I am sick of the dilettante middle class, and mean to try what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who live among facts.

And in May, after referring to his Preliminary Course and the earnestness and attention of his audience, he adds that he has begun his similar course to working men exclusively—a series of six, given in turn by each Professor:—

The theatre holds 600, and is crammed full. I believe in the fustian, and can talk better to it than to any amount of gauze and Saxony; and to a fustian audience (but to that only) I would willingly give some when I come to Tenby [Dr. Dyster's home].

Moreover, he took a practical interest in the corresponding movement set afoot by F.D. Maurice, and gave occasional addresses at the Working Men's College between 1857 and 1877, the last of which was that delightful discourse on science as "trained and organized common sense" which bears the alluring title of "The Method of Zadig."



IX

POPULAR EDUCATION

These lectures to working men, no less than his profound interest and exhausting work on behalf of popular education, illustrate his intense belief that science is not solely a thing of the laboratory, but a vital factor in right living. It was still true that the people perish for want of knowledge. And as he said when talking of posthumous fame: "If I am to be remembered at all, I should like to be remembered as one who did his best to help the people."

Nor did he lack appreciation among those whom he tried thus to aid. Professor Mivart tells the following story:—

I recollect going [in 1874] with him and Mr. John Westlake, Q.C., to a meeting of artisans in the Blackfriars Road, to whom he gave a friendly address. He felt a strong interest in working men, and was much beloved by them. On one occasion, having taken a cab home, on his arrival there, when he held out his fare to the cabman, the latter replied: "Oh no, Professor; I have had too much pleasure and profit from hearing you lecture to take any money from your pocket; proud to have driven you, Sir!"

Another story is told by Mr. Raymond Blaythwayt:—

Only to-day I had a most striking instance of sentiment come beneath my notice. I was about to enter my house, when a plain, simply dressed working man came up to me with a note in his hand, and, touching his hat, he said: "I think this is for you, Sir"; and then he added: "Will you give me the envelope, Sir, as a great favour?" I looked at it, and, seeing it bore the signature of Professor Huxley, I replied: "Certainly I will; but why do you ask for it?" "Well," said he; "it's got Professor Huxley's signature, and it will be something for me to show my mates and keep for my children. He has done me and my like a lot of good; no man more."

In these special lectures of his very best and in his other essays, which, however far-reaching, were always intelligible to plain readers, may be seen one side of his desire to spread clear thinking among the less instructed masses; another was his work on the first School Board. By 1870 his health was already shaken by the heavy work which filled his days and nights; nevertheless, whatever the cost in time and labour and health, he felt it imperative to try, with all his power, to give rational shape to the new lines of universal education, and to revivify it with the fresh breath of the new renascence in aim and method. Science must be represented in the new Parliament of Education, and there was no one else ready to undertake the part. Moreover, he had already enjoyed some practical experience of the workings of elementary education while examiner under the Science and Art Department, the establishment of which he considered

a measure which came into existence unnoticed, but which will, I believe, turn out to be of more importance to the welfare of the people than many political changes over which the noise of battle has rent the air.

On the proper working of the new Act depended the physical, moral, and intellectual betterment of the nation; in particular, "book-learning" needed to be tempered with not merely handcraft, but with something of the direct knowledge of nature; for in itself, if properly applied, this is an admirable instrument of education, and by its method promotes an attitude of mind capable of understanding the reasons for the vast changes at work in human thought.

Accordingly, he stood as a candidate for Marylebone, and, without canvassing, for which he had neither time nor inclination, he was elected second on the list. He had addressed several meetings, and, as an amplification of his election address, he included extracts from his forthcoming article, "The School Boards: What They Can Do, and What They May Do," which were sent to the papers by the editor of the Contemporary Review. (See Coll. Ess., iii, 374.) Here was his programme, a great part of which he saw carried out:—Physical training, for health and as a basis for further training; Domestic training, especially for girls; Moral training, in a knowledge of moral and social laws, and an engaging of the affections for what is good instead of what is evil; Intellectual training, in knowledge and the means of acquiring knowledge, alike for practical purposes and for recreation.

The opponents of popular education raised their still familiar outcry about "cramming children full of nonsense" and "unfitting them for the state of life to which they were called." But one cannot say what state of life they may be called to without opportunity of testing their capacities, and as for cramming them with nonsense, such a scheme, if properly carried out, ought rather to expel nonsense. Above all, it set the interests of humanity above the mere development of skill, which would simply turn the child of man into the subtlest beast of the field.

True education, he declared, was impossible without "religion," the unchanging essence of which lies in the love of some ethical ideal to govern and guide conduct, "together with the awe and reverence which have no kinship with base fear, but rise whenever one tries to pierce below the surface of things, whether they be material or spiritual."

It was in this sense that he advocated Bible-reading in schools—simple Bible-reading, without theological gloss. On the one hand, this was the only workable plan under existing circumstances. True, that he would not have employed the Bible as the agency for introducing the religious and ethical idea in a system that could begin with a clean slate. He believed that the principle of strict secularity in State education is sound and must ultimately prevail. But moral instruction must not be too rudely divorced from the system of belief current among the generality; and the Bible had been the instrument of the clergy of all denominations, to whose efforts the mass of half-instructed people owed such redemption from ignorance and barbarism as they possessed. Make all needful deductions, and there remains a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur, interwoven with three centuries of our history. The Bible, as English literature, as old-world history, as moral teaching, as the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed, the most democratic book in the world, could not be spared. The mass of the people should not be deprived of the one great literature which is open to them; not shut out from the perception of their relations with the whole past history of civilized mankind, nor from an unpriestly view of Judaism and Jesus of Nazareth, purged of the accretions of centuries. Accordingly, he supported Mr. W.H. Smith's motion for Bible-reading, even against the champions of immediate secularization; but for Bible-reading under such regulations as would carry out for the children the intention of Mr. W.E. Forster, the originator of the Education Act, that "in the reading and explanation of the Bible... no efforts will be made to cram into their poor little minds theological dogmas which their tender age prevents them from understanding."

But the compromise was not permanently satisfactory. In 1893-94 the clerical party on the School Board "denounced" the treaty agreed to in 1871, and up till then undisputed, in the expectation of securing a new one more favourable to themselves; and the Times, hurrying to their support, did not hesitate to declare in a leading article that "the persons who framed the rule" respecting religious instruction intended to include definite teaching of such theological dogmas as the Incarnation.

In a letter to the Times Huxley replied (April 29, 1893):—

I cannot say what may have been in the minds of the framers of the rule; but, assuredly, if I had dreamed that any such interpretation could fairly be put upon it, I should have opposed the arrangement to the best of my ability.

In fact, a year before the rule was framed I wrote an article in the Contemporary Review, entitled "The School Boards—what they can do and what they may do," in which I argued that the terms of the Education Act excluded such teaching as it is now proposed to include.

And this contention he supported by the quotation from Mr. W.E. Forster, given above.

Further, in October, 1894, he replied as follows to a correspondent who had asked him whether flat adhesion to the compromise had not made nonsense of a certain Bible lesson, which was the subject of much comment:—

I am at one with you in hating "hush up" as I do all other forms of lying; but I venture to submit that the compromise of 1871 was not a "hush up." If I had taken it to be such, I should have refused to have anything to do with it....

There has never been the slightest ambiguity about my position in the matter; in fact, if you will turn to one paper on the School Board written by me before my election in 1870, I think you will find that I anticipated the pith of the present discussion.

The persons who agreed to the compromise did exactly what all sincere men who agree to compromise do. For the sake of the enormous advantage of giving the rudiments of a decent education to several generations of the people, they accepted what was practically an armistice in respect of certain matters about which the contending parties were absolutely irreconcilable.

To return to his activity on the School Board. His vigorous work as chairman of the committee appointed to frame an educational scheme was marked by great breadth of view. He desired the elementary schools to be linked at the one end with infant schools; at the other with continuation schools and some scheme for technical education. A perfect scheme would provide what he first called a ladder from the gutter to the university, whereby children of exceptional capacity might reach the places for which nature had fitted them. His sense of fitness would have welcomed even more warmly some system whereby the incompetent born into the higher strata of the social organism should be automatically graded down to the positions more appropriate to their wits and character. But this is an ideal only possible in Plato's State, where philosophers are kings and possess superhuman power of intuition.

Sincerity is sometimes impracticable. But here sincerity was combined with common-sense practicality, and even an opponent like Lord Shaftesbury was impelled to write in his journal:—"Professor Huxley has this definition of morality and religion: 'Teach a child what is wise: that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful: that is religion!' Let no one henceforth despair of making things clear and of giving explanations!"

He did not, however, disguise his fundamental opposition to Ultramontanism, that intellectual and social imperium in imperio, with its basic hostility to the free scientific spirit. This he had already expressed in his "Scientific Education" (Coll. Ess., iii, 111), an address of 1869, and he repeated it towards the end of his service on the School Board when opposing a bye-law that the Board should pay over direct to denominational schools the fees for poor children—to schools, that is, outside the Board's control. He opposed it partly because it would assuredly lead to repeated contests on the Board; partly because it would give a handle to that party whose system, as set forth in the syllabus, of securing complete possession of the minds of their flock, was destructive of all that was highest in the nature of mankind and inconsistent with intellectual and political liberty.

The committee did excellent work in systematizing important matters and leaving minor arrangements to the local managers; in apportioning essential and discretionary subjects, and—what was of special interest to its chairman—the teaching of elementary geography and elementary social economy, and in particular the systematized object-lessons, embracing a course of elementary construction in physical science, and serving as an introduction to the courses for the examinations under the Science and Art Department. Science, as he declared, was assuming such a position alike in practical life and in thought that any one totally ignorant of it would be at a disadvantage in both spheres. Moreover, the proposed technical schools—for applied science, that is—must suffer if they had to deal with pupils who had no preliminary grounding in the principles of physical science. His early advocacy of music and drawing, not to produce artists, but to develop personality, also bore some fruit. The man of science, too, was found defending Latin as a discretionary subject, alternatively with a modern language. Latin was the gate to many things, and, apart from the question of overloading the curriculum, there was great danger if educational possibilities were not thrown open to all without restriction. There is no more frightful "sitting on the safety valve" than in denying men of ability the means of rising to the positions for which their talents and industry might qualify them.

As for the compulsory element in education and the justification for levying rates and taxes for what objectors called "educating other people's children," his answer was: "Every ignorant person tends to become a burden upon, and, so far, an infringer of the liberty of, his fellows, and an obstacle to their success. Under such circumstances an education rate is, in fact, a war tax, levied for purposes of defence."

In all this it was his attitude towards the child which deeply impressed his colleagues in whom child-sympathy was strongest. As the Rev. Benjamin Waugh put it, he was on the Board to establish schools for the children. He wanted to turn them into sound men and women, and resented the idea that schools were to train either congregations for churches or hands for factories. "What he sought to do for the child was for the child's sake, that it might live a fuller, truer, worthier life."

After fifteen months of service on the School Board superadded to the heavy strain of his ordinary work, his health broke down utterly, and he resigned. But after his retirement his successors found that their duty was "to put into practice the scheme of instruction which Huxley was mainly instrumental in settling. We were thus able indirectly to improve both the means and methods of teaching.... The most important developments and additions have been in the direction of educating the hand and eye.... Thus the impulse given by Huxley in the first months of the Board's existence has been carried forward by others." So wrote Dr. J. H. Gladstone in 1896. The tide of education has swelled since then and is still swelling, but its main direction is the same.

NOTE

As these pages are passing through the press, I note an appeal for money by the Religious Tract Society, which is running short of funds to keep up the number and quality of the 6-7,000 Bibles annually awarded as prizes to elementary school children. This advertisement fills more than half a column of the Times of March 25, 1920. It is headed in bold type, PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON THE BIBLE, and, opening with the words "All who value the teaching of the Holy Bible will appreciate this wonderful description of the Bible by Professor Huxley," proceeds to quote the eloquent passage, referred to above on p. 54, from "The School Boards, etc." (Coll. Ess., iii, 396).

This testimony to the interest of the Bible outside its theological applications is detached from its context as a spur to "all those who value the Word of God... to send the Society help in [its] work of extending Bible teaching in our Elementary Schools."

But these words were written with grave qualifications, especially as to the need of excluding doctrinal teaching. By suppressing these qualifications the Secretaries of the Religious Tract Society approve themselves denizens of the world of half-truths, along with puff-writers and similar experts.



X

EDUCATION: ESPECIALLY OF TEACHERS AND OF WOMEN

The third of his excursions into the field of education, in his burning desire to give the people that right knowledge for want of which they perish, was the training of the teachers who prepared pupils for the examinations of the Science and Art Department. The future of scientific teaching depended upon the proper supply of trained teachers. Now, the School of Mines in Jermyn Street was without a laboratory in which to make even his own students work out with their own hands the structure of the biological "types" expounded in the lectures. An opportunity to train these new "scientific missionaries" came in 1871, when he was deep in the great schemes of elementary education. More than a hundred of them flocked to South Kensington, where some large rooms on the ground floor of the museum had been secured and rigged up for the purpose by the Professor and his three demonstrators. For six weeks in the summer there was a daily lecture, followed by four hours' laboratory work under the demonstrators, in which the students verified for themselves facts which they had hitherto heard about and taught to their unfortunate pupils from books alone. The naive astonishment and delight of the more intelligent among them was sometimes almost pathetic. One clergyman, who had for years conducted classes in physiology under the Science and Art Department, was shown a drop of his own blood under the microscope. "Dear me!" he exclaimed, "it's just like the picture in Huxley's Physiology."

From 1872 onwards, when the School of Mines removed bodily to new buildings at South Kensington, Huxley had a fine laboratory of his own, in which not only were these teachers taught, but he was able to adopt the same method with the students in his regular courses—a method for long universally adopted in detail as well as in principle. The first and unchangeable principle was to make the student verify every fact for himself; to be satisfied with nothing at second hand. The system was to work over a chosen set of biological types, each representing a well-marked group and providing comparisons one with another as well as stepping stones to further investigations. Originally he started the series with the simplest organisms, and proceeded to the more complex; but, though a good philosophical order, it had the disadvantages of requiring the beginner to have much skill in handling the microscope, and of proceeding from the less known organism to the better known. Starting with the latter, the beginner would know better what to look for. His demonstrator, Jeffery Parker, argued the point vigorously with Huxley, and finally persuaded him to invert the series, with great success, albeit other lecturers preferred to keep to his original arrangement.

Education, furthermore, owes him a great debt for his long and active work upon the Royal Commissions on the Royal College of Science for Ireland, on Science and Art Instruction in Ireland, on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science; on Vivisection, to inquire into the Universities of Scotland, and on the Medical Acts—all in the sixteen years between 1866 and 1882. At the London University, also, he was an examiner for many years, and in the early nineties he strove hard to give it a new constitution, first as a member of the Senate, and then as president of a reforming Association. It is noteworthy, too, that ten years earlier he was elected a Governor of Eton College, and in the short time before his health broke down a second time he did something to aid science-teaching there and to make drawing a general subject.

In the general need for education he ranked high the need for the education of women. As early as 1860 he wrote: "I don't see how we are to make any permanent advancement while one-half of the race is sunk, as nine-tenths of women are, in mere ignorant parsonese superstitions." If only people would not bring up their daughters as man-traps for the matrimonial market, the next generation would see women fit to be the companions of men in all their pursuits; "though," he added, "I don't think that men have anything to fear from their competition." On this point he remarked five years later: "Nature's old salique law will never be repealed, and no change of dynasty will be effected, though whatever argument justifies a given education for boys justifies its application to girls as well."

A letter of 1874, touching the first efforts of women to qualify as doctors, prefigures what has been done since for the higher education of women:—

Without seeing any reason to believe that women are, on the average, so strong physically, intellectually, or morally, as men, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that many women are much better endowed in all these respects than many men, and I am at a loss to understand on what grounds of justice or public policy a career which is open to the weakest and most foolish of the male sex should be forcibly closed to women of vigour and capacity. We have heard a great deal lately about the physical disabilities of women. Some of these alleged impediments, no doubt, are really inherent in their organization, but nine-tenths of them are artificial—the products of their modes of life. I believe that nothing would tend so effectually to get rid of these creations of idleness, weariness, and that "over-stimulation of the emotions" which, in plainer-spoken days, used to be called wantonness, than a fair share of healthy work, directed towards a definite object, combined with an equally fair share of healthy play during the years of adolescence; and those who are best acquainted with the requirements of an average medical practitioner will find it hardest to believe that the attempt to reach that standard is likely to prove exhausting to an ordinarily intelligent and well-educated young woman.

Twenty years later he supported the entry of women into public life in a plainly reasoned letter, which he himself thought highly complimentary, although a number of estimable ladies flew at him for writing it:—

The best of women are apt to be a little weak in the great practical arts of give-and-take and putting up with a beating, and a little too strong in their belief in the efficacy of government. Men learn about these things in the ordinary course of their business; women have no chance in home life, and the boards and councils will be capital schools for them. Again, in the public interest it will be well; women are more naturally economical than men, and have none of our false shame about looking after pence. Moreover, they don't job for any but their lovers, husbands, and children, so that we know the worst.

Directly, then, as teacher, lecturer, and essayist indirectly as organizer, he ranks among the great educators of his age. But he did not establish a "school" of his own; such a thing was abhorrent to him. A resolute seeker after truth, he bade others seek also; but he refused to impose his own conclusions on any man.

Of all possible positions [he wrote in 1892], 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 school, 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 hydrant 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.

In fact, what his teaching stood for was not so much the thing taught as the method by which facts should be observed and conclusions drawn from them. As science, in his definition, is but trained and organized common sense, so this method, the scientific method, is but the ordinary common-sense method rigidly carried out. And the correlative to this method is the attitude of mind that suspends judgment until adequate proof is forthcoming.



XI

METHODS OF WORK

Of his method of work something has already been said, recalling his insistence upon verifying, experimentally, all statements made by others which he wished to employ in his lectures. This was true not only of his daily teaching, but of any new research that interested him. He repeated the series of Pasteur's experiments for himself before making a pronouncement on the much-debated question of spontaneous generation. A curious by-result of these investigations was that the Admiralty requested him to track down the cause of great trouble in the Navy—namely, that the ship's biscuit, though carefully prepared and packed in tins, was constantly found, when the tins were opened, to be full of maggots.

His far-ranging work in Comparative Anatomy was based upon dissections by his own hand, executed rapidly and broadly, going straight to the essential point without any finikin elaboration, and recorded in very fine anatomical drawings. Indeed, his power of clear and rapid draughtsmanship was the other side of his unusual power of visualizing a conception. Each faculty helped the other, and one of the most striking examples of his memory of forms was when, before a delighted audience, he traced on the blackboard the development of some complex structure, showing, stroke upon stroke, the orderly transition from one form to the next.

Until failing health forbade work with the microscope, he was continually busy with the rational re-grouping of animal forms. Besides his published works on the anatomy of both the Invertebrates and the Vertebrates, whether manuals of anatomy or monographs of special groups or general essays, and his work of classifying birds and reptiles and fishes on new principles, there exists among the vast number of drawings and notes preserved at the Huxley Laboratory at South Kensington a quantity of unpublished and unfinished work which, in detail, often anticipates the work of subsequent investigators, and which, for the most part, represents fresh studies of special groups of animals to be used in a general classification such as was suggested in his paper "On the Application of the Laws of Evolution to the arrangement of the Vertebrata, and more particularly of the Mammalia" (1880)—"the most masterly," remarks Professor Howes, "of his scientific theses; the only expression which he gave to the world of the interaction of a series of revolutionary ideas and conceptions (begotten of the labours of his closing years as a working zoologist) which were at the period assuming shape in his mind. They have done more than all else of their period to rationalize the application of our knowledge of the Vertebrata, and have now left their mark for all time on the history of progress, as embodied in our classificatory systems." But neither this great work nor the other special monographs still in hand reached completion. His health broke down; he could no longer stoop over the microscope, and had perforce to abandon zoological work before he was sixty.

A remark made by Huxley about others is very true of himself—that what matters most is not the microscope, but the man behind it; not the objects seen, but the interpretation of them and their relationships. The outward and the inward eye had the same quickness, the same highly developed sense of form and relationship, backed by a store of living knowledge; so well organized that it could respond at once to any suggestion which would throw light on undiscovered affinities and provide a true base for classification.

While much of his bookwork and writing was done at home, his later anatomical work was done at his laboratory. As official engagements multiplied, his time was much broken into; but he snatched every available moment, often dashing down to South Kensington in a cab for a half-hour of work between two official meetings. His absorption in his studies was intense—as at one time he signs himself to his fellow-worker, W. K. Parker, "Ever yours amphibially," so Jeffery Parker, his demonstrator, who tells the story, came to him with a question about the brain of the codfish at a time when he was deep in the investigation of some invertebrate group. "Codfish?" he replied; "that's a vertebrate, isn't it? Ask me a fortnight hence, and I'll consider it."

One more note concerning his method of work. His love of visualizing his problems regularly led him to make charts to show geographically, say, the distribution of certain forms of life over the globe, or to illustrate points of history—such, for example, as a coloured map of the Aegean, with fifty-mile circles drawn from the centre of the Cyclades to illustrate the range of Greek civilization as it spread over the shores of Asia and Europe. And as in writing a book he was careful first to plan out the scheme of it and the balance of the parts, so, however much his public addresses gave the impression of being largely impromptu, he had always thought out carefully every word he meant to say. "There is," he said, "no greater danger than the so-called inspiration of the moment, which leads you to say something which is not exactly true, or which you would regret afterwards."

Yet his was not a strong verbal memory. It was essentially a memory for facts; he could tear the heart out of a book as swiftly as a Macaulay, packing the facts into the framework of his knowledge, and always knowing thereafter where to find his facts or verify his references. In his speeches it was the compelling thought seeking expression, and fitting the form of expression exactly to the form of the thought, that brought the meditated words so infallibly and so spontaneously to his lips: they were already welded together in mind. But he had not that kind of memory which, after once reading a page of a book, can recite the whole word for word, whether prose or verse. Single phrases embodying a notable image would remain with him, and remain ready for use as allusive colour or pointed epigram. Many of these were Biblical phrases, for he knew his Bible well, and admired not only the grandeur of thought to be found enshrined in it, but its magnificence as a treasure-house of our English tongue. And, apart from many scientific terms of his invention, he coined divers words and phrases which have enriched our language, such as "Agnostic," "the ladder from the gutter to the university," the descriptions of Positivism as "Catholicism without Christianity," and the Salvation Army methods as "Corybantic Christianity."

His working day began soon after nine, for he was never one of those people who can do hours of work before breakfast. The working day, however, regularly went on until midnight, and, as has been mentioned, was often prolonged by late reading.

The speed with which his mind worked to see through complex questions and spring swiftly to a conclusion was such that he contrived to do four ordinary men's work in a single lifetime. But this swiftness of reaching a conclusion, so useful at most times, was liable sometimes to betray him. If, however, he found that he had made a mistake, he was ready to confess the fact. The most celebrated instance of this was the story of Bathybius. In 1868, while soundings were being made in connection with the laying of the Atlantic cable, certain specimens of mud were dredged up. The mud was sticky, owing to the presence of innumerable lumps of a transparent gelatinous substance. This was in fine granules, which possessed neither a nucleus nor a covering membrane. Scattered through it were calcareous coccoliths. Such were the facts; what inference was to be drawn? The only thing this substance resembled was one of the many simple forms of oceanic life recently found and described by the great zoologist Haeckel.

I conceive [wrote Huxley] that the granulate heaps and the transparent gelatinous matter in which they are embedded represent masses of protoplasm. Take away the cysts which characterize the Radiolaria, and a dead Sphaerozoum would very nearly represent one of this deep-sea "Urschleim," which must, I think, be regarded as a new form of those simple animated beings which have recently been so well described by Haeckel in his Monographie der Moneras.

So it received the name of Bathybius Haeckelii.

The explanation was plausible enough, if the evidence had been all that it seemed to be. But the specimens examined by himself and by Haeckel, who two years later published a full and detailed description of Bathybius, were seen only in a preserved state. It was dredged up again on the voyage of the Porcupine and examined in a fresh state by Sir Wyville Thomson and Dr. W.B. Carpenter, but they found no better explanation to give of it. Doubt only arose when, in 1879, the Challenger expedition failed to find it very widely distributed, as expected, over the sea bottom; and the behaviour of certain specimens gave good ground for suspecting that what had been sent home before as genuine deep-sea mud was a precipitate due to the action on the specimens of the spirit in which they were preserved. Though Haeckel—his large experience of Monera fortified by the discovery of a close parallel near Greenland in 1876—would not desert Bathybius, the rest of its sponsors gave it up. The evidence in this particular case was tainted. At the meeting of the British Association in 1879 Huxley came forward and took occasion to "eat the leek" in a speech as witty as it was candid.

Now, Bathybius had often been pointed to as an example of almost primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise limitations of the matter, seized upon the Bathybius recantation as a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian dog. To the most noteworthy case of this, eleven years later, Huxley retorted:—

That which interested me in the matter was the apparent analogy of Bathybius with other well-known forms of lower life.... Speculative hopes or fears had nothing to do with the matter, and if Bathybius were brought up alive from the bottom of the Atlantic to-morrow the fact would not have the slightest bearing that I can discern upon Mr. Darwin's speculations, or upon any of the disputed problems of biology.

As to the eating of the leek, he had commended it many a long year before to an over-impetuous German friend who had read enough Shakespeare to understand the meaning of the phrase:—

Well, every honest man has to do that now and then, and I assure you that, if eaten fairly and without grimaces, the devouring of that herb has a very wholesome cooling effect on the blood, particularly in people of a sanguine temperament.

Reflections on making mistakes lead to a striking conclusion:—

The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.

Until he reached middle age, his quickness of thought and decision was fretted by men of slower mind if they happened to be associated with him on some enterprise, and to certain colleagues his ardour was sometimes almost terrifying. And in those days also, before custom had hardened him, he was apt to be short with those devoid of any claim to intervene who thrust themselves into his affairs. Salutary as this doubtless was to the really ignorant meddler, there was one occasion, of which I learnt thirty years later, where at bottom the rebuke was not deserved. The sufferer, admittedly devoid of anatomical knowledge, questioned the statement in an early edition of The Elementary Physiology as to the method in which the voice is produced, and propounded a different movement in part of the larynx. The Professor replied to the effect that the writer had better learn some anatomy before challenging the result of careful experiment. But some years later, as a result of further investigation, this same change was made in a new edition of the book. By that time the very name of the critic was forgotten. But if he and his suggestion had been remembered, I am inclined to think that he would have received an amende.



XII

SCIENCE AND ETHICS

Huxley's work in education was his direct contribution to the social improvement of the world. Not instruction merely—for, "though under-instruction is a bad thing, it is not impossible that over-instruction may be a worse"—but through education, the bringing out of the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual citizen, which is the one condition of the success of a State. And this condition, resting on the basic faith in veracity, he felt to be above all the work of science, the Cinderella of thought. For, as he wrote:—

If the diseases of Society consist in the weakness of its faith in the existence of the God of the theologians, in a future state, and in uncaused volitions, the indication, as the doctors say, is to suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose bickerings about things of which they know nothing have been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the unknowable.

Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these high matters. She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner; and is rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to low and material interests. But in her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken of the pair of shrews who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the order which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great drama of evolution, with its full share of pity and terror, but also with abundant goodness and beauty, unrolls itself before her eyes; and she learns, in her heart of hearts, the lesson, that the foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.

She knows that the safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of this or that philosophical speculation, or this or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical disease after physical trespasses. And of that firm and lively faith it is her high mission to be the priestess.

In a world the elements of which are thus mixed with pity and terror, goodness and beauty, he held himself, like the majority of men, as neither optimist nor pessimist. "The world is neither so good, nor so bad, as it conceivably might be; and as most of us have reason, now and again, to discover that it can be."

On the one side, the optimistic dogma that this is the best of all possible worlds is little better than a libel on possibility. On behalf of the modified optimism that benevolence is on the whole the regulating principle of the sentient world, it may be granted that there are hosts of subtle contrivances devoted to the production of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; but, if so, why is it not equally proper to say of the equally numerous arrangements, the no less necessary result of which is the production of pain, that they are evidences of malevolence? Translating these facts into moral terms, the goodness of the hand that aids Blake's "little lamb" is neutralized by the wickedness of the other hand that eggs on his "tiger burning bright," and the course of nature will appear to be neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral.

On the other side, though this may not be the best of all possible worlds, to say that it is the worst is "mere petulant nonsense." With a courage based on hours and days of personal knowledge, he exclaims:—

There can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person that mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly well with vastly less happiness and far more misery than find their way into the lives of nine people out of ten. If each and all of us had been visited by an attack of neuralgia, or of extreme mental depression, for one hour in every twenty-four—a supposition which many tolerably vigorous people know, to their cost, is not extravagant—the burden of life would have been immensely increased without much practical hindrance to its general course. Men with any manhood in them find life quite worth living under worse conditions than these.

Moreover, another fact utterly contradicts the hypothesis that the sentient world is directed by malevolence:—

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

To speak, then, of the course and intention of nature in terms of human thought, we must say that its governing principle is intellectual and not moral. It is a logical process materialized, with pleasures and pains that fall, in most cases, without the slightest reference to moral desert.

From the moralist's point of view the animal world, in which our own cosmic nature has been severely trained for millions of years, is no better than a gladiatorial show, and we cannot expect, within a few centuries, to subdue the masterfulness of this inborn tendency, in part necessary to our existence, to purely ethical ends. So deep rooted is it that the struggle may last till the end of time. But, he exclaims with a ringing note—

I see no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles of investigation, and organized in common effort, may modify the conditions of existence for a period longer than that now covered by history. And much may be done to change the nature of man himself. The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.

In the long struggle pain and sorrow are inevitable. The aim of man is not to escape these, but rather to earn peace and self-respect. To this he added a special point, in a letter of 1890:—

If you will accept the results of the experience of an old man who has had a very chequered existence—and has nothing to hope for except a few years of quiet downhill—there is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human affections), nothing that satisfies quiet reflection, except the sense of having worked according to one's capacity and light, to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts. That was the lesson I learned from Carlyle's books when I was a boy, and it has stuck by me all my life.

The animal world, then, having the principle of its existence in a state of war, society was created by the first men who substituted the state of mutual peace for the state of mutual war. The object of society was the limitation of the struggle for existence. That shape of society most nearly approaches perfection in which the war of individual against individual is most strictly limited. Happiness and freedom of action are restricted to a sphere where they do not interfere with the happiness and freedom of others; the common weal becomes an essential part of individual welfare. In short, even if under the most perfect conditions "Witless will always serve his master," man aims to escape from his place in the animal kingdom, founded on the free development of the principle of non-moral evolution, and to establish a kingdom of Man governed upon the principle of moral evolution. For society not only has a moral end, but in its perfection social life is embodied morality. Moral purpose is "an article of exclusively human manufacture—and very much to our credit."

To society, then, its members owe a vital debt; for society, the work of the ethical man, has slowly and painfully built up around us a fabric of defence against barbarism, the work of the non-ethical man. This debt we are bound to repay by furthering in ourselves the good work of human fellowship, and by striving to improve the conditions of our social life; and the means thereto are self-discipline, self-support, intelligent effort, not unreasoning violence with its disruption of the defences against anarchic barbarism.

Yet if society, in making life easier, multiplies the species in excess of the means of subsistence, it raises up within itself, in the intensest form, the unlimited struggle for existence. "This is the true riddle of the Sphinx, and every nation which does not solve it will, sooner or later, be devoured by the monster itself has generated."

Improvement there has been during the historical period: with goodwill and clear thought Huxley looked for ever-accelerating improvement, though contemporary civilizations seemed neither to embody any worthy ideal nor even to possess the merit of stability. In the atmosphere of plain verity, where, as he said, "my business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations," he confidently looked for the hopes of the future; but were it not so, he solemnly declared—

If there is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over Nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of want, with its concomitant physical and moral degradation among the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet which would sweep the whole affair away as a desirable consummation.

In the matter of personal conduct he rejected the notions that the moral government of the world is imperfect without a system of future rewards and punishments, and that such a system is indispensable to practical morality. "I believe," he said, "that both these dogmas are very mischievous lies."

There is no need for future compensation because, so he firmly believed, "the Divine Government—if we may use such a phrase to express the sum of the 'customs of matter'—is wholly just....But for this to be clear we must bear in mind what almost all forget, that the rewards of life are contingent upon obedience to the whole law—physical as well as moral—and that moral obedience will not atone for physical sin, or vice versa." Thus he could declare "the more I know intimately of the lives of other men (to say nothing of my own), the more obvious it is that the wicked does not flourish, nor is the righteous punished." "The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain as that of the earth to the sun, and more so—for experimental proof of the fact is within reach of us all—nay, is before us all in our own lives, if we had but the eyes to see it." Nevertheless—

It is to be recollected, in view of the apparent discrepancy between men's acts and their rewards, that Nature is juster than we are. She takes into account what a man brings with him into this world, which human justice cannot do. If I, born a bloodthirsty and savage brute, inheriting these qualities from others, kill you, my fellow-men will very justly hang me; but I shall not be visited with the horrible remorse which would be my real punishment if, my nature being higher, I had done the same thing.

Accordingly—

Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I believe that the seeking for rewards and punishments out of this life leads men to a ruinous ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards and punishments are here.

If the expectation of hell hereafter can keep me from evil-doing, surely a fortiori the certainty of hell now will do so? If a man could be firmly impressed with the belief that stealing damaged him as much as swallowing arsenic would do (and it does), would not the dissuasive force of that belief be greater than that of any based on mere future expectations?

And this leads me to quote words written by an old friend and colleague of his, Sir Spencer Walpole:—

Of all the men I have ever known, his ideas and his standard were, on the whole, the highest. He recognized that the fact of his religious views imposed on him the duty of living the most upright of lives; and I am very much of the opinion of a little child, now grown into an accomplished woman, who, when she was told that Professor Huxley had no hope of future rewards and no fear of future punishments, emphatically declared: "Then I think Professor Huxley is the best man I have ever known."



XIII

MORALITY AND THE CHURCH

It is alike interesting and satisfactory to reflect that practical morality in civilized life is much the same for all earnest men, however they differ in their theories as to the origin of moral ideas and the kind of motives and sanctions to be insisted on for right action. It is true that the theologians and supernaturalists have erected their scaffolding around the building of social and human morality, vowing that it will not stand without. Yet it remains steady when the scaffolding is warped by the winds of doctrine or uprooted by advancing knowledge. The spirit that has built it is free from the perverted enthusiasms which crusade against freedom, put thought in fetters, and sanctify persecution. It lends no support to the other spirit that would dominate minds and consciences by formulae that lie outside the court of reason. These things are of clericalism, and it was clericalism to which Huxley ever found himself in opposition, for it "raises obstacles to scientific ways of thinking, which are even more important than scientific discoveries." But all associations for promoting that sympathy which is at the foundation of human society need not be infected with clericalism. If such a step were otherwise expedient, even the State might do something towards that end indirectly:—

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

But, while sympathy is the basis of society and enthusiasm the greatest motive power of humanity, there remains something more to be considered. The man who could appreciate the value of the personal consolations brought by the Bible-woman to the poor and down-trodden, and the infinitely comfortable assurance of the mystic, firm as hypnotic conviction, that he is the direct associate and instrument of the Almighty, whether submissive or arrogant, from Stephen to the Bab, from Cromwell and Gordon to Bismarck and his Imperial associates, such a man might well say: "I wish I could be so magnificently self-confident, so untroubled by doubt. But I can't, for I have to ask: Is it true?; and I find that these persons base themselves upon very questionable grounds."

True, that in regard to the place of good and evil in this world the best theological teachers—

substantially recognize 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.

...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 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.

Such were the shapes into which the Christian theologians had fashioned a number of moral truths when they annexed the house of human morality. But what is the basis of certitude on which these interpretations rest? If Adam was not an historical character, if the story of the Fall be whittled down into a "type" which is typical of no underlying reality, the basis of Pauline theology is shaken, and practical deductions drawn from it are shaken also. In fact, "the Demonology of Christianity shows that its founders knew no more about the spiritual world than anybody else, and Newman's doctrine of 'Development' is true to an extent of which the Cardinal did not dream." And as to the argument that the successful spread of Christianity attests the truth of the New Testament story, he replied to his questioner with the general propositions:—

1. The Church founded by Jesus has not made its way; has not permeated the world; but did become extinct in the country of its birth—as Nazarenism and Ebionism.

2. The Church that did make its way and coalesced with the State in the fourth century had no more to do with the Church founded by Jesus than Ultramontanism has with Quakerism. It is Alexandrian Judaism and Neoplatonistic mystagogy, and as much of the old idolatry and demonology as could be got in under new or old names.

3. Paul has said that the Law was schoolmaster to Christ with more truth than he knew. Throughout the Empire the synagogues had their cloud of Gentile hangers-on—those who "feared God" and who were fully prepared to accept a Christianity which was merely an expurgated Judaism and the belief in Jesus as the Messiah.

4. The Christian "Sodalitia" were not merely religious bodies, but friendly societies, burial societies, and guilds. They hung together for all purposes; the mob hated them as it now hates the Jews in Eastern Europe, because they were more frugal, more industrious, and led better lives than their neighbours, while they stuck together like Scotchmen.

If these things are true—and I appeal to your knowledge of history that they are so—what has the success of Christianity to do with the truth or falsehood of the story of Jesus?

Furthermore, behind all the theological developments of the Church lies the whole question of Theism, and "the philosophical difficulties of Theism now are neither greater nor less than they have been ever since Theism was invented."



XIV

LIFE AND FRIENDSHIPS

"To live laborious days" was, for Huxley, at all times a necessity as well as a creed. The lover of knowledge and truth, he firmly believed, must devote his uttermost powers to their service; he held as strongly that every man's first duty to society was to support himself. But science provided more fame than pence, and with wife and family to support he was spurred to redoubled efforts. In the early years of married life especially, while he was still struggling to make his way, he often felt the pinch. He added to his modest income by reviewing and translating scientific books and by lecturing. On one occasion, when he was a candidate for a certain scientific lectureship, one of the committee of election, a wealthy man, expressed astonishment at his application—"what can he want with a hundred a year?" "I dare say," commented Huxley, "he pays his cook that." In early days, visioning the future, he and his wife had fondly planned to marry on L400 a year, while he pursued science, unknown if need be, for the sake of science. The reality pressed hardly upon them; those were dark evenings when he would come home fagged out by a second lecture at the end of a full day's work and lay himself down wearily on one couch, while she, so long a semi-invalid, lay uselessly on another. And, later, the upbringing of a large family, though its advent made life the more worth living, involved a heavy strain. At the same time, a man who was ever ready to take up responsibilities for the furtherance of every branch of science with which he was concerned had endless responsibilities committed to him. Besides his researches in pure science, whether anatomy, paleontology, or anthropology, his regular teaching work and other courses of lectures, his long work as examiner at the London University, the production of scientific memoirs and text-books and more general essays, he took a leading share in editing the Natural History Review for two and a-half years; he was an active supporter of the chief scientific societies to which he belonged, and took a prominent part in their administration as member of council, secretary, or president, the most laborious period of which was during the nine years of his secretaryship of the Royal Society, soon to be followed by the presidency. Add to these his service on the School Board and no less than eight Royal Commissions, and it is easy to see that the longest working days he could contrive were always filled and over-filled.

When very tired he would occasionally dash off for a week or two's walking with a friend in Wales, or some corner of France; two summer holidays in Switzerland with John Tyndall resulted in a joint paper on the "Structure of Glacier Ice"; later, the family holidays by the sea regularly saw a good deal of time devoted to writing, while his exercise consisted of long walks.

Unlike Darwin, who at last found nothing save science engrossing enough to make him oblivious of his constant ill-health, Huxley never lost his keen delight in literature and art. He was a rapid and omnivorous reader, devouring everything from a fairy tale to a blue book, and tearing the heart out of a book at express speed. With this went a love of great and beautiful poetry and of prose expression that is at once exact and artistically balanced. "I have a great love and respect for my native tongue," he wrote, "and take great pains to use it properly. Sometimes I write essays half-a-dozen times before I can get them into the proper shape; and I believe I become more fastidious as I grow older." Indeed, even after much re-writing, his corrections in proof must have appalled his publishers. "Science and literature," he declared, "are not two things, but two sides of one thing." "Have something to say, and say it," was the great Duke's theory of style. "Say it in such language," added Huxley, "that you can stand cross-examination on every word. Be clear, though you may be convicted of error. If you are clearly wrong, you will run up against a fact some time and get set right. If you shuffle with your subject, and study chiefly to use language which will give a loophole of escape either way, there is no hope for you."

Herein lay the secret of his lucidity. Uniting the scientific habit of mind with the literary art, he showed that truthfulness need not be bald, and that power lies rather in accuracy than in luxuriance of diction. As to the influence which such a style exerted on the habit of mind of his readers, there is remarkable testimony in a letter from Spedding, the editor of Bacon, printed in the Life of Huxley, ii, 239. Spedding, his senior by a score of years, describes the influence of Bacon on his own style in the matter of exactitude, the pruning of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless superlatives to positives, and asserts that if, as a young man, he had fallen in with Huxley's writings before Bacon's, they would have produced the same effect upon him.

Huxley's own criticism of the one and only poem be ever published is also instructive. On his way back from the funeral of Tennyson in Westminster Abbey, he spent the journey in shaping out some lines on the dead poet, the germ of which had come into his mind in the Abbey. These, with a number of other tributes to Tennyson by professed poets, were printed in the Nineteenth Century for November, 1892. He writes in a private letter:—

If I were to pass judgment upon it in comparison with the others, I should say that as to style it is hammered, and as to feeling, human.

They are castings of much prettier pattern and of mainly poetico-classical educated-class sentiment. I do not think there is a line of mine one of my old working-class audience would have boggled over.

As regards the arts other than literary, he had a keen eye for a picture or a piece of sculpture, for, in addition to the draughtman's and anatomist's sense of form, he had a strong sense of colour. To good music, also, he was always susceptible; as a young man he used to sing a little, but his voice, though true, was never strong. In music, as in painting, he was untrained. Yet, as has been noted already, his illustrations to MacGillivray's Voyage of the Rattlesnake and his holiday sketches suggest that he might have gone far had he been trained as an artist.

When first married he used to set aside Saturday afternoons to take his wife to the Ella concerts, fore-runners of the "Saturday Pops.," but it was not very long before the pressure of circumstance forbade this pleasure. Later, he very occasionally managed to go to the theatre; but his chief recreation, apart from change of work and the rapid devouring of a good novel, was in meeting his friends, when occasion offered, at the scientific societies or at dinner, or now and then in country visits which had not yet received the name of "week-ends."

When, in the middle seventies, his position was firmly established and he was living in a roomy house, No. 4 Marlborough Place, St. John's Wood, there were gatherings of friends on Sunday evenings. An informal meal awaited the guests, who came either on a general invitation or when specially bidden; others put in an appearance later. There would be much talk, from grave to gay, in those plainly appointed rooms, or on a fine summer evening, perhaps, in the garden with its little lawn behind the house. Some music, too, was almost sure to be performed by friends or by the daughters of the house, whose progress in the art of singing was ever a matter of concern to Mr. Herbert Spencer, himself a great lover of music. Letters and Art were well represented there as well as Science, intermingled with the friends of the younger generation. "Here," writes G.W. Smalley,

people from many other worlds than those of abstract science were bidden; where talk was to be heard of a kind rare in any world. It was scientific at times, but subdued to the necessities of the occasion; speculative, yet kept within such bounds that bishop or archbishop might have listened without offence; political even, and still not commonplace, and, when artistic, free from affectation.

There and elsewhere Mr. Huxley easily took the lead if he cared to, or if challenged. Nobody was more ready in a greater variety of topics, and if they were scientific it was almost always another who introduced them. Unlike some of his comrades of the Royal Society, he was of opinion that man does not live by science alone, and nothing came amiss to him.... Even in private the alarm of war is sometimes heard, and Mr. Huxley is not a whit less formidable as a disputant across the table than with pen in hand. Yet an angry man must be very angry indeed before he could be angry with this adversary. He disarmed his enemies with an amiable grace that made defeat endurable, if not entirely delightful.

If scientific subjects came up in conversation, the luminous style, so familiar in his written work, reappeared in talk.

Yet it has more than that. You cannot listen to him without thinking more of the speaker than of his science, more of the solid beautiful nature than of the intellectual gifts, more of his manly simplicity and sincerity than of all his knowledge and his long services.

But in the intermediate period, from about 1860 onwards, the unceasing rush of occupation rendered it very difficult to keep in touch with his friends. On his initiative a small dining club of scientific friends and allies was established. Almost all these close friends were members of the Royal Society, and were likely to attend its meetings. Dinner, therefore, was to be taken at a convenient hotel before the monthly meeting of the Society, and those who were inevitably drifting apart under the stress of circumstances would have a regular meeting ground. This was the famous x Club, a name singularly appropriate on the principle of lucus a non lucendo to a club of nine members who never proceeded to the election of a tenth. Opinions as to the name and constitution of the little society being no less numerous than the members—indeed more so—"we finally accepted the happy suggestion of our mathematicians to call it the x Club; and the proposal of some genius among us that we should have no rules, save the unwritten law not to have any, was carried by acclamation."

Huxley first propounded the scheme to his most intimate friends, Joseph Dalton Hooker, then Assistant Director of Kew, and John Tyndall, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution. George Busk, the anatomist, afterwards President of the College of Surgeons, was another whose friendship dated from soon after the return of the Rattlesnake to England. Herbert Spencer, the philosopher, and Sir John Lubbock, banker and naturalist, were friends of nearly as long standing. Edward Frankland, Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, and Thomas Archer Hirst, Professor of Physics and Pure Mathematics at University College, London, afterwards Director of Naval Studies at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, entered the circle as special friends of Tyndall's. William Spottiswoode, Queen's Printer and mathematician, was the ninth member, elected by the rest at the first meeting.

Between them they could have managed to contribute most of the articles to a scientific Encyclopaedia: six were Presidents of the British Association; three were Associates of the Institute of France; and from among them the Royal Society chose a Secretary, a Foreign Secretary, a Treasurer, and three successive Presidents. Meeting though they did for the sake of friendship and good fellowship, it was inevitable that they should discuss the burning questions of the scientific world freely from varied points of view, and, being all animated by similar ideas of the high function of science and of the great Society, the chief representative of science to which all but one of them belonged, they incidentally exercised a strong influence on the progress of scientific organization.

The first meeting took place on November 3, 1864; nearly nineteen years passed before the circle was broken by the death of Spottiswoode. Proposals were made to fill the gap with a new friend, but, as the raison d'etre of the club had been simply the personal attachment of the original nine, the project fell through. Finally, after Hirst's death in 1892, when five out of the remaining six were living away from London and for the most part in uncertain health, it became more and more difficult to arrange a meeting, and the club quietly lapsed after nearly twenty-eight years of existence.

Guests were often entertained at the x dinners, men of science or letters of almost every nationality—a delightful and quite informal mode of personal intercourse. In the summer, also, the x often made a week-end expedition into the country or up the river, in which the wives of the married members took part, the formula for the invitation being x's + yv's.



XV

CHARLES DARWIN

To this focus of close friendships Charles Darwin would assuredly have been invited to belong had he been other than an invalid living away from London; for he was the warm and revered friend not only of Huxley, but still more of Hooker, who in age stood midway between the two—eight years younger than the one and eight years older than the other—and who, for some fifteen years before the publication of the Origin of Species, had been Darwin's most intimate friend and aid in his work.

Huxley had made Darwin's acquaintance early in the fifties, and soon fell under the spell of his deep thought, his utter sincerity and generous warmth of heart. Darwin, for his part, was strongly attracted by his new friend's penetrating knowledge, incisive criticism, and brilliant conversation. When, in 1858, he began to write out the Origin, Huxley was one of the three men he fixed upon by whose judgment of the book he meant to abide. Lyell, who had read the book before it came out, was the first; Hooker, his long-time aid and critic and finally convert, the second. On the eve of publication, secure of these, he adds: "If I can convert Huxley I shall be content."

On all three the effect of the completed book, with its array of detailed argument and evidence, was far greater than that of previous discussions. With one or two reservations as to the logical completeness of the theory, Huxley accepted it as a well-founded working hypothesis, calculated to explain problems otherwise inexplicable. There were evolutionists before Darwin, from Lamarck and the author of the Vestiges of Creation to Herbert Spencer; but as there was no evidence to bear out the orthodox creational view of the Book of Genesis, enlarged upon in detail by Milton, so before Darwin the evidence in favour of the transmutation of species was wholly insufficient, and no suggestion which had been made to the causes of the assumed transmutation was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena. Under such conditions only an agnostic attitude was possible. "So," writes Huxley—

I took refuge in that "thaetige Skepsis," which Goethe has so well defined, and, reversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I usually defended the tenability of the received doctrines when I had to do with the transmutationists, and stood up for the possibility of transmutation among the orthodox, thereby, no doubt, increasing an already current, but quite undeserved, reputation for needless combativeness.

Then came the publication of the Darwin-Wallace paper in 1858, and of the Origin in 1859, the effect of which he compares to—

the flash of light which, to a man who has lost himself on a dark night, suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way. That which we were looking for, and could not find, was an hypothesis respecting the origin of known organic forms which assumed the operation of no causes but such as could be proved to be actually at work. We wanted, not to pin our faith to that or any other speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite conceptions which could be brought face to face with facts and have their validity tested. The Origin provided us with the working hypothesis we sought. Moreover, it did the immense service of freeing us for ever from the dilemma—refuse to accept the creation hypothesis and what have you to propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner? In 1857 I had no answer ready, and I do not think that any one else had. A year later we reproached ourselves with dullness for being perplexed with such an inquiry. My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the Origin, was: "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that." I suppose that Columbus's companions said much the same when he made the egg stand on end. The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the Origin guided the benighted.

Whether the particular shape which the doctrine of Evolution, as applied to the organic world, took in Darwin's hands would prove to be final or not, was to me a matter of indifference. In my earliest criticisms of the Origin I ventured to point out that its logical foundation was insecure so long as experiments in selective breeding had not produced varieties which were more or less infertile; and that insecurity remains up to the present time. But, with any and every critical doubt which my sceptical ingenuity could suggest, the Darwinian hypothesis remained incomparably more probable than the creation hypothesis. And if we had none of us been able to discern the paramount significance of some of the most patent and notorious of natural facts, until they were, so to speak, thrust under our noses, what force remained in the dilemma—creation or nothing? It was obvious that hereafter the probability would be immensely greater, that the links of natural causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than that natural causation should be incompetent to produce all the phenomena of nature. The only rational course for those who had no other object than the attainment of truth was to accept "Darwinism" as a working hypothesis and see what could be made of it. Either it would prove its capacity to elucidate the facts of organic life or it would break down under the strain. This was surely the dictate of common sense, and for once common sense carried the day.

Mention has been made of the instant support he was able to lend the Origin in the Times review of the book, and the extension of its doctrines in regard to man. Even before the book appeared, however, he began to act as what Darwin laughingly called his "general agent." His address on "Persistent Types" (June, 1859) aimed at clearing up in advance one of the obvious objections raised against acceptance of the doctrine of Evolution—namely, how is it that, if evolution is ever progressive, progress is not universal? How is it that all forms do not necessarily advance, and that simple organisms still exist? As it happened, Darwin did not discuss this point when he first put the Origin together, and speedily came to regard this as the most serious omission in the book.

Great, then, was the debt of all science to Darwin. And not of science only. The fight for freedom of thought and speech in science, into which Huxley especially threw himself, was the more successful because the immediate cause he upheld was so overwhelmingly strong in reason and demonstration; and, the supreme curb upon thought being once broken, a wider freedom was gained.

For Darwin, therefore, Huxley had the reverence due to one who had forged a new and mighty weapon in the war for plain truth. But, while he could not but uphold a theory so much in accord with his own knowledge and so fruitful in its promise of new knowledge, whether the author of it were his friend or not, admiration and affection for a man of such utter sincerity, such selfless respect for truth, and warm personality, led him, when those views were stupidly or maliciously attacked, to take more trouble in his defence and support, and to strike out much harder at his adversary than he would otherwise have done. Darwin's friends were well assured that the scanty time which his health allowed for work was far too precious to be wasted in controversy; for his own sake and for the sake of the calm atmosphere in which a great theory should be worked out, they thought that the battling on a lower plane should be left to them. "You ought to be like one of the blessed gods of Elysium, and let the inferior deities do battle with the infernal powers." "If I say a savage thing," Huxley told him, "it is only 'pretty Fanny's way'; but if you do, it is not likely to be forgotten." Hence a dash of personal pleasure was infused into the duty of upholding and defending the bringer of new light.

The acquaintance had begun about 1851; there was a common bond in their sea experiences and explorations, as well as in their search after a wider philosophy, to include the teachings of natural science; the older man found in the younger a source of much biological and other information, a suggestive critic and a stimulating companion. Their relations took a long step towards intimacy after 1861, when, after the loss of her eldest child, Mrs. Huxley and her other children made a long stay at Down, and entered upon a life-long friendship with Mrs. Darwin and the family. Thereafter followed many visits to Down, and, whenever Darwin was in London, the certainty of half-an-hour's keen talk—all that the doctor allowed—with his friend and fellow-worker on some critical question of the moment.

Darwin's admiration of his friend's powers was outspoken. To quote one or two expressions of it: Huxley had delivered, in 1862, six lectures to working men, which were printed off each week as delivered in "little green pamphlets," under the general title of "On Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature," winding up with an account of the bearing of the Origin upon the complete theory of these causes. Acknowledging Nos. IV and V, Darwin writes:—

They are simply perfect. They ought to be largely advertised; but it is very good in me to say so, for I threw down No. IV with this reflection: "What is the good of me writing a thundering big book when everything is in this green little book, so despicable for its size?" In the name of all that is good and bad, I may as well shut up shop altogether.

After reading the article "Mr. Darwin's Critics" in 1871, he wrote yet more enthusiastically. Mr. Mivart, in an apologia for the attitude of Roman Catholicism towards Evolution, twitted the generality of men of science with their ignorance of the real doctrines of his Church, and cited the Jesuit theologian, Suarez, the latest great representative of scholasticism, as following St. Augustine in asserting derivative creation—that is, evolution from primordial matter endowed with certain powers. Huxley thereupon examined the works of the learned Jesuit, and found not only that the particular reference was not to the point, but that, in his tract on the "Six Days of Creation," Suarez expressly rejects the doctrine and reprehends Augustine for holding it. "So," write Huxley gleefully at the irony of the situation, "I have come out in the new character of a defender of Catholic orthodoxy, and upset Mivart out of the mouth of his own prophet."

In the course of a most appreciative letter Darwin exclaimed:—

What a wonderful man you are to grapple with those old metaphysico-divinity books.... The pendulum is now swinging against our side, but I feel positive it will soon swing the other way; and no mortal man will do half as much as you in giving it a start in the right direction, as you did at the commencement.

And then, after "mounting climax on climax," he adds:

"I must tell you what Hooker said to me a few years ago. 'When I read Huxley I feel quite infantile in intellect.'"

The most touching act of friendship, and one which assuredly gave personal point to Huxley's remark in another connection, "Darwin is in all things noble and generous—one of those people who think it a privilege to let him help," took place when Huxley's health had utterly broken down in 1873, and he was as depressed in mind as in body. Who could say No to these words from the oldest and most venerated among his devoted friends?—

Down, Beckenham, Kent. April 23, 1873.

My dear Huxley,

I have been asked by some of your friends (eighteen in number,) to inform you that they have placed through Robarts, Lubbock, and Company the sum of L2,100 to your account at your bankers. We have done this to enable you to get such complete rest as you may require for the re-establishment of your health; and in doing this we are convinced that we act for the public interest, as well as in accordance with our most earnest desires. Let me assure you that we are all your warm personal friends, and that there is not a stranger or mere acquaintance among us. If you could have heard what was said, or could have read what was, as I believe, our inmost thoughts, you would know that we all feel towards you as we should to an honoured and much-loved brother. I am sure that you will return this feeling, and will therefore be glad to give us the opportunity of aiding you in some degree, as this will be a happiness to us to the last day of our lives. Let me add that our plan occurred to several of your friends at nearly the same time, and quite independently of one another. My dear Huxley, your affectionate friend,

CHARLES DARWIN.

Huxley was deeply moved. "What have I done to deserve this?" he exclaimed. Before this generosity he at last allowed himself to confess that, in the long struggle against ill health, he had been beaten; but, as he said, only enough to teach him humility.

The relief from anxieties, the ultimate restoration to health through a clear holiday, were an unforgettable gift from this "band of brothers," and the sufferer who had been healed rejoiced when not long after an opportunity arose to share in a similar gift of help and healing to another of the same good fellowship.



XVI

HOOKER, FORBES, TYNDALL, AND SPENCER

Of his nearer contemporaries the two most intimate and faithful of his life-long friendships were with Tyndall and Hooker, concerning the utter frankness of which he writes to the latter:—

I wish you wouldn't be apologetic about criticism from people who have a right to criticize. I always look upon any criticism as a compliment, not but what the old Adam in T.H.H. will arise and fight vigorously against all impugnment and irrespective of all odds in the way of authority, but that is the way of the beast. Why I value your and Tyndall's and Darwin's friendship so much is, among other things, that you all pitch into me when necessary. You may depend upon it, however blue I may look when in the wrong, it's wrath with myself and nobody else.

The common note in these friendships was not only community of aims, but an essential generosity and sincerity. This it was that had drawn him so strongly to Edward Forbes among the leaders of biology when he returned, an unknown but promising pioneer of science, from the voyage of the Rattlesnake. For Forbes inspired his admiration and affection as a man of letters and an artist who had not merged the man in the man of science; free from pedantry or jealousy—the two besetting faults of literary and scientific men; earnest, disinterested, ready to give his time and influence to help any man who was working for the cause; one of the few to whom a proud man could feel obliged without losing a particle of independence or self-respect.

My notions [he writes] are diametrically opposed to his in some matters, and he helps me to oppose him.... I had a long paper read at the Royal Society which opposed some of his views, and he got up and spoke in the highest terms of it afterwards. This is all as it should be. I can reverence such a man and yet respect myself.

Without his aid and sympathy the young man would never have persevered in the course he ventured to choose, and in following which it was one of his greatest hopes that they should work in harmony for long years at the aims so dear to both.

"One could trust him so thoroughly!" There lay the root of friendship. And the trust was thoroughly reciprocated. The entire frankness between friends is brightly illustrated by the history of the award of the Royal Medal in 1854. As a member of the Royal Society Council, Huxley had to vote on the names proposed for the various medals. For the Royal Medal first Hooker was named, and received his hearty support; then Forbes was put up, in his eyes equally deserving, and almost more closely bound to him by ties of active friendship, so that, whichever way he ultimately voted, his action might possibly be ascribed to personal, not scientific, motives. Thereupon he explained to the Council that he considered their claims equal; that, whichever chanced to have been put forward first, he would never have proposed the other in opposition to him. As he had spoken of Hooker's merits, so also he spoke of Forbes's, positively, and not by way of comparison; and this done, voted for both!

Hooker was actually elected. Huxley then wrote to both his friends, explaining fully what he had done. Had he felt that one of the two had strongly superior claims, and thought it right to vote for him only, the other, he was sure, would have fully appreciated his motives, and it would have done no injury to their friendship.

He was not mistaken. Among his most precious possessions he kept Forbes's reply:—

I heartily concur in the course you have taken, and, had I been placed as you have been, would have done exactly the same.... Your way of proceeding was as true an act of friendship as any that could be performed. As to myself, I dream so little about medals that the notion of being on the list never entered my brain, even when asleep. If it ever comes, I shall be pleased and thankful; if it does not, it is not the sort of thing to break my equanimity. Indeed, I would always like to see it given not as a mere honour, but as a help to a good man, and this it is assuredly in Hooker's case. Government people are so ignorant that they require to have people's merits drummed into their heads by all possible means, and Hooker's getting the medal may be of real service to him before long. I am in a snug, though not an idle, nest; he has not got his resting-place yet. And so, my dear Huxley, I trust that you know me too well to think that I am either grieved or envious; and you, Hooker, and I are much of the same way of thinking.

Frankness was the only remedy for such an imbroglio, and, as Huxley wrote to Hooker about a similar case a couple of years later:—

It's deuced hard to keep straight in this wicked world, but, as you say, the only chance is to out with it, and I thank you much for writing so frankly about the matter.



With Hooker, the keen observer and critical reasoner, the man of warm impulses and sane judgments, he had a peculiarly intimate bond of friendship summed up in a letter of 1888, when they had received the Copley medal in successive years:—

It is very pleasant to have our niches in the Pantheon close together. It is getting on for forty years since we were first "acquent," and, considering with what a very considerable dose of tenacity, vivacity, and that glorious firmness (which the beasts who don't like us call obstinacy) we are both endowed, the fact that we have never had the shadow of a shade of a quarrel is more to our credit than being ex-Presidents and Copley medallists. But we have had a masonic bond in both being well salted in early life. I have always felt that I owed a great deal to my acquaintance with the realities of things gained in the old Rattlesnake.

From earliest days, soon after they had returned, the one from the South Seas, the other from the Himalayas, they had stood shoulder to shoulder confidently in the struggle to put science on a firm and independent footing. When the future of the Natural History Collections at the British Museum was in the balance, they energetically resolved to constitute themselves into a permanent "Committee of Safety," to watch over what was being done and take measures with the advice of others when necessary. Together as biologists they realized the greatness of Darwin's vision; together they bore the brunt of the battle of the Origin at Oxford. In seeking a good mouthpiece for scientific opinion, in reorganizing and administering the great scientific societies, in their work for scientific education, they shared the same ideas, and their friendship and Tyndall's formed the starting-point of the x Club, with its regular meetings of old friends. More than once they went off on a short holiday tour together, and when Huxley was invalided in 1873 it was Hooker who took charge and carried him off for a month's active trip in the geological paradise of the Auvergne. The care and company of so good a friend made the crowning ingredient in a most successful prescription. And when both had retired from official life a new interest in common sprang up through Huxley's incursion into botany. While recruiting his health in the high Alps, his interest was aroused by the Gentians, and he wrote a valuable paper on their morphology and distribution. This interest continued itself into the making of a rock-garden in his Eastbourne home, where, in his spare hours, he proceeded to put into happy practice Candide's famous maxim, "Cultivons notre jardin," and drew from this occupation the simile of the wild chalk down and the cultivated garden in his Romanes Lecture to illustrate the contrast between the cosmic process and the social organism.

Hooker often sent his friend plants from his own garden, sometimes banteringly including one which would "flourish in any neglected corner."

An unclouded intimacy of friendship lasted to the end, and it was Hooker who received the last letter written by his friend.

Close as a brother, too, and claiming the name of brother in affectionate adoption, was John Tyndall, radiant in genial warmth and high spirits. They, too, were at one in thoughts, sympathies, and aims; they travelled together, especially in the Alps, where Tyndall mainly carried out the investigation of certain problems in relation to the glaciers which Huxley had suggested to him, and, being "a masterful man and over-generous," insisted that the resulting paper on glaciers should bear both their names.

Tyndall came to the School of Mines as Professor of Physics in 1859 at his friend's instigation, and for nine years they were, as colleagues, in daily contact, and indeed were not far separated when Tyndall succeeded Faraday at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street.

Tyndall, who remained a bachelor till late in middle life, always found a warm corner beside his friend's hearth. From the earliest days of the household in the little house at Waverley Place he was admitted to the inner circle of a lively friendship by Mrs. Huxley also, that keen judge of character, and to the children ranked as a kind of unofficial uncle. On New Year's Day he was chief among the two or three intimates who were bidden here, having no domestic hearth of their own, Herbert Spencer and Hirst being the other "regulars," and later Michael Foster.

As the two men both had ready pens and stood side by side in many controversies, they came to be regarded by the public as a pair of Great Twin Brethren, the Castor and Pollux of many a scientific battle of Lake Regillus. Odd confusions sometimes followed. In 1876, not long after Tyndall's marriage to the daughter of Lord Claud Hamilton, Huxley was described in a newspaper paragraph as setting out for America "with his titled bride," and even, on Tyndall's death, received the doubtful honour of a funeral sermon.

True that they did not see eye to eye on some of the most fundamental matters of social and political principle, and where they did Tyndall's vehement enthusiasm would sometimes sweep him into activities where his friend could not follow. But these things were no bar to their mutual affection and esteem, and in token of this two letters of 1866 may be quoted, when England was sharply divided on the question of Governor Eyre's action in suppressing an incipient revolt in Jamaica.

In particular, a negro preacher named Gordon had been arrested, court-martialled, and summarily executed. A Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the case declared that the evidence given appeared to be wholly insufficient to establish the charge upon which the prisoner took his trial, and that in the evidence adduced they could not see any sufficient proof of Gordon's complicity in the outbreak, or of having been a party to any general conspiracy against the Government.

To many thoughtful and law-abiding persons such a proceeding appeared to be no better than judicial murder, constituting a hideous precedent; a committee was formed to present a formal indictment against Governor Eyre and obtain a judicial pronouncement on the question, quite apart from the two other questions persistently confused with it—namely, was Gordon a Jamaica Hampden or was he a psalm-singing firebrand, and was Governor Eyre actuated by the highest and noblest motives, or was he under the influence of panic-stricken rashness or worse impulses?

With this high constitutional end in view—the protection of individual liberty—Huxley joined the committee. To Charles Kingsley, who confessed to taking the hero-worshipper's view of Governor Eyre, Huxley replied:—

I dare say he did all this with the best of motives and in a heroic vein. But if English law will not declare that heroes have no more right to kill people in this fashion than other folk, I shall take an early opportunity of migrating to Texas or some other quiet place where there is less hero-worship and more respect for justice, which is to my mind of much more importance than hero-worship.

In point of fact, men take sides on this question, not so much by looking at the mere facts of the case, but rather as their deepest political convictions lead them. And the great use of the prosecution, and one of my reasons for joining it, is that it will help a great many people to find out what their profoundest political beliefs are.