me to grow beans. It would keep you from attempting hopeless experiments, and would enable you to take advantage of the innumerable hints which Dame Nature gives to people who live in direct contact with things. And this leads me to the second general principle which I think applies to all technical teaching for school-boys and school-girls, and that is, that they should be led from the observation of the commonest facts to general scientific truths. If I were called upon to frame a course of elementary instruction preparatory to agriculture, I am not sure that I should attempt chemistry, or botany, or physiology or geology, as such. It is a method fraught with the danger of spending too much time and attention on abstraction and theories, on words and notions instead of things. The history of a bean, of a grain of wheat, of a turnip, of a sheep, of a pig, or of a cow properly treated—with the introduction of the elements of chemistry, physiology, and so on as they come in—would give all the elementary science which is needed for the comprehension of the processes of agriculture in a form easily assimilated by the youthful mind, which loathes everything in the shape of long words and abstract notions, and small blame to it. I am afraid I shall not have helped you very much, but I believe that my suggestions, rough as they are, are in the right direction.

[The remaining letters of the year are of miscellaneous interest. They show him happily established in his retreat at Eastbourne in very fair health, on his guard against any further repetition of his "jubilee honour" in the shape of his old enemy pleurisy; unable to escape the more insidious attacks of influenza, but well enough on the whole to be in constant good spirits.]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, January 13, 1891.

My dear Skelton,

Many thanks to you for reminding me that there are such things as "Summer Isles" in the universe. The memory of them has been pretty well blotted out here for the last seven weeks. You see some people can retire to "Hermitages" as well as other people; and though even Argyll cum Gladstone powers of self-deception could not persuade me that the view from my window is as good as that from yours, yet I do see a fine wavy chalk down with "cwms" and soft turfy ridges, over which an old fellow can stride as far as his legs are good to carry him.

The fact is, that I discovered that staying in London any longer meant for me a very short life, and by no means a merry one. So I got my son-in-law to build me a cottage here, where my wife and I may go down-hill quietly together, and "make our sowls" as the Irish say, solaced by an occasional visit from children and grandchildren.

The deuce of it is, that however much the weary want to be at rest the wicked won't cease from troubling. Hence the occasional skirmishes and alarms which may lead my friends to misdoubt my absolute detachment from sublunary affairs. Perhaps peace dwells only among the fork-tailed Petrels!

I trust Mrs. Skelton and you are flourishing, and that trouble will keep far from the hospitable doors of Braid through the New Year.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[No sooner had he settled down in his new country home, than a strange piece of good fortune, such as happens more often in a story-book than in real life, enabled him at one stroke to double his little estate, to keep off the unwelcome approach of the speculative builder, and to give himself scope for the newly-discovered delights of the garden. The sale of the house in Marlborough Place covered the greater part of the cost of Hodeslea; but almost on the very day on which the sale was concluded, he became the possessor of another house at Worthing by the death of Mr. Anthony Rich, the well-known antiquarian. An old man, almost alone in the world, his admiration for the great work done recently in natural science had long since led him to devise his property to Darwin and Huxley, to the one his private fortune, to the other his house and its contents, notably a very interesting library.

As a matter of feeling, Huxley was greatly disinclined to part with this house, Chapel Croft, as soon as it had come into his hands. A year earlier, he might have made it his home; but now he had settled down at Eastbourne, and Chapel Croft, as it stood, was unlikely to find a tenant. Accordingly he sold it early in July, and with the proceeds bought the piece of land adjoining his house. Thus he writes to Sir J. Hooker:—]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, May 17, 1891.

My dear Hooker,

My estate is somewhat of a white elephant. There is about a couple of acres of ground well situated and half of it in the shape of a very pretty lawn and shrubbery, but unluckily, in building the house, dear old Rich thought of his own convenience and not mine (very wrong of him!), and I cannot conceive anybody but an old bachelor or old maid living in it. I do not believe anybody would take it as it stands. No doubt the site is valuable, and it would be well worth while to anybody with plenty of cash to spare to build on to the house and make it useful. But I neither have the cash, nor do I want the bother. However, Waller is going to look at the place for me and see what can be done. It seems hardly decent to sell it at once; and moreover the value is likely to increase. I suppose at present it is worth 2000 pounds, but that is only a guess.

Apropos of naval portrait gallery, can you tell me if there is a portrait of old John Richardson anywhere extant? I always look upon him as the founder of my fortunes, and I want to hang him up (just over your head) on my chimney breast. Voici! [sketch showing the position of the pictures above the fireplace]:—

By your fruits ye shall judge them! My cold was influenza, I have been in the most preposterously weak state ever since; and at last my wife lost patience and called in the doctor, who is screwing me up with nux vomica.

Sound wind and limb otherwise.

Ever yours affectionately,

T.H. Huxley.

[And again on July 3:—]

I have just been offered 2800 pounds for Anthony Rich's place and have accepted it. It is probably worth 3000 pounds, but if I were to have it on my hands and sell by auction I should get no more out of the transaction.

I am greatly inclined to put some of the money into a piece of land—a Naboth's vineyard—in front of my house and turn horticulturist. I find nailing up creepers a delightful occupation.

[In the same letter he describes two meetings with old friends:—]

Last Friday I ran down to Hindhead to see Tyndall. He was very much better than I hoped to find him, after such a long and serious illness, quite bright and "Tyndalloid" and not aged as I feared he would be...The local doctor happened to be there during my visit and spoke very confidently of his speedy recovery. The leg is all right again, and he even talks of Switzerland, but I begged Mrs. Tyndall to persuade him to keep quiet and within reach of home and skilled medical attendance.

Saturday to Monday we were at Down, after six or seven years' interruption of our wonted visits. It was very pleasant if rather sad. Mrs. Darwin is wonderfully well—naturally aged—but quite bright and cheerful as usual. Old Parslow turned up on Sunday, just eighty, but still fairly hale. Fuimus fuimus!

[(Parslow was the old butler who had been in Mr. Darwin's service for many years.)

To his daughter, Mrs. Roller.]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, May 5, 1891.

You dear people must have entered into a conspiracy, as I had letters from all yesterday. I have never been so set up before, and begin to think that fathers (like port) must improve in quality with age. (No irreverent jokes about their getting crusty, Miss.)

Julian and Joyce taken together may perhaps give a faint idea of my perfections as a child. I have not only a distinct recollection of being noticed on the score of my good looks, but my mother used to remind me painfully of them in my later years, looking at me mournfully and saying, "And you were such a pretty boy!"

[Much as he would have liked to visit the Maloja again this year, the state of his wife's health forbade such a long journey. He writes just after his attack of influenza to Sir M. Foster, who had been suffering in the same way:—]

Hodeslea, May 12, 1891.

My dear Foster,

I was very glad to hear from you. Pray don't get attempting to do anything before you are set up again.

I am in a ridiculous state of weakness, and bless my stars that I have nothing to do. I find it troublesome to do even that.

I wish ballooning had advanced so far as to take people to Maloja, for I do not think my wife ought to undertake such a journey, and yet I believe the high air would do us both more good than anything else....

The University of London scheme appears to be coming to grief, as I never doubted it would.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[So instead of going abroad, he stayed in Eastbourne till the end of August, receiving a short visit from his old friend Jowett, who, though sadly enfeebled by age, still persisted in travelling by himself, and a longer visit from his elder son and his family. But from September 11 to the 26th he and his wife made a trip through the west country, starting from Salisbury, which had so delighted him the year before, and proceeding by way of the Wye valley, which they had not visited since their honeymoon, to Llangollen. The first stage on the return journey was Chester, whence they made pious pilgrimage to the cradle of his name, Old Huxley Hall, some nine miles from Chester. Incorporated with a modern farm-house, and forming the present kitchen, are some solid stone walls, part of the old manor-house, now no longer belonging to any one of the name. From here they went to Coventry, where he had lived as a boy, and found the house which his father had occupied still standing.

A letter to an old pupil contains reflections upon the years of work to which he had devoted so much of his energies.]

To Professor T. Jeffery Parker, Otago.

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, August 11, 1891.

My dear Parker,

It is a long time since your letter reached me, but I was so unwise as to put off answering it until the book arrived and I had read it. The book did not reach me for a long time, and what with one thing and another I have but just finished it. I assure you I am very proud of having my name connected with such a thorough piece of work, no less than touched by the kindness of the dedication.

Looking back from the aged point of view, the life which cost so much wear and tear in the living seems to have effected very little, and it is cheering to be reminded that one has been of some use.

Some years of continued ill-health, involving constant travelling about in search of better conditions than London affords, and long periods of prostration, have driven me quite out of touch with science. And indeed except for a certain toughness of constitution I should have been driven out of touch with terrestrial things altogether.

It is almost indecent in a man at my time of life who has had two attacks of pleurisy, followed by a dilated heart, to be not only above ground but fairly vigorous again. However, I am obliged to mind my P's and Q's; avoid everything like hard work, and live in good air.

The last condition we have achieved by setting up a house close to the downs here; and I begin to think with Candide that "cultivons notre jardin" comprises the whole duty of man.

I was just out of the way of hearing anything about the University College chair; and indeed, beyond attending the Council of the school when necessary, and meetings of Trustees of the British Museum, I rarely go to London.

I have had my innings, and it is now for the younger generation to have theirs.

With best wishes, ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[As for being no longer in touch with the world of science, he says the same thing in a note to Sir M. Foster, forwarding an inquiry after a scientific teacher (August 1).]

Please read the enclosed, and if you know of anybody suitable please send his name to Mr. Thomas.

I have told him that I am out of the way of knowing, and that you are physiologically omniscient, so don't belie the character!

[This year a number of Huxley's essays were translated into French. "Nature" for July 23, 1891 (volume 44 page 272),—notes the publication of "Les Sciences Naturelles et l'Education," with a short preface by himself, dwelling upon the astonishing advance which had been made in the recognition of science as an instrument of education, but warning the younger generation that the battle is only half won, and bidding them beware of relaxing their efforts before the place of science is entirely assured. In the issue for December 31 ("Nature" 46 397), is a notice of "La Place de l'Homme dans la Nature," a re-issue of a translation of more than twenty years before, together with three ethnological essays, newly translated by M. H. de Varigny, to whom the following letters are addressed.]

To H. De Varigny.

May 17, 1891.

I am writing to my publishers to send you "Lay Sermons", "Critiques", "Science and Culture", and "American Addresses", pray accept them in expression of my thanks for the pains you are taking about the translation. "Man's Place in Nature" has been out of print for years, so I cannot supply it.

I am quite conscious that the condensed and idiomatic English into which I always try to put my thoughts must present many difficulties to a translator. But a friend of mine who is a much better French scholar than I am, and who looked over two or three of the essays, told me he thought you had been remarkably successful.

The fact is that I have a great love and respect for my native tongue, 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.

November 25, 1891.

I am very glad you have found your task pleasant, for I am afraid it must have cost you a good deal of trouble to put my ideas into the excellent French dress with which you have provided them. It fits so well that I feel almost as if I might be a candidate for a seat among the immortal forty!

As to the new volume, you shall have the refusal of it if you care to have it. But I have my doubts about its acceptability to a French public which I imagine knows little about Bibliolatry and the ways of Protestant clericalism, and cares less.

These essays represent a controversy which has been going on for five or six years about Genesis, the deluge, the miracle of the herd of swine, and the miraculous generally, between Gladstone, the ecclesiastical principal of King's College, various bishops, the writer of "Lux Mundi", that spoilt Scotch minister the Duke of Argyll, and myself.

My object has been to stir up my countrymen to think about these things; and the only use of controversy is that it appeals to their love of fighting, and secures their attention.

I shall be very glad to have your book on "Experimental Evolution". I insisted on the necessity of obtaining experimental proof of the possibility of obtaining virtually infertile breeds from a common stock in 1860 (in one of the essays you have translated). Mr. Tegetmeier made a number of experiments with pigeons some years ago, but could obtain not the least approximation to infertility.

From the first, I told Darwin this was the weak point of his case from the point of view of scientific logic. But, in this matter, we are just where we were thirty years ago, and I am very glad you are going to call attention to the subject.

Sending a copy of the translation soon after to Sir J. Hooker, he writes:—]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, January 11, 1892.

My dear Hooker,

We have been in the middle of snow for the last four days. I shall not venture to London, and if you deserve the family title of the "judicious," I don't think you will either.

I send you by this post a volume of the French translation of a collection of my essays about Darwinism and Evolution, 1860-76, for which I have written a brief preface. I was really proud of myself when I discovered on re-reading them that I had nothing to alter.

What times those days were! Fuimus.

Ever yours affectionately,

T.H. Huxley.

[The same subject of experimental evolution reappears in a letter to Professor Romanes of April 29. A project was on foot for founding an institution in which experiments bearing upon the Darwinian theory could be carried out. After congratulating Professor Romanes upon his recent election to the Athenaeum Club, he proceeds:—]

In a review of Darwin's "Origin" published in the "Westminster" for 1860 ("Lay Sermons" pages 323-24), you will see that I insisted on the logical incompleteness of the theory so long as it was not backed by experimental proof that the cause assumed was competent to produce all the effects required. (See also "Lectures to Working Men" 1863 pages 146 and 147.) In fact, Darwin used to reproach me sometimes for my pertinacious insistence on the need of experimental verification.

But I hope you are going to choose some other title than "Institut transformiste," which implies that the Institute is pledged to a foregone conclusion, that it is a workshop devoted to the production of a particular kind of article. Moreover, I should say that as a matter of prudence, you had better keep clear of the word "experimental." Would not "Biological Observatory" serve the turn? Of course it does not exclude experiment any more than "Astronomical Observatory" excludes spectrum analysis.

Please think over this. My objection to "Transformist" is very strong.

[In August his youngest daughter wrote to him to find out the nature of various "objects of the seashore" which she had found on the beach in South Wales. His answers make one wish that there had been more questions.]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, August 14, 1891.

Dearest Babs,

1. "Ornary" or not "ornary" B is merely A turned upside down and viewed with the imperfect appreciation of the mere artistic eye!

2. Your little yellow things are, I expect, egg-cases of dog whelks. You will find a lot of small eggs inside them, one or two of which grow faster than the rest, and eat up their weaker brothers and sisters.

The dog whelk is common on the shores. If you look for something like this [sketch of a terrier coming out of a whelk shell], you will be sure to recognise it.

3. Starfish are NOT born in their proper shape and don't come from your whitish yellow lumps. The thing that comes out of a starfish egg is something like this [sketch], and swims about by its cilia. The starfish proper is formed inside, and it is carried on its back this-uns.

Finally starfish drops off carrying with it t'other one's stomach, so that the subsequent proceedings interest t'other one no more.

4. The ropy sand tubes that make a sort of banks and reefs are houses of worms, that they build up out of sand, shells, and slime. If you knock a lot to pieces you will find worms inside.

5. Now, how do I know what the rooks eat? But there are a lot of unconsidered trifles about and if you get a good telescope and watch, you will have a glimpse as they hover between sand and rooks' beaks.

It has been blowing more or less of a gale here from the west for weeks—usually cold, often foggy—so that it seems as if summer were going to be late, probably about November.

But we thrive fairly well. L. and J. and their chicks are here and seem to stand the inclemency of the weather pretty fairly. The children are very entertaining.

M— has been a little complaining, but is as active as usual.

My love to Joyce, and tell her I am glad to hear she has not forgotten her astronomy.

In answer to your inquiry, Leonard says that Trevenen has twenty-five teeth. I have a sort of notion this can be hardly accurate, but never having been a mother can't presume to say.

Our best love to you all.

Ever your loving Pater.

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, August 26, 1891.

Dearest Babs,

'Pears to me your friend is a squid or pen-and-ink fish, Loligo among the learned. Probably Loligo media which I have taken in that region. They have ten tentacles with suckers round their heads, two much longer than the others. They are close to cuttlefish, but have a thin horny shell inside them instead of the "cuttle-bone." If you can get one by itself in a tub of water, it is pretty to see how they blush all over and go pale again, owing to little colour-bags in the skin, which expand and contract. Doubtless they took you for a heron, under the circumstances [sketch of a wader].

With slight intervals it has been blowing a gale from the west here for some months, the memory of man indeed goeth not back to the calm. I have not been really warm more than two days this so-called summer. And everybody prophesied we should be roasted alive here in summer.

We are all flourishing, and send our best love to Jack and you. Tell Joyce the wallflowers have grown quite high in her garden.

Ever your loving Pater.

[Politics are not often touched upon in the letters of this period, but an extract from a letter of October 25, 1891, is of interest as giving his reason for supporting a Unionist Government, many of whose tendencies he was far from sympathising with:—]

The extract from the "Guardian" is wonderful. The Gladstonian tee-to-tum cannot have many more revolutions to make. The only thing left for him now, is to turn Agnostic, declare Homer to be an old bloke of a ballad-monger, and agitate for the prohibition of the study of Greek in all universities...

It is just because I do not want to see our children involved in civil war that I postpone all political considerations to keeping up a Unionist Government.

I may be quite wrong; but right or wrong, it is no question of party. "Rads delight not me nor Tories neither," as Hamlet does not say.

The following letter to Sir M. Foster shows how little Huxley was now able to do in the way of public business without being knocked up:—]

Hodeslea, October 20, 1891.

My dear Foster,

If I had known the nature of the proceedings at the College of Physicians yesterday, I should have braved the tedium of listening to a lecture I could not hear in order to see you decorated. Clark had made a point of my going to the dinner [I.e. at the College of Physicians.], and, worse luck, I had to "say a few words" after it, with the result that I am entirely washed out to-day, and only able to send you the feeblest of congratulations.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[The same thing appears in the following to Sir W.H. Flower, which is also interesting for his opinion on the question of promotion by seniority:—]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, October 23, 1891.

My dear Flower,

My "next worst thing" was promoting a weak man to a place of responsibility in lieu of a strong one, on the mere ground of seniority.

Caeteris paribus, or with even approximate equality of qualifications, no doubt seniority ought to count; but it is mere ruin to any service to let it interfere with the promotion of men of marked superiority, especially in the case of offices which involve much responsibility.

I suppose as trustee I may requisition a copy of Woodward's Catalogue. I should like to look a little more carefully at it...We are none the worse for our pleasant glimpse of the world (and his wife) at your house; but I find that speechifying at public dinners is one of the luxuries that I must utterly deny myself. It will take me three weeks' quiet to get over my escapade.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

CHAPTER 3.9.

1892.

The revival of part of the former controversy which he had had with Mr. Gladstone upon the story of creation, made a warlike beginning of an otherwise very peaceful year. Since the middle of December a great correspondence had been going on in the "Times", consequent upon the famous manifesto of the thirty-eight Anglican clergy touching the question of inspiration and the infallibility of the Bible. Criticism, whether "higher" or otherwise, defended on the one side, was unsparingly denounced on the other. After about a month of this correspondence, Huxley's name was mentioned as one of these critics; whereupon he was attacked by one of the disputants for "misleading the public" by his assertion in the original controversy that while reptiles appear in the geological record before birds, Genesis affirms the contrary; the critic declaring that the word for "creeping things" (rehmes) created on the sixth day, does not refer to reptiles, which are covered by the "moving creatures" (shehretz) used of the first appearance of animal life.

It is interesting to see how, in his reply, Huxley took care to keep the main points at issue separate from the subordinate and unimportant ones. His answer is broken up into four letters. The first ("Times" January 26) rehearses the original issue between himself and Mr. Gladstone; wherein both sides agreed that the creation of the sixth day included reptiles, so that, formally at least, his position was secure, though there was also a broader ground of difference to be considered. Before proceeding further, he asks his critic whether he admits the existence of the contradiction involved, and if not, to state his reasons therefor. These reasons were again given on February 1 as the new interpretation of the two Hebrew words already referred to, an interpretation, by the way, which makes the same word stand both for "the vast and various population of the waters" and "for such land animals as mice, weasels, and lizards, great and small."

On February 3 appeared the second letter, in which, setting aside the particular form which his argument against Mr. Gladstone had taken, he described the broad differences between the teachings of Genesis and the teachings of evolution. He left the minor details as to the interpretation of the words in dispute, which did not really affect the main argument, to be dealt with in the next letter of February 4. It was a question with which he had long been familiar, as twenty years before he had, at Dr. Kalisch's request, gone over the proofs of his "Commentary on Leviticus".

The letter of February 3 is as follows:—]

While desirous to waste neither your space nor my own time upon mere misrepresentations of what I have said elsewhere about the relations between modern science and the so-called "Mosaic" cosmogony, it seems needful that I should ask for the opportunity of stating the case once more, as briefly and fairly as I can.

I conceive the first chapter of Genesis to teach—(1) that the species of plants and animals owe their origin to supernatural acts of creation; (2) that these acts took place at such times and in such a manner that all the plants were created first, all the aquatic and aerial animals (notably birds) next, and all terrestrial animals last. I am not aware that any Hebrew scholar denies that these propositions agree with the natural sense of the text. Sixty years ago I was taught, as most people were then taught, that they are guaranteed by Divine authority.

On the other hand, in my judgment, natural science teaches no less distinctly—(1) that the species of animals and plants have originated by a process of natural evolution; (2) that this process has taken place in such a manner that the species of animals and plants, respectively, have come into existence one after another throughout the whole period since they began to exist on the earth; that the species of plants and animals known to us are as a whole, neither older nor younger the one than the other.

The same holds good of aquatic and aerial species, as a whole, compared with terrestrial species; but birds appear in the geological record later than terrestrial reptiles, and there is every reason to believe that they were evolved from the latter.

Until it is shown that the first two propositions are not contained in the first chapter of Genesis, and that the second pair are not justified by the present condition of our knowledge, I must continue to maintain that natural science and the "Mosaic" account of the origin of animals and plants are in irreconcilable antagonism.

As I greatly desire that this broad issue should not be obscured by the discussion of minor points, I propose to defer what I may have to say about the great "shehretz" and "rehmes" question till to-morrow.

[On February 11 he wrote once more, again taking certain broader aspects of the problem presented by the first chapter of Genesis. He expressed his belief, as he had expressed it in 1869, that theism is not logically antagonistic to evolution. If, he continues, the account in Genesis, as Philo of Alexandria held, is only a poem or allegory, where is the proof that any one non-natural interpretation is the right one? and he concludes by pointing out the difficulties in the way of those who, like the famous thirty-eight, assert the infallibility of the Bible as guaranteed by the infallibility of the Church.

Apart from letters and occasional controversy, he published this year only one magazine article and a single volume of collected essays, though he was busy preparing the Romanes Lecture for 1893, the more so because there was some chance that Mr. Gladstone would be unable to deliver the first of the lectures in 1892, and Huxley had promised to be ready to take his place if necessary.

The volume (called "Controverted Questions") which appeared in 1892, was a collection of the essays of the last few years, mainly controversial, or as he playfully called them, "endeavours to defend a cherished cause," dealing with agnosticism and the demonological and miraculous element in Christianity. That they were controversial in tone no one lamented more than himself; and as in the letter to M. de Varigny, of November 25, 1891, so here in the prologue he apologises for the fact.]

This prologue,—of which he writes to a friend], "It cost me more time and pains than any equal number of pages I have ever written,"—[was designed to indicate the main question, various aspects of which are dealt with by these seemingly disconnected essays.]

The historical evolution of humanity [he writes], which is generally, and I venture to think not unreasonably, regarded as progress, has been, and is being, accompanied by a co-ordinate elimination of the supernatural from its originally large occupation of men's thought. The question—How far is this process to go? is, in my apprehension, the controverted question of our time.

This movement, marked by the claim for the freedom of private judgment, which first came to its fulness in the Renascence, is here sketched out, rising or sinking by turns under the pressure of social and political vicissitudes, from Wiclif's earliest proposal to reduce the Supernaturalism of Christianity within the limits sanctioned by the Scriptures, down to the manifesto in the previous year of the thirty-eight Anglican divines in defence of biblical infallibility, which practically ends in an appeal to the very principle they reject.

But he does not content himself with pointing out the destructive effects of criticism upon the evidence in favour of a "supernature"—"The present incarnation of the spirit of the Renascence," he writes, "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 that "is no speculation, but a generalisation of certain facts, which may be observed by any one who will take the necessary trouble." And in a short dozen pages he sketches out that "common body of established truths" to which it is his confident belief that "all future philosophical and theological speculations will have to accommodate themselves."

There is no need to recapitulate these; they may be read in "Science and Christian Tradition", the fifth volume of the "Collected Essays"; but it is worth noticing that in conclusion, after rejecting "a great many supernaturalistic theories and legends which have no better foundations than those of heathenism," he declares himself as far from wishing to "throw the Bible aside as so much waste paper" as he was at the establishment of the School Board in 1870. As English literature, as world-old history, as moral teaching, as the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed, the most democratic book in the world, he could not spare it.] "I do not say," [he adds], "that even the highest biblical ideal is exclusive of others or needs no supplement. But I do believe that the human race is not yet, possibly may never be, in a position to dispense with it."

[It was this volume that led to the writing of the magazine article referred to above. The republication in it of the "Agnosticism," originally written in reply to an article of Mr. Frederic Harrison's, induced the latter to disclaim in the "Fortnightly Review" the intimate connection assumed to exist between his views and the system of Positivism detailed by Comte, and at the same time to offer the olive branch to his former opponent. But while gratefully accepting the goodwill implied in the offer, Huxley still declared himself unable to] "give his assent to a single doctrine which is the peculiar property of Positivism, old or new," [nor to agree with Mr. Harrison when he wanted:—]

to persuade us that agnosticism is only the Court of the Gentiles of the Positivist temple; and that those who profess ignorance about the proper solution of certain speculative problems ought to call themselves Positivists of the Gate, if it happens that they also take a lively interest in social and political questions.

[This essay, "An Apologetic Irenicon," contains more than one passage of personal interest, which are the more worth quoting here, as the essay has not been republished. It was to have been included in a tenth volume of collected Essays, along with a number of others which he projected, but never wrote.

Thus, begging the Positivists not to regard him as a rival or competitor in the business of instructing the human race, he says:—]

I aspire to no such elevated and difficult situation. I declare myself not only undesirous of it, but deeply conscious of a constitutional unfitness for it. Age and hygienic necessities bind me to a somewhat anchoritic life in pure air, with abundant leisure to meditate upon the wisdom of Candide's sage aphorism, "Cultivons notre jardin"—especially if the term garden may be taken broadly and applied to the stony and weed-grown ground within my skull, as well as to a few perches of more promising chalk down outside it. In addition to these effectual bars to any of the ambitious pretensions ascribed to me, there is another: of all possible positions that of master of a school, or leader of a sect, or chief of a party, appears to me to be the most undesirable; in fact, the average British matron cannot look upon followers with a more evil eye than I do. Such acquaintance with the history of thought as I possess, has taught me to regard schools, parties, and sects, as arrangements, the usual effect of which is to perpetuate all that is worst and feeblest in the master's, leader's, or founder's work; or else, as in some cases, to upset it altogether; as a sort of hydrants for extinguishing the fire of genius, and for stifling the flame of high aspirations, the kindling of which has been the chief, perhaps the only, merit of the protagonist of the movement. I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever proposed to myself is to say, this and this have I learned; thus and thus have I learned it: go thou and learn better; but do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions, the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.

[Again, replying to the reproach that all his public utterances had been of a negative character, that the great problems of human life had been entirely left out of his purview, he defends once more the work of the man who clears the ground for the builders to come after him:—]

There is endless backwoodsman's work yet to be done, If "those also serve who only stand and wait," still more do those who sweep and cleanse; and if any man elect to give his strength to the weeder's and scavenger's occupation, I remain of the opinion that his service should be counted acceptable, and that no one has a right to ask more of him than faithful performance of the duties he has undertaken. I venture to count it an improbable suggestion that any such person—a man, let us say, who has well-nigh reached his threescore years and ten, and has graduated in all the faculties of human relationships; who has taken his share in all the deep joys and deeper anxieties which cling about them; who has felt the burden of young lives entrusted to his care, and has stood alone with his dead before the abyss of the eternal—has never had a thought beyond negative criticism. It seems to me incredible that such an one can have done his day's work, always with a light heart, with no sense of responsibility, no terror of that which may appear when the factitious veil of Isis—the thick web of fiction man has woven round nature—is stripped off.

[Challenged to state his "mental bias, pro or con," with regard to such matters as Creation, Providence, etc., he reiterates his words written thirty-two years before:—]

So far back as 1860 I wrote:—

"The doctrine of special creation owes its existence very largely to the supposed necessity of making science accord with the Hebrew cosmogony"; and that the hypothesis of special creation is, in my judgment, a "mere specious mask for our ignorance." Not content with negation, I said:—

"Harmonious order governing eternally continuous progress; the web and woof of matter and force interweaving by slow degrees, without a broken thread, that veil which lies between us and the infinite; that universe which alone we know, or can know; such is the picture which science draws of the world."

Every reader of Goethe will know that the second is little more than a paraphrase of the well-known utterance of the "Zeitgeist" in "Faust", which surely is something more than a mere negation of the clumsy anthropomorphism of special creation.

Follows a query about "Providence," my answer to which must depend upon what my questioner means by that substantive, whether alone, or qualified by the adjective "moral."

If the doctrine of a Providence is to be taken as the expression, in a way "to be understanded of the people," of the total exclusion of chance from a place even in the most insignificant corner of Nature, if it means the strong conviction that the cosmic process is rational, and the faith that, throughout all duration, unbroken order has reigned in the universe, I not only accept it, but I am disposed to think it the most important of all truths. As it is of more consequence for a citizen to know the law than to be personally acquainted with the features of those who will surely carry it into effect, so this very positive doctrine of Providence, in the sense defined, seems to me far more important than all the theorems of speculative theology. If, further, the doctrine is held to imply that, in some indefinitely remote past aeon, the cosmic process was set going by some entity possessed of intelligence and foresight, similar to our own in kind, however superior in degree, if, consequently, it is held that every event, not merely in our planetary speck, but in untold millions of other worlds, was foreknown before these worlds were, scientific thought, so far as I know anything about it, has nothing to say against that hypothesis. It is, in fact, an anthropomorphic rendering of the doctrine of evolution.

It may be so, but the evidence accessible to us is, to my mind, wholly insufficient to warrant either a positive or a negative conclusion.

[He remarks in passing upon the entire exclusion of "special" providences by this conception of a universal "Providence." As for "moral" providence:—]

So far as mankind has acquired the conviction that the observance of certain rules of conduct is essential to the maintenance of social existence, it may be proper to say that "Providence," operating through men, has generated morality. Within the limits of a fraction of a fraction of the living world, therefore, there is a "moral" providence. Through this small plot of an infinitesimal fragment of the universe there runs a "stream of tendency towards righteousness." But outside the very rudimentary germ of a garden of Eden, thus watered, I am unable to discover any "moral" purpose, or anything but a stream of purpose towards the consummation of the cosmic process, chiefly by means of the struggle for existence, which is no more righteous or unrighteous than the operation of any other mechanism.

[This, of course, is the underlying principle of the Romanes Lecture, upon which he was still at work. It is more specifically expressed in the succeeding paragraph:—]

I hear much of the "ethics of evolution." I apprehend that, in the broadest sense of the term "evolution," there neither is, nor can be, any such thing. The notion that the doctrine of evolution can furnish a foundation for morals seems to me to be an illusion which has arisen from the unfortunate ambiguity of the term "fittest" in the formula, "survival of the fittest." We commonly use "fittest" in a good sense, with an understood connotation of "best"; and "best" we are apt to take in its ethical sense. But the "fittest" which survives in the struggle for existence may be, and often is, the ethically worst.

[Another paragraph explains the sense in which he used to say that the Romanes Lecture was a very orthodox discourse on the text, "Satan, the Prince of this world":—]

It is the secret of the superiority of the best theological teachers to the majority of their opponents that they substantially recognise these realities of things, however strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the "liberal" popular illusions that babies are all born good, and that the example of a corrupt society is responsible for their failure to remain so; that it is given to everybody to reach the ethical ideal if he will only try; that all partial evil is universal good, and other optimistic figments, such as that which represents "Providence" under the guise of a paternal philanthropist, and bids us believe that everything will come right (according to our notions) at last.

As to "Immortality" again [he refers his critic to his book on "Hume"]. I do not think I need return to "subjective" immortality, but it may be well to add that I am a very strong believer in the punishment of certain kinds of actions, not only in the present, but in all the future a man can have, be it long or short. Therefore in hell, for I suppose that all men with a clear sense of right and wrong (and I am not sure that any others deserve such punishment) have now and then "descended into hell" and stopped there quite long enough to know what infinite punishment means. And if a genuine, not merely subjective, immortality awaits us, I conceive that, without some such change as that depicted in the fifteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, immortality must be eternal misery. The fate of Swift's Struldbrugs seems to me not more horrible than that of a mind imprisoned for ever within the flammantia moenia of inextinguishable memories.

Further, it may be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspiration 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.

[He admits that the generality of mankind will not be satisfied to be told that there are some topics about which we know nothing now, and do not seem likely ever to be able to know more; and, consequently, that in the long-run the world will turn to those who profess to have conclusions:—]

And that is the pity of it. As in the past, so, I fear, through a very long future, the multitude will continue to turn to those who are ready to feed it with the viands its soul lusteth after; who will offer mental peace where there is no peace, and lap it in the luxury of pleasant delusions.

To missionaries of the Neo-Positivist, as to those of other professed solutions of insoluble mysteries, whose souls are bound up in the success of their sectarian propaganda, no doubt, it must be very disheartening if the "world," for whose assent and approbation they sue, stops its ears and turns its back upon them. But what does it signify to any one who does not happen to be a missionary of any sect, philosophical or religious, and who, if he were, would have no sermon to preach except from the text with which Descartes, to go no further back, furnished us two centuries since? I am very sorry if people will not listen to those who rehearse before them the best lessons they have been able to learn, but that is their business, not mine. Belief in majorities is not rooted in my breast, and if all the world were against me the fact might warn me to revise and criticise my opinions, but would not in itself supply a ghost of a reason for forsaking them. For myself I say deliberately, it is better to have a millstone tied round the neck and be thrown into the sea than to share the enterprises of those to whom the world has turned, and will turn, because they minister to its weaknesses and cover up the awful realities which it shudders to look at.

[A letter to Mr. N.P. Clayton also discusses the basis of morality.]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, November 5, 1892.

Dear Sir,

I well remember the interview to which you refer, and I should have replied to your letter sooner, but during the last few weeks I have been very busy.

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 becomes 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 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.

Now for this last sort of people there is no reason why they should discharge any 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 almost as much as the bad.

If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be (under due limitations) obeyed; 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—Shakespere, 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 fulfilling its plainest dictates. As there are men born physically cripples, and intellectually idiots, so there are some who are moral cripples and idiots, and can be kept straight not even by punishment. For these people there is nothing but shutting up, or extirpation.

I am, yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The peaceful aspect of the "Irenicon" seems to have veiled to most readers the unbroken nature of his defence, and he writes to his son-in-law, the Hon. John Collier, suggesting an alteration in the title of the essay:—]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, November 8, 1892.

My dear Jack,

It is delightful to find a reader who "twigs" every point as acutely as your brother has done. I told somebody—was it you?—I rather wished the printer would substitute o for e in Irenicon. So far as I have seen any notices, the British critic (what a dull ass he is) appears to have been seriously struck by my sweetness of temper.

I sent you the article yesterday, so you will judge for yourself.

With love, ever yours affectionately,

T.H. Huxley.

You should see the place I am claiming for Art in the University. I do believe something will grow out of my plan, which has made all the dry bones rattle. It is coming on for discussion in the Senate, and I shall be coming to you to have my wounds dressed after the fight. Don't know the day yet.

[This allusion to the place of Art in the University refers to the proposed reorganisation of the London University.

Since the year 1887 the question of establishing a Teaching University for London had become more and more pressing. London contained many isolated teaching bodies of various kinds—University College, King's College, the Royal College of Science, the Medical Schools, Bedford College, and so forth, while the London University was only an examining body. Clearly these scattered bodies needed organising; the educational forces of the metropolis were disintegrated; much teaching—and this was especially true of the medical schools—that could have been better done and better paid in a single institution, was split up among several, none of which, perhaps, could offer sufficient inducement to keep the best men permanently.

The most burning question was, whether these bodies should be united into a new university, with power to grant degrees of its own, or should combine with the existing University of London, so that the latter would become a teaching as well as an examining body. And if so, there was the additional question as to the form which this combination should take—whether federation, for example, or absorption.

The whole question had been referred to a Royal Commission by the Government of Lord Salisbury. The results were seen in the charter for a Gresham University, embodying the former alternative, and in the introduction into Parliament of a Bill to carry this scheme into effect. But this action had only been promoted by some of the bodies interested, and was strongly opposed by other bodies, as well as by many teachers who were interested in university reform.

Thus at the end of February, Huxley was invited, as a Governor of University College, to sign a protest against the provisions of the Charter for a Teaching University then before Parliament, especially in so far as it was proposed to establish a second examining body in London. The signatories also begged the Government to grant further inquiry before legislating on the subject

The protest, which received over 100 signatures of weight, contributed something towards the rejection of the Bill in the House of Commons. It became possible to hope that there might be established in London a University which should be something more than a mere collection of teachers, having as their only bond of union the preparation of students for a common examination. It was proposed to form an association to assist in the promotion of a teaching university for the metropolis; but the first draft of a scheme to reconcile the complication of interests and ideals involved led Huxley to express himself as follows:—]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, March 27, 1892.

Dear Professor Weldon [Then at University College, London; now Linacre Professor of Physiology at Oxford.],

I am sorry to have kept you waiting so long for an answer to your letter of the 17th: but your proposal required a good deal of consideration, and I have had a variety of distractions.

So long as I am a member of the Senate of the University of London, I do not think I can with propriety join any Association which proposes to meddle with it. Moreover, though I have a good deal of sympathy with the ends of the Association, I have my doubts about many propositions set forth in your draft.

I took part in the discussions preliminary to Lord Justice Fry's scheme, and I was so convinced that that scheme would be wrecked amidst the complication of interests and ideals that claimed consideration, that I gave up attending to it. In fact, living so much out of the world now, and being sadly deaf, I am really unfit to intervene in business of this kind.

Worse still, I am conscious that my own ideal is, for the present at any rate, hopelessly impracticable. I should cut away medicine, law, and theology as technical specialities in charge of corporations which might be left to settle (in the case of medicine, in accordance with the State) the terms on which they grant degrees.

The university or universities should be learning and teaching bodies devoted to art (literary and other), history, philosophy, and science, where any one who wanted to learn all that is known about these matters should find people who could teach him and put him in the way of learning for himself.

That is what the world will want one day or other, as a supplement to all manner of high schools and technical institution in which young people get decently educated and learn to earn their bread—such as our present universities.

It will be a place for men to get knowledge; and not for boys and adolescents to get degrees.

I wish I could get the younger men like yourself to see that this is the goal which they may reach, and in the meanwhile to take care that no such Philistine compromise as is possible at present, becomes too strong to survive a sharp shake.

I am, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[He sketches his ideal of a modern university, and especially of its relation to the Medical Schools, in a letter to Professor Ray Lankester of April 11:—]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, April 11, 1892.

My dear Lankester,

We have been having ten days of sunshine, and I have been correspondingly lazy, especially about letter-writing. This, however, is my notion; that unless people clearly understand that the university of the future is to be a very different thing from the university of the past, they had better put off meddling for another generation.

The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge, and except in the way of dialectic cobweb-spinning, its professors had nothing to do with novelties. Of the historical and physical (natural) sciences, of criticism and laboratory practice, it knew nothing. Oral teaching was of supreme importance on account of the cost and rarity of manuscripts.

The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge: its professors have to be at the top of the wave of progress. Research and criticism must be the breath of their nostrils; laboratory work the main business of the scientific student; books his main helpers.

The lecture, however, in the hands of an able man will still have the utmost importance in stimulating and giving facts and principles their proper relative prominence.

I think we should get pretty nearly what is wanted by grafting a College de France on to the University of London, subsidising University College and King's College (if it will get rid of its tests, not otherwise), and setting up two or three more such bodies in other parts of London. (Scotland, with a smaller population than London, has four complete universities!)

I should hand over the whole business of medical education and graduation to a medical universitas to be constituted by the royal colleges and medical schools, whose doings, of course, would be checked by the Medical Council.

Our side has been too apt to look upon medical schools as feeders for Science. They have been so, but to their detriment as medical schools. And now that so many opportunities for purely scientific training are afforded, there is no reason they should remain so.

The problem of the Medical University is to make an average man into a good practical doctor before he is twenty-two, and with not more expense than can be afforded by the class from which doctors are recruited, or than will be rewarded by the prospect of an income of 400 to 500 pounds a year.

It is not right to sacrifice such men, and the public on whom they practise, for the prospect of making 1 per cent of medical students into men of science.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[An undated draft in his own handwriting (probably the draft of a speech delivered the first time he came to the committee as President, October 26) expands the same idea as to the modern requirements of the University:—]

The cardinal fact in the University question, appears to me to be this: that the student to whose wants the mediaeval University was adjusted, looked to the past and sought book-learning, while the modern looks to the future and seeks the knowledge of things.

The mediaeval view was that all knowledge worth having was explicitly or implicitly contained in various ancient writings; in the Scriptures, in the writings of the greater Greeks, and those of the Christian Fathers. Whatever apparent novelty they put forward, was professedly obtained by deduction from ancient data.

The modern knows that the only source of real knowledge lies in the application of scientific methods of inquiry to the ascertainment of the facts of existence; that the ascertainable is infinitely greater than the ascertained, and that the chief business of the teacher is not so much to make scholars as to train pioneers.

From this point of view, the University occupies a position altogether independent of that of the coping-stone of schools for general education, combined with technical schools of Theology, Law, and Medicine. It is not primarily an institution for testing the work of schoolmasters, or for ascertaining the fitness of young men to be curates, lawyers, or doctors.

It is an institution in which a man who claims to devote himself to Science or Art, should be able to find some one who can teach him what is already known, and train him in the methods of knowing more.

I include under Art,—Literature, the pictorial and plastic art with Architecture, and Music; and under Science,—Logic, Philosophy, Philology, Mathematics, and the Physical Sciences.

The question of the connection of the High Schools for general education, and of the technical schools of Theology, Law, Medicine, Engineering, Art, Music, and so on, with the University is a matter of practical detail. Probably the teaching of the subjects which stand in the relation of preliminaries to technical teaching and final studies in higher general education in the University would be utilised by the colleges and technical schools.

All that I have to say on this subject is, that I see no reason why the existing University of London should not be completed in the sense I have defined by grafting upon it a professoriate with the appropriate means and appliances, which would supply London with the analogue of the Ecole des hautes Etudes and the College de France in Paris, and of the Laboratories with the Professor Extraordinarius and Privat Docenten in the German Universities.

[A new Commission was promised to look into the whole question of the London University. This is referred to in a letter to Sir J. Donnelly of March 30, 1892.]

Unless you want to kill Foster, don't suggest him for the Commission. He is on one already.

The whole affair is a perfect muddle of competing crude projects and vested interests, and is likely to end in a worse muddle, as anything but a patch up is, I believe, outside practical politics at present.

If I had carte blanche, I should cut away the technical "Faculties" of Medicine, Law, and Theology, and set up first-class chairs in Literature, Art, Philosophy, and pure Science—a sort of combination of Sorbonne (without Theology) and College de France.

Thank Heaven I have never been asked to say anything, and my chimaeras remain in petto. They would be scouted.

[On the other hand, he was most anxious to keep the School of Science at South Kensington entirely independent. He writes again on May 26:—]

I trust Rucker and Thorpe are convinced by this time that I knew what I was talking about when I told them, months ago, that there would be an effort to hook us into the new University hotch-potch.

I am ready to oppose any such project tooth and nail. I have not been striving these thirty years to get Science clear of their schoolmastering sham-literary peddling to give up the game without a fight. I hope my Lords will be staunch.

I am glad my opinion is already on record.

[And similarly to Sir M. Foster on October 30:—]

You will have to come to London and set up physiology at the Royal College of Science. It is the only place in Great Britain in which scientific teaching is trammelled neither by parsons nor by litterateurs. I have always implored Donnelly to keep us clear of any connection with a University of any kind, sort, or description, and I tried to instil the same lesson into the doctors the other day. But the "liberal education" cant is an obsession of too many of them.

[A further step was taken in June, when he was sent a new draft of proposals, afterwards adopted by the above-mentioned general meeting of the Association in March 1893, sketching a constitution for a new university, and asking for the appointment of a Statutory Commission to carry it out. The University thus constituted was to be governed by a Court, half of which should consist of university professors] ("As for a government by professors only" [he writes in the "Times" of December 6, 1892], "the fact of their being specialists is against them. Most of them are broad-minded; practical men; some are good administrators. But, unfortunately, there is among them, as in other professions, a fair sprinkling of one-idea'd fanatics, ignorant of the commonest conventions of official relation, and content with nothing if they cannot get everything their own way. It is these persons who, with the very highest and purest intentions, would ruin any administrative body unless they were counterpoised by non-professional, common-sense members of recognised weight and authority in the conduct of affairs." [Furthermore, against the adoption of a German university system, he continues], "In holding up the University of Berlin as our model, I think you fail to attach sufficient weight to the considerations that there is no Minister of Public Instruction in these realms; that a great many of us would rather have no university at all than one under the control of such a minister, and whose highest representatives might come to be, not the fittest men, but those who stood foremost in the good graces of the powers that be, whether Demos, Ministry, or Sovereign."); [it was to include such faculties as Law, Engineering, Medicine, while it was to bring into connection the various teaching bodies scattered over London. The proposers themselves recognised that the scheme was not ideal, but a compromise which at least would not hamper further progress, and would supersede the Gresham scheme, which they regarded as a barrier to all future academic reform.

The Association as thus constituted Huxley now joined, and was immediately asked to accept the Presidency, not that he should do any more militant work than he was disposed to attempt, but simply that he should sit like Moltke in his tent and keep an eye on the campaign.

He felt it almost a point of honour not to refuse his best services to a cause he had always had at heart, though he wrote:—]

There are some points in which I go further than your proposals, but they are so much, to my mind, in the right direction that I gladly support them.