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 Thomas Henry Huxley
 
 Modern English Writers 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD . . . Professor SAINTSBURY. 
 
 R. L. STEVENSON . L. COPE CORNFORD. 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN Mrs. MEYNELL. 
 
 TENNYSON ..... ANDREW LANG. 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT . . . . A. T. QUILLER-COUCH. 
 
 BROWNING C. H. HERFORD. 
 
 FROUDE JOHN OLIVER HOBBES. 
 
 HUXLEY EDWARD CLODD. 
 
 THACKERAY CHARLES WHIBLEY. 
 
 DICKENS W. E. HENLEY. 
 
 * # * Other Volumes will be announced in due course.
 
 THOMAS HENRY 
 HUXLEY 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD CLODD 
 
 Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 1902
 
 Copyright, 1902 
 BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY. 
 
 First Edition Published 
 March, IQOS.
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 31 
 
 INSCRIBED TO 
 
 Mrs. Huxley 
 
 WITH DEEP RESPECT AND REGARD
 
 Prefatory Note 
 
 IN the preparation of this book there have been 
 large drafts from the materials supplied by Mr. 
 Leonard Huxley in the very admirable Life and 
 Letters of his father. The foot-note references to 
 that work are sufficiently denoted by the omission 
 of its title. 
 
 For the convenience of readers who may not 
 possess the original editions of Huxley's writings, 
 the references to them are, for the most part, cited 
 from the Collected Essays.
 
 Contents 
 
 CHRONOLOGY xi 
 
 I. THE MAN i 
 
 II. THE DISCOVERER . . . .64 
 
 III. THE INTERPRETER .... 97 
 
 IV. THE CONTROVERSIALIST . . .158 
 V. THE CONSTRUCTOR .... 224 
 
 NOTE ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE UN- 
 KNOWABLE . . . . . 246 
 
 INDEX 249
 
 Chronology 
 
 1825. Born at Baling (4th May). 
 
 1841. Assistant to doctor at Rotherhithe. 
 
 1842. Student at Charming Cross Hospital Medical School. 
 1845. M- B - and Gold Medallist for Anatomy and Physiology at 
 
 University of London. 
 
 1845. Discovered membrane of human hair known as "Huxley's 
 
 layer." 
 
 1846. Entered Naval Medical Service. 
 
 1846. Appointed assistant-surgeon of the surveying ship Rattle- 
 snake. 
 
 1849. Published memoir on the Family of the Medusa. 
 
 1850. Returned to England: granted leave ashore to work out re- 
 
 sults of voyage. 
 
 1851. Elected Fellow of the Royal Society. 
 
 1852. Received Gold Medal of Royal Society. 
 
 1853. Further leave ashore refused: struck off the Navy List. 
 
 1853. Published article on the Cell Theory. 
 
 1854. Appointed Professor of Natural History and Paleontology 
 
 in Royal School of Mines, and Curator of Fossils in 
 Museum of Practical Geology. 
 
 1855. Married Henrietta Anne Heathorn, of Sydney. 
 
 1856. Visited Switzerland with Tyndall. 
 
 1857. Published paper on The Structure and Motion of Glaciers. 
 1857. Appointed Examiner in Physiology and Comparative Anat- 
 omy in University of London. 
 
 1857. Appointed Fullerian Professor of Comparative Anatomy at 
 
 the Royal Institution. 
 
 1858. Appointed Croonian Lecturer. 
 
 xi
 
 Xli HUXLEY. 
 
 1859. Published Croonian lecture on Origin of the Vertebrate 
 Skull. 
 
 1859. Reviewed the Origin of Species in the Times (26th Decem- 
 ber). 
 
 1859. Appointed Secretary of the Geological Society. 
 
 1859. Published Oceanic Hydrozoa. 
 
 1860. Attended British Association Meeting at Oxford (debate 
 
 with Bishop Wilberforce). 
 
 1861. Lectured on Relation of Man to the rest of the Animal 
 
 Kingdom at Edinburgh and London. 
 
 1862. Elected Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of 
 
 Surgeons. 
 
 1863. Published Man's Place in Nature. 
 
 1864. Appointed on Royal Commission on Sea Fisheries. 
 
 Note. Huxley served between 1863 and 1884 on ten Royal Commissions 
 on Fisheries, Scientific Education, etc. 
 
 1866. Received degree of LL.D. Edinburgh. 
 
 1866. Published Lessons in Elementary Physiology. 
 
 1868. Elected President of the Ethnological Society. 
 
 1868. Lectured on the Physical Basis of Life. 
 
 1868. Published memoirs on the Classification of Birds and on 
 
 Intermediate Animals between Birds and Reptiles. 
 
 1869. Elected President of the Geological Society. 
 1869. Joined the Metaphysical Society. 
 
 1869. Published Introduction to the Classification of Animals. 
 
 1870. Elected President of British Association Meeting at Liver- 
 
 pool. 
 1870. Elected member of the first School Board for London. 
 
 1870. Published Lay Sermons. 
 
 1871. Appointed Secretary of the Royal Society. 
 
 1871. Broke down in health; visited Egypt. 
 
 1872. Elected Lord Rector of Aberdeen University. 
 
 1873. Published Critiques and Addresses. 
 
 1874. Lectured on Animals as Automata at British Association 
 
 Meeting, Belfast. 
 
 1874. Lectured on Natural History as deputy to Sir Wyville 
 
 Thomson at Edinburgh. 
 
 1875. Took active part in controversy on Vivisection. 
 
 1875. Published Practical Instruction in Elementary Biology.
 
 CHRONOLOGY. Xlll 
 
 1876. Visited America. 
 
 1877. Published American Addresses; Physiography; and a 
 
 Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals. 
 
 1878. Published Hume. 
 
 1879. Received degree of LL.D. Cambridge. 
 
 1880. Lectured on The Coming of Age of the ' Origin of Species ' 
 
 at the Royal Institution. 
 
 1880. Published The Crayfish; an Introduction to the Science of 
 
 Zoology ; and Introductory Science Primer. 
 
 1 88 1. Appointed Inspector of Salmon Fisheries. 
 
 1 88 1. Became, on departmental changes at the School of Mines, 
 Professor of Biology and Dean of the Royal College of 
 Science. 
 
 1 88 1. Published Science and Culture. 
 
 1883. Elected President of the Royal Society. 
 
 1883. Delivered the Rede Lecture at Cambridge (on The Pearly 
 
 Nautilus and Evolution). 
 
 1884. Further breakdown in health. 
 
 1885. Received degree of D.C.L. Oxford. 
 
 1885. Retired on pension from all official appointments. 
 
 1886. Began series of papers on Evolution of Theology. 
 1888. Elected a Trustee of the British Museum. 
 
 1888. Received Copley Medal of the Royal Society. 
 
 1889. Removed to Eastbourne. 
 
 1891. Published Social Diseases and Worse Remedies. 
 
 1892. Published Essays on Controverted Questions. 
 
 1892. Made a Privy Councillor. 
 
 1893. Delivered Romanes Lecture at Oxford (on Evolution and 
 
 Ethics). 
 
 1893-94. Reissued, with rearrangement, the articles and lectures 
 in Lay Sermons, etc., in nine volumes entitled Collected 
 Essays. 
 
 1894. Received Darwin Medal of the Royal Society. 
 
 1894. Attended British Association Meeting, Oxford. 
 
 1895. Died 2 9 th J une - Buried at Finchley, 4th July.
 
 HUXLEY 
 
 THE MAN 
 
 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, the seventh and youngest 
 child of George and Rachel Huxley, was born on the 
 4th May, 1825, at Ealing, then a village separated by 
 stretches of open country from London. His father, 
 who was assistant-master in a semi-public school 
 there, is described by him as a man " rather too easy- 
 going for this wicked world," yet with a certain tenac- 
 ity of character which, since he inherited it, Huxley 
 dryly says, " unfriendly observers sometimes call 
 obstinacy." This, together with a faculty for draw- 
 ing, constituted the father's legacy to the son. It is 
 of his mother that he declares himself " physically 
 and mentally " the child, " even down to peculiar 
 movements of the hands " ; her agile mind, with its 
 rapid arrival at conclusions, remained, he says, the 
 perilous but most prized part of his " inheritance of 
 mother-wit." His love for'her was a passion. 
 i
 
 2 HUXLEY 
 
 But his boyhood was a cheerless time. Reversing 
 Matthew Arnold's sunnier memories: 
 
 No " rigorous teachers seized his youth, 
 And purged its faith, and tried its fire, 
 
 Shewed him the high, white star of truth, 
 There bade him gaze, and there aspire." 
 
 He told Charles Kingsley that he was " kicked into 
 the world a boy without guide or training, or with 
 worse than none," 1 and, contrasting Herbert Spen- 
 cer's happier lot, says that he " had two years of a 
 Pandemonium of a school (between eight and ten), 
 and after that neither help nor sympathy in any in- 
 tellectual direction till he reached manhood." * On 
 the dreary week-days he was flung among boys of 
 low type, and on the drearier Sundays he was taken 
 to church, where the preacher's allusions to infidels 
 left on his mind the impression that " such folks be- 
 longed to the criminal classes." When he was about 
 ten, the break-up of the Ealing school sent the 
 family, literally, to Coventry, where, in the irony of 
 fate, the shiftless father became manager of a 
 savings' bank. The daughters took to school-keep- 
 ing, and the boys were left free to browse among the 
 remnants of the home library. Huxley was pos- 
 sessed of that love of reading which, in Gibbon's 
 famous words, he " would not have exchanged for the 
 1 1. 220. II. 145.
 
 THE MAN 3 
 
 treasures of India." From boyhood to old age his 
 tastes were omnivorous, ranging from science and 
 philosophy to the last new fiction. Dr. Johnson said 
 that Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy took him out of 
 bed two hours before his usual time ; Mutton's 
 Geology kept Huxley in it, with blanket pinned round 
 his shoulders. At twelve he had read Hamilton's 
 essay On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned, with the 
 result, he tells us, of stamping on his mind " the 
 strong conviction that on even the most solemn and 
 important of questions, men are apt to take cunning 
 phrases for answers." Carlyle's translations from the 
 German moved him to teach himself a language 
 knowledge of which was to be of the utmost service 
 in his life-work. Of the influence which Sartor 
 Resartus had upon him, he says, " It led me to know 
 that a deep sense of religion was compatible with the 
 entire absence of theology." 1 
 
 During this formative period his interest ranged 
 from speculations on the absolute basis of matter and 
 the crystallisation of carbon to the injustice of com- 
 pelling Dissenters to pay church rates. In the boy's 
 quotation from Lessing, " I hate all people who want 
 to found sects," there is the spirit of the man who 
 said that " science commits suicide when it adopts a 
 creed." In a scheme for a " classification of all 
 I. 220.
 
 4 HUXLEY 
 
 knowledge" written in a fragmentary journal, kept 
 from his fifteenth to his seventeenth year, there was 
 the expression of that passion for general principles, 
 for search after unity at the core of things, which 
 ruled all his observation and speculation, and which 
 is the salvation of a man from the evil of specialism. 
 
 " Thus to be a Seeker is to be of the best sect next 
 to a Finder," said Oliver Cromwell ; and of himself 
 Huxley, who at fifty -three learned Greek that he 
 might read Aristotle in the original, wrote three years 
 before his death, " I have always been, am, and pro- 
 pose to remain a mere scholar." So wrote Michael 
 Angelo in old age, " Imparo ancora " I am learning 
 still. 
 
 Huxley's bent, like that, it may be added, of both 
 Herbert Spencer and the late W. B. Carpenter, was 
 towards mechanical engineering, and this was mani- 
 fest in his life-work. For his interest centred in the 
 " architectural part " of organisms, in the adaptation 
 of apparatus to function, and in whatever evidenced 
 u unity of plan in the thousands and thousands of 
 diverse living constructions." 1 Whatever he worked 
 at, he " visualised clearly " by diagram or map or 
 picture. 
 
 He paid a lifelong penalty for his curiosity about 
 the mechanism of the human body. When he was
 
 THE MAN 5 
 
 fourteen he was taken by some student friends to a 
 post-mortem, the result of which was an attack of 
 blood-poisoning. To this he attributed the " hypo- 
 chondriacal dyspepsia " which afflicted him to the end 
 of his life. Although engineering was his hobby, 
 medicine, at the start, was his destiny. At sixteen, 
 on the removal of his family to Rotherhithe, he was 
 placed as assistant to a Dr. Chandler as a preliminary 
 to " walking the hospitals." Many of the patients 
 were in more need of food than physic, a condition 
 of things which set Huxley wondering " why the 
 masses did not sally forth and get a few hours' eating 
 and drinking and plunder to their heart's content 
 before the police could stop and hang a few of 
 them." l 
 
 This early contact with the grim realities of the 
 social problem gave him authority to be heard upon 
 the economic and educational questions in which his 
 interest deepened with his years, and to indicate to the 
 people how they may alone work out their own salva- 
 tion. 
 
 I believe in the fustian [he said], and can talk to it 
 better than to any amount of gauze and Saxony. 
 I want the working classes to understand 
 that Science and her ways are great facts for them 
 that physical virtue is the base of all other, and that 
 they are to be clean and temperate and all the rest 
 
 I. 16.
 
 6 HUXLEY 
 
 not because fellows in black with white ties tell them 
 so, but because these are plain and patent laws of na- 
 ture which they must obey under penalties. 1 
 
 Leaving Mr. Chandler, he was apprenticed to his 
 brother-in-law, Dr. Scott (Huxley's two sisters had 
 married doctors), and began study for the matricula- 
 tion examination of the University of London. He 
 failed in this, but had compensation in winning the 
 silver medal of the Pharmaceutical Society, while the 
 standard reached by his brother James and himself 
 secured them free scholarships in the medical school 
 of Charing Cross Hospital. In 1845 ^ e passed his 
 M. B. at the University of London and made his first 
 discovery in detecting a hitherto unknown membrane 
 at the root of the human hair. It is known as 
 " Huxley's layer." The next year he acted on the 
 suggestion of a fellow-student, Mr. (now Sir Joseph) 
 Fayrer, and applied to Sir William Burnet, then Di- 
 rector of the Medical Service, for a naval appoint- 
 ment. Sir William returned his visiting card " with 
 the frugal reminder " that he might " probably find it 
 useful on some other occasion," but the interview 
 gained him entry on the books of Nelson's old ship, 
 the Victory, for duty at Haslar Hospital. Then came 
 a turn of the tide which, not without ebb, led on to 
 fortune, at least to the fortune never, despite the 
 I. 138.
 
 THE MAN 
 
 7 
 
 discreditable insinuation in PunchJ a commercial one 
 which Huxley coveted. 
 
 Owen Stanley, son of the Bishop of Norwich and 
 brother of Dean Stanley, was in command of the 
 Rattlesnake, a 28-gun frigate commissioned to survey 
 the intricate passages within the barrier-reef skirting 
 the eastern shores of Australia, between which colony 
 and the mother country a shorter sea-passage was de- 
 manded by the growing trade. Captain Stanley 
 wanted an assistant-surgeon, and on the recommenda- 
 tion of Sir John Richardson, the famous Arctic ex- 
 plorer, Huxley was given the post. It was the best 
 possible apprenticeship for the work which lay, un- 
 suspected, before him the solution of the problems 
 of organology, and the indicating of their far-reach- 
 ing significance. Life had its origin in water, and 
 therein the biologist finds his most suggestive material. 
 Darwin and Joseph Hooker had passed through a like 
 curriculum the one in 1831, and the other in 1839. 
 
 The Rattlesnake left Plymouth on the I2th De- 
 cember, 1846, two years before Bates and Wallace 
 sailed for exploration of the Amazons. It was a time 
 of preparation, each only vaguely knowing to what 
 ends he worked, but in his measure contributing an- 
 swer to the question whether species were mutable or 
 permanent. 
 
 1 II. 26.
 
 8 HUXLEY 
 
 The conditions on board the Rattlesnake contrasted 
 ill with the luxurious equipment of exploring ships 
 since her time. She was a man-of-war of the old 
 class ; her seams were leaky ; the berths swarmed 
 with cock-roaches, and the biscuits with weevils. The 
 Admiralty refused to supply any books, and in the ab- 
 sence of proper apparatus for sifting the contents of 
 the dredge, Huxley had to adapt a wire meat-cover. 
 The ship carried an official naturalist, whose chief care 
 was to collect objects for museums, leaving to Hux- 
 ley's willing hands the dissection and examination of 
 the specimens brought up from the deep sea. 
 
 The first long stay was made at Sydney, where 
 Huxley met his future wife, Henrietta Annie Heath- 
 orn. For her he was "to serve longer and harder 
 than Jacob thought to serve for Rachel," of whom, 
 in immortal words, the poet-chronicler says, " seven 
 years seemed unto him but a few days for the love he 
 had to her." ' Huxley had his reward in forty years 
 of the closest and most helpful fellowship. 
 
 The nature and import of the work accomplished 
 by him during the voyage, which came to an end in 
 November, 1849, Wl ^ ^ dealt w ' th m t ^ ie next chap- 
 ter. Here it suffices to say that while sundry reports 
 on marine creatures, which were sent to the Linnean 
 Society, were pigeon-holed, better fortune attended a 
 1 Genesis xxix. 20.
 
 THE MAN 
 
 paper on the Medusae or jelly-fish family, transmitted 
 to the Royal Society through Bishop Stanley, whose 
 admirable History of Birds has survived his episcopal 
 charges. It was promptly published, and was the 
 warrant of Huxley's election into the Society at the 
 early age of twenty-six. Thus far he could have no 
 quarrel with bishops. 
 
 Back in England, " equipped as a perfect zoologist 
 and keen-sighted ethnologist " (the words are Vir- 
 chow's), Huxley obtained for a time the privilege of 
 appointment for " particular service," which enabled 
 him to work out on shore the results of the voyage. 
 But nearly five years of suspense and struggle were 
 to pass before he secured a permanent appointment 
 of 200 per annum, one-half of the modest 
 maximum he desired. Writing to his sister in 1850 
 he says : 
 
 I have no ambition, except as means to an end, and 
 that end is the possession of a sufficient income to 
 marry upon. ... A worker I must always be 
 it is my nature but if I had .400 a-year I would 
 never let my name appear to anything I did or ever 
 shall do. It would be glorious to be a voice working 
 in secret, and free from all those personal motives that 
 have actuated the best. 1 
 
 He was in the front rank of anatomists; in 1852 
 his society conferred upon him the Royal Medal, 
 ' I. 62.
 
 10 HUXLEY 
 
 which, for the 50 worth of gold therein, he sold 
 eleven years after, to assist a brother's widow ; he was 
 deluged with invitations to dinners and soirees while 
 not earning enough to pay his cab-fare. He kept 
 fragile body and self-reliant soul together by writing, 
 lecturing, and translating. Toronto, Aberdeen, Cork, 
 King's College, each in turn rejected him as he sought 
 a professorship of natural history, and he had thoughts 
 of trying his luck as a doctor in Australia, if only to 
 be near his sweetheart. Domestic cares, his mother's 
 death, and his father's serious illness, added to the 
 gloom of these five dreary years. But though his 
 circumstances ran low, his ideals soared high. In the 
 letter of 1850 to his sister he says : 
 
 I don't know and I don't care whether I shall ever 
 be what is called a great man. I will leave my mark 
 somewhere, and it shall be clear and distinct 
 
 T. H. H. his mark 
 
 and free from the abominable blur of cant, humbug, 
 and self-seeking which surrounds everything in this 
 present world that is to say, supposing that I am not 
 already unconsciously tainted myself, a result of which 
 I have a morbid dread. 1 
 
 At the end of 1853 tne Admiralty commanded him 
 
 to join the ship Illustrious; he refused, and paid the 
 
 penalty in being struck off the Navy List. But, as 
 
 he cheerily said, " there is always a Cape Horn in 
 
 1 1. 63.
 
 THE MAN II 
 
 one's life," and, " not without a good deal of damage 
 to spars and rigging," he rounded it. In July, 1854, 
 on the transfer of his friend Edward Forbes to Edin- 
 burgh, he was appointed Professor of Natural History 
 at the School of Mines with a salary of 200, which, 
 soon after, was doubled on his becoming naturalist to 
 the Geological Survey. The next year Miss Heath- 
 orn's parents brought her to England. Her health 
 was so ,bad that a famous doctor gave her only six 
 months to live. But the faculty differed; Huxley 
 took the brighter view, and wrote thus to Hooker on 
 the nth July : 
 
 I terminate my Baccalaureate and take my degree 
 of M.A.trimony (isn't that atrocious ?) on Saturday, 
 July 21. 
 
 When he was appointed to the School of Mines he 
 told Sir Henry De la Beche that he " didn't care for 
 fossils," the mechanism of the living animal alone in- 
 teresting him. But it came to pass that during his 
 thirty-one years' tenure of his post the larger part of 
 his work was palaeontological. And well that this so 
 happened, because, when the battle over organic evo- 
 lution was fought, Huxley was able to adduce out of 
 his treasury of knowledge a mass of evidence from 
 the fossil-yielding rocks which, supplemented by the 
 evidence from embryology, put the theory of " descent
 
 12 HUXLEY 
 
 with modification " on a foundation which cannot be 
 shaken. 
 
 Routine work leaves little, if any, time for original 
 investigation. Administrative detail filled the larger 
 part of each day with Huxley ; his heart was centred 
 in schemes for the diffusion of science ; the arrange- 
 ment and cataloguing of the contents of the Jermyn 
 Street Museum was a labour of years ; he gave, un- 
 grudgingly, help in forming other public as well as 
 private collections, which, in his own words, 
 
 should be large enough to illustrate the most impor- 
 tant truths of natural history, but not so extensive as 
 to weary and confuse ordinary visitors. 
 
 But with Huxley this, although an essential, was a 
 secondary, part of the business; with the organising 
 of materials there went pan passu instruction in their 
 nature and meaning, involving courses of lectures and 
 series of articles, both technical and popular, while 
 other public appointments made their inroads on his 
 time. This would seem enough to exhaust the day, 
 and when it is remembered that all which he under- 
 took, paid and unpaid alike, was done despite frequent 
 breakdown from dyspepsia and allied troubles, the 
 marvel grows that he found a moment for original 
 research, or for the wide and varied reading which, 
 fortifying him on every side, enabled him " to put to
 
 THE MAN 13 
 
 flight the armies " of the obscurantists in science, 
 ethics, and theology. 
 
 Work was his passion, method was his salvation ; 
 he took care of the minutes arid the hours took care 
 of themselves. And yet, like Gibbon, who wrote 
 
 While every one looks on me as a prodigy of appli- 
 cation, I know myself how strong a propensity I have 
 to indolence, 
 
 we find Huxley accusing himself of an ingrained 
 laziness. 1 
 
 On the last night of 1856, while waiting for the 
 birth of his first child, he made this entry in his 
 journal : 
 
 1856-7-8 must still be " Lehrjahre " to complete 
 training in principles of Histology, Morphology, 
 Physiology, Zoology, and Geology by Monographic 
 Work in each department. 1860 will then see me 
 well grounded and ready for any special pursuits in 
 either of these branches. ... In 1860 I may 
 fairly look forward to fifteen or twenty years' " Meis- 
 terjahre " ; and with the comprehensive views my 
 training will give me, I think it will be possible in 
 that time to give a new and healthier direction to all 
 Biological Science. To smite all humbugs, however 
 big, to give a nobler tone to science; to set an ex- 
 ample of abstinence from petty personal controversies, 
 and of toleration for everything but lying ; to be in- 
 different as to whether the work is recognised as mine 
 or not, so long as it is done : are these my aims ? 
 1860 will show. 
 
 i 1. 268.
 
 14 HUXLEY 
 
 Half-past ten at night. Waiting for my child. I 
 seem to fancy it the pledge that all these things shall 
 be. 
 
 Born five minutes before twelve. Thank God. 
 New- Year's Day, 1857.! 
 
 On the 20th September, 1860, a year that was to 
 " show " so much, there was made the last entry in 
 the journal, telling what lifelong sorrow fell upon a 
 great and tender soul. 
 
 And the same child, our Noel, our first-born, after 
 being for nearly four years our delight and our joy, 
 was carried ofF by scarlet fever in forty-eight hours. 
 This day week he and I had a great romp together. 
 On Friday his restless head, with its bright blue eyes 
 and tangled golden hair, tossed all day upon his 
 pillow. On Saturday night, the fifteenth, I carried 
 him here into my study, and laid his cold still body 
 here where I write. Here too, on Sunday night, 
 came his mother and I to that holy leave-taking. 
 
 My boy is gone ; but in a higher and better sense 
 than was in my mind when I wrote four years ago 
 what stands above, I feel that my fancy has been ful- 
 filled. I say heartily, and without bitterness Amen, 
 so let it be. 2 
 
 In a very remarkable letter, written at this time to 
 Charles Kingsley in reply to one setting forth the 
 warrant for belief in immortality, the attitude of 
 Huxley from his youth upwards towards the current 
 theology is shown clearly. 3 He sees no justification 
 for the belief; the arguments in its favour are to his 
 
 '1.151. '1.152. '1. 217-222.
 
 THE MAN 15 
 
 mind " delusive and mischievous," and there, since 
 his was not the spirit which denies, he leaves the 
 matter. The letter contains the already-quoted re- 
 mark that Sartor Resartus led him to knowledge of 
 the non-dependence of religion on theology, religion 
 meaning, as he says elsewhere, simply the reverence 
 and love for the ethical ideal, and the desire to realise 
 that ideal in life, which every man ought to feel. 1 
 He adds : 
 
 Science and her methods gave me a resting-place 
 independent of authority and tradition. Love opened 
 up to me a view of the sanctity of human, nature, and 
 impressed me with a deep sense of responsibility. 
 
 In the chapter on " The Everlasting No " in Sartor, 
 Carlyle had said : 
 
 After all the nameless woes that Inquiry, which for 
 me, what it is not always, was genuine love of Truth, 
 had wrought me, I nevertheless still loved Truth and 
 bate no jot of my allegiance to her. 
 
 In that allegiance Huxley never wavered : 
 
 If wife and child, and name and fame were all lost 
 to me, one after another, still I would not lie. 
 . The longer I live, the more obvious it is to 
 me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say 
 and to feel, " I believe such and such to be true." 
 All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties 
 of existence cling about that act. The universe is 
 
 1 Collected Essays, v. p. 249.
 
 l6 HUXLEY 
 
 one and the same throughout ; and if the condition 
 of my success in unravelling some little difficulty of 
 anatomy or physiology is, that I shall rigorously re- 
 fuse to put faith in that which does not rest on 
 sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great 
 mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on 
 other terms. 1 
 
 Huxley summed up the whole matter in his Rec- 
 torial Address to the students of Aberdeen University : 
 " Veracity is the heart of morality." His references 
 to the formative influences on his life in the letter to 
 Kingsley are prefaced by the statement that his 
 neglected boyhood had been followed by a profligate 
 manhood. His words are, " I confess to my shame 
 that few men have drank deeper of all kinds of sin 
 than I." Commenting on this in his review of the 
 Life and Letters, Sir W. Thiselton-Dyer says, 
 " Frankly, I do not believe a word of it." And those 
 who knew Huxley in any degree of intimacy will 
 agree with him. Sir W. Thiselton-Dyer adds : 
 
 In a rather serious conversation I once had with 
 him, he spoke of a period in his life when he might 
 have taken to evil courses; but he did not give me 
 the smallest reason to suppose that in the retrospect 
 he saw more than the existence of a possible crevasse 
 in his path into which he might have fallen. 2 
 
 The truth is that we have here the language of ex- 
 aggeration born of the desolation of the moment ; the 
 1 1. 217. Nature, I3th June, 1901, p. 146.
 
 THE MAN 17 
 
 " troops of follies and errors " 1 of youth refracted 
 through the medium of tears. It is the language of 
 Augustine's Confessions ; of Bunyan's Grace Abound- 
 ing; and of the 
 
 many excellent persons whose moral character from 
 boyhood to old age has been free from any stain dis- 
 cernible to their fellow-creatures, who have, in their 
 autobiographies or diaries, applied to themselves, and 
 doubtless with sincerity, epithets as severe as could be 
 applied to Titus Gates or Mrs. Brownrigg. 2 
 
 In acknowledging a birthday letter from one of his 
 daughters, Huxley hopes that his own imperfections 
 may make him deal the more gently with those of 
 others. He adds that he has little toleration for the 
 "just man who needed no repentance," and whose 
 smugly correct family circle " was perhaps as the in- 
 terior of an ice-pail." 3 Walter Bagehot remarks 
 that " in the greatest cases scientific men have been 
 calm men. There is a coldness in their fame. We 
 think of Euclid as of pure ice ; we admire Newton as 
 we admire the Peak of Teneriffe." 4 The statement 
 is too sweeping ; it has no application to Huxley, in 
 whom was neither coldness nor detachment. He was 
 hot-tempered ; now and again he was austere to a 
 degree approaching severity : he had, as with all 
 strong individualities, strong likes and dislikes. 5 But 
 
 1 II. 330. 2 Macaulay's Essays, " John Bunyan," iv. p. 407. 
 
 3 II. 331. 4 Literary Studies, ii. p. 222. * II. 409.
 
 1 8 HUXLEY 
 
 the anger and the austerity were passing moods ; they 
 were the price which he and others paid for abiding 
 virtues; for the "woman's element" ' in him which 
 made him cling to wife and children ; for the quick 
 response to every call of duty or affection ; for the 
 generous application of great powers to noble and un- 
 selfish ends. Of him may be said what Lowell has 
 said of Lessing : " No biographical chemistry is 
 needed to bleach spots out of his reputation." 2 His 
 home was " a focus of the best affections not less 
 than of intellectual light." 3 He loved anniversaries ; 
 the devotion of his children warmed him " better than 
 the sun," and when his gifted daughter Marian died 
 in the flower of womanhood, he confessed, in the 
 depth of his grief, that " man is not a rational animal, 
 especially in his parental capacity." Where he 
 hated, the scorn and loathing were deserved, for they 
 were manifest only against the insincere and the 
 evasive ; if he could not brook contradiction, it was 
 only where ignorance or folly vaunted their assurance 
 and their blunders ; if he could not suffer bores gladly, 
 by what right did they compel a waste of time un- 
 grudgingly given where counsel or information were 
 honestly asked, no matter by whom ? For, like all 
 
 ' " I have a woman's element in me." I. 61. 
 * The English Poets and other Essays, p. 278. 
 Leslie Stephen, on " Huxley," Nineteenth Century, Dec., 1900, 
 p. 917.
 
 THE MAN 19 
 
 men who loom large in the public eye, he had to 
 make enforced acquaintance with that aggravated 
 variety of the species known as the crank. Circle- 
 squares and earth-flatteners pestered him with pam- 
 phlets ; four-paged letters praying for his conversion, 
 or, more often, for his damnation, as an atheist of the 
 most mischievous type, were sent to him ; bulky 
 manuscripts, crammed with mad theories, which he 
 was asked to revise and get published, were left at his 
 house. Sometimes the comic side of the matter 
 appealed to him, as witness this note to his friend Sir 
 John Donnelly : 
 
 I had a letter from a fellow yesterday morning who 
 must be a lunatic, to the effect that he had been read- 
 ing my essays, thought I was just the man to spend a 
 month with, and was coming down by the five o'clock 
 train, attended by his seven children and his mother- 
 in-law ! 
 
 Frost being over, there was lots of boiling water 
 ready for him, but he did not turn up ! 
 
 Wife and servants expected nothing less than as- 
 sassination ! * 
 
 The entry in his journal, " 1860 will show," had 
 deeper significance than Huxley dreamed when he 
 made it. In 1858, he had delivered a lecture on the 
 origin of the vertebrate skull, in which he demolished 
 a theory propounded by Oken, supported by Goethe, 
 1 II. 372-
 
 2O HUXLEY 
 
 and indorsed by Owen. At that time the influence 
 of Owen in biological science was supreme and un- 
 challenged, and it needed no small courage to tell so 
 high an authority that even he might sometimes be in 
 error. Moreover, the task was not easier when, as 
 experience showed, Owen was no fair fighter, and 
 given to sacrificing truth to expediency. 
 
 As Huxley cared nothing for authority, and every- 
 thing for truth, it is not surprising that the result was 
 an "internecine feud " between them. The breach 
 was widened on the publication of the Origin of 
 Species; an event which, in Huxley's words, "marks 
 the Hejira of Science from the idolatries of special 
 creation to the purer faith of Evolution." * In a 
 paper on the Characters, Principles of Division, and 
 Primary Groups of the Class Mammalia, read by Owen 
 before the Linnean Society in 1859, ne referred to 
 certain cerebral structures as " peculiar to the genus 
 Homo," and added that the " peculiar mental powers 
 associated with this highest form of brain" war- 
 ranted the placing of man in a distinct sub-class of 
 the Mammalia. 
 
 At the meeting of the British Association at Ox- 
 ford on 28th June, 1860, Owen emphasised the state- 
 ment that " the brain of the gorilla presented more 
 
 1 Review of Haeckel's Antkropogenie. Academy, 2d January, 
 1875-
 
 THE MAN 21 
 
 differences, as compared with the brain of man, than 
 it did when compared with the brains of the very 
 lowest and most problematical of the Quadrumana." 
 To this Huxley, in polite English, gave the lie direct, 
 and pledged himself to "justify that unusual pro- 
 cedure elsewhere." 1 Two days after, by mere 
 chance, he was present at the reading of a paper by 
 Dr. Draper On the Intellectual Development of Europe 
 considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin. 
 In the discussion which followed, Bishop Wilber- 
 force, throwing a glance at Huxley, ended a suave 
 and superficial speech by asking him " as to his belief 
 in being descended from an ape. Is it on his grand- 
 father's or his grandmother's side that the ape an- 
 cestry comes in ? " Huxley did not rise till the 
 meeting called for him ; then he let himself go. 2 
 " The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands," he 
 said in undertone to Sir Benjamin Brodie. After 
 showing how ill-equipped was the Bishop for con- 
 troversy upon the general question of organic evolu- 
 tion, although it was an open secret that Owen had 
 primed him for the contest, Huxley said : " You say 
 that development drives out the Creator, but you 
 assert that God made you ; and yet you know that 
 you yourself were originally a little piece of matter, 
 
 1 Man's Place in Nature, p. 114 (1863 edition). 
 3 Letter to F. Darwin, i. p. 187.
 
 22 HUXLEY 
 
 no bigger than the end of this gold pencil-case ? " 
 Then followed the famous retort : 
 
 I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason 
 to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. 
 If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame 
 in recalling it would rather be a man a man of rest- 
 less and versatile intellect who, not content with 
 success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into 
 scientific questions with which he has no real ac- 
 quaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless 
 rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from 
 the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and 
 skilled appeals to religious prejudice. 1 
 
 The rebuke was supplemented in an article in the 
 Natural History Review, January, 1861, on the 
 " Zoological Relation of Man with the Lower Ani- 
 mals," wherein Huxley redeemed his promise to re- 
 fute Owen, and proved that " the brains of the lower 
 true apes and monkeys differ far more widely from 
 the brain of the orang than the brain of the orang 
 differs from that of man." * 
 
 Whether [he says], as some think, man is, by his 
 origin, distinct from all other living beings, or 
 whether, on the other hand, as others suppose, he is 
 the result of the modification of some other mammal, 
 his duties and his aspirations must, I apprehend, re- 
 main the same. The proof of his claim to inde- 
 
 1 There is a good portrait of Huxley at this time in Reminis- 
 cences of Oxford, by Rev. W. Tuckwell. 
 P.84.
 
 THE MAN 23 
 
 pendent parentage will not change the brutishness of 
 man's lower nature ; nor, except to those valet souls 
 who cannot see greatness in their fellow because his 
 father was a cobbler, will the demonstration of a 
 pithecoid pedigree one whit diminish man's divine 
 right of kingship over nature ; nor lower the great 
 and princely dignity of perfect manhood, which is an 
 order of nobility, not inherited, but to be won by each 
 of us, so far as he consciously seeks good and avoids 
 evil, and puts the faculties with which he is endowed 
 to their fittest use. 1 
 
 Notwithstanding " the crushing evidence from orig- 
 inal dissections of numerous apes' brains " adduced 
 by Rolleston, Flower, and other comparative anato- 
 mists, Owen repeated and never retracted the thing 
 which he must have known to be false : the question 
 between Huxley and himself therefore became one of 
 " personal veracity," and led to a permanent rupture. 
 Moreover, Owen was known to have written an ad- 
 verse notice of the Origin of Species in the Edinburgh 
 Review of April, 1860, and to have inspired Wilber- 
 force in the preparation of his article upon the book 
 in the Quarterly Review of the following July, an 
 article of which Huxley said 
 
 It is a production which should be bound up in good 
 stout calf, or better, asses' skin, if such material is to 
 be had, by the curious book-collector, together with 
 Brougham's attack on the undulatory theory of light 
 when it was first propounded by Young. 
 
 1 Ib. t p. 67.
 
 24 HUXLEY 
 
 The outcome of all this was his first, and, in many 
 respects, his most important book, Evidence as to 
 Man's Place in Nature, which, based upon lectures 
 delivered to working men in London, and at the 
 Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, was published 
 in 1863. He was no superficial student of his kind ; 
 he was anthropologist as well as anatomist j he had 
 studied in the book of the world more than in the 
 world of books. As he told an audience in 1882, 
 it had been his fate 
 
 to be familiar with almost every form of society, from 
 the uncivilised savage of Papua and Australia and the 
 civilised savages of the slums and dens of the pov- 
 erty-stricken parts of great cities, to those who, per- 
 haps, are occasionally the somewhat over-civilised 
 members of our upper ten thousand. 1 
 
 He saw with Herbert Spencer and Darwin (who 
 had been content to throw out a bare hint at the end 
 of his book) that if the processes of what is called 
 the law of Evolution are applicable anywhere, they 
 are applicable everywhere ; that when once the funda- 
 mental relation of man to the lower animals, so far as 
 his bodily structure and functions are concerned, is 
 proven, inquiry into the relation of his mental ap- 
 paratus and faculties to theirs must follow, and, 
 with this, the study of his intellectual and spiritual 
 development, and of his progress from the selfish- 
 1 Coll. Essays, iii. p. 164.
 
 THE MAN 25 
 
 ness of the primitive horde to the comity of na- 
 tions. Hence, as he says in the second division of 
 the book 
 
 The question of questions for mankind the problem 
 which underlies all others, and is more deeply inter- 
 esting than any other is the ascertainment of the 
 place which Man occupies in nature and of his relation 
 to the universe of things. Whence our race has 
 come ; what are the limits of our power over nature 
 and of nature's power over us ; to what goal we are 
 tending j are the problems which present themselves 
 anew and with undiminished interest to every man 
 born into the world. 1 
 
 While, however, this interest in ultimate problems, 
 evidenced in the journal of his boyhood, grew with his 
 years, it absorbed no undue proportion of his time. 
 Man in his relation to his fellows had more interest 
 for him, and explains Huxley's activities in all things 
 affecting the body politic, and the social progress of 
 his kind. Needless to say that he who was all for 
 truth was likewise all for freedom. In 1862, when 
 the Civil War in America was raging, and when 
 Gladstone was telling us that Jefferson Davis had 
 " made a nation," Huxley never doubted that slavery 
 was doomed. Not that he believed in the negro ; he 
 knew how permanent are the natural inequalities of 
 races, and how hopeless, except in the rarest cases, it 
 
 1 P. 56.
 
 26 HUXLEY 
 
 is to look for any elevation of the sensuous and vola- 
 tile black, charged as he is with animal instincts ac- 
 cumulated beneath the tropical suns of unnumbered 
 years. But he was for the North, because " slavery 
 means bad political economy, bad social morality, and 
 a bad influence upon free labour and freedom all over 
 the world." 1 Two years later, he joined the Jamaica 
 Committee, formed to prosecute Governor Eyre for 
 the execution of the negro Gordon, because " English 
 law does not permit good persons as such to strangle 
 bad persons, as such." 2 
 
 He was in favour of the emancipation of women, 
 of the removal of every obstacle in the way of their 
 intellectual advancement and development. 3 Writing 
 to Miss Jex Blake about her difficulty in obtaining a 
 medical education, he said 
 
 that he was at a loss to understand on what grounds 
 of justice or public policy, a career which is open to 
 the weakest and most foolish of the male sex should 
 be forcibly closed to women of vigour and capacity. 
 
 They should, if they so pleased, 
 
 become merchants, barristers, politicians. Let them 
 have a fair field, but let them understand, as the 
 necessary correlative, that they are to have no favour. 
 
 1 1. 252. In like manner, Darwin, writing at this time to Asa 
 Gray, says : " Great God ! how I should like to see the greatest 
 curse on earth slavery abolished! " Life and Letters, ii. p. 375. 
 
 1.280. !. 212.
 
 THE MAN 27 
 
 Let Nature alone sit high above the lists, " rain in- 
 fluence and judge the prize." 
 
 But the prize, he was sure, would not be theirs, 
 since the most Darwinian of theorists will not ven- 
 ture to propound the doctrine that the physical disabil- 
 ities under which women have hitherto laboured in 
 the struggle for existence with men are likely to be 
 removed by even the most skilfully conducted process 
 of educational selection. 1 
 
 Strongly convinced, as the most pronounced indi- 
 vidualist can be, that it is desirable that every man 
 should be free to act in every way which does not 
 limit the corresponding freedom of his fellow-man, he 
 made his practical protest against the liberty-infrin- 
 ging Deceased Wife's Sister Bill in approving the 
 union of one of his daughters with the husband of 
 her late sister Marian. And while knowing, as few 
 knew so well, what an " immense amount of remedi- 
 able misery exists among us," misery which, " if not 
 effectually dealt with, will destroy modern civilisa- 
 tion," he opposed the means adopted by the Salvation 
 Army to cope with it, not because of its " Corybantic 
 Christianity " and coarse dogmas, but because a 
 fanatical despotism controls it. 
 
 Few social evils are of greater magnitude than 
 uninstructed and unchastened religious fanaticism ; no 
 personal habit more surely degrades the conscience 
 and the intellect than blind and unhesitating obedience 
 to unlimited authority. Undoubtedly, harlotry and 
 1 Lay Sermons, p. 22.
 
 28 HUXLEY 
 
 intemperance are sore evils, and starvation is hard to 
 bear, or even to know of; but the prostitution of the 
 mind, the soddening of the conscience, the dwarfing 
 of manhood, are worse calamities. ' 
 
 By the time that Evidence as to Man's Place in 
 Nature was written, Huxley had command of a style 
 which, in the judgment of Sir Spencer Walpole, a 
 judgment with which few will be found to disagree, 
 " made him the greatest master of prose of his 
 time." 2 Apt in application to him is Caxton's 
 tribute to Chaucer, " for he writeth no void words, 
 but all his matter is full of high and quick sentence." 
 Yet with a great price bought he this freedom of 
 ready speech and pen. Those who heard, and, hear- 
 ing, can never forget, his wonderful discourse On the 
 Coming of Age of the Origin of Species^ at the Royal 
 Institution in 1880, when, without notes, he told the 
 story of that epoch-making book in clear and force- 
 ful English which held his audience spellbound, may 
 learn with surprise that his early essays upon the plat- 
 form boded ill for his success. But he, who all the 
 days of his life was at school, profited by criticism of 
 the kind which came from a local institute, begging 
 "not to have that young man again " ; from working 
 men ; and from members of the Royal Institution. 
 As a writer, he had served a useful apprenticeship in 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, ix. p. 244. II. 25.
 
 THE MAN 29 
 
 reviewing and popular " pot-boiling, whereby there is 
 acquired the art of condensation and simplification of 
 a subject " ; while a retentive memory utilised the 
 stores of years of miscellaneous reading in his own 
 and other languages for example and allusion. 
 
 But all this would have availed little in the absence 
 of that mother-wit which gave him quick fnsight into 
 things ; and of that passion for logical symmetry 
 whereby he made clear to others what he saw clearly 
 himself. He followed methods, not models; he 
 " doubted the wisdom of attempting to mould one's 
 style by any other process than that of striving after 
 the clear and forcible expression of definite concep- 
 tions." In commending the study of Hobbes for 
 dignity, of Swift for concision and clearness, and of 
 Defoe and Goldsmith for simplicity, 1 he commended 
 the qualities with which his own work is charged. 
 Ars est celare artem, and deftly enough has he effaced 
 the traces of the labour which the preparation of his 
 lectures and his writing cost him. In 1860 he wrote 
 to Hooker, " It becomes more and more difficult to 
 me to finish things satisfactorily " ; 2 and thirty years 
 after, in a letter to M. de Varigny, he says : 
 
 I have a great love and respect for my native 
 tongue [that " noble instrument of thought," he else- 
 where calls it], and take great pains to use it properly. 
 
 1 II. 284; and see Coll. Essays, vi. p. xii. 2 I. 215.
 
 3O HUXLEY 
 
 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. 1 
 
 The nine volumes of Collected Essays bear evidence 
 throughout to Huxley's supreme skill as an interpreter, 
 and to his genius for constructing while he de- 
 molished. Miscellaneous as are their contents, they 
 have the unity which is inspired by a central idea. 
 With the exception of a verbal correction, and of a 
 slightly qualifying foot-note, here and there, each 
 stands as it was originally written. Revision could 
 only have impaired their stately, lucid, and sonorous 
 prose, while to their main subject-matter all sub- 
 sequent additions to knowledge have brought only 
 confirmation. 
 
 As for his letters, with which his son has, wisely, 
 largely filled his biography, even where traces of 
 hurry may be noted, there is never a slovenly 
 sentence ; the gist of an essay is often packed in a 
 few lines, and the passion to put things in such a way 
 that the meaning may be seen at a glance is as ap- 
 parent as in the more elaborate compositions. And 
 the humorous touches, sparsely, but always effectively, 
 applied in these, are, in the letters to friends and 
 familiars, thrown in freely, with a boy-like enjoyment 
 of the fun. 
 
 II. 291.
 
 THE MAN 31 
 
 In the limits of a sketch which permits only of an 
 attempt to portray the salient features of Huxley's 
 character, and to indicate his attitude towards the 
 burning questions of his time, confusion rather than 
 clearness would result from import of details of the 
 less eventful years. Hence the sometimes abrupt 
 passage from one period to another, leaving the blanks 
 to be filled up by reference to the brief chronological 
 table which precedes this outline. 
 
 In 1870, perhaps the busiest year of Huxley's busy 
 life, he was urged to offer himself as a candidate for 
 the newly-formed School Board for London. His 
 many commitments made him hesitate to stand, but 
 he consented, because the position gave him a coveted 
 chance of helping to put into practice the theories of 
 education which he had long advocated. The op- 
 portunity was given him ; he came out second on the 
 poll. His views upon the subject are scattered 
 through many lectures and essays, but their consist- 
 ency permits brief presentment. He contended that 
 education should be " free and equal " ; the business 
 of the school boards being the provision of " a ladder 
 reaching from the gutter to the university, along 
 which every child in the three kingdoms should have 
 the chance of climbing as far as he was fit to go." l 
 That the race is to the swift and the battle to the 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, iii. p. 424.
 
 32 HUXLEY 
 
 strong, was added reason for according equality of op- 
 portunity : Nature might be depended upon to let 
 the incompetent find their level. In physical training, 
 drill and the simpler kind of gymnastics should be 
 taught, the importance of this being paramount in the 
 case of town-bred children who, shut up in sunless 
 alleys, have to amuse themselves with " marbles and 
 chuck-farthings instead of cricket or hare-and- 
 hounds." He would have girls taught the elements 
 of household work, if a supply of competent servants 
 and of thrifty housewives is to be maintained. In 
 mental training, after the " three R's," reading being 
 taught so as to make it a pleasure and incentive, fore- 
 most place should be given to some one or more of 
 the natural sciences, because these bring the faculties 
 of observation and inquiry into play, and because, in 
 teaching a child the nature and properties of things, 
 he is shown that the method of reaching knowledge 
 of these is to be applied to every other branch of 
 knowledge. 
 
 Let every child be instructed in those general views 
 of the phenomena of Nature for which we have no 
 exact English name. The nearest approximation to 
 a name for what I mean, and which we possess, is 
 " physical geography." ' The Germans have a bet- 
 ter, Erdkunde (" earth knowledge " or " geology " in 
 
 'The more inclusive, but somewhat indefinite, term "physi- 
 ography," has since come into use.
 
 THE MAN 
 
 33 
 
 its etymological sense), that is to say, a general knowl- 
 edge of the earth, and what is on it, in it, and about 
 it. The child asks, " What is the moon, and why 
 does it shine ? " " What is this water, and where 
 does it run ? " " What is the wind ? " " What 
 makes the waves in the sea?" "Where does this 
 animal live, and what is the use of that plant ? " And 
 if not snubbed and stunted by being told not to ask 
 foolish questions, there is no limit to the intellectual 
 craving of a young child ; nor any bounds to the 
 slow, but solid, accretion of knowledge and develop- 
 ment of the thinking faculty in this way. To all 
 such questions, answers which are necessarily incom- 
 plete, though true as far as they go, may be given by 
 any teacher whose ideas represent real knowledge and 
 not mere book-learning ; and a panoramic view of 
 Nature, accompanied by a strong infusion of the 
 scientific habit of mind, may thus be placed within 
 the reach of every child of nine or ten. 1 
 
 Huxley deemed it necessary for everybody, whether 
 for a longer or shorter period, to learn to draw a 
 thing quite feasible, since everybody can be taught to 
 write, and writing is a form of drawing. The value 
 of this cannot be 
 
 exaggerated, because it gives the means of training 
 the young in attention and accuracy, the two things 
 in which all mankind are more deficient than in any 
 other mental quality whatever. 2 
 
 Among scientific topics he would include the 
 
 elements of the theory of political and social life, 
 which, strangely enough, it never seems to occur to 
 
 1 Lay Sermons, p. 55. * Coll. Essays, iii. p. 183.
 
 34 HUXLEY 
 
 anybody to teach a child. I would have the history 
 of our own country, and of all the influences which 
 have been brought to bear upon it, with incidental 
 geography, taught, not as a mere chronicle of reigns 
 and battles, not as evidence that Providence has al- 
 ways been on the side of the Whigs or Tories, but 
 as a chapter in the development of the race, and the 
 history of civilisation. 1 
 
 Literature should have a large place, because 
 
 an exclusively scientific training will bring about a 
 mental twist as surely as an exclusively literary train- 
 ing. For literature is the greatest of all sources of 
 refined pleasure, and there is scope enough for the 
 purposes of liberal education in the study of the rich 
 treasures of our own language alone. ... I have 
 said before, and I repeat it here, that if a man cannot 
 get literary culture of the highest kind out of his 
 Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, he cannot get it 
 out of anything, and I would assuredly devote a very 
 large portion of the time of every English child to 
 the careful study of models of English writing of 
 such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, 
 what is still more important, and still more neglected, 
 the habit of using that language with precision, with 
 force, and with art. 2 
 
 These, together with translations of the best ancient 
 and modern works, where time or circumstance do not 
 permit of the learning of foreign languages, Huxley 
 counted among the essentials. The law of propor- 
 tion, non multa, sed multum, must be observed if there 
 is to be any thoroughness in education, and if the 
 
 1 Id., iii. p. 184. * Coll. Essays, iii. pp. 109, 185.
 
 THE MAN 35 
 
 freshness and vigour of body and mind are to be 
 maintained, as they can be only by avoidance of " the 
 educational abomination of desolation of the present 
 day the stimulation of young people to work at high 
 pressure by incessant competitive examinations." l 
 
 A generation has passed since these words were 
 written, and things remain as they were. Education, 
 whether in public or elementary school, is as bad 
 as it can be. It belies its name. There is no 
 "drawing-out," but only a cramming-in ; no culti- 
 vation of observation, of reasoning, or reflection ; 
 only the teaching of a crowd of facts without making 
 clear their relation, and hence no incitement to inde- 
 pendent thought. 
 
 Technical training, the importance of which Hux- 
 ley enforced in a remarkable essay on " The Struggle 
 for Existence in Human Society," 2 he left to the 
 workshop, " as the only real school for a handicraft." 
 
 In moral training ; since each child is 
 
 a member of a social and political organisation of 
 great complexity, and has, in future, to fit himself 
 into that organisation, or be crushed by it, it is need- 
 ful not only that boys and girls should be made ac- 
 quainted with the elementary laws of conduct, but 
 that their affections should be trained so as to love 
 with all their hearts that conduct which tends to the 
 attainment of the highest good for themselves and 
 
 1 Ib., Hi. p. 410. * Ib., ix. pp. 223-225.
 
 36 HUXLEY 
 
 their fellow-men, and to hate with all their hearts that 
 opposite course of action which is fraught with evil. 1 
 
 Lacking this, intellectual training may be as produc- 
 tive of harm as of good ; reading, writing, and cipher- 
 ing may equip a youth for forgery, and training in 
 mechanics make him an expert burglar. In the year 
 before his election on the School Board, Huxley thus 
 summed up what in his judgment is comprised in a 
 liberal education : 
 
 That man, I think, has had a liberal education who 
 has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready 
 servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure 
 all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; 
 whose intellect is a clear, cold logic-engine, with all its 
 parts of equal strength and in smooth working order ; 
 ready, like a steam-engine, to be turned to any kind 
 of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the 
 anchors of the mind ; whose mind is stored with the 
 knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of 
 nature and of the laws of her operations ; one who, no 
 stunted ascetic, is full of fire and life, but whose pas- 
 sions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, 
 the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned 
 to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate 
 all vileness, and to respect others as himself. Such 
 an one, and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal 
 education ; for he is, as completely as a man can be, 
 in harmony with Nature. He will make the best of 
 her, and she of him. They will get on together 
 rarely : she as his ever beneficent mother ; he as her 
 mouthpiece, her conscious self, her minister and 
 interpreter. 2 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, iii. p. 393. * Lay Sermons, p. 30.
 
 THE MAN 37 
 
 In moral training, or the application of knowledge 
 to conduct, Huxley would accord no place to theol- 
 ogy. If the various denominations, whether Church 
 or Dissenting, choose to start and maintain schools in 
 which their several tenets are to be taught, that is 
 their affair. They pay the piper, and they may call 
 the tune. But schools established and maintained by 
 the community depart from their proper functions 
 when they train " either hands for factories or con- 
 gregations for churches." 1 They are to hold on 
 brief for any sect. The ethics which they teach must 
 have relation to life, and therefore must be neither 
 technical nor speculative. Theology is both, and 
 cannot be otherwise. Moreover, where order is pres- 
 ent, it imports confusion; it, and it alone, is the 
 apple of discord, and its dogmas, on many of which 
 no two sects are agreed, bring " not peace, but a 
 sword." The teaching of the ascertained facts of 
 history, astronomy, geology, and other branches of 
 science ; the inculcation of the duties of cleanliness 
 and temperance ; of self-respect and self-restraint ; of 
 consideration for others ; of kindness to animals ; and 
 of honesty and truthfulness in all the relations of life 
 all which, enforced by example and illustration, can 
 be brightly conveyed, these run smoothly enough 
 and arouse no bitterness. It is over the disputable 
 'I- 35'-
 
 38 HUXLEY 
 
 creed and dogma; over the unproven nay, as the 
 well-informed among clergy and laity know, the dis- 
 proved that the precious time of youthhood is 
 wasted, and the battle for capture of the schools is 
 waged. " By their fruits ye shall know them." And 
 if the moral tone of the generation which has been 
 brought up on the creeds and the catechism satisfies 
 the teachers as to the practical influence of these on 
 the lives of the taught, it is clear that a low standard 
 contents them. 
 
 Knowing Huxley's antagonistic attitude towards 
 orthodox beliefs, both cleric and secularist were be- 
 wildered when the " great Agnostic," as the Spectator 
 called him, pronounced himself in favour of the use 
 of the Bible in Board Schools. That his decision was 
 ruled by the highest motives va sans dire, but, as he 
 came to see, it was none the less deplorable. On 
 the eve of the election he explained his position as 
 follows : 
 
 When the great mass of the English people declare 
 that they want to have the children in the elementary 
 schools taught the Bible, and when it was plain from 
 the terms of the Act that it was intended that such 
 Bible-reading should be permitted, unless good cause 
 for prohibiting it could be shown, I do not see what 
 reason there is for opposing that wish. Certainly, I, 
 individually, could with no shadow of consistency 
 oppose the teaching of the children of other people 
 that which my own children are taught to do. And
 
 THE MAN 39 
 
 even if the reading of the Bible were not, as I think 
 it is, consonant with political reason and justice, and 
 with a desire to act in the spirit of the education 
 measure, I am disposed to think it might still be well 
 to read that book in the elementary schools. 
 
 I have always been strongly in favor of secular 
 education, in the sense of education without the- 
 ology ; but I must confess I have been no less 
 seriously perplexed to know by what practical meas- 
 ures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis 
 of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly 
 chaotic state of opinion, without the use of the Bible. 
 The Pagan moralists lack life and colour, and even 
 the noble Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, is too high and re- 
 fined for an ordinary child. Take the Bible as a 
 whole : make the severest deductions which fair 
 criticism can dictate for shortcomings and positive 
 errors ; eliminate, as a sensible lay-teacher would do, 
 if left to himself, all that it is not desirable for chil- 
 dren to occupy themselves with ; and there still re- 
 mains in this old literature a vast residuum of moral 
 beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great 
 historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has 
 been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest 
 in English history ; that it has become the national 
 epic of Britain, and is as familiar to noble and simple, 
 from John-o'-Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante 
 and Tasso once were to the Italians ; that it is written 
 in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in ex- 
 quisite beauties of mere literary form ; and, finally, 
 that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his vil- 
 lage to be ignorant of the existence of other coun- 
 tries and other civilisations, and of a great past, 
 stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest 
 nations in the world. By the study of what other 
 book could children be so much humanised and made 
 to feel that each figure in that vast historical proces-
 
 4O HUXLEY 
 
 sion fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in 
 the interval between two eternities ; and earns the 
 blessings or the curses of all time, according to its 
 effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are 
 earning their payment for their work ? 
 
 On the whole, then, I am in favour of reading the 
 Bible, with such grammatical, geographical, and his- 
 torical explanations by a lay-teacher as may be need- 
 ful, with rigid exclusion of any further theological 
 teaching than that contained in the Bible itself. And 
 in stating what this is, the teacher would do well not 
 to go beyond the precise words of the Bible ; for if 
 he does, he will, in the first place, undertake a task 
 beyond his strength, seeing that all the Jewish and 
 Christian sects have been at work upon that subject 
 for more than two thousand years, and have not yet 
 arrived, and are not in the least likely to arrive, at an 
 agreement ; and, in the second place, he will certainly 
 begin to teach something distinctively denominational, 
 and thereby come into violent collision with the Act 
 of Parliament. 1 
 
 As is well known, the so-called Cowper-Temple 
 clause in the Act, which is itself an unsatisfactory 
 compromise, prescribes that u no religious catechism 
 or religious formulary which is distinctive of any 
 particular denomination shall be taught in the 
 school"; and Huxley believed that, in the words of 
 W. E. Forster, no attempt would be made to cram 
 into the children's " poor little minds theological 
 dogmas which their tender age prevents them from 
 understanding." * He mistrusted the clergy ; but he 
 Coll. Essays, iii. pp. 397~399- ' I. 344-
 
 THE MAN 41 
 
 had faith that, in lay hands, " the teaching of that 
 1 venerable record of ancient life, miscalled a book,' l 
 would be gradually modified into harmony with com- 
 mon-sense." But in his belief that his opponents 
 would abide by the compact, he assumed that their 
 standard of honour and integrity was not lower than 
 his own. He was mistaken. The bargain has not 
 been kept by the clerical party, and attempt after at- 
 tempt has been, and is being, made to reduce the 
 Cowper-Temple clause to a nullity. Theological 
 bias, or fear of retarded promotion, have made many 
 of the teachers puppets in the hands of the parsons. 
 The Bible is not interpreted, as Jowett said it should 
 be, " like any other book," and this to the grievous 
 impairment of its value, since appreciation of it is 
 deepened in the degree that it is freed from the 
 shackles of theories of inspiration. Its miscellaneous 
 contents, many of them of uncertain authorship and 
 of disputed meaning, are presented as constituting one 
 harmonious supernatural document; its myths are still 
 taught as history ; and the Ten Commandments are 
 put on the same high ethical plane as the Beatitudes. 
 Not very long before his death Huxley was asked 
 to take part in opposing the tactics known as " Riley- 
 ism." To this he replied : 
 
 I feel very strongly about the attempt to capture 
 .'II. 123.
 
 42 HUXLEY 
 
 elementary education on the part of the orthodox 
 sects, in spite of the clear pledges given by Forster, 
 and the understanding arrived at by the first School 
 Board. Unfortunately, I am entangled in several un- 
 dertakings, which I did not bargain for, and could not 
 refuse, and which will occupy all my scanty working 
 powers for some months to come. So I must really 
 keep out of the melee. Indeed, I am not sure but that 
 the best policy is to let these Christian pagans have 
 their way. The axe is laid to the root of the tree, 
 and when it falls they will be crushed the more 
 effectually for their short success. 1 
 
 While "ecclesiastically-minded persons," not content 
 with absorbing one entire day in the week, and some 
 portion of other days, clamoured for more, Huxley 
 retorted by asking them to surrender a portion of the 
 Sunday 
 
 for the purpose of instructing those who have no 
 other leisure in a knowledge of the phenomena of 
 Nature, and of man's relation to Nature. I should 
 like to see a scientific Sunday-school in every parish, 
 not for the purpose of superseding any existing means 
 of teaching the people the things that are for their 
 good, but side by side with them. I cannot but think 
 that there is room for all of us to work in helping to 
 bridge over the great abyss of ignorance which lies at 
 our feet. 2 
 
 Westminster Gazette, 1st July, 1895 ; and see I. 343 (note). 
 In his Bible in School, p. 12, Mr. Allanson Picton says that shortly 
 before his death Huxley expressed regret that he had not voted 
 with Mr. Picton for the exclusion of the Bible from elementary 
 schools. 
 
 * Lay Sermons, p. 6l.
 
 THE MAN 43 
 
 As late as 1893 ne planned-out a series of working 
 men's lectures on the Bible, "in which he should 
 present to the unlearned the results of scientific study 
 of the documents, and do for theology what he had 
 done for zoology thirty years before " ; and although 
 this scheme, the outline of which Mr. Leonard 
 Huxley copies from his father's note-book, was never 
 carried out, " it was constantly before Huxley's mind 
 during the two years left to him." l Before leaving 
 the subject of his general influence as an educational 
 reformer, it should be noted that he worked with an 
 apostolic fervour to improve the quality of the 
 teachers as the only security for thorough education 
 of the taught. He established regular classes for the 
 training of "scientific missionaries," 2 as he described 
 them ; pressed his views on technical education on the 
 City guilds and other influential bodies, and kept before 
 his students, as the mark of their "high calling," 
 
 the cultivation of that enthusiasm for truth, that 
 fanaticism of veracity which is a greater possession 
 than much learning, a nobler gift than the power of 
 increasing knowledge; by so much greater than these 
 as the moral nature of man is greater than the intel- 
 lectual. 3 
 
 Owing to a serious breakdown in health, Huxley 
 was compelled, after fourteen months' service on the 
 School Board, to resign his membership. "A 
 1 II. 345. 2 I. 377. 3 Coll. Essays, iii. p. 205.
 
 wealthy friend wrote to him in the most honourable 
 and delicate terms, begging him, on public grounds, 
 to accept ^400 a-year to enable him to continue his 
 work on the Board. He refused the offer as simply 
 and straightforwardly as it was made; his means, 
 though not large, were sufficient for his present 
 needs." 1 Some, who had no personal knowledge of 
 him, thought that his desire to secure a seat on the 
 School Board indicated an intention to enter Parlia- 
 ment. But he had neither taste nor ambition for 
 politics. 
 
 At a Royal Society dinner in 1892, Mr. Shaw 
 Lefevre expressed his regret that Huxley's abilities 
 had never been placed at the service of the House of 
 Commons. In his reply, reminiscences of youth and 
 of controversies in recent years found a place. He told 
 the company that, when he was a very young man, a 
 lawyer in good practice, believing that he saw in him 
 qualities that would ensure success at the bar, offered 
 to advance him an income for a certain number of 
 years until he could repay the amount from the fees 
 which he was sure to earn. He declined, because, as 
 he dryly said, 
 
 so far as I understand myself, my faculties are so 
 entirely confined to the discovery of truth, that I have 
 no sort of power of obscuring it. 
 
 'I- 353-
 
 THE MAN 45 
 
 In 1870, Huxley's defense of Dr. Brown-Sequard 
 at the Liverpool meeting of the British Association 
 brought him into collision with the opponents of 
 vivisection, and the battle went on, in intermittent 
 fashion, for some seven years. Experiments had been 
 carried on, chiefly in France, without regard to animal 
 suffering,- and also for the wholly needless purpose of 
 further demonstrating well-known facts in physiology 
 and pathology. Hence an agitation which, within 
 limits, commanded the sympathy of all humanely 
 minded folk, and the appointment of a committee 
 by the Association to consider what steps should be 
 taken to reduce to its minimum the suffering entailed 
 by legitimate inquiry. The committee recommended 
 that there should be no experiments without the use 
 of anaesthetics ; or for the purpose of illustrating 
 truths already known ; or for practice in manual 
 dexterity ; and these provisions, with others of undue 
 stringency, were embodied in " An Act to amend the 
 law relating to Cruelty to Animals," passed in 1876. 
 Huxley held that " the wanton infliction of pain on 
 man or beast is a crime," l and that the vivisectionist 
 is justified only when his aim is the discovery of the 
 origin and nature of disease with a view to the 
 alleviation or removal of the suffering which it 
 causes. In this he has rendered incalculable service 
 I. 436.
 
 46 HUXLEY 
 
 to mankind, and also to the lower animals, since 
 " not a single one of all the great truths of modern 
 physiology has been established otherwise than by ex- 
 periments on living things." ! 
 
 In defending a practice which by one successful 
 experiment on an animal rendered insensible to pain 
 might save numberless lives from some fell disease, 
 Huxley had to meet a frontal attack, whose chief 
 weapon, wielded by fanaticism, was misrepresentation 
 and slander. He was charged by one of the so- 
 called " religious " papers with advocating the 
 practice of vivisection before children, and the charge 
 was repeated in the House of Lords. It was nec- 
 essary to publicly deny what had been thus publicly 
 asserted; he quoted chapter and verse from his 
 Elementary Physiology in refutation, adding that 
 " personally and constitutionally " the performance of 
 experiments upon living and conscious animals was 
 " so extremely disagreeable " to himself that he had 
 " never followed any line of investigation in which 
 such experiments were required." But he said that, 
 as a teacher of physiology, he could not 
 
 consent to be prohibited from showing the circulation 
 in a frog's foot, because the frog is made slightly un- 
 comfortable by being tied up for that purpose; nor 
 from showing the fundamental properties of nerves, 
 
 'I- 434.
 
 THE MAN 47 
 
 because extirpating the brain of the same animal 
 inflicts one-thousandth part of the prolonged suffering 
 which it undergoes when it makes its natural exit 
 from the world by being slowly forced down the 
 throat of a duck, and crushed and asphyxiated in that 
 creature's stomach. l 
 
 He had small stock of patience for the "senti- 
 mental hypocrisy " which evidenced its lack of sin- 
 cerity in not abstaining from eating the flesh of 
 creatures put to death in lingering torture, both in the 
 slaughter-house and on the moors, or in destroying 
 rats, mice, and other " sentient vermin " ; and when 
 the Act of 1876, on the Royal Commission concern- 
 ing which he was a member, was passed, he showed 
 how it exemplified the old adage that "one man may 
 steal a horse while the other may not look over the 
 hedge." 
 
 While, as a member of a late Royal Commission, I 
 did my best to prevent the infliction of needless pain 
 for any purpose, I think it is my duty to take this 
 opportunity of expressing my regret at a condition 
 of the law which permits a boy to troll for pike or set 
 lines with live-frog bait for idle amusement, and at 
 the same time lays the teacher of that boy open to 
 the penalty of fine and imprisonment if he uses the 
 same animal for the purpose of exhibiting one of the 
 most beautiful and instructive of physiological spec- 
 tacles the circulation in the web of the foot. 
 
 So it comes about that in this year of grace 1877, 
 two persons may be charged with cruelty to animals. 
 
 I. 432-
 
 4 HUXLEY 
 
 One has impaled a frog, and suffered the creature to 
 writhe about in that condition for hours ; the other 
 has pained the animal no more than one of us would 
 be pained by tying strings round his fingers and keep- 
 ing him in the position of a hydropathic patient. 
 The first offender says, " I did it because I find fish- 
 ing very amusing " ; and the magistrate bids him 
 depart in peace, nay, probably wishes him good sport. 
 The second pleads, " I wanted to impress a scientific 
 truth with a distinctness attainable in no other way 
 on the minds of my scholars," and the magistrate 
 fines him five pounds. l 
 
 From 1870 onward, the time which Huxley had 
 been able to snatch from public and private demands 
 for biological research grew less and less. " For eight 
 years he was continuously on one Royal Commission 
 after another. His administrative work on learned 
 societies continued to increase; in 1869-70 he held 
 the presidency of the Ethnological Society (which, 
 chiefly by his efforts, became merged in the Anthro- 
 pological Institute) ; he was elected president of the 
 Geological Society in 1872; and for nearly ten years, 
 from 1871 to 1880, he was Secretary of the Royal 
 Society, an office which occupied no small portion of 
 his time and thought." 2 Little wonder, therefore, 
 that his dyspepsia became chronic, compelling a 
 lengthy absence, which, through the generosity of 
 friend^, was spent along the Mediterranean seaboard 
 as far as Egypt. 3 Returning thence bronzed and 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, iii. pp. 301, 302. I. 324. I. 367.
 
 THE MAN 49 
 
 bearded, but only patched up, he perforce took life a 
 little easier. In 1874 he followed-up Tyndall's 
 famous Presidential Address at the Belfast meeting of 
 the British Association with a lecture on " Animal 
 Automatism," which underwent the usual misin- 
 terpretation attending any presentment of psychical 
 activity in mechanical terms. In 1870, when lectur- 
 ing before the Cambridge Young Men's Christian 
 Society, Huxley had made the life and philosophy of 
 Descartes the text of insistence on the duty of doubt 
 as a condition of reaching certainty ; and now, before 
 a presumably more scientific audience, he showed 
 what significant contributions that master-mind had 
 made to our knowledge of the physiology of the 
 nervous system. The resulting intrusion of the biolo- 
 gist into the domain of metaphysics, which theology 
 had so long annexed, aroused the old antagonism, and 
 Huxley had again to combat the passion and preju- 
 dice which his famous "lay sermon," on "The 
 Physical Basis of Life," had aroused in Edinburgh in 
 1868. 
 
 The summer of 1875 found him in that city lec- 
 turing on Natural History on behalf of Sir (then Pro- 
 fessor) Wyville Thomson, who was absent on the 
 Challenger expedition. In a letter which Huxley 
 received from Thomson in August, doubts were 
 thrown on Huxley's theory of the organic character
 
 5O HUXLEY 
 
 of a viscid, granular substance which had been 
 dredged from the bottom of the Atlantic in 1868. He 
 had expressed the opinion that this deposit was a 
 living form of very low type, and in this faith, and as 
 a compliment to Haeckel, had named it Bathybius 
 Haeckelii. 1 But it turned out that what seemed to be- 
 long to the group of simplest living things was only a 
 precipitate, probably due to its having been preserved 
 in spirit. 2 There was an impression, confined, how- 
 ever, to superficial critics, that Huxley had regarded 
 Bathybius as a hitherto missing link between the 
 living and the not-living, and they rejoiced doubly ; 
 first, in his discomfiture as possibly weakening his 
 authority, and next, in the blow dealt, as they hoped, 
 to the theory of the unity of the cosmos. But, as he 
 told them, when admitting the error, 
 
 that which interested me in the matter was the 
 apparent analogy of Bathybius with other well-known 
 forms of lower life. . . . Speculative hopes and 
 fears had nothing to do with the matter; and if 
 Bathybius were brought up alive from the bottom 
 of the Atlantic to-morrow, the fact would not have 
 the slightest bearing, that I can discern, upon Mr. 
 Darwin's speculations, or upon any of the disputed 
 problems of biology. It would merely be one ele- 
 mentary organism the more added to the thousands 
 already known. 3 
 
 1 Scientific Memoirs, Hi. p. 337. * I. 295, 446; II. 5, 160. 
 
 ColL Essays, v. p. 154.
 
 THE MAN 51 
 
 Misrepresentation, whose roots were in animus 
 rather than in ignorance, went on, and as late as 1890 
 Mr. Mallock revived the " Bathybius myth " in the 
 Nineteenth Century, upon which Huxley commented, 
 with warrantable irritation : 
 
 Bathybius is far too convenient a stick to beat this 
 dog with to be ever given up, however many lies may 
 be needful to make the weapon effectual. I told the 
 whole story in my reply to the Duke of Argyll, but 
 of course the pack give tongue just as loudly as ever. 
 Clerically-minded people cannot be accurate, even the 
 liberals. 1 
 
 In 1876 he paid a long-cherished visit to America. 
 The newspapers, confusing him with Tyndall, recently 
 married to a daughter of the aristocratic house of 
 Hamilton, reported that he was bringing with him his 
 " titled bride," who, needless to say, had long been 
 the joyful mother of many children. The trip inter- 
 ested and invigorated him ; his progress from place to 
 place was almost royal. But that with which his 
 hosts thought to impress him most impressed him 
 least. Their energy won his admiration ; watching 
 the mass of moving craft in New York harbour, he 
 said, " If I were not a man, I think I should like to 
 be a tug." But, in his lecture before the Johns Hop- 
 kins University at Baltimore, he said : 
 i II. 160.
 
 52 HUXLEY 
 
 I am not in the slightest degree impressed by your 
 bigness or your material resources, as such. Size is 
 not grandeur ; territory does not make a nation. The 
 great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and 
 the terror of overhanging fate, is "What are you 
 going to do with all these things ? " . . . The 
 one condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the 
 moral worth and intellectual clearness of the indi- 
 vidual citizen. 
 
 He was deeply interested in the fossil remains in 
 the Yale College museum which Professor Marsh had 
 unearthed from the Tertiary beds of the Far West. 
 They demonstrated what was new to him the evolu- 
 tion of the horse on the American continent, " and 
 for the first time indicated the direct line of descent 
 of an existing animal." The fascinating story of the 
 series of discoveries, linking the one-toed genus Equus 
 of to-day with a five-toed ancestor common to it and 
 other hoofed quadrupeds, is told, with the added 
 charm which Huxley's power of clear exposition im- 
 parts, in his American Addresses. The subject will 
 have fuller treatment in the next chapter. 
 
 In the following six years Huxley published as 
 many books, among which, and of enduring value, 
 were his monographs on the anatomy and physiology 
 of the Crayfish and on the philosophy of Hume, 
 subjects seemingly diverse enough, but alike in the 
 problems which they suggest concerning Nature as 
 "nowhere inaccessible, and everywhere unfathom-
 
 THE MAN 53 
 
 able." 1 In 1881, concurrently with the absorption 
 of the School of Mines in what was then called the 
 Normal School, Huxley became Professor of Biology 
 and Dean of the Royal College of Science, claiming 
 thereby, as he jocosely reminded his friends, the title 
 of " The Very Reverend " ; and in the same year he 
 accepted an Inspectorship of Fisheries, which had the 
 advantage of taking him into the fresh air. 
 
 In 1883 he received the highest honour which his 
 fellow-savants could bestow in being elected President 
 of the Royal Society. But the dignity, which he ac- 
 cepted with reluctance, was, on account of bad health, 
 surrendered in November, 1885. He had become 
 more and more the invalid ; holidays had given him 
 only fillips, and the little store of energy which they 
 added was quickly dissipated ; deafness troubled him, 
 bringing its dreaded isolation, and in the previous 
 May, having reached his sixtieth year, an age at which 
 he had often jocosely said that men of science should 
 be pole-axed, lest through ossification of mind they 
 become arresters of progress, he resigned all his ap- 
 pointments, paid and unpaid, and retired upon a pen- 
 sion of ;i,2OO a-year, which, shortly afterwards, was 
 supplemented by a Civil List pension of ^300 a-year. 
 
 But resignation of offices meant not retirement 
 from work. During the ten years of life that re- 
 1 The Crayfish, p. 3.
 
 54 HUXLEY 
 
 mained to him he was more in evidence than ever. 
 He had never permitted his official position to curb 
 his freedom of speech, and now that his time was all 
 his own, that freedom could have larger play. In a 
 retrospect of life, summing-up the part he had played 
 in what he called the " New Reformation," he said 
 that the objects which he had pursued were " briefly 
 these": 
 
 To promote the increase of natural knowledge and 
 to forward the application of scientific methods of 
 investigation to all the problems of life to the best of 
 my ability, in the conviction which has grown with 
 my growth and strengthened with my strength, that 
 there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind 
 except veracity of thought and of action, and the 
 resolute facing of the world as it is, when the gar- 
 ment of make-belief by which pious hands have 
 hidden its uglier features is stripped off. It is with 
 this intent that I have subordinated any reasonable or 
 unreasonable ambition for scientific fame which I may 
 have permitted myself to entertain to other ends : to 
 the popularisation of science ; to the development and 
 organisation of scientific education ; to the endless 
 series of battles and skirmishes over evolution ; and 
 to untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit, that 
 clericalism which in England, and everywhere else, 
 and to whatever denomination it may belong, is the 
 deadly enemy of science. 1 
 
 The " battles and skirmishes over evolution " were 
 now resolved by Huxley into a well-conceived plan of 
 campaign in which all the forces that come of the 
 1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 17.
 
 TH-E MAN 55 
 
 widest knowledge and most varied experience were to 
 be used in applying the doctrine of evolution to the 
 demolition of beliefs which, in the degree that they 
 are untrue, must be mischievous. But he was not 
 merely critical and destructive : he razed only that he 
 or others might raise. In the Prologue to his Essays 
 on Controverted Questions he says that 
 
 The present incarnation of the spirit of the Renas- 
 cence differs from its predecessor in the eighteenth 
 century, in that it builds up, as well as pulls down. 
 That of which it has laid the foundation, of which it 
 is already raising the superstructure, is the doctrine of 
 Evolution, ... a doctrine which is no specula- 
 tion, but a generalisation of certain facts which may 
 be observed by any one who will take the necessary 
 trouble. 1 
 
 Hence the inclusion therein of all that is of deepest 
 import to man. Hence the inevitable, however tardy, 
 supersession of theology as a body of speculative 
 dogma by a religion having correspondence with the 
 constitution and needs of human nature ; and the 
 gradual displacement of ethics resting on ancient and 
 shifting codes and conventions by ethics founded on 
 what, after ages of sore testing, man has proven to be 
 best for the welfare of society, and, therefore, as a 
 social being, for himself. 
 
 Huxley's health, however, remained so indifferent 
 that he needed stimulus to work. It came in unusual 
 1 Coll. Essays, v. pp. 41, 42.
 
 56 HUXLEY 
 
 form from an article in the Nineteenth Century of 
 November, 1885, in which Mr. Gladstone made a re- 
 view of Dr. Reville's Prolegomena to the History of 
 Religions the vehicle of obsolete arguments in support 
 of harmony between the Mosaic cosmogony and the 
 theory of organic evolution. Re-stated by a man 
 whose high authority in matters political had led 
 many (for the logical faculty is, as yet, in the em- 
 bryonic stage in the majority of minds) to accept him 
 as an authority upon everything else, these arguments, 
 refuted, as they had been, over and over again, had to 
 be dealt with once more. ' Huxley was the man for 
 the task. The article, " he used humorously to say, 
 so stirred his bile as to set his liver right at once ; " 
 indeed, stagnation making him "unendurable to him- 
 self and everybody else," he said that he was thankful 
 to " Providence " for specially devolving on Glad- 
 stone, Gore, & Co. the function of keeping " c 'ome 
 'appy ' for him." 2 
 
 The controversies thus involved, together with 
 essays on philosophical and social questions, filled the 
 time between long intervals of broken health, and of 
 sojourns on Alpine summits. Arolla made him feel 
 young again : 
 
 " Balm floating on thy mountain air 
 
 And healing sights to see ; " 
 1 II. 425. II. 269.
 
 THE MAN 57 
 
 but, eager to return to active life, he was " glad to see 
 one's own dear native mud again. There is no 
 foreign mud to come near it." l London, however, 
 with its social beguilements, had long ceased to at- 
 tract him, and the old home in Marlborough Place 
 (charged for many a guest with delightful memories 
 of Sunday evenings, with their conversation grave and 
 gay), where he had lived since 1872, was given up, 
 and Eastbourne fixed upon. There, through a timely 
 legacy, he was able to build himself a house which he 
 called Hodeslea, the ancestral form of the family 
 name. There he lived from 1890 until his death, 
 dividing his time between his books, his garden, and 
 his grandchildren. He left it only at short and rare 
 intervals to discharge the remnants of duties devolv- 
 ing upon him as honorary Dean of the Royal College 
 of Science and as a Trustee of the British Museum. 
 One notable journey was made in 1892. Fifteen 
 years before then, Lord Salisbury had invited Hux- 
 ley's opinion as to a " formal recognition of dis- 
 tinguished services in science, literature, and art by 
 the granting of titles." Against this Huxley ex- 
 pressed himself strongly. 2 But when the dignity of 
 a Privy Councillorship was offered him, he accepted 
 it, because, as he wrote to Sir J. Donnelly 
 
 I have always been dead against orders of merit and 
 1 II. 103. 8 L 359.
 
 58 HUXLEY 
 
 the like, but I think that men of letters and science 
 who have been of use to the nation (Lord knows if I 
 have) may fairly be ranked among its nominal or 
 actual councillors. l 
 
 So, in August, 1892, he went to kiss hands at Os- 
 borne, remembering, as he passed the old Victory, 
 " that six-and-forty years ago he went up her side to 
 report himself on appointment as a poor devil of an 
 assistant-surgeon." In the following October he was 
 present at Tennyson's funeral, and but for a biting 
 wind, would have been at Owen's in the following 
 December. His "opinion of the man's character" 
 never altered ; but death " ends all quarrels," and at 
 the request of Owen's grandson and biographer he 
 contributed a chapter on " Owen's Place in Anatom- 
 ical Science," which enabled him to pay honest tribute 
 to the value and importance of Owen's work in that 
 branch of biology. Friends were falling out of the 
 ranks : in the autumn of 1893 Jowett, Tyndall, and 
 Sir Andrew Clark passed away, bringing home the 
 thought that " one should always be ready to stand at 
 attention when the order to march comes." 2 
 
 Oxford had seen little of Huxley since the day of 
 his famous duel with its bishop in 1860. Ten years 
 later, Pusey and his party had prevented the confer- 
 ring of the degree of D.C.L. on Owen although he 
 
 II. 323. II. 368.
 
 THE MAN 59 
 
 was persona grata to the Episcopal bench as well as 
 on Froude and Huxley. But, tardily following the 
 sister and other universities, Oxford reversed the de- 
 cision in 1885. Eight years later, Huxley revisited 
 the " home of lost causes " to deliver the Romanes 
 Lecture on Evolution and Ethics. The occasion may 
 rank as historic. 
 
 The Sheldonian Theatre was thronged before he 
 appeared upon the platform, a striking presence in his 
 D.C.L. robes, and looking very leonine with his long 
 silvery gray hair sweeping back in one long wave 
 from his forehead, and the rugged squareness of his 
 features tempered by the benignity of an old age 
 which has seen much and overcome much. He read 
 the lecture from a printed copy, not venturing, as he 
 would have liked, upon the severe task of speaking it 
 from memory, considering its length and the impor- 
 tance of preserving the exact wording. 1 
 
 In August, 1894, the temptation offered by the 
 meeting of the British Association at Oxford to re- 
 new a visit was too strong to be resisted, if only for the 
 contrast of feelings which the occasion would awaken. 
 Huxley might aptly have applied to himself the ancient 
 words with which he ended his lecture On the Coming 
 of Age of the Origin of Species : " The stone which 
 the builders rejected the same is become the head of 
 the corner." Lord Salisbury was president, and in 
 his address, while admitting that Darwin had, " as a 
 'II. 356-
 
 60 HUXLEY 
 
 matter of fact, disposed of the doctrine of the im- 
 mutability of species," he raised a number of dis- 
 ingenuous objections to the general theory of what he 
 ironically called the " comforting word, Evolution," 
 objections evidencing the " biassed amateur" and the 
 "representative of ecclesiastical conservatism and 
 orthodoxy." Huxley had consented to second the 
 vote of thanks to the president, and although " the 
 old Adam, of course, prompted the tearing of the ad- 
 dress to pieces, which would have been a very easy 
 job," he had perforce to content himself with " con- 
 veying criticism in the shape of praise." l However, 
 he dealt with the " polemical dexterity " of the Mar- 
 quis and gave him "a Roland for his Oliver" in an 
 article on "Past and Present "in Nature, ist No- 
 vember, 1894. In that month the Royal Society put 
 its final seal to Huxley's life-work in awarding him 
 the Darwin medal ; and in his speech at the anniver- 
 sary dinner acknowledging the compliment, a speech 
 whose impressiveness can never fade from the mem- 
 ory of those who heard it, he also set the " seal to his 
 ministry " in emphasising his belief 
 
 that the views which were propounded by Mr. Dar- 
 win thirty-five years ago may be understood hereafter 
 as constituting an epoch in the intellectual history of 
 the human race. They will modify the whole system 
 
 'II. 379.
 
 THE MAN 6 I 
 
 of our thought and opinion, our most intimate con- 
 victions. 
 
 With the exception of a hurried visit to London 
 in January, 1895, to join as spokesman in a deputation 
 to Lord Salisbury on a cause near his heart, that of 
 London University Reform, he never left Eastbourne 
 again. The last thing which he wrote was a criticism 
 of Mr. Balfour's " quaintly-entitled " (the happy 
 phrase is Mr. Leslie Stephen's) Foundations of Belief. 1 
 He had to deal with the same vagueness, elusiveness, 
 and want of insight into the position travestied which 
 is the feature of Mr. Gladstone's polemics, and which 
 make Mr. Balfour, trained as he is in the same at- 
 mosphere of obscuration of the truth and of dialec- 
 tical fencing, the intellectual representative of that 
 master of the art of mystification. In returning the 
 proofs of the first part of the article to the editor of 
 the Nineteenth Century, Huxley wrote : 
 
 My estimation of Balfour, as a thinker, sinks lower 
 and lower the farther I go. God help the people 
 who think his book an important contribution to 
 thought ! The Gigadibsians 2 who say so are past 
 
 1 See infra, p. 204. 
 
 8 " You Gigadibs who, thirty years of age, 
 Believe you see two points in Hamlet's soul 
 Unseized by the Germans yet which view you'll print." 
 Bishop Blougram's Apology BROWNING. 
 (Quoted by Huxley, Nineteenth Century, 
 March. 1895, P-
 
 62 HUXLEY 
 
 divine assistance. 1 . . . A. B. is the incarnation 
 of Gigadibs. I should call him Gigadibsius Optimus 
 Maximus? 
 
 The second part was never published ; its incomple- 
 tion has curious parallel in the following extract from 
 a letter written by Huxley to Tyndall in 1854: 
 
 The poor fellow vanished in the middle of an un- 
 finished article, which has appeared in the last West- 
 minster, as his forlorn Vale ! to the world. After all, 
 that is the way to die, better a thousand times than 
 drivelling off into eternity betwixt awake and asleep 
 in a fatuous old age. 3 
 
 From March onwards old complications were ag- 
 gravated by influenza, and although he threw this off, 
 it left him weaker for the struggle, yet hopeful of the 
 issue. On the 26th June he wrote in cheerful tone 
 to his old friend Hooker; but on the afternoon of the 
 igth he passed away, " the Fates," as he had prayed, 
 leaving him " clear and vigorous mind " 4 to the end. 
 
 It has become a fashion to more or less burden a 
 man's biography with tributes to his worth from his 
 friends. Such " appreciations," as these witnesses to 
 character are called, weaken rather than strengthen, 
 since their presence implies their possible necessity. 
 Of these credentials Huxley stands in no need. He 
 is his own witness in the work which he did, and in 
 
 11.400. i II. 430. I. 121. '11.361.
 
 THE MAN 63 
 
 the spirit which informed it. Those who knew him 
 best loved him most, and none came into touch with 
 his eager, sympathetic, breezy, and altogether beauti- 
 ful nature without receiving an impulse to higher 
 aims. Of spotless integrity in every relation, and 
 single-minded in every purpose, he went on from 
 strength to strength, because each step made the 
 Tightness of the path which he had chosen more 
 manifest. One "who never turned his back, but 
 marched breast forward " ; unswayed by motives of 
 worldly prudence ; undeterred by authority which 
 could produce no valid warrant of its claims ; gov- 
 erned by " morality touched by emotion," and guided 
 by reason within limits which none have defined so 
 well, he remains alike an example and an inspiration 
 to all men for all time.
 
 II 
 
 THE DISCOVERER 
 
 IN the preface to the eighth volume of his Collected 
 Essays Huxley says : 
 
 It must be admitted that the popularisation of 
 science, whether by lectures or by essays, has its 
 drawbacks. Success in this department has its perils 
 for those who succeed. The " people who fail " take 
 their revenge by ignoring all the rest of a man's work, 
 and glibly labelling him a mere populariser. If the 
 falsehood were not too glaring, they would say the 
 same of Faraday, and Helmholtz, and Kelvin. * 
 
 They said it of Huxley. In a recent compilation 
 entitled One Hundred and One Great Writers, issued 
 under the editorship of so well-equipped a scholar as 
 Dr. Richard Garnett, Huxley's work is described as 
 " that of the populariser ; the man who makes few 
 original contributions to science or thought, but states 
 the discoveries of others better than they could have 
 stated them themselves." And, doubtless, that is a very 
 common impression about a man the titles of whose 
 original scientific papers 2 fill ten pages of the appendix 
 
 > P. rii. 
 
 * Now collected in four volumes under the editorship of Sir 
 Michael Foster and Professor E. Kay Lankcstcr. 
 64
 
 THE DISCOVERER 65 
 
 to his biography. J The fact is, he loomed so large 
 in the public eye as the most luminous expositor of 
 the theory of organic evolution, as the proclaimer of 
 its significance, and as the protagonist in the great 
 revolution which it has brought about, that the im- 
 portance of his discoveries in biology is obscured. 
 And there is further explanation, which is given by 
 Mr. Chalmers Mitchell in his admirable monograph, 
 Thomas Henry Huxley : a Sketch of his Life and 
 Work. He says : 
 
 The years that have passed since 1850 have seen 
 not only the most amazing progress in our knowledge 
 of comparative anatomy, but almost a revolution in 
 the methods of studying it. Huxley's work has been 
 incorporated in the very body of science. A large 
 number of later investigators have advanced upon the 
 lines he laid down; and just as the superstructures of 
 a great building conceal the foundations, so later 
 anatomical work, although it has only amplified and 
 extended Huxley's discoveries, has made them seem 
 less striking to the modern reader. The present 
 writer, for instance, learned all that he knows of 
 anatomy in the last ten years, and until he turned to 
 it for the purpose of this volume he had never re- 
 ferred to Huxley's original paper. [Mr. Chalmers 
 Mitchell is here speaking of the Memoir on the 
 Medusae.] When he did so, he found from beginning 
 to end nothing that was new to him, nothing that was 
 strange ; all the ideas in the memoir had passed into 
 the currency of knowledge, and he had been taught 
 them as fundamental facts. It was only when he 
 
 ill. 460-470.
 
 66 HUXLEY 
 
 turned to the text-books of anatomy and natural his- 
 tory current in Huxley's time that he was able to 
 realise how the conclusions of the young ship- 
 surgeon struck the President and Fellows of the Royal 
 Society as luminous and revolutionary ideas. ' 
 
 And again: 
 
 Huxley's work upon birds, like his work in many 
 other branches of anatomy, has been so overlaid by 
 the investigations of subsequent zoologists that it is 
 easy to overlook its importance. His employment 
 of the skeleton as the basis of classification was suc- 
 ceeded by the work of others who made a similar use 
 of the muscular anatomy, of the intestinal canal, of 
 the windpipe, of the tendons of the feet, and many 
 other structures which display anatomical modifica- 
 tions in different birds. . . . Huxley's anatom- 
 ical work was essentially living and stimulating, and 
 too often it has become lost to sight simply because 
 of the vast superstructures of new facts to which it 
 gave rise. 2 
 
 The centring of Huxley's interest in the apparatus 
 and functions of living things has been named, as also 
 the opportunity for exercise of this which his voyage 
 in the Rattlesnake supplied. The dredge brought 
 him strange dwellers of the deep sea fantastic in 
 form, delicate in structure, and exquisite in colour. 
 These he sketched with his facile pencil, dissected, 
 
 1 Pp- 34,35- 
 
 /<*., p. 137. The third, fifth, and eighth chapters of Mr. 
 Chalmers Mitchell's book are to be strongly commended for the 
 clear and accurate account of Huxley's original work which they 
 furnish.
 
 THE DISCOVERER 67 
 
 and, whenever chance offered, compared, giving 
 special attention to the family of the Medusae, his 
 memoir on which laid the foundation-stone of his 
 scientific fame. It should be noted that that memoir 
 was written in 1848, eleven years before the publica- 
 tion of the Origin of Species, because in determining 
 the value of any scientific, and, especially, of biolog- 
 ical work, its chronological place must be taken into 
 account. In science the Old and the New Dispensa- 
 tion may be severally defined as the Pre-Darwinian 
 and the Post-Darwinian, and perhaps a brief survey 
 of what advance towards knowledge of the funda- 
 mental unity of living things had been reached during 
 the Old Dispensation may make clearer the bearing 
 of Huxley's discoveries, and explain why their signifi- 
 cance was not apparent even to himself. 
 
 The great name of Aristotle is associated with the 
 earliest attempt at a classification of animals. This 
 was based, in the main, on likenesses of external 
 structure, and was accepted, without fundamental 
 variation, for the long period of eighteen hundred 
 years. The first step towards any important revision 
 was taken, in the seventeenth century, by Ray, 
 "the father of modern zoology." In the eighteenth 
 century Boerhaave's experiments proved that all liv- 
 ing things are built up of the same materials, while 
 Hunter demonstrated the likenesses in animal
 
 68 HUXLEY 
 
 structure. Towards the close of that century, 
 Linnaeus had completed his great scheme of classifica- 
 tion of plants and animals, dividing the latter into six 
 classes : the Vertebrates into mammals, birds, am- 
 phibians (including reptiles), and fishes ; and the 
 Invertebrates into insects and worms. Aristotle had 
 conceived of life as a ladder whose steps represented 
 the several animals in ascending scale : Lamarck (to 
 whom Huxley pays high tribute '), with genuine in- 
 sight, depicted it as a many-branched tree, and there- 
 fore, as interrelated and interdependent. Cuvier re- 
 duced Linnaeus's six divisions to four : Vertebrata, or 
 backboned (fishes to men) ; Mollusca, or soft-bodied 
 (snails, oysters, etc.) ; Articulata, or jointed (spiders, 
 bees, ants, etc.), and Radiata, or rayed (jelly-fish, 
 polyps, sea-anemones). 
 
 Meanwhile, the microscope, by which, in the mid- 
 dle of the seventeenth century, Malpighi had made 
 pioneer discoveries, was becoming more and more the 
 important instrument of examination of the internal 
 structure of living things, and hence opening the way 
 to inquiry into their origin and history. The study 
 of anatomy advanced to comparison of the structures 
 and of the several corresponding organs in divers 
 plants and animals, and of the functions discharged 
 by those organs; hence the rise of the comparative 
 1 II. 59-
 
 THE DISCOVERER 69 
 
 method, with its demonstration of fundamental rela- 
 tions between living things. Schleiden discovered 
 that the cell is the unit of plant-life ; and Schwann 
 proved that the same is true of animals. Harvey's 
 formula of development, " All life comes from an 
 egg " (pmne vivum ex ovo), gave place to the doctrine 
 of omnis cellula e cellitla. The lowest animals are one- 
 celled, or, sometimes, a loosely connected cluster of 
 cells ; all other animals are built up of a number of 
 cells, whence tissues and organs are developed. In 
 1844, five years after Schwann's demonstration, Von 
 Mohl showed that each cell contains a viscous, gran- 
 ular-looking, highly active substance, the result of a 
 very complex union of carbon (to which Haeckel as- 
 signs the chief activity), hydrogen, oxygen, and nitro- 
 gen. This substance is known as protoplasm, and is, 
 in Huxley's familiar phrase, " the physical basis of 
 life." Some years before this, Von Baer had observed 
 that the embryos of birds, dogs, fish, and other back- 
 boned animals, including man, are all alike during 
 their earlier stages. It is concerning Von Baer's 
 writings that Huxley said none had made so great an 
 impression on him down to the publication of the 
 Origin of Species 1 ; and it was in Von Baer's Law 
 of Development that Mr. Spencer found hints and 
 evidence supporting his own theory of advance 
 1 1. 175, and cf. 163.
 
 70 HUXLEY 
 
 from the simple to the complex as applied to the 
 cosmos. 
 
 The effect of these discoveries was to produce an 
 unsettled feeling as to the truth of the doctrine of the 
 fixity of species. Lamarck was the most prominent, 
 but not the only, naturalist of the eighteenth century 
 to suggest that the various species had not been sepa- 
 rately created, but had been developed by sundry 
 causes, operating through long ages, from a few 
 simple forms. It was a perilous step in those days of 
 the long-reaching secular arm to throw doubt on the 
 account of the creation contained in a document 
 which God Himself was believed to have inspired ; 
 but the doubt once harboured, a mass of facts telling 
 against the orthodox view came into unwonted sig- 
 nificance. Every scheme of classification hitherto 
 propounded had assumed the immutability of the 
 several groups ; the conception of any fundamental 
 relation of the several types to a common primitive 
 type was unborn ; and the most superficial comparison 
 between the vertebrates, in which some structural re- 
 semblances were obvious, and the loose and confused 
 medley covered by the term invertebrate, was suf- 
 ficient to negative any idea of an underlying unity 
 that might be broached. 
 
 The illustrious Cuvier regarded the several groups 
 as the outcome o f a preordained plan of the Creator,
 
 THE DISCOVERER 'Jl 
 
 and believed that each successive annihilation of plants 
 and animals was followed by a fresh creative fiat. 
 His most distinguished pupil, Owen, likewise ex- 
 plained the succession of species as the operation of 
 " a continuously creational law." But, nevertheless, 
 facts were pouring in which could not be thus inter- 
 preted. The fossil-yielding rocks, whose contents 
 both these great anatomists were arranging, making 
 the dry bones tell the story of a long and connected 
 life-history, and of the descent of certain existing ani- 
 mals along well-marked ancestral lines, were to prove 
 the most sure foundation on which the doctrine of 
 organic evolution rests. Lyell's Principles of Geology 
 raised the question, " If natural causation is compe- 
 tent to account for the not-living part of the globe, 
 why should it not account for the living part ? " 
 Herbert Spencer was asking which was the more ra- 
 tional theory to account for the existence of millions 
 of species : 
 
 Is it most likely that there have been ten millions 
 of special creations ; or is it most likely that by con- 
 tinual modifications, due to change of circumstances, 
 ten millions of varieties have been produced as varie- 
 ties are being produced still ? * 
 
 The answer to that question an answer which in- 
 volved the putting of more momentous questions 
 
 1 Leader, 2oth March, 1852.
 
 72 HUXLEY 
 
 was not forthcoming for another seven years. As for 
 Huxley's position in the matter, he says, in the chap- 
 ter " On the Reception of the Origin of Species," 
 which he contributed to Darwin's Life and Letters, 
 that he was " not brought into serious contact with 
 the 4 species' question until after 1850." He had 
 " long done with the Pentateuchal cosmogony," and 
 he rejected all theories of " archetypal ideas," " per- 
 fecting principles," and the like ; but the frequent 
 discussions which he had with Mr. Spencer from 
 1852 onwards failed to drive him from his "agnostic 
 position." His difficulties were twofold : 
 
 Firstly, that up to that time the evidence in favour 
 of transmutation was wholly insufficient ; and sec- 
 ondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of 
 transmutation assumed, which had been made, was in 
 any way adequate to explain the phenomena. Look- 
 ing back at the state of knowledge at that time, I 
 really do not see that any other conclusion was 
 justifiable. 1 
 
 He sums up his attitude in two words, as that of 
 " critical expectancy." 
 
 " Wandering between two worlds : one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born." 
 
 At his first interview with Darwin he expressed, 
 
 " with all the confidence of youth and imperfect 
 
 knowledge," his belief in the sharpness of the lines 
 
 1 Darwin's Life and Letters, ii. p. 188.
 
 THE DISCOVERER 73 
 
 of demarcation between natural groups, and in the 
 absence of transitional forms. 
 
 I was not aware, at that time, that he had been many 
 years brooding over the species question ; and the 
 humorous smile which accompanied his gentle 
 answer, that such was not altogether his view, long 
 haunted and puzzled me. l 
 
 The incident may have recalled to his mind an inter- 
 view with Faraday in the old student days at Charing 
 Cross Hospital, of which he tells in one of his letters 
 from the Rattlesnake. He had made one of the man- 
 ifold attempts to realise perpetual motion, and, having 
 put his scheme on paper, took it to the Royal Institu- 
 tion, at the door of which he ran against " a little 
 man in a brown coat." The " little man " was Fara- 
 day, who, although he knew nothing of Huxley, at 
 once looked at the plan which he had drawn, and 
 then asked him if he " was acquainted with mecha- 
 nism, what we call the laws of motion ? " 
 
 I saw that all was up with my poor scheme, so 
 after trying a little to explain, in the course of which 
 I certainly failed in giving him a clear idea of what I 
 would be at, I thanked him for his attention, and 
 went off as dissatisfied as ever. 2 
 
 Needless to say, as with himself and Darwin, the 
 two were to meet in very different relations in a few 
 1 Darwin's Life and Letters, ii. p. 196. j. 22 .
 
 74 HUXLEY 
 
 years, when Huxley's sense of humour would impel 
 him to remind Faraday of the lesson learned from 
 him. 
 
 The more important of Huxley's original contribu- 
 tions to biological science may now be set forth, with 
 as much freedom from technical terms as the subjects 
 permit. 
 
 The discoveries of Schleiden and Schwann in cell- 
 structure, as well as those of Von Baer in compara- 
 tive embryology, were known to Huxley when, 
 " with microscope lashed to the mast," he examined 
 the fragile organisms, " as the sand of the seashore 
 innumerable." To those discoveries he made an im- 
 portant addition in detecting that the Medusae are 
 built up of two cell-layers, or " foundation-mem- 
 branes," enclosing a stomach-cavity. From the outer 
 layer the skin and nervous system (as to the ex- 
 istence of which latter, since proven, Huxley was at 
 the time doubtful) are . developed ; and from the inner 
 layer the alimentary and other organs are developed. 
 He also found that the reproductive organs are exter- 
 nal, and that all the Medusas have thread-cells where- 
 with poison is discharged at their prey. He then 
 made search for the presence of these several features 
 in other families of the Hydrozoa, and found unity 
 of plan throughout. In modern classification, there 
 are three grades of animals : the Protozoa, which em-
 
 THE DISCOVERER 75 
 
 brace only the one-celled ; and the Coelenterata and 
 Coelomata, grouped as many-celled, under the term 
 Metazoa. Even this scheme is under modification 
 the animals known as sponges being now assigned a 
 separate place as " an independent and sterile branch 
 of the tree of life," a branch, perhaps, in direct 
 descent from the one-celled organism. 1 The Me- 
 dusae, hydra, and sea-anemones are grouped under 
 Coelenterata, or hollow-bodied, comprising all two- 
 layered animals. The Coelomata comprise all 
 animals in which a third foundation-membrane has 
 been developed, and which possess a coelom, or true 
 stomach, with blood-vessels. They embrace every 
 animal from a worm to a man. 
 
 Huxley's next step was to compare the two founda- 
 tion-membranes of the Coelenterata with the serous 
 and mucous layers of the embryos of vertebrates ; and 
 here, although he then guessed it not, he made a con- 
 tribution of the highest importance to the doctrine of 
 descent. Von Baer had shown the resemblances be- 
 tween all back-boned animals in their passage from 
 the embryo to the adult state, and Huxley showed 
 that, in still earlier stages of their development, they 
 exhibited the two foundation-membranes of the 
 Coelenterata, thus recording, as it were, the history 
 
 1 A Treatise on Zoology. Part II. The Porifera and Ccelen- 
 terata. Edited by E. Ray Lankester, F.R.S.
 
 76 HUXLEY 
 
 of their evolution from those lower organisms. It is 
 easy enough to us, looking back, to see what a key to 
 the proof of the fundamental unity of living things 
 this supplied ; but even the prevision of Huxley, 
 shown so markedly in many ways, was obscured by 
 the dominance of the notion of fixity outside certain 
 well-marked lines. For in 1853 ne writes that "there 
 is no progression from a lower to a higher type, but 
 merely a more or less complete evolution of one 
 type." Nevertheless, his acute comparison between 
 the Crelenterata and the Coelomata was destined to 
 supply proof of the progression which he questioned. 
 His discovery, says Professor Allman, 
 
 that the body of the Medusse is essentially composed 
 of two membranes, an outer and an inner, and his 
 recognition of these as the homologues of the two 
 primary germinal leaflets in the vertebrate embryo, is 
 one of the greatest claims of his splendid work on the 
 recognition of zoologists. This discovery stands at 
 the very base of a philosophical zoology, and of a 
 true conception of the affinities of animals. It is the 
 ground on which Haeckel has founded his famous 
 Gastraea-theory, and without it Kowalesky could never 
 have announced his great discover)' of the affinity of 
 the Ascidians and Vertebrates, by which zoologists 
 have been startled. ! 
 
 Noting, by the way, that before Huxley sailed in 
 the Rattlesnake, he had made the interesting discovery 
 1.40.
 
 THE DISCOVERER 77 
 
 that the composition of the blood of the lancelet, a 
 very low vertebrate, approached that of the blood of 
 the higher vertebrates, we find his work on the Me- 
 dusae followed by a further contribution to knowledge 
 of organic relation in an examination of the structure 
 of the sea-squirts, or Ascidians, so called from their 
 resemblance to a double-necked bottle (Greek askidion, 
 a small bottle). These animals are found singly, and 
 also in clusters, and interest in them, as hinted in the 
 quotation from Professor Allman, has deepened since 
 the discovery that they are in the line of the develop- 
 ment from invertebrate to vertebrate which ends in 
 man himself. Still feeling his way towards the great 
 central doctrine of unity, denial of which is the only 
 heresy from which a man need pray to be delivered, 
 Huxley made Schwann's cell-theory the basis of ex- 
 amination into the identity of structure in plants and 
 animals. He showed and this with luminous skill 
 in the famous " lay sermon " on " The Physical Basis 
 of Life " that the cell is the unit of structure, and 
 not the unit of function ; that, in technical terms, it 
 is morphological, not physiological, the " protoplasm " 
 being the fundamental element. " Although," re- 
 marks Professor Ray Lankester 
 
 it is forty years since the " Review of the Cell 
 Theory " was published, and although our knowledge 
 of cell-structure has made immense progress during
 
 78 HUXLEY 
 
 those forty years, yet the main contention of that 
 article viz., that cells are not the cause but the re- 
 sult of organisation, in fact are, as Huxley says, to 
 the tide of life what the line of shells and weeds on 
 the seashore is to the tide of the living sea is even 
 now being reasserted, and, in a slightly modified form, 
 is by very many cytologists admitted as having more 
 truth in it than the opposed view and its later out- 
 comes, to the effect that the cell is the unit of life in 
 which and through which alone living matter mani- 
 fests our activities. 1 
 
 The contents of the Scientific Memoirs show that in 
 all the papers which Huxley contributed to the Royal 
 Society and other learned bodies, his researches were 
 ruled not so much by the desire to classify and label 
 specimens as to establish affinities between organisms, 
 and to supersede the ill-assorted jumble, which, for 
 example, lumped crabs and bees together under one 
 heading, by an orderly and demonstrable classification. 
 Down to 1854, when he succeeded Forbes at the 
 School of Mines, his studies had been restricted to 
 invertebrates ; but from that period, fossil forms, for 
 which, as already remarked, he had no taste, 2 were to 
 occupy a main portion of his time. They appeared 
 to take him off the main track that might lead to a 
 great generalisation : he saw no solution of the prob- 
 lem of transmutation save in study of the living 
 thing ; there was, as he said in a lecture at the Royal 
 
 1 I. 140. Ante, p. 10.
 
 THE DISCOVERER 79 
 
 Institution in 1855, " no real parallel between the 
 successive forms assumed in the development of the 
 life of the individual at present, and those which have 
 appeared at different epochs in the past." But, so 
 complete was the revolution effected by the Origin of 
 Species^ that in 1878 he wrote : 
 
 On the evidence of palaeontology, the evolution of 
 many existing forms of animal life from their prede- 
 cessors is no longer an hypothesis but an historical 
 fact. 1 
 
 While, in an address to the British Association at 
 York two years afterwards, he said : 
 
 If the doctrine of evolution had not existed, palae- 
 ontologists must have invented it, so irresistibly is it 
 forced upon the mind by the study of the remains of 
 the Tertiary Mammalia which have been brought to 
 light since 
 
 Huxley soon found that extinct animals also afforded 
 play for his favourite inquiry into the architecture and 
 affinities of organisms, and hence, in his hands, the 
 fossil became, as it were, a living thing, bringing a 
 message from the past. His inquiry into the char- 
 acter of some supposed fish-shields from the Down- 
 ton sandstone, near Ludlow, led to the revolutionising 
 of old theories concerning the earliest fishes. He 
 showed that the huge creatures named, from the com- 
 
 Coll. Essays, ii. p. 226. 2 n. 341.
 
 80 HUXLEY 
 
 plex structure of their teeth, Labyrinthodonts, are 
 allied to fishes, amphibians, and reptiles ; and if the 
 intermediate forms between birds and reptiles are not 
 so clearly traceable as he and others then held, his 
 demonstration of the affinity between the two was one 
 of his most brilliant successes. 
 
 One great consequence of these researches was that 
 science was enriched by a clear demonstration of the 
 many and close affinities between reptiles and birds, 
 so that the two henceforth came to be known under 
 the joint title of Sauropsida, the Amphibia being at 
 the same time distinctly more separated from the 
 reptiles, and their relations to fishes more clearly sig- 
 nified by the joint title of Ichthyopsida. At the same 
 time proof was brought forward that the line of the 
 descent of the Sauropsida clearly diverged from that 
 of the Mammalia, both starting from some common 
 ancestry. And besides this great generalisation, the 
 importance of which, both from a classificatory and 
 from an evolutional point of view, needs no com- 
 ment, there came out of the same researches numer- 
 ous lesser contributions to the advancement of mor- 
 phological knowledge, including among others an 
 attempt, in many respects successful, at a classification 
 of birds. 1 
 
 But what will, perhaps, make closer appeal to the 
 general inquirer, is the story of the fulfilment of 
 Huxley's prophecy as to the discovery of the pedigree 
 of the horse, which, down to 1870, had been traced 
 to a three-toed ancestor. 
 
 > Obituary Notice of T. H. Huxley," by Sir Michael Foster. 
 Proc. Royal Society, vol. lix.
 
 THE DISCOVERER 8 1 
 
 The ungulate or hoofed quadrupeds are divided into 
 the odd-toed and the even-toed, the toes never exceed- 
 ing, except in the case of monstrosities, five on each 
 limb. The horse, whose nearest allies in descent are 
 the tapir and the rhinoceros, belongs to the odd-toed 
 or Perissodactyla (Greek, perissos, uneven, and daktulos^ 
 finger). In the horse of to-day the toes have become 
 absorbed, so that what is called its " knee " corre- 
 sponds to the position of a man's wrist ; the metacar- 
 pus, or " cannon-bone," answers to the third or 
 middle finger of the human hand ; the " pastern," 
 " coronary," and " coffin " bones answer to the joints 
 .of that finger, and the hoof to its nail. The smaller, 
 or " splint bones," represent our second and fourth 
 fingers, and some small bony prominences at the 
 bases of these probably represent our first and fifth 
 fingers. 1 
 
 Fossil remains of horses of the existing type are found 
 as far back as the later Tertiary period ; in the later 
 Miocene or middle Tertiary beds, horse-like animals 
 with three toes, the middle one of which touched the 
 ground, have been discovered, while the early Mio- 
 cene deposits have yielded an animal with horse-like 
 characters having three complete toes. Here the 
 European evidence comes to an end, and in summa- 
 
 1 On the general structure and modifications see The Horse, by 
 Sir W. H. Flower, chaps, iii., iv.
 
 82 HUXLEY 
 
 rising it in his presidential address to the Geological 
 Society in 1870, Huxley said that 
 
 if the expectation raised by the splints of the horses 
 that, in some ancestors of the horses, these splints 
 would be found to be complete digits, has been veri- 
 fied, we are furnished with very strong reasons for 
 looking for a no less complete verification of the 
 expectation that the three-toed Plagio/opbus-\\ke 
 " avus " of the horse must have been a five-toed 
 " atavus " at some early period. 1 
 
 In 1876, when visiting America, he was shown by 
 Professor Marsh the remarkable fossil found, among 
 others, in the Eocene formations of North America, 
 to which the name Orohippus was given, and which 
 was then the oldest known " member of the equine 
 series." It had four complete toes on the front limb, 
 and three toes on the hind limb, besides other features 
 linking it with the chain of equine ancestry. The 
 discovery evidenced that the accepted theory of the 
 European origin of the horse must be abandoned in 
 favour of America, into which continent that animal, 
 having become extinct, was imported by the Spaniards. 
 
 In commenting on this wonderful " find," in a 
 lecture given at New York in September, 1876, 
 Huxley repeated the prophecy uttered six years be- 
 fore: 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, viii. p. 361.
 
 THE DISCOVERER 83 
 
 The knowledge we now possess justifies us com- 
 pletely in the anticipation that, when the still lower 
 Eocene deposits, and those which belong to the Cre- 
 taceous period, have yielded up their remains of an- 
 cestral equine animals, we shall find, first, a form with 
 four complete toes and a rudiment of the fifth digit 
 in the hind foot; while, in the older forms, the series 
 of digits will be more and more complete until we 
 come to the five-toed animals in which, if the doctrine 
 of evolution is well-founded, the whole series must 
 have taken its origin. 1 
 
 The prophecy was fulfilled two months afterwards in 
 Professor Marsh's discovery of complete skeletons of 
 a five-toed animal in the early Eocene deposits at 
 Wasatch in North America. The existence of the 
 fossil form, which is named Phenacodus, was known 
 to Professor Cope three years before by its teeth alone. 
 The unearthing of it, with all the bones in due place, 
 the terminal bones of the toes showing that they were 
 encased in hoofs, enabled palaeontologists to assign it 
 a place in the ungulate group, the type, as shown by 
 the size of the brain-pan, being extremely low. 
 "This," remarks Sir W. H. Flower, "is exactly in 
 accord with what is now generally known of the pro- 
 gressive diminution of the size of the brain in all 
 groups of animals the farther back we pass from the 
 present time." 2 
 
 Reference has been made already to the famous 
 
 1 American Addresses, p. 89. 2 The Horse, p. 22.
 
 84 HUXLEY 
 
 book in which Huxley demonstrates the physical and 
 psychical identity of man and the higher apes with a 
 completeness never before attempted, but the con- 
 sideration of some of the effects of that demon- 
 stration will have more fitting place in the next 
 chapter. 
 
 Omitting any account of Huxley's minor discover- 
 ies, the last one of importance to be noted takes us 
 back to 1878. In that year, while he was Fullerian 
 Professor at the Royal Institution, he delivered a 
 lecture on the origin of the skull in vertebrates. 1 In 
 1806, Oken, a German naturalist of somewhat 
 dreamy type, when walking in the Hartz Forest, 
 picked up the dried skull of a sheep, and the idea 
 struck him that it was an expanded vertebral column. 
 The priority of idea was, apparently with justice, 
 claimed by Goethe, who saw in it a correlate to his 
 theory of the " transformation of plants " /'. *., that 
 every part of a plant is made up of stem and leaf, 
 modified for the particular function it has to perform. 
 But what secured unquestioned belief in the view that 
 the skull " is formed of a series of expanded vertebrae 
 moulded together," was the support given to it by 
 Owen, "who was at that time the leading vertebrate 
 anatomist in England," and whose indorsement may 
 be in some measure explained by the seeming ac- 
 1 Ante, p. 17.
 
 THE DISCOVERER 85 
 
 corclance of the theory with his belief in " archetypal 
 ideas." 
 
 Huxley, ever acting on his own maxim, " to regard 
 the value of authority as neither greater nor less than 
 as much as it can prove itself to be worth," was by 
 no means convinced of the truth of the vertebral 
 theory, since it lacked such confirmation as compara- 
 tive embryology might be expected to supply. After 
 examining a number of skulls of fishes, beasts, and 
 men, he was satisfied that each skull is built upon a 
 common plan, and that the primitive skull in the 
 lowest or cartilaginous fishes, where traces of the 
 original vertebrae might be expected, " is an unseg- 
 mented gristly brain-box, and that in higher forms the 
 vertebral nature of the skull cannot be thought of for 
 a moment, since many of the bones, for example, 
 those along the top of the skull, arise in the skin. 
 . . . It may be true to say that there is a primi- 
 tive identity of structure between the spinal or verte- 
 bral column and the skull, but it is no more true that 
 the adult skull is a modified vertebral column than it 
 would be to affirm that the vertebral column is a 
 modified skull." This demolition of a hitherto un- 
 challenged theory added to the strain on the relations 
 between Owen and Huxley, but that minor result was 
 of no moment to the latter, the larger issue of whose 
 labours lay in the " marking an epoch in England in
 
 86 HUXLEY 
 
 vertebrate morphology," and in " enunciating views 
 which, if somewhat modified, are still, in the main, 
 the views of the anatomists of to-day." ' 
 
 Linnaeus says that " fossils are not the children, 
 but the parents, of rocks," and the interest aroused in 
 the contents of the fossil-yielding rocks when Huxley 
 went to the School of Mines was extended to the 
 rocks themselves. During his more official connec- 
 tion with the Geological Society as Deputy-President 
 in 1862, and as President in 1869 and 1870, he de- 
 livered three addresses, each of which holds matter of 
 permanent value. As already shown, the latest of 
 these, which was entitled " Palaeontology and the 
 Doctrine of Evolution," dealt with the ancestry of 
 the horse ; but it embraced the more general question 
 of the evidence as to intermediate links between 
 species supplied by the fossiliferous rocks. This in- 
 volved a revision of opinions expressed in the address 
 of 1862, and the clear deliverance that Huxley enter- 
 tained " no sort of doubt that the Reptiles, Birds, and 
 Mammals of the Trias are the direct descendants of 
 Reptiles, Birds, and Mammals which existed in the 
 latter part of the Paleozoic epoch, but not in any 
 area of the present dry land which has yet been ex- 
 plored by the geologist." In the 1862 address ref- 
 
 >Sir Michael Foster, "Obituary Notice of T. H. Huxley," 
 Proc. Royal Society, vol. lix.
 
 THE DISCOVERER 87 
 
 erence was made to the two facts established by 
 palaeontology : I. That one and the same area of 
 the earth's surface has been successively occupied by 
 very different kinds of living beings ; 2. That the 
 order of succession established in one locality holds 
 good, approximately, in all. 
 
 The inference which geologists had drawn from 
 this was that wherever rocks containing the same 
 kind of fossils are found in widely separated parts of 
 the globe, they were formed at the same time. Cor- 
 respondence in succession came to be looked upon as 
 correspondence in age. Huxley, on the other hand, 
 argued that the presence of fossils identical in type in 
 distant rock-formations pointed to an opposite con- 
 clusion. On the theory of special creation the ap- 
 pearance of the same animal remains in the same 
 order of strata in different zones was explicable. But 
 on the theory of evolution considerable periods of 
 time must have elapsed to permit of the migration of 
 animals from place to place. Therefore, Huxley 
 suggested that the ambiguous and misleading term 
 "synchronism" should be discarded in favour of the 
 term " homotaxial," as indicating that the presence 
 of certain fossils in the same relative position in the 
 succession of strata indicated a similarity of order, but 
 not an identity of date. 
 
 In the 1869 address he discussed the interesting
 
 88 HUXLEY 
 
 question of the age of the earth as determining the 
 length of time which elapsed before it became cool 
 enough to be the abode of life. On this question the 
 physicists and the biologists were at issue. 
 
 At the outset the earth was a mass of glowing, in- 
 candescent gas, hurled-off, like its -fellow-planets, 
 from the vast nebula which was to condense into the 
 solar system. Passing, under the continuous loss of 
 heat, from the gaseous through the liquid and viscous 
 to the solid state, it reached a degree of temperature 
 which permitted of the existence of life upon its sur- 
 face. The first living things were plants, and the 
 carbon, which is an essential element in their struc- 
 ture, could not be detached from the atmosphere 
 except at a temperature " somewhat above the freez- 
 ing-point, and somewhat less than half-way to the 
 boiling-point of water." Hence the question, At 
 what period of its history did our globe, or that por- 
 tion of it on which life first appeared (probably, as 
 Buffbn suggested, the polar area, as this would be the 
 earliest to cool), arrive at that temperature ? To this 
 the mathematical physicists, at the head of whom 
 stands Lord Kelvin, essayed answer, the data for 
 which were supplied I, by the rate at which the 
 earth parted with its store of heat; 2, by the decrease 
 in the length of its day ; and 3, by the time that the 
 sun, as the source of life, has illuminated the earth.
 
 THE DISCOVERER 89 
 
 Of these, only the briefest summary is here possible. 
 As to the first, Lord Kelvin (then Sir William 
 Thomson) assumed that the matter of which the 
 globe is made up is uniform throughout, and, there- 
 fore, that the rate at which it has parted with its heat 
 is uniform. After hesitating between the statement 
 that " the consolidation cannot have taken place less 
 than twenty million years ago, nor more than four 
 hundred million years ago," Lord Kelvin agreed that 
 " some such period of time as one hundred million 
 years ago " might be taken as a safely approximate 
 estimate. As to the second, when the earth and 
 moon were very near each other, the rotation was 
 enormously quickened, and, as the moon retreated, 
 the earth's rotation slowed, involving the gradual 
 lengthening of the day. The retardation is due to 
 the friction of the tides, which, under the pull of sun, 
 and, in far greater degree, of moon, act as a brake 
 upon the globe, increasing the day by about twenty- 
 two seconds of time in every century. The period 
 of the earth's habitability was reached when the day 
 was approximately what it is now, permitting of the 
 alternations of light and darkness, heat and cold, and 
 other conditions now prevailing. Lord Kelvin esti- 
 mates " that the centrifugal force at the time of solid- 
 ification cannot have been more than three per cent, 
 greater than it is at present, and, therefore, having
 
 90 HUXLEY 
 
 regard to the known rate of retardation of the earth's 
 rotation, this event occurred not more than one hun- 
 dred million years ago." 
 
 As to the third, physicists are agreed that the main- 
 tenance of the sun's energy is to be explained as due 
 to the heat generated by the falling-in and resulting 
 collision of the particles of matter of which he is 
 composed, involving the shrinkage of his diameter at 
 the rate of two hundred and twenty feet yearly, or 
 four miles per century. Lord Kelvin, admitting that 
 " the estimates are necessarily very vague," is of 
 opinion that " the sun may have already illuminated 
 the earth for as many as one hundred million years ; 
 but it is almost certain that he has not illuminated the 
 earth for five hundred million years." 
 
 Commenting on the indefiniteness of these and the 
 foregoing estimates, Huxley aptly remarks that 
 
 Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite 
 workmanship, which grinds you stuff in any degree of 
 fineness, but, nevertheless, what you get out depends 
 on what you put in ; and as the grandest mill in the 
 world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so 
 pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of 
 loose data. 1 
 
 But although some mathematicians of lesser calibre 
 thought that Lord Kelvin had conceded too long a 
 
 1 Lay Sermons, p. 216.
 
 THE DISCOVERER 9! 
 
 period, there was sufficient accord between them to 
 make the biologists feel themselves in a tight place. 
 Reckoning, from the rate at which materials, through 
 the agency of rivers, are being deposited on ocean- 
 bottoms, how long a time was necessary for the for- 
 mation of the sedimentary rocks, and of rocks pre- 
 sumably within the life-period, the aggregate thickness 
 of which is estimated at about fifty miles, they found 
 the years allowed by the mathematicians wholly insuf- 
 ficient. Darwin was much concerned. Writing to 
 Wallace in 1869, he says: "Thomson's views of 
 the recent age of the world have been for some time 
 one of my sorest troubles;" and again, in 1871, "I 
 can say nothing more about missing links than what I 
 have said. I should rely much on pre-Silurian times ; 
 but then comes Sir W. Thomson, like an odious 
 spectre." Huxley was in no wise disturbed. 
 
 Biology [he said] takes her time from geology. 
 The only reason we have for believing in the slow 
 rate of the change in living forms is the fact that they 
 persist through a series of deposits which, geology in- 
 forms us, have taken a long while to make. If the 
 geological clock is wrong, all the naturalist will have 
 to do is to modify his notions of the rapidity of 
 change accordingly. And I venture to point out that 
 when we are told that the limitation of the period 
 during which living beings have inhabited this planet 
 to one, two, or three hundred million years requires a 
 complete revolution in geological speculation, the onus
 
 92 HUXLEY 
 
 probandi rests on the maker of the assertion, who 
 brings forward not a shadow of evidence in its 
 support. ' 
 
 Meantime, occasion was given to eager adversaries 
 to say, " Behold how good and how pleasant a thing 
 it is to see this discord ! " and it is not surprising that 
 the hope was nurtured in the minds of many that so 
 serious a disagreement would in some way wreck the 
 doctrine of evolution. That reluctant convert to the 
 theory of the mutability of species, Lord Salisbury, 
 did not fail to press home the difficulty in his Presi- 
 dential Address to the British Association. After re- 
 ferring to the " penurious spirit " shown by Professor 
 Tait in cutting down Lord Kelvin's estimate of one 
 hundred million years to ten million years, he chaffed 
 their opponents with revelling in the prodigality of 
 the ciphers which they put at the end of the earth's 
 hypothetical life. 
 
 Long cribbed and cabined within the narrow bounds 
 of the popular chronology, they have exulted wantonly 
 in their new freedom. They have lavished their 
 millions of years with the open hand of a prodigal 
 heir indemnifying himself by present extravagance for 
 the enforced self-denial of "his youth. But it cannot 
 be gainsaid that their theories require at least all this 
 elbow-room. If we think of that vast distance over 
 which Darwin conducts us from the jelly-fish lying 
 
 Lay Sermons, p. 213.
 
 THE DISCOVERER 93 
 
 on the primeval beach to man as we know him now ; 
 if we reflect that the prodigious change requisite to 
 transform one into the other is made up of a chain of 
 generations, each advancing by a minute variation 
 from the form of its predecessor, and if we further 
 reflect that these successive changes are so minute 
 that in the course of our historical period say three 
 thousand years this progressive variation has not ad- 
 vanced by a single step perceptible to our eyes, in 
 respect to man or the animals and plants with which 
 man is familiar, we shall admit that for a chain of 
 change so vast, of which the smallest link is longer 
 than our recorded history, the biologists are making 
 no extravagant claim when they demand at least many 
 hundred million years for the accomplishment of the 
 stupendous process. Of course, if the mathematicians 
 are right, the biologists cannot have what they demand. 
 If, for the purposes of their theory, organic life must 
 have existed on the globe more than a hundred million 
 years ago, it must, under the temperature then pre- 
 vailing, have existed in a state of vapour. The jelly- 
 fish would have been dissipated in steam long before 
 he had had a chance of displaying the advantageous 
 variation which was to make him the ancestor of the 
 human race. I see, in the eloquent discourse of one 
 of my most recent and most distinguished predecessors 
 in this chair, Sir Archibald Geikie, that the contro- 
 versy is still alive. The mathematicians sturdily 
 adhere to their figures, and the biologists are quite 
 sure the mathematicians must have made a mistake. 
 I will not get myself into the line of fire by inter- 
 vening in such a controversy. But until it is adjusted 
 the laity may be excused for returning a verdict of 
 "not proven" upon the wider issues the Darwinian 
 school has raised. 1 
 
 1 Times, gth August, 1894.
 
 94 HUXLEY 
 
 Lord Salisbury unwittingly helped the cause which 
 his instincts prompted him to hinder. With that pre- 
 vision of the seer in combination with the skill of the 
 discoverer, which is the possession only of the rarer 
 spirits of our kind, Huxley had pierced the core of 
 the matter when he asked, " Is the earth nothing but 
 a cooling mass, 4 like a hot-water jar, such as is used 
 in carriages,' or * a globe of sandstone,' and has its 
 cooling been uniform ? " And incited thereto by 
 Lord Salisbury's Address, provocative as it was of 
 discussion on so many sides, Professor Perry, who 
 held the common opinion that it was "hopeless to 
 expect that Lord Kelvin should have made an error 
 in calculation," examined the subject, not " to substi- 
 tute a more correct age for that obtained by Lord 
 Kelvin, but rather to show that the data from which 
 the true age could be calculated are not really 
 available." The result of that examination was to 
 challenge Lord Kelvin's assumption of a uniform 
 state of the materials of the globe, and to show that 
 " its interior may be of better conducting material 
 than the surface rock," whereby the cooling of that 
 surface to a habitable condition would be enormously 
 quickened, and the life-period pushed back to the four 
 hundred million years required by the geologists and 
 biologists. The details of the process by which 
 Professor Perry arrived at his conclusions are too
 
 THE DISCOVERER 95 
 
 technical and lengthy for reproduction here, 1 and, 
 moreover, it suffices to quote Lord Kelvin's admission 
 that his estimate may be insufficient. " I thought," 
 he says in a letter to Nature, " my range from twenty 
 millions to four hundred millions was probably wide 
 enough ; but it is quite possible that I should have 
 put the superior limit a good deal higher, perhaps four 
 thousand instead of four hundred." 2 Apropos of 
 Professor Perry's results, Huxley wrote in a private 
 letter, under date of 6th November, 1894: "I am so 
 much out of the world now that I had not heard of 
 the l rift within the lute '' of the mathematicians. 
 But that a big crack would show itself sooner or later 
 I have never doubted." 
 
 It would be easy to fill many pages of this little 
 volume with a summarised account of Huxley's 
 original work in biology alone, but the examples 
 chosen may be taken to constitute his chief claim to 
 the title of discoverer. They may suffice to show, 
 in the words of the tribute paid to him by Sir 
 Michael Foster and Professor E. Ray Lankester in 
 their preface to the collection of his Scientific 
 Memoirs, that, " apart from the influence exerted by 
 his popular writings, the progress of biology during 
 
 1 For these, see Nature, 3<1 January, 1895 '> ^h September, 
 1896. 
 * Nature, 3d January, 1895.
 
 96 HUXLEY 
 
 the present century was largely due to labours of his 
 of which the general public knew nothing, and that 
 he was in some respects the most original and most 
 fertile in discovery of all his fellow-workers in the 
 same branch of science." ' 
 
 'Vol. I. p. vi. (1898).
 
 Ill 
 
 THE INTERPRETER 
 
 IN an essay on the Origin of Species, written in 
 1860, Huxley admits that two years before then "the 
 position of the supporters of the special creation 
 theory seemed more impregnable than ever, if not by 
 its own inherent strength, at any rate by the obvious 
 failure of all the attempts which have been made to 
 carry it." * If it was discarded, there was nothing to 
 replace it ; hence, like institutions for the reform or 
 abolition of which the time is not ripe, it existed on 
 sufferance. Emphasis of this fact is necessary for 
 full understanding of the revolution whereby old 
 things passed away and all things became new. 
 
 Huxley was a boy of twelve when Darwin, on his 
 return to England, opened his " first note-book for 
 facts in relation to the origin of species," speculation 
 about the possible modification of which had been 
 incited by his observations on past and present life- 
 forms on the South American continent. Fifteen 
 months afterwards, in October, 1838, he read for 
 amusement Malthus on Population, and he says : 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, ii. p. 69. 
 97
 
 98 HUXLEY 
 
 Being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for 
 existence which everywhere goes on, from long-con- 
 tinued observations of the habits of plants and animals, 
 it at once struck me that under these circumstances 
 favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and 
 unfavourable ones destroyed. The result of this 
 would be the formation of new species. 1 
 
 In 1842 he put his theory into shape, then enlarged 
 his manuscript from time to time, and with that un- 
 paralleled patience which controlled all his researches, 
 went on collecting masses of facts and weighing the 
 evidence deducible from them, not venturing to make 
 known, save to his most intimate friends, his convic- 
 tions as to the mutability of species. It seemed 
 "like confessing a murder," he said. And so the 
 matter drifted until 1858, when there came to him 
 from Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, who was living at 
 Ternate, an island in the Malay Archipelago, a com- 
 munication in which his own theory was propounded, 
 and in such coincidence of terms that Darwin told 
 Lyell if Wallace had had his MS. sketch of 1842, 
 "he could not have made a better short abstract." 2 
 To complete the parallel, Wallace also was led to 
 think of " positive checks " by reading Parson 
 Malthus. After conferring with Hooker and Lyell, 
 both of whom had seen Darwin's abstract some years 
 before, it was arranged that Wallace's paper and a 
 
 1 Darwin's Life and Letters, i. p. 83. Ib. t ii. p. 1 16.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 99 
 
 precis of Darwin's manuscript should be read at a 
 meeting of the Linnean Society, which was held on 
 ist July, 1858. l Hooker says that the interest excited 
 was intense, but no discussion, only desultory talk, 
 " with bated breath," followed the reading, and the 
 matter caused no commotion outside a limited circle. 
 Huxley does not appear to have been present, and 
 it is doubtful if he knew aught of the proceedings 
 save by hearsay. For, writing to Hooker on 5th 
 September, 1858, he says, "Wallace's impetus seems 
 to have set Darwin going in earnest, and I am re- 
 joiced to hear we shall learn his views in full, at last. 
 I look forward to a great revolution being effected." 2 
 And, in his lecture " On the Persistent Types of 
 Animal Life," delivered at the Royal Institution on 
 3d June, 1859, tnere is no reference to the Darwin- 
 Wallace theory, only allusion to the 
 
 hypothesis which supposes the species of living beings 
 living at any time to be the result of the gradual modi- 
 fication of preexisting species a hypothesis which, 
 though unproven and sadly damaged by some of its 
 supporters, is yet the only one to which physiology 
 lends any countenance. 3 
 
 He was not a convert till the book appeared. 
 " What will Huxley say ? " is the burden of Darwin's 
 
 1 An excellent abstract of the joint Memoir is given by Professor 
 E. B. Poulton in his Charles Darwin, pp. 65-78. 
 
 2 1. 159. 3 Scient. Memoirs, ii. p. 90.
 
 100 HUXLEY 
 
 letters. " I am intensely curious to hear Huxley's 
 opinion of my book." " If I can convert Huxley I 
 shall be content." "I long to hear what Huxley 
 thinks." l Ten days after this, in a letter dated 23d 
 November, 1859, Huxley, to whom an advance copy 
 had been sent, tells Darwin that he is " prepared to 
 go to the stake, if requisite," for the doctrine of 
 natural selection, and, scenting the battle from afar, 
 adds: "I am sharpening up my claws and beak in 
 readiness for defense of the 4 noble book.' " Darwin 
 was made happy. He had converted the chief of 
 doubters, to whom he replied : " Like a good 
 Catholic who has received extreme unction, I can 
 now sing 4 Nunc dimitlis.' I should have been more 
 than contented with one quarter of what you have 
 said." 2 
 
 Huxley was satisfied that Darwin " had demon- 
 strated a true cause for the production of species." 
 In a course of lectures to working men delivered in 
 1863, he said : 
 
 I really believe that the alternative is either Dar- 
 winism or nothing, for I do not know of any rational 
 conception or theory of the organic universe which 
 has any scientific position at all beside Mr. Darwin's. 
 
 1 Life and Letters, ii. pp. 176, 221, 225. What Huxley did 
 think, after mastering the central idea of the book, was, "How 
 extremely stupid not to have thought of that ! " /<*., p. 197. 
 
 /., p. 232.
 
 THE INTERPRETER IOI 
 
 . . . Whatever may be the objections to his views, 
 certainly all other theories are absolutely out of court. 1 
 
 But doubting, as was his wont, " whatever could 
 be doubted," he was not satisfied that the evidence 
 was in all respects complete. He held that full proof 
 would be obtained only when experiments in selective 
 breeding from a common stock resulted in the pro- 
 duction of varieties more or less infertile with one 
 another. In his article on the " Origin of Species " 
 in the Westminster Review of April, 1860, he says: 
 
 After much consideration, and with assuredly no 
 bias against Mr. Darwin's views, it is our clear con- 
 viction that, as the evidence stands, it is not absolutely 
 proven that a group of animals, having all the char- 
 acters exhibited by species in nature, has ever been 
 originated by selection, whether artificial or natural. 
 Groups having the morphological character of species 
 distinct and permanent races, in fact have been so 
 produced over and over again ; but there is no posi- 
 tive evidence at present that any group of animals 
 has, by variation and selective breeding, given rise to 
 another group which was even in the least degree in- 
 fertile with the first. Mr. Darwin is perfectly aware 
 of this weak point, and brings forward a number of 
 ingenious and important arguments to diminish the 
 force of the objection. We admit the value of these 
 arguments to their fullest extent nay, we will go so 
 far as to express our belief that experiments conducted 
 by a skilful physiologist (" instead of by a mere breeder," 
 he adds in a letter to Darwin 2 ), would very probably 
 obtain the desired production of mutually more or 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, ii. p. 467. 2 I. 195 ; and cf. ib., 239. 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORN& 
 SANXA
 
 102 HUXLEY 
 
 less infertile breeds from a common stock in a com- 
 paratively few years. But still, as the case stands at 
 present, this " little rift within the lute " is not to be 
 disguised or overlooked. 1 
 
 Twenty-seven years afterwards, Huxley referred to 
 the insecurity of the logical foundation as remaining 
 in the absence of experiments with the results de- 
 manded; nevertheless, in the last speech which he 
 delivered in public, a few months before his death, he 
 expressed his unshaken belief in the theory 
 
 propounded by Mr. Darwin thirty-four years ago as 
 the only hypothesis at present put before us which 
 has a sound scientific foundation. 2 
 
 It may not be out of place to quote some suggestive 
 observations on Huxley's contention from an article 
 on the Life and Letters in a recent number of his 
 whilom antagonist, but now appreciative, if not 
 whole-hearted, disciple, the Quarterly Review : 
 
 It is not difficult to understand the mutual sterility 
 of natural species as an incidental result of their 
 separation for an immense period of time. In the 
 process of fertilisation a portion of a single cell- 
 nucleus from one individual fuses with a portion from 
 another individual, the two combining to form the 
 complete nucleus of the first cell of the offspring, 
 from which all the countless cells of the future in- 
 dividual will arise by division. Each part-nucleus 
 contains the whole of the hereditary qualities re- 
 
 i Cell. Essays, ii. p. 75. 1 1. 389.
 
 THE INTERPRETER $03 
 
 ceived from and through its respective parent, and 
 must therefore be of inconceivable complexity. We 
 can only speak in generalities of processes of which 
 so little is known j but we cannot be wrong in as- 
 suming that sterility is sometimes due to the fact that 
 the complexity of the one part-nucleus fails in some 
 way to suit the complexity of the other. 
 The length of time required for mutual sterility to be 
 complete may be inferred from the fact that entirely 
 distinct, but closely related, species are still partially 
 fertile in that they can produce hybrid offspring. 
 When our domestic breeds of pigeons have been en- 
 tirely prevented from interbreeding for some immense 
 period of time, we may expect that they too will only 
 produce sterile hybrids, and, later still, not even these. 
 At present the majority of these breeds are not every- 
 where rigidly prevented from interbreeding, so that an 
 approximation to natural species-formation has not 
 even begun. There are others, however, such as the 
 most widely different breeds of dogs, in which the di- 
 vergence in size is so extreme that interbreeding has 
 probably been a mechanical impossibility for some 
 considerable time. 1 
 
 Huxley's letters express dissent from the so-called 
 " Neo-Lamarckian " school, represented by Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer, which contends that the use and 
 disuse of organs, together with the action of sur- 
 roundings, produce modifications of structure which 
 are transmitted to offspring. There are no specific 
 references to Professor Weismann's Essays in Heredity 
 (1883), in which, representing the so-called " Neo- 
 Darwinian " school, natural selection, acting on 
 
 January, 1901, pp. 269, 271.
 
 104 HUXLEY 
 
 favourable variations, is held to be all-sufficient for 
 the production of new species ; but, in June, 1886, 
 Huxley wrote to Mr. Spencer as follows : 
 
 Mind, I have no a priori objection to the transmis- 
 sion of functional modifications whatever. In fact, 
 as I told you, I should rather like it to be true. 
 
 But I argued against the assumption (with Dar- 
 win, as I do with you) of the operation of a factor 
 which, if you will forgive me for saying so, seems as 
 far off support by trustworthy evidence now as ever 
 it was. 1 
 
 To Mr. Platt Ball he wrote in 1890: 
 
 I absolutely disbelieve in use-inheritance as the 
 evidence stands. Spencer is bound to it a priori his 
 psychology goes to pieces without it. 2 
 
 Huxley's researches in palaeontology and embry- 
 ology strengthened 'his conviction that " if all the 
 conceptions promulgated in the Origin of Species which 
 are peculiarly Darwinian were swept away, the theory 
 of evolution of plants and animals would not be in 
 the slightest degree shaken." s For him the im- 
 portance of that book lay in its influence beyond the 
 limits of its theory, which dealt only with living 
 things. This is put with his usual clearness and 
 vigour in his chapter on its reception in Darwin's 
 Life and Letters, and explains his place as foremost 
 champion : 
 
 >II. 133. II. 268. Nature, 1st Nov., 1894.
 
 THE INTERPRETER IO5 
 
 The oldest of all philosophies was bound hand 
 and foot, and cast into utter darkness, during the 
 millennium of theological scholasticism. But Dar- 
 win poured new life-blood into the ancient frame ; 
 the bonds burst, and the revivified thought of ancient 
 Greece has proved itself to be a more adequate ex- 
 pression of the universal order of things than any of 
 the schemes which have been accepted by the credu- 
 lity, and welcomed by the superstition, of seventy later 
 generations of men. 
 
 To any one who studies the signs of the times, the 
 emergence of the philosophy of Evolution, in the at- 
 titude of claimant to the throne of the world of 
 thought, from the limbo of hatred, and, as many 
 hoped, forgotten things, is the most portentous event 
 of the nineteenth century. But the most effective 
 weapons of the modern champions of Evolution 
 were fabricated by Darwin ; and the Origin of Species 
 has enlisted a formidable body of combatants, trained 
 in the severe school of Physical Science, whose ears 
 might have long remained deaf to the speculations of 
 a priori philosophers. 1 
 
 In this same chapter Huxley makes a short refer- 
 ence, as to a storm whose tumult has long been 
 stilled, leaving only a ground-swell, to the " years 
 which had to pass away before misrepresentation, 
 ridicule, and denunciation ceased to be the most 
 notable constituents of the majority of the multi- 
 tudinous criticisms of the Origin of Species" What 
 he touches upon with brevity need not be amplified 
 
 'II. p. 1 80; and cf. Coll. Essays, i. p. 43; ix. p. 104. "Clas- 
 sical history is a part of modern history : it is medieval history 
 which is ancient." Bagehot's Physics and Politics, p. 169.
 
 106 HUXLEY 
 
 here. It would fail to interest an age which, lightly 
 valuing the intellectual freedom won for it, but not 
 by it, is without enthusiasm, without aspiration, save 
 as these are moved by ignoble lust of empire or by 
 enervating craving after luxury ; an age in which 
 44 the coarsest political standard is undoubtingly and 
 finally applied over the whole realm of human 
 thought, ... in which the souls of men have 
 become void, while into the void have entered in 
 triumph the seven devils of Secularity." l 
 
 But the remnant who care to know through what 
 tribulation the fighters in the sixties entered the king- 
 dom of the free may be told that the battle was the 
 fiercer by reason of divisions in the camp of science, 
 whereas the theologians were a solid phalanx. True 
 it is that one of the earliest converts to Darwinism 
 was a clerical ornithologist, Canon Tristram (still 
 with us), who applied the theory of natural selection 
 to explanation of the colours of birds of the Sahara. 
 Charles Kingsley, too, was sympathetic; but these 
 were as men "born out of due time." Owen's 
 malignant attitude has had reference; Sir John 
 Herschel said that natural selection was " the law of 
 higgledy-piggledy," the exact meaning of which, 
 Darwin confessed, puzzled him, as well it might; 
 Adam Sedgwick read parts of the book with " abso- 
 1 On Compromise, by John Morley, pp. 14, 37.
 
 THE INTERPRETER IOJ 
 
 lute sorrow, as false and grievously mischievous." 
 But he hoped to meet Darwin " in heaven." 
 Whewell's opposition took the form of refusing the 
 Origin of Species a place in the library of Trinity 
 College ; Lyell at first, and Carpenter, with others, 
 throughout, accepted with reservations; while the 
 tone of the more intellectual organs was reflected in 
 the Atbenceum, for long years an anti-Darwinian 
 journal. Touching on the theological issues in- 
 volved, it committed Darwin " to the tender mercies 
 of the Divinity Hall, the College, the Lecture-room, 
 and the Museum." 
 
 On both sides of the Atlantic the drum ecclesiastic 
 was beaten in pulpits where, needless to say, 
 vituperative rhetoric did duty for argument ; preachers 
 in cathedrals and little Bethels were at one in con- 
 demnation of a " brutal philosophy " whose success 
 meant the denial of Scripture and the dethronement 
 of God ; while Episcopacy voiced itself through the 
 Bishop of Oxford's philippic in the Quarterly Review, 
 which, albeit inspired by Owen, exhibited " pre- 
 posterous incapacity " in dealing with elementary 
 biology. 
 
 There was only one man qualified to take up the 
 gauntlet. Huxley's prominence as the most capable 
 interpreter and best-equipped defender of the 
 Darwinian theory dates from the British Association
 
 1O8 HUXLEY 
 
 Meeting of 1860. Apropos of some friction with 
 Owen in 1852, he said, in a letter to his sister, that 
 he was " quite ready to fight half-a-dozen dragons." 
 He was then writing for his living, and, referring to 
 his jealous rival's " bitter pen," he adds, " I flatter 
 myself that, on occasion, I can match him in that 
 department. ' Eight years after, the serious issues 
 between himself and the anti-Darwinians, added to 
 his eagerness for the fray unguibus et rostra. This 
 was gratified by the opportunity for exercise of a pen 
 never dipped in malice. By a happy chance the 
 columns of the Times were opened to him for a 
 review of the Origin of Species. The book had been 
 sent to Mr. Lucas, a member of the staff, who " was 
 as innocent of any knowledge of science as a babe," 
 and who, at the suggestion of a friend, passed-on the 
 copy to Huxley, stipulating only that he should pref- 
 ace the article with a few sentences. The review 
 appeared on 26th December, 1859, an ^ thereby 
 Huxley secured the aid of the then influential paper 
 in " giving the book a fair start with the multitudi- 
 nous readers of the leading journal " " the educated 
 mob who derive their ideas from the Times" as he 
 said in a letter to Hooker. 2 The review is reprinted 
 in the second volume of Collected Essays, in which, 
 under the title " Darwiniana," are included allied 
 'I- 98. *i. 177.
 
 THE INTERPRETER lOQ 
 
 articles expository of the doctrine of natural selec- 
 tion, which had appeared in serials or were based 
 upon popular lectures. They were needed, since 
 u exposition was not Darwin's forte, and his English 
 is sometimes wonderful." l 
 
 The Origin of Species is not easy reading. Thirty 
 years after its publication, when Huxley, of all men, 
 might have been expected to have mastered it from 
 title to colophon, he said in a letter to Hooker, " It is 
 one of the hardest books to understand thoroughly 
 that I know of." 2 
 
 Darwin, recluse by temperament and frail health, 
 content, in the quiet of his Kentish home, to continue 
 his work of collecting and verifying, was no con- 
 troversialist. Hence the preaching of the new doc- 
 trine and the fighting for it fell to " my general 
 agent," 3 as he called Huxley ; to " Darwin's bull- 
 dog," as Huxley called himself. 4 Not returning rail- 
 ing for railing, but fact-supported argument for 
 epithet ; albeit sometimes answering " a fool accord- 
 ing to his folly," Huxley made it his chief business to 
 enlarge to the full the hint which, at the end of the 
 Origin of Species, Darwin threw out in a brief sen- 
 tence : " Much light will be thrown on the origin of 
 man and his history." Darwin's desire not to unduly 
 
 'II. 190- II. 192. 
 
 'Darwin's Life and Letters, ii. p. 251. * I. 363.
 
 HO HUXLEY 
 
 prejudice the minds of readers to whom his theory 
 was wholly new by too plain an indication of its 
 bearing, and his anxiety to advance no statement with- 
 out complete investment of fact, explain his reticence. 
 But it needed no great acuteness on the part of a 
 critical reader to see that the subject could not be 
 thus selvedged. The Descent of Man was the logical 
 supplement to the Origin of Species ; but it was not 
 published until 1871. Explaining in 1894 the posi- 
 tion which he took up in 1860, Huxley says: 
 
 Among the many problems which came under my 
 consideration, the position of the human species in 
 zoological classification was one of the most serious. 
 Indeed, at that time it was a burning question, in the 
 sense that those who touched it were almost certain 
 to burn their fingers severely. . . . Even among 
 those who considered man from the point of view, 
 not of vulgar prejudice, but of science, opinions lay 
 poles asunder. Linnaeus had taken one view, Cuvier 
 another ; and among my senior contemporaries, men 
 like Lyell, regarded by many as revolutionaries of the 
 deepest dye, were strongly opposed to anything which 
 tended to break down the barrier between man and 
 the rest of the animal world. 
 
 Huxley then refers to his own hesitation upon the 
 matter, until Owen's assertion as to certain funda- 
 mental differences of structure in the brain of man 
 and ape ' led him to reinvestigate the subject, with 
 the result that he was satisfied as to the structures in 
 1 Ante, p. 1 8.
 
 THE INTERPRETER III 
 
 question not being peculiar to man, " but shared by 
 him with all the higher, and many of the lower apes." 
 Matters were at this point when the Origin of 
 Species appeared. 
 
 The weighty sentence, " Light will be thrown on 
 the origin of man and his history," was not only in 
 full harmony with the conclusions at which I had ar- 
 rived, but was strongly supported by them. And in- 
 asmuch as Development and Vertebrate Anatomy 
 were not among Mr. Darwin's many specialities, it 
 appeared to me that I should not be intruding on the 
 ground he had made his own if I discussed this part 
 of the general question. In fact, I thought that I 
 might probably serve the cause of Evolution by doing 
 
 In the spring of 1861 he gave a course of weekly 
 lectures to working men, " On the Relation of Man 
 to the rest of the Animal Kingdom." This was fol- 
 lowed by an invitation from the Philosophical In- 
 stitution of Edinburgh to deliver two lectures upon 
 the same subject. As " it was only a few years since 
 that the electors to the Chair of Natural History in a 
 famous northern university had refused to invite a 
 very distinguished man to occupy it because he advo- 
 cated the doctrine of the diversity of species of man- 
 kind," Huxley was not prepared for the applause 
 with which the Edinburgh audience greeted the state- 
 ment that he entertained " no doubt of the origin of 
 UI. 178.
 
 112 HUXLEY 
 
 man from the same stock as the apes." But there 
 were shouts of dissent outside the lecture hall. The 
 local press was furious at the reception accorded to 
 that " anti-scriptural and most debasing theory, . . . 
 standing in blasphemous contradiction to Biblical nar- 
 rative and doctrine." There should have been deep 
 resentment at this " foul outrage committed upon 
 them individually and upon the whole species as 
 4 made in the likeness of God,' by deserting the hall 
 in a body, or using some more emphatic form of 
 protest against the corruption of youth by the vilest 
 and beastliest paradox ever vented in ancient or 
 modern times amongst Pagans or Christians." l Thus 
 wrote the Witness, invective, as usual, doing duty for 
 argument; while the Scotsman, as Huxley told Dar- 
 win, was "more scurrilously personal, and more 
 foolish." 
 
 The two sets of lectures formed the basis of Evi- 
 dence as to Man's Place in Nature, published in 1863. 
 The third section of the book dealt with the question 
 of fossil human remains, concerning which Lyell had 
 asked for information when preparing his Antiquity of 
 Man. Well anathematised by the reviewers, the 
 "old stupid Athen&um" as Darwin called it, telling 
 its readers that " LyelPs object is to make man old, 
 Huxley's to degrade him," the book had an imme- 
 I. 194-
 
 THE INTERPRETER 113 
 
 diate success. It remains a classic on the subject, 
 because, as Mr. Chalmers Mitchell remarks, "the ad- 
 vance of knowledge has only added to the details of 
 the argument ; it has not made any reconstruction of 
 it necessary." l 
 
 An outline of the chapter describing the manlike 
 apes, and explaining the likenesses and differences be- 
 tween them and man, may help to make clear how 
 inevitable was a controversy in which Huxley took 
 the chief part. 
 
 It is obvious that, in any classification of animals 
 founded on external resemblances, both empiric and ex- 
 pert would agree in grouping the monkeys, those 
 " blurred copies," often caricatures, of man, with him. 
 And " the great lawgiver of systematic zoology," 
 Linnaeus, places man and the four anthropoid or man- 
 like apes the chimpanzee, gorilla, orang-utan, and 
 gibbon at the head of the Primates, the name given 
 by him to the highest members of the Vertebrate 
 class. The chimpanzee and gorilla are sometimes 
 grouped as of the same genus, but the orang-utan and 
 gibbon are undoubtedly distinct genera. They are 
 found only in the old world the chimpanzee and 
 gorilla inhabiting tropical Africa, and the orang-utan 
 and gibbon southeastern Asia and the Malay Archi- 
 pelago. They are tailless, semi-erect, long-armed, 
 
 1 Thomas Henry Huxley, p. 185.
 
 114 HUXLEY 
 
 the aperture of the nostrils pointing downwards, 
 whence the term catarrhine ; they are arboreal in their 
 habits, and, mainly, vegetarians. 
 
 The Chimpanzee is about five feet in height, nearly 
 black, like the negro, has arms which reach below the 
 knee, and a slightly curved back-bone. (The S-like 
 shape of man's back-bone is one of the cooperating 
 causes of his erect position, stability being thereby 
 given to the structure, so that nine times as great a 
 vertical force is required to bend it as if it had been 
 straight. The back-bone of the savage is less curved 
 than that of civilised man.) The chimpanzee has 
 one pair of ribs more than man. The feet are flat- 
 soled, and shorter than the hands, and have an oppo- 
 sable toe, which, in all the anthropoids, acts as a 
 thumb, the feet being used for climbing and grasping. 
 The fingers of the hand are long and powerful, but 
 the thumb is smaller than that of a man, with the 
 lines and furrows on whose hand those on the hand 
 of the ape correspond. The impostors who ply the 
 trade of palmistry may note this fact, either for the 
 purpose of reading the fate and fortune of the an- 
 thropoids, or, what would be equally reasonable in the 
 case of their dupes, determining the future of these 
 from the creases in their trousers. The skull of the 
 chimpanzee approximates nearest among the anthro- 
 poids to man's, and the brain, which is half the size
 
 THE INTERPRETER 115 
 
 of his, has the same ridges or convolutions, although, 
 in proportion, these are simpler and larger. The 
 number of teeth in man and the manlike apes is the 
 same, but in the latter the canines are longer. The 
 chimpanzee makes its nest in trees, swinging from 
 branch to branch to a great distance, and leaping with 
 astonishing agility. " It is not unusual to see the l old 
 folks ' sitting under a tree regaling themselves with 
 fruit and friendly chat, while their t children ' are 
 leaping around them, and swinging from tree to tree 
 with boisterous merriment." 1 
 
 The Gorilla is the largest and most savage of the 
 four. It is about five feet and a half in height ; its 
 body is massive and powerful, and covered with coarse 
 black hair. The arms reach to the middle of the leg, 
 and, of all the anthropoids, the feet and hands most 
 approximate to those of man. It has very long 
 canine teeth, although these are relatively smaller than 
 in the primitive mammal. Its ponderous body renders 
 it less agile for arboreal life, hence it dwells chiefly on 
 the ground, resting its arms on the knuckles of the 
 hands as it shambles along in a half-swinging motion. 
 The gorillas live in bands, but are not so numerous 
 as the chimpanzees : the females generally exceed the 
 males in number. " My informants all agree in the 
 assertion that but one adult male is seen in a band ; 
 
 1 Dr. Savage, quoted in Man's Place in Nature, p. 43 (1863).
 
 II 6 HUXLEY 
 
 that when the young males grow up a contest takes 
 place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and 
 driving out the others, establishes himself as the head 
 of the community." 1 
 
 The Orang-utan is about four feet in height. Its 
 body is bulky and powerful, and reddish-brown in 
 colour, like that of the Malay native. The back-bone 
 is slightly curved ; the feet are longer than the hands, 
 and the arms reach to the ankles. Its brain approxi- 
 mates nearest of all the anthropoids to that of man in 
 structure and appearance. It is a slow and cautious 
 climber, but on all-fours it can, for a time, outstrip a 
 man in running. Like the gorilla, it defends itself 
 with its hands. It is wholly arboreal, making nests 
 for itself and family, the young remaining for some 
 time under the mother's protection. In reading Dr. 
 Alfred Russel Wallace's account of a baby orang- 
 utan, the late John Fiske was struck by the fact that 
 it had an infancy which is a great deal longer than 
 that of some lower mammals, but which was very 
 brief compared with that of the period of human in- 
 fancy. Twenty-five centuries ago Anaximander re- 
 marked that " while other animals quickly find food 
 for themselves, man alone requires a prolonged period 
 of suckling." Looking at this fact under the light of 
 evolution, the theory suggested itself to Mr. Fiske 
 1 Alan's Plate in Nature, p. 49.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 1IJ 
 
 that the comparatively long duration of human in- 
 fancy is a condition of human intelligence, the period, 
 moreover, being longer in the civilised man than in 
 the savage. While in all other animals, in descend- 
 ing scale, little remains to be developed after birth, in 
 man it is precisely the reverse. The period during 
 which he remains helpless or dependent upon others 
 fills a large portion of his life. Puppies, kittens, and 
 colts are born fully equipped with all the nervous ap- 
 paratus by which they can shift for themselves : they 
 have nothing to learn from, or to add to, the stock of 
 inherited qualities. One generation succeeds another 
 in unprogressive monotony. Whereas, in man, the 
 period during which the nerve-connections and their 
 correlative associations necessary for self-maintenance 
 are being formed lengthens as intelligence becomes 
 more complex. From this much of great import fol- 
 lows. For it is this long, helpless period of human 
 infancy, involving dependence on the parents, which 
 begets the solicitude, the sympathy, and the self-de- 
 nial of which the strands of family life are woven. 
 Carried further, there is the development of those re- 
 gardful feelings for others, and of that self-restraint, 
 which results in the extension of the family unit to 
 the social unit, all which lie at the base of ethics. 
 
 The Gibbon, smallest and gentlest of the four, is 
 about three feet in height. Its arms touch the ground
 
 Il8 HUXLEY 
 
 when it is erect ; the soles of the feet turn inward, a 
 feature explained by their arboreal functions, and con- 
 cerning which Professor Osborn reports a droll re- 
 mark of Huxley's. He said, u When a fond mother 
 calls upon me to admire her baby, I never fail to re- 
 spond ; and while cooing appropriately, I take ad- 
 vantage of any opportunity to gently ascertain 
 whether the soles of its feet turn in, and tend to sup- 
 port my theory of arboreal descent." l The chest of 
 the gibbon approximates nearest to that of man's, and 
 it has callosities or sitting-pads on the buttocks. It 
 can run for some distance on its feet, but it lives in 
 tall trees, and is a rapid leaper, springing as much as 
 forty feet from tree to tree. Like the chimpanzee, it 
 fights with its teeth. 
 
 In contrast and resemblance to these four anthro- 
 poid apes is man^ " erect and featherless biped," be- 
 tween whom and his semi-erect and hairy congeners 
 there is no fundamental differences in structure, the 
 variations being no greater than in any other allied 
 group of animals. It is true that no anatomist could 
 mistake the bones of a man for those of a gorilla ; 
 but the differences between the one and the other are 
 less than those between a gorilla and the lowest Pri- 
 mates, say, a lemur. Like all other animals, the Pri- 
 mates originate from a fertilised egg-cell ; the primor- 
 1 II. 424-
 
 THE INTERPRETER IIQ 
 
 dial germ of a man, a dog, a bird, a fish, a beetle, a 
 snail, and a polyp being in no essentially structural 
 respects distinguishable. Like all other vertebrates, 
 the Primates pass through a period of embryonic de- 
 velopment, in which the resemblances to one another 
 are so closely the same both in outward and inward 
 form and essentials of structure 
 
 that the differences between them are inconsiderable, 
 while, in their subsequent course, they diverge more 
 and more widely from one another. And it is a gen- 
 eral law, that the more closely any animals resemble 
 one another in adult structure, the longer and the 
 more intimately do their embryos resemble one an- 
 other ; so that, for example, the embryos of a Snake 
 and of a Lizard remain like one another longer than 
 do those of a Snake and of a Bird ; and the embryos 
 of a Dog and of a Cat remain like one another for a 
 far longer period than do those of a Dog and of a 
 Bird, or of a Dog and an Opossum, or even than those 
 of a Dog and a Monkey. 
 
 Thus the study of development affords a clear test 
 of closeness of structural affinity, and one turns with 
 impatience to inquire what results are yielded by the 
 study of the development of Man. Is he something 
 apart ? Does he originate in a totally different way 
 from Dog, Bird, Frog, and Fish, thus justifying those 
 who assert him to have no place in nature and no real 
 affinity with the lower world of animal life ? Or 
 does he originate in a similar germ, pass through the 
 same slow and gradually progressive modification 
 depend upon the same contrivances for protection and 
 nutrition, and finally enter the world by the help of the 
 same mechanism ? The reply is not doubtful for a 
 moment, and has not been doubtful any time these
 
 120 HUXLEY 
 
 thirty years. Without question, the mode of origin 
 and the early stages of the development of man are 
 identical with those of the animals immediately below 
 him in the scale : without a doubt, in these respects, 
 he is far nearer the Apes than the Apes are to the 
 
 Identical in the physical processes by which he 
 originates identical in the early stages of his forma- 
 tion identical in the mode of his nutrition, before 
 and after birth, with the animals which lie immedi- 
 ately below him in the scale Man, if his adult and 
 perfect structure be compared with theirs, exhibits, as 
 might be expected, a marvellous likeness of organ- 
 isation. He resembles them as they resemble one 
 another he differs from them as they differ from one 
 another. And though these differences and resem- 
 blances cannot be weighed and measured, their value 
 may be readily estimated, the scale or standard of 
 judgment, touching that value, being afforded and ex- 
 pressed by the system of classification of animals now 
 current among zoologists. 1 
 
 In his general organisation man is most nearly 
 allied to the Chimpanzee or the Gorilla (in mental 
 capacity the Chimpanzee appears to be the nearer), 
 and for the purposes of comparison, Huxley chose 
 the Gorilla as " a brute now so celebrated in prose 
 and verse " that " all must have formed some concep- 
 tion of his appearance." In dealing with the most 
 important points of difference between Man and 
 Gorilla, he also contrasted the differences which 
 separate the Gorilla from other Primates. 
 1 Man's Place in Nature, pp. 67, 68.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 121 
 
 The differences in the body and limbs of Man and 
 Gorilla at once strike the eye. The trunk of the 
 latter is larger, the lower limbs shorter, the upper 
 limbs longer, and the brain-case smaller, than in Man. 
 In the " nobler and more characteristic organ," the 
 skull, the differences are " immense." The face of 
 the Gorilla has massive jaw-bones and predominates 
 over the brain-case ; in Man these proportions are 
 reversed. The surface of the human skull is com- 
 paratively smooth, the brow prominences or ridges 
 project very little ; in the Gorilla " vast crests are 
 developed upon the skull, and the brow-ridges over- 
 hang the cavernous orbits like great pent-houses. 
 The smallest cranium observed in any race of Man 
 measures 63 cubic inches ; while the most capacious 
 Gorilla skull measures not more than 34^ cubic 
 inches. Striking as are these differences, their force 
 is somewhat impaired in view of the differences be- 
 tween men themselves. The difference in the volume 
 of the cranial cavity of the various races of mankind 
 is far greater, absolutely, than that between the lowest 
 Man and the highest Ape, while,. relatively, it is about 
 the same. For the largest human skull contained 114 
 cubic inches that is to say, had very nearly double 
 the capacity of the smallest while its absolute pre- 
 ponderance of 51 cubic inches is far greater than 
 that by which the lowest adult male human cranium
 
 122 HUXLEY 
 
 surpasses the largest of the gorillas. After making 
 all due allowance for difference of size, the cranial 
 capacities of some of the lower apes fall nearly as 
 much, relatively, below those of the higher apes as 
 the latter fall below man. Thus, even in the im- 
 portant matter of cranial capacity, Men differ more 
 widely from one another than they do from the Apes ; 
 while the .lowest Apes differ as much, in proportion, 
 from the highest, as "the latter does from Man." l 
 " What is true of these leading characteristics of the 
 skull holds good, as may be imagined, of all minor 
 features ; so that for every difference between the 
 Gorilla's skull and the Man's, a similar constant 
 difference of the same order (that is to say, consisting 
 in excess or defect of the same quality) may be found 
 between the Gorilla's skull and that of some other 
 Ape. So that, for the skull, no less than for the 
 skeleton in general, the proposition holds good, that 
 the differences between Man and the Gorilla are of 
 smaller value than those between the Gorilla and 
 some other Apes." 2 
 
 Reference has been made more than once to 
 Owen's assertion that certain cerebral structures the 
 posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippo- 
 campus minor are peculiar to man, and to the evi- 
 
 1 Man's Place in Nature, p. 78. 
 Man's Place in Nature, p. 8l.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 123 
 
 dence adduced by Huxley, Flower, and other com- 
 parative anatomists in disproof of this, and if any 
 justification of Huxley's denial of Owen's contention 
 was needed, this will be found in Professor D. J. 
 Cunningham's address to the Anthropological section 
 of the British Association meeting of 1901. He 
 says : 
 
 To us, at the present time, it is difficult to con- 
 ceive how it was ever possible to doubt that the 
 occipital lobe was a distinctive character of the simian 
 brain as well as of the human brain, and yet at suc- 
 cessive meetings of the Association (1860, 1861, and 
 1862), a discussion, which was probably one of the 
 most heated in the course of its history, took place on 
 this very point. In the light of our present knowl- 
 edge we could fully understand Professor Huxley 
 closing the discussion by stating that the question had 
 "become one of personal veracity." Indeed, the 
 occipital lobe, so far from being absent, was developed 
 in the ape to a relatively greater extent than in man, 
 and this constituted one of the leading positive dis- 
 tinctive characters of the simian cerebrum. ' 
 
 The advance in degree of complexity of brain- 
 structure is traceable along the whole series of 
 animals. In the Invertebrates the brain is a mass 
 of nerve-ganglia near the head end of the body ; in 
 the lowest Vertebrate, the fish, it is very small, com- 
 pared with the spinal cord ; in reptiles its mass in- 
 creases ; and in birds it is still more marked. " The 
 1 Times, Sept. 14, 1901.
 
 124 HUXLEY 
 
 brain of the lowest Mammals, such as the duck-billed 
 Platypus and the Opossums and Kangaroos, exhibits 
 a still more definite advance in the same direction." 
 A step higher in the scale, among the placental Mam- 
 mals, the cerebral structure acquires a vast modifica- 
 tion in the appearance of a new structure between 
 the two halves of the brain, connecting them 
 together. 
 
 In the lower and smaller forms of placental 
 Mammals the surface of the cerebral hemispheres is 
 either smooth or evenly rounded, or exhibits a very 
 few grooves, which are technically termed " sulci," 
 separating ridges or " convolutions " of the substance 
 of the brain, and the smaller species of all orders 
 tend to a similar smoothness of brain. But, in the 
 higher orders, and especially the larger members of 
 these orders, the grooves or sulci become extremely 
 numerous, and the intermediate convolutions pro- 
 portionately more complicated in their meanderings, 
 until, in the Elephant, trie Porpoise, the higher Apes, 
 and Man, the cerebral surface appears a perfect 
 labyrinth of tortuous foldings. 1 . . . The sur- 
 face of the brain of a monkey exhibits a sort of 
 skeleton map of man's, and in the manlike apes the 
 details become more and more filled in until it is only 
 in minor characters, such as the greater excavation 
 of the anterior lobes, the constant presence of fissures 
 usually absent in man, and the different disposition 
 and proportions of some convolutions that the 
 Chimpanzee's or the Orang's brain can be structurally 
 distinguished from Man's. 2 
 
 1 Man's Place in Nature, p. 96. 
 Jfa's Place in Nature, p. 100.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 125 
 
 It must not be overlooked, however, that there is a 
 very striking difference in absolute mass and weight 
 between the lowest human brain and that of the 
 highest ape, a difference which is all the more re- 
 markable when we recollect that a full-grown Gorilla is 
 probably pretty nearly twice as heavy as a Bosjes man, 
 or as many a European woman. It may be doubted 
 whether a healthy human adult brain ever weighed 
 less than 31 or 32 ounces, or that the heaviest gorilla 
 brain has exceeded 20 ounces. This is a very note- 
 worthy circumstance, and doubtless will one day help 
 to furnish an explanation of the great gulf which in- 
 tervenes between the lowest man and the highest 
 ape in intellectual power; but it has little systematic 
 value, for the simple reason that, as may be concluded 
 from what has been already said respecting cranial 
 capacity, the difference in weight of brain between 
 the highest and the lowest men is far greater, both 
 relatively and absolutely, than that between the lowest 
 man and the highest ape. The latter, as has been 
 seen, is represented by, say, 12 ounces of cerebral 
 substance absolutely, or by 32 : 20 relatively ; but as 
 the largest recorded human brain weighed between 65 
 and 66 ounces, the former difference is represented by 
 more than 33 ounces absolutely, or by 65 : 32 
 relatively. Regarded systematically, the cerebral 
 differences of man and apes are not of more than 
 generic value his family distinction resting chiefly 
 on his dentition, his pelvis, and his lower limbs. 
 
 Thus, whatever system of organs be studied, the 
 comparison of their modifications in the ape series 
 leads to one and the same result that the structural 
 differences which separate Man from the Gorilla and 
 the Chimpanzee are not so great as those which 
 separate the gorilla from the lower apes. 1 
 
 1 It., p. 103.
 
 126 HUXLEY 
 
 After thus showing that no line of separation can 
 be drawn between man and the animals beneath him, 
 structurally considered, Huxley added his " belief that 
 the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally 
 futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and 
 of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life." f 
 
 For, in all the higher mammals, the structure and 
 functions of the nervous system are, fundamentally, 
 the same ; in the minutest microscopical details, the 
 sense-organs, the nerves, and spinal cord, and the 
 brain of a dog, an elephant, and an ape correspond to 
 the same organs in man. If any part of the mental 
 apparatus is injured or thrown out of gear, the result 
 is the same in each case functional disturbance or 
 suspense. The dog and the horse behave as we be- 
 have ; nor can this be otherwise, since their sense- 
 organs report, of course with vast differences of re- 
 sult, to their central nervous systems the messages 
 that are transmitted by like apparatus to ours, and, 
 within the limits of their consciousness, they are af- 
 fected as we are affected, and their actions are ruled 
 accordingly. " If there is no ground for believing 
 that a dog thinks, neither is there any for believing 
 that he feels." To those familiar with the ways of 
 animals, there is no need to labour the point, and, 
 "in short," as Huxley says: 
 
 1 Man's Place in Nature, p. 109.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 127 
 
 It seems hard to assign any good reason for denying 
 to the higher animals any mental state, or process, in 
 which the employment of the vocal or visual symbols 
 of which language is composed is not involved; and 
 comparative psychology confirms the position in rela- 
 tion to the rest of the animal world assigned to man 
 by comparative anatomy. As comparative anatomy 
 is easily able to show that, physically, man is but the 
 last term of a long series of forms which lead, by 
 slow gradations, from the highest mammal to the al- 
 most formless speck of living protoplasm which lies 
 on the shadowy boundary between animal and 
 vegetable life ; so comparative psychology, though but 
 a young science, and far short of her elder sister's 
 growth, points to the same conclusion. 1 
 
 Nevertheless, the gulf which separates the man from 
 the ape and from animals whose intelligence excels 
 that of the ape, is vast and impassable. Its vastness 
 prevents some among the qualified few, and of course 
 the majority of the prejudiced or ill-informed, from 
 accepting the fact of a common origin of animal and 
 human mental faculties. Among those who walked 
 one mile with Darwin, but refused to go " twain," 
 the most notable is Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the 
 co-propounder of the theory of natural selection. 
 He contends that man's spiritual and intellectual na- 
 ture " must have had another origin, and for this 
 origin we can only find adequate cause in the unseen 
 universe of spirit." In like manner, the late Pro- 
 
 M 
 1 Coll. Essays, vi. p. 125.
 
 128 HUXLEY 
 
 fessor St. George Mivart, while admitting that man's 
 body u was evolved from preexisting material," as- 
 serted that " his soul was created in quite a different 
 way ... by the direct action of the Almighty." ' 
 And in a lecture on the functions of the brain, the 
 late Sir James Paget contended that man's possession 
 of reason and conscience 
 
 establish between him and the brutes a great differ- 
 ence, not in degree alone, but in kind. The spirit 
 differs from all the faculties in its independence of our 
 organisation, for it is exercised best in complete 
 abstraction from all that is sensible : it is wholly in- 
 dependent of the organisation of the brain, wholly 
 independent also of the education of the understand- 
 ing. 8 
 
 This was written in 1854, when psychology was at 
 the level represented by Dr. Carpenter, who was 
 satisfied that 
 
 There is an entity wherein man's nobility essentially 
 consists, which does not depend for its existence on 
 any play of physical or vital forces, but which makes 
 these forces subservient to its determination. 3 
 
 That Dr. Wallace accepts, with astounding cre- 
 dulity, the genuineness of the tricks of u spiritualist " 
 charlatans of the Eusapio Paladino type; that St. 
 George Mivart died, despite his treatment at the 
 
 1 Genesis of Species, p^325. * Memoir ; by his Son, p. 175. 
 
 Mental Physiology, p. 27.
 
 THE INTERPRETER I2Q 
 
 hands of his Church, a professed Catholic; that Sir 
 James Paget accepted, with never a doubt, the dogmas 
 of orthodoxy ; and that Dr. Carpenter was a Unita- 
 rian, goes far to explain the attitude of each. But, 
 surely, these opponents of the doctrine of continuity, 
 by which Evolution stands or falls, had they made 
 the effort, must have found it difficult to envisage the 
 moment of supernatural intervention in the history 
 of man when he passed from the mortal to the im- 
 mortal ; when the " entity " which was not of him 
 was injected into him. There is an inevitable vague- 
 ness in the words of each writer; but it must be as- 
 sumed that they all reject the old " preformation " 
 theory of Leibnitz and Haller, and agree as to the im- 
 portation of a separate " ens," or " being," into every 
 man of woman born, whereby the individual becomes 
 " a living soul." That being so, it is permissible to 
 ask at what stage of gestation or of subsequent de- 
 velopment the supernatural act of special creation, 
 for that is what it comes to, was effected ? It must 
 be admitted that, prior to this, man must be at least 
 potentially, if not, by reason of his slow develop- 
 ment, actually, an animal of highly equipped intel- 
 ligence. There is no need, in the common phrase, 
 to " pause for a reply," because no reply is possible. 
 A few words of Huxley's will, as usual, clear the 
 atmosphere of verbal fog :
 
 130 HUXLEY 
 
 No one who is cognisant of the facts of the case 
 nowadays doubts that the roots of psychology lie in the 
 physiology of the nervous system. What we call the 
 operations of the mind are functions of the brain, 
 and the materials of consciousness are products of 
 cerebral activity. Cabanis may have made use of 
 crude and misleading phraseology when he said that 
 the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile ; 
 but the conception which that much-abused phrase 
 embodies is, nevertheless, far more consistent with 
 fact than the popular notion that the mind is a 
 metaphysical entity seated in the head, but as inde- 
 pendent of the brain as a telegraph operator is of his 
 instrument. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to point out that the doctrine 
 just laid down is what is commonly called materialism. 
 But it is, nevertheless, true that the doctrine contains 
 nothing inconsistent with the purest idealism. For 
 as Hume remarks (as indeed Descartes had observed 
 long before) : " 'Tis not our body we perceive when 
 we regard our limbs and members, but certain im- 
 pressions which enter by the senses ; so that the as- 
 cribing a real and corporeal existence to these im- 
 pressions, or to their objects, is an act of the mind as 
 difficult to explain as that (the external existence of 
 objects) which we examine at present." Therefore, 
 if we analyse the proposition that all mental phenom- 
 ena are the effects or products of material phenom- 
 ena, all that it means amounts to this; that whenever 
 those states of consciousness which we call sensation, 
 or emotion, or thought come into existence, complete 
 investigation will show good reason for the belief that 
 they are preceded by those other phenomena of con- 
 sciousness to which we give the names of matter and 
 motion. All material changes appear, in the long- 
 run, to be modes of motion ; but our knowledge of 
 motion is nothing but that of a change in the place
 
 THE INTERPRETER 13! 
 
 and order of our sensations; just as our knowledge 
 of matter is restricted to those feelings of which we 
 assume it to be the cause. 1 
 
 Were it not, as Huxley says, that " the ignorance 
 of the so-called educated classes is colossal," there 
 might be need for apology in restatement of the fact 
 that man is not descended from the ape. The rela- 
 tionship between them is lateral, not lineal, both being 
 offshoots of the same stock, but each remaining, of 
 course in very different degrees of development, iso- 
 lated groups of mammals. The blood-relationship 
 of the two has naturally prompted the question as to 
 the missing link. A pertinent question, which has 
 partial answer in the fact that all intermediate forms 
 are, in virtue of their transitional character, the least 
 likely to survive, and in the further fact that the 
 chances against the preservation of any remains of 
 the progenitor of man and ape are as manifold as 
 those against the preservation of any fossils of ani- 
 mals of correspondingly small size. Even in the 
 period when rudely-fashioned stone tools and weapons 
 of undoubted human origin abound, the occurrence 
 of fragments of human skeletons is rare. In the 
 section on " Fossil Remains of Man " in Man's 
 Place in Nature Huxley discusses the value of the 
 evidence supplied by skulls found in various bone- 
 1 Coll. Essays, vi. pp. 94, 95.
 
 132 HUXLEY 
 
 caverns of Western Europe, discoveries to which 
 several important additions have been made since 
 1863. Comparing these with the skulls of the low- 
 est savages extant, notably the Australian aborigines, 
 he considered that we are not taken " appreciably 
 nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the modifica- 
 tion of which man has, probably, become what he 
 is." Where, then, he asks, "must we look for 
 primeval Man ? Was the oldest Homo sapiens plio- 
 cene or miocene, or yet more ancient ? In still older 
 strata do the fossilised bones of an Ape more anthro- 
 poid, or a Man more pithecoid, than any yet known, 
 await the researches of some unborn palaeontologist ? 
 Time will show." 
 
 Time has not yet shown. But in 1892 Dr. 
 Eugene Dubois found in the upper Pliocene beds at 
 Trinil, on the banks of the river Bengavan, in Java, 
 a calvaria or portion of skull, two molar teeth, and a 
 thigh-bone, which he assumed belonged to an animal 
 named by him Pithecanthropus erectus^ or " upright 
 ape-man." The forehead was low and narrow, the 
 inner surface of the skull bore impressions of con- 
 volutions, and M. Dubois estimated that the brain was 
 about twice as large as that of the brain of the largest 
 anthropoid. Although the shape of the thigh-bone 
 warranted the inference that the creature walked erect, 
 it also indicated adaptation to a tree-climbing habit
 
 THE INTERPRETER 133 
 
 absent in the human thigh-bone. Siam and Java 
 may, in the upper Tertiary period, have been joined 
 to the mainland ; and these remains of the " upright 
 ape-man " occur in a region where it is highly prob- 
 able that man and ape became differentiated. 
 
 When Huxley published his book he had to meet 
 the objection that the belief in the common origin of 
 man and brute involved the brutalisation and degrada- 
 tion of the former. But, he asks 
 
 Is this really so ? Could not a sensible child confute, 
 by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who 
 would force this conclusion upon us ? Is it, indeed, 
 true that the Poet, or the Philosopher, or the Artist, 
 whose genius is the glory of his age, is degraded from 
 his high estate by the undoubted historical probability, 
 not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant 
 of some naked and bestial savage, whose intelligence 
 was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning 
 than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than 
 the Tiger ? Or is he bound to howl and grovel on 
 all-fours because of the wholly unquestionable fact 
 that he was once an Egg, which no ordinary power 
 of discrimination could distinguish from that of a 
 Dog ? Or is the philanthropist or the saint to give 
 up his endeavour to lead a noble life because the 
 simplest study of man's nature reveals at its founda- 
 tions all the selfish passions and fierce appetites of 
 the merest quadruped ? Is mother-love vile because 
 a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess 
 it? 
 
 The common-sense of the mass of mankind will 
 answer these questions without a moment's hesitation. 
 Healthy humanity, finding itself hard pressed to es-
 
 134 HUXLEY 
 
 cape from real sin and degradation, will leave the 
 brooding over speculative pollution to the cynics and 
 the " righteous overmuch," who, disagreeing in every- 
 thing else, unite in blind insensibility to the nobleness 
 of this visible world, and in inability to appreciate the 
 grandeur of the place Man occupies therein. 
 
 Nay more, thoughtful men, escaped from the blind- 
 ing influences of traditional prejudice, will find in the 
 lowly stock whence man has sprung, the best evidence 
 of the splendour of his capacities ; and will discern 
 in his long progress through the Past a reasonable 
 ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler Future. 1 
 
 Several causes united to give man his preeminence 
 and distinctive place in the " files of time." The 
 slow acquirement of the erect position led to the flat- 
 tening of the feet ; to projection of the heel as sup- 
 port ; and to the altered position of the skull with the 
 added weight of brain which went on pan passu with 
 new functions, the skull becoming nicely balanced on 
 the spine, which became more curved, and, therefore, 
 a better support. The bipedal position set free the 
 arms from the work of locomotion, enabling man to 
 use them as organs for grasping things, whereby their 
 nature was ascertained, and for the manifold purposes 
 which the struggle for life compelled. Interaction of 
 brain and hand, together with increased modification 
 of the thumb as opposable, went on ; while the gre- 
 garious instinct, more and more developed, bound the 
 
 1 Man's Place in Nature, pp. no, III.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 135 
 
 members together in ever enlarging groups, whose 
 mutual dependence led to their permanence, and to 
 the survival of the strongest. 
 
 To these purely natural factors is to be added the 
 enormous part played by the evolution of articulate 
 speech. " Much water has flowed under the bridges " 
 since David Hartley, a pioneer-anthropologist of the 
 eighteenth century, of whom Huxley had high appre- 
 ciation, expressed the opinion that, owing to the 
 shortness of the time which has elapsed since the 
 Flood, both language and writing must have been 
 given by direct miraculous agency. 1 Small blame to 
 the philosophers of that time ; but not to those who, 
 in our own, would place the faculty of speech among 
 the supernatural endowments of man. For modern, 
 physiology has not only demonstrated that the cortex, 
 or layer of grey cellular substance, which covers the 
 cerebrum, is the organ of the mind ; it has localised 
 the psychic centres to which the several sensory 
 nerves telegraph their reports from the outer world, 
 and it has also determined the place of the motor 
 centre of articulate speech. In discussing the struc- 
 tural changes in the brain which have made possible 
 the associated movement required for that " priceless 
 gift," Professor D. J. Cunningham, in the address 
 
 1 Hartley, Prop. Ixxxiii., quoted by Leslie Stephen, History of 
 English Thought in the Eighteenth Century , i. p. 193.
 
 136 HUXLEY 
 
 already referred to, shows by what slow processes of 
 natural growth it must have . been acquired. The 
 more intelligent of the lower animals communicate 
 with one another and express their feelings by various 
 sounds, and the progenitors of man acted likewise. 
 The actual germs of language existed in a few form- 
 less roots, most of these being natural sounds, whether 
 in the tumbling of waters or the song of birds, and it 
 is in the imitation of these sounds that the large 
 number of words known as onomatopoetic, and the 
 enormous number of words derived from them, have 
 their rise. All sounds were supplemented by gestures 
 and postures, which, among some races, still play a 
 great part in communication. And it is to a physical 
 and sensible source that our most abstract and meta- 
 physical terms are traceable. For example, when we 
 " apprehend " a thing, we " lay hold " of it ; when 
 we " apply " ourselves we bend " towards " ; when 
 we " transfer " we " carry " ; to " concrete " is to 
 combine particles together, while to " abstract " is to 
 remove them ; and few of us remember that in call- 
 ing any one " supercilious " we mean, literally, that 
 he raises his eyebrows. The choice and currency of 
 this and that sound obviously lay in the aptness with 
 which it conveyed the meaning in the mind of the 
 speaker to that of the listener. Here we may use the 
 terms of " natural selection " and say that the fittest
 
 THE INTERPRETER 137 
 
 for the purpose survived, and passed into the vocabu- 
 lary, becoming the parent of a great group of words. 
 Without question, the acquisition of speech became 
 a dominant factor in determining the high develop- 
 ment of the human brain. To quote Professor Cun- 
 ningham : 
 
 The first word uttered expressive of an external ob- 
 ject marked a new era in the history of our early 
 progenitors. At this point the simian or brute-like 
 stage in their developmental career came to an end, 
 and the human dynasty, endowed with all its intellec- 
 tual possibilities, began. The period in the evolution 
 of man at which this important step was taken was a 
 vexed question, and one in the solution of which we 
 had little solid ground to go upon beyond the material 
 changes produced in the brain, and the consideration 
 of the time that these might reasonably be supposed 
 to take in their development. . . . The struc- 
 tural characters which distinguish the human brain in 
 the region of the speech-centre constitute one of the 
 leading peculiarities of the human cerebral cortex ; 
 they are totally absent in the brain of the anthropoid 
 ape, and of the speechless microcephalic idiot. 
 Further, it was significant that in certain anthropoid 
 brains a slight advance in the same direction might 
 occasionally be faintly traced, whilst in certain human 
 brains a distinct backward step is sometimes notice- 
 able. The path which had led to this special develop- 
 ment was thus in some measure delineated. These 
 structural additions to the human brain were no recent 
 acquisition by the stem-form of man, but were the 
 result of a slow evolutionary growth, a growth which 
 had been stimulated by the laborious efforts of count- 
 less generations to arrive at the perfect coordination
 
 138 HUXLEY 
 
 of all the muscular factors which were called into 
 play in the production of articulate speech. 1 
 
 " It goes without saying " that in his all-round ap- 
 plication of the doctrine of evolution Huxley came 
 to close quarters with those who demand the exclusion 
 of the psychical nature of man from its operations. 
 In one of the last papers that he wrote he contended > 
 with rigorous logic, that " if man has come into ex- 
 istence by the same process of evolution as other ani- 
 mals ; if his history, hitherto, is that of a gradual 
 progress to a higher thought and a larger power over 
 things ; if that history is essentially natural, the fron- 
 tiers of the new world, within which scientific method 
 is supreme, will receive such a remarkable extension 
 as to leave little but cloudland for its rival." 2 
 
 The discoveries of the astronomer since the time 
 of Copernicus had compelled momentous changes in 
 old conceptions of the relation of the earth to the 
 other bodies of space ; those of the geologists, from 
 the time of Hutton and Lyell, had modified ideas con- 
 cerning its age and the processes moulding its surface ; 
 and those of the palaeontologists, from the time of 
 Cuvier, had revolutionised theories of the origin of 
 death as due to the original sin of Adam. A yet 
 more profound revolution was set afoot when the rude 
 
 1 Times, September 14, 1901. Nature, November I, 1894.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 139 
 
 tools and weapons of ancient river-gravels and bone- 
 caverns brought their witness to man's high antiquity 
 and primitive savagery, since therein was the further 
 refutation of the doctrine of his fall on which the 
 scheme of his redemption rests. To these witnesses 
 were added those supplied by students of comparative 
 mythology as to the origin of the Creation, Paradise, 
 and other legends, evidencing these to be the product 
 of pre-scientific periods, when myths, gathering sanc- 
 tity with age, became the unquestioned explanations 
 of phenomena. 
 
 Hence, the old positions, one by one, have been 
 abandoned on the advance of solid phalanxes of facts, 
 until the defenders, strong in faith in its ultimate im- 
 pregnability, have made their last stand within the 
 citadel of Mansoul. But all in vain. The venerable 
 walls, mounted with the old weapons of obscurant- 
 ism, ignorance, and misrepresentation, have been 
 stormed by the resistless forces of truth, and although 
 the opening of the gates to the victor be delayed, his 
 triumph is assured. But of this conflict the Jehad 
 of Science in which Huxley was "gladiator-gen- 
 eral " and inspirer, more anon. 
 
 Meanwhile, to return to his work as interpreter, it 
 must be borne in mind that, hitherto, his exposition 
 of the theory of evolution had been limited to the 
 organic. Thus far he followed Darwin, the Origin
 
 140 HUXLEY 
 
 of Species not being concerned with the evolution of 
 the inorganic, nor with the problem of the origin of 
 life, nor with the relation of the living to the not- 
 living. As already noted, speculations on these high 
 matters had their rise in Ionia five or six centuries be- 
 fore Christ, and, after an arrest of a thousand years, 
 due to political and theological changes, had made a 
 new start some three hundred years ago. But it was 
 not until the last century was well advanced that any 
 attempt to coordinate the several branches of knowl- 
 edge into a harmonious theory of development was 
 possible, and for the achievement of this the world is 
 indebted to Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose " Synthetic 
 Philosophy," dealing with evolution as an all-inclusive 
 process, begins with the condensation of vaporous 
 stuff into cosmic systems, and ends with the develop- 
 ment of human society. He explains all phenomena, 
 from suns to souls, as the necessary results of the per- 
 sistence of force under its forms of matter and 
 motion, both indestructible, both ever changing, that 
 which thus persists being "an unknown and unknow- 
 able" power, which we are obliged to recognise as 
 without limit in space and without beginning or end 
 in time. Thus, in endless rhythm, are the changes 
 rung on Evolution and Dissolution from eternity to 
 eternity. Huxley did " not very much care to speak 
 of anything as * unknowable,' and regrets that he made
 
 THE INTERPRETER 14! 
 
 the mistake of wasting a capital c U ' upon it." ! 
 What he was sure about was that there were many 
 things concerning which he knew nothing, and which, 
 so far as he could see, were out of reach of human 
 faculties. 
 
 Whether these things are knowable by any one else 
 is exactly one of those matters which is beyond my 
 knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opin- 
 ion as to the probabilities of the case. Relatively to 
 myself, I am quite sure that the region of uncertainty 
 the nebulous country in which words play the part 
 of realities is far more extensive than I could wish. 2 
 
 But his endorsement of Mr. Spencer's contention as 
 to the fundamental unity of the organic and the in- 
 organic was emphatic. In an address to the Interna- 
 tional Medical Congress in 1881 he says: 
 
 In nature, nothing is at rest, nothing is amorphous ; 
 the simplest particle of that which men in their blind- 
 ness are pleased to call " brute matter " is a vast ag- 
 gregate of molecular mechanisms performing compli- 
 cated movements of immense rapidity, and sensitively 
 adjusting themselves to every change in the surround- 
 ing world. 
 
 And living matter differs from other matter in de- 
 gree and not in kind ; the microcosm repeats the 
 macrocosm ; and one chain of causation connects the 
 nebulous original of suns and planetary systems with 
 the protoplasmic foundation of life and organisation. 3 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 311. See NOTE, infra. 
 
 2 Ib., p. 311. 3 Coll. Essays, iii. p. 371.
 
 1^2 HUXLEY 
 
 Thirteen years earlier he had said the same thing 
 on a Sunday evening in November to an Edinburgh 
 audience. Like his wonderful discourse on " Animal 
 Automatism," delivered before the British Association 
 at Belfast, his Edinburgh " lay sermon " on " The 
 Physical Basis of Life " was spoken without depend- 
 ence on note or reference, and afterwards written out 
 from memory for publication. Following on the 
 demonstration of the identical constitution of proto- 
 plasm as the raw stuff which builds up the cell as the 
 structural foundation of every living thing, Huxley 
 showed that the protoplasm itself is built up of cer- 
 tain compounds, and that "a threefold unity namely, 
 a unity of power or faculty, a unity of form, and a 
 unity of substantial composition pervades the whole 
 living world." 
 
 In whatever form protoplasm is manifest, whether, 
 as in the very lowest plant or animal, without a 
 nucleus, or, as in the higher organisms, nucleated, 
 there are found four of the elementary substances, 
 carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in very com- 
 plex union. These non-living materials the plant, 
 and the plant alone, by some mysterious alchemy, 
 converts into a living thing, and upon this the animal 
 sustains life. It is not easy to determine where the 
 plant ends and where the animal begins, since some 
 organisms exhibit the characters of both, but, broadly
 
 THE INTERPRETER 143 
 
 speaking, the fact abides that the animal depends on 
 the vegetable. And, clearly, the vegetable depends, 
 plus the energy of the sun, on the mineral. Each of 
 the four elements of which protoplasm is made up is, 
 by itself, ineffective to produce the organic; united, 
 they are stirred by complex movements of astounding 
 rapidity which constitute the phenomena of life at its 
 simplest ; life whose " hidden bond connects the 
 flower which a girl wears in her hair with the blood 
 which courses through her youthful veins," and the 
 " brightly coloured lichen, which so nearly resembles 
 a mere mineral incrustation of the bare rock on 
 which it grows, with the painter, to whom it is in- 
 stinct with beauty, and the botanist, whom it feeds 
 with knowledge." * 
 
 The dependence of the highest upon the lowest 
 living things, and, to a certain extent, the close rela- 
 tion between them, is too obvious to be questioned ; 
 but so great is the reluctance to push things to con- 
 clusions involving collision with traditionally-received 
 ideas, that this admission does not affect the common 
 belief in a difference of kind, say, between the stand- 
 ing corn and the man who reaps it for his daily 
 bread. Still stronger is the feeling that life itself, 
 whether in the weed or the philosopher, is an 
 "entity" in matter, but not ofh; the view which, as 
 1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 131.
 
 144 HUXLEY 
 
 has been seen, Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace and others 
 hold concerning the introduction of a spiritual faculty 
 into man at some stage of his development being ex- 
 tended, in the popular mind, to the introduction of 
 life on the globe as due to the direct action of the 
 Almighty. Huxley's assertion that " living matter 
 differs from other matter in degree and not in kind," 
 is, therefore, a hard saying, and few there be who 
 accept it. It seems to shatter " the mighty hopes that 
 make us men." The theory that man has descended, 
 in an unbroken chain, like all the other higher ani- 
 mals, from simple life-forms, offends his " pride of 
 life " ; but the theory that there is no difference in 
 kind between him and the dust on which he treads 
 excites his repugnance, and stirs him to revolt. It 
 was repellant enough to make him one with the tardy 
 snail and the immobile oyster, for the question of his 
 immortality seemed thereby involved with that of 
 theirs ; but to make him one with the lifeless earth 
 seemed the very "superfluity of naughtiness," and 
 the outcome of a diabolical materialism. 
 
 Huxley knew that this cry would be raised when 
 he went to Edinburgh. And although, as will be 
 seen, he made "a protest, from the philosophical side, 
 against what is commonly called * materialism,' " he 
 found himself "generally credited with having in- 
 vented * protoplasm ' in the interests of l material-
 
 THE INTERPRETER 145 
 
 ism.' " But he proceeded to justify his words by 
 the following comparison, the design of which was to 
 show that the ultimate nature of matter is as fully a 
 mystery as that of mind, and that the terms in which 
 we speak of the one are equally applicable to the 
 other. 
 
 Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, when 
 brought together under certain conditions, give rise to 
 the complex stuff, protoplasm, which manifests what 
 is known as life. When two of these elements, 
 oxygen and hydrogen, are mixed in a certain propor- 
 tion, and an electric spark is passed through them, 
 they disappear, and the result is water. In the one 
 case we talk of a " vital force" having stirred the 
 dead elements into living matter ; but in the other 
 case we do not talk of a something called " aquosity " 
 having blended the two invisible gases into visible 
 water. Is not the one process as mysterious as the 
 other ? 
 
 Does anybody quite comprehend the modus operand! 
 of an electric spark, which traverses a mixture of 
 oxygen and hydrogen ? 
 
 What justification is there, then, for the assump- 
 tion of the existence in the living matter of a some- 
 thing which has no representative or correlative in the 
 not-living matter which gave rise to it ? What better 
 philosophical status has " vitality " than " aquosity " ? 
 . . . If the phenomena exhibited by water are its 
 1 Lay Sermons, Preface, p. vii.
 
 146 HUXLEY 
 
 properties, so are those presented by protoplasm, living 
 or dead, its properties. If the properties of water 
 may be properly said to result from the nature and 
 disposition of its component molecules, I can find no 
 intelligible ground for refusing to say that the prop- 
 erties of protoplasm result from the nature and dis- 
 position of its molecules. . . . 
 
 It may seem a small thing to admit that the dull 
 vital actions of a fungus or a foraminifer are the 
 properties of their protoplasm, and are the direct re- 
 sults of the nature of the matter of which they are 
 composed. But if their protoplasm is essentially 
 identical with, and most readily converted into, that 
 of any animal, I can discover no logical halting-place 
 between the admission that such is the case and the 
 further concession that all vital action may, with equal 
 propriety, be said to be the result of the molecular 
 forces of the protoplasm which displays it. And if 
 so, it must be true, in the same sense and to the same 
 extent, that the thoughts to which I am now giving 
 utterance, and your thoughts regarding them, are the 
 expression of molecular changes in that matter of life 
 which is the source of our other vital phenomena. 1 
 
 The origin of life remains, and will doubtless re- 
 main, an unsolved problem, if for no other reason 
 than the absolute effacement of the primitive forms, 
 the fragility of which is to be inferred from all that is 
 known of the lowest organisms. But the problem of 
 the origin of water, without which life could not have 
 been, also remains unsolved. The chemist can both 
 decompose and produce water; but, as Huxley asks, 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, i. pp. 152, 154.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 147 
 
 who can comprehend the modus operandi of the electric 
 spark? Chemistry has also succeeded in manufac- 
 turing nearly two hundred organic compounds from 
 dead matter ; Professor Britschli has even produced a 
 substance which simulates protoplasm, but the 
 arcana vita remains hidden. Nevertheless, noting 
 what advances have been made in organic chemistry, 
 in molecular physics, and in physiology, Huxley 
 thinks that " it would be the height of presumption 
 for any man to say that the conditions under which 
 matter assumes the properties we call c vital ' may not 
 be artificially brought together." The manifest inti- 
 mate connection between vital and electrical phenom- 
 ena is a further reason against dogmatism on the 
 subject. And since the " scientific use of the imagi- 
 nation " has been the handmaid of progress, it is 
 permissible to speculate, as does Huxley, on the 
 possible mode of the beginning of life, whose " vital 
 spark," once kindled, has, like the fire on the altar 
 of Vesta, known no extinguishment. 
 
 To say that, in the admitted absence of evidence, I 
 have any belief as to the mode in which the existing 
 forms of life have originated, would be using words 
 in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible 
 where belief is not ; and if it were given me to look 
 beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the 
 still more remote period when the earth was passing 
 through physical and chemical conditions which it can 
 no more see again than a man can recall his infancy,
 
 148 HUXLEY 
 
 I should expect to be a witness of the evolution f 
 living protoplasm from not-living matter. 
 
 I should expect to see it appear under forms f 
 great simplicity, endowed, like existing fungi, with 
 the power of determining the formation of new pro- 
 toplasm from such matters as ammonium carbonates, 
 oxalates, and tartrates, alkaline and earthy phosphates, 
 and water without the aid of light. That is the ex- 
 pectation to which analogical reasoning leads me; 
 but I beg you once more to recollect that I have no 
 right to call my opinion anything but an act of philo- 
 sophical faith. ' 
 
 The success which has attended the search after 
 fundamental likeness between the earth and its living, 
 as well as not-living, contents, has followed all obser- 
 vation into the nature and constitution of the system 
 of which the earth is one of the lesser members. 
 While the conditions prevailing in the sun and planets 
 make it certain that life, as we know it, cannot be 
 present in them, the differences between them and 
 our globe are only, using the term in its chemical 
 sense, quantitative. They are made of the same 
 stuff as the globe itself. So, broadly speaking, are 
 the stars. The year 1859 is memorable in science, 
 not only for the publication of the Origin of Species, 
 but for the triumphant researches of Kirchhoff and 
 Bunsen into the chemistry of the sun. 
 
 In 1802, one hundred and thirty years after New- 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, viii. p. 256.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 149 
 
 ton had refracted a sunray on a prism, and shown 
 that light is made up of differently coloured rays, 
 Wollaston, using a thin slit to admit the ray, observed 
 that it was crossed by a few dark lines. In 1814, 
 Fraunhofer succeeded, by means of yet finer appara- 
 tus, in detecting nearly six hundred of these lines. 
 He, and following observers, made shrewd guesses as 
 to their meaning, but another forty-five years passed 
 before the riddle was read. The details of its solu- 
 tion are given in popular books on astronomy ; and 
 here it must suffice to say that the lines, which are 
 now counted in their thousands, reveal the secret of 
 the chemical constitution of the sun, and tell us that 
 not only are iron, sodium, and some thirty other ele- 
 ments present in his atmosphere, the spectrum of iron 
 alone numbering above two thousand lines, but that 
 the raw materials of protoplasm, notably its most im- 
 portant constituent, carbon, are present also. l Kirch- 
 hoff's discovery was followed by Sir William Hug- 
 gins's analysis of the light from stars and nebulas, 
 which proved that the former are made of like 
 materials as the sun, himself a star of no high magni- 
 tude, and that the latter are gaseous, the vagrant 
 comets having a spectrum which is a compound of 
 carbon and hydrogen. The same astronomer also 
 
 1 On the apparent absence of oxygen and nitrogen in the solar 
 atmosphere, see my Pioneers of Evolution, p. 165.
 
 150 HUXLEY 
 
 ingeniously discovered that a minute displacement of 
 the lines of their spectra gave a key to the direction 
 of the movements of the stars in space, while their 
 colours indicate whether they are in the stages of 
 youth, maturity, or decay. 
 
 It is a far cry from the apelike man to the nebula, 
 and yet, in the foregoing rapid summary of cosmic 
 processes, no warrant can be found for assumption of 
 any break in causal relations. Nevertheless, when 
 Huxley made the naked statement that there is no 
 difference in kind between living and not-living mat- 
 ter; and when Tyndall, decking the same in rhetor- 
 ical garb, said that " all our philosophy, all our poetry, 
 all our science, all our art Plato, Shakespeare, Newton 
 and Raphael are potentia, in the fires of the sun," l 
 there can be little wonder that charges of the kind 
 made by the Presbytery of Belfast, that they " ignored 
 the existence of God, and advocated pure and simple 
 materialism," were levelled against them. 
 
 Huxley anticipated this ; and in his Edinburgh 
 lecture, as later, more elaborately, in Hume and Helps 
 to the Study of Berkeley? he deals with subjects which 
 bring us face to face with the ultimate problems of 
 philosophy. He was no tyro in these : from his early 
 boyhood, when, reading Sir William Hamilton, he 
 
 1 Fragments of Science, p. 453. 
 
 These fill the sixth volume of Collected Essays.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 15! 
 
 found only " cunning phrases for answers," ] his in- 
 terest in metaphysics had been deep and constant. 
 He had only scorn for the logomachies of the 
 
 41 pure metaphysicians," who attempt to base the 
 theory of knowing upon supposed necessary and uni- 
 versal truths, and assert that scientific observation is 
 impossible unless such truths are already known and 
 implied, which to those who are not " pure metaphy- 
 sicians " seems very much as if one should say that 
 the fall of a stone cannot be observed unless the law 
 of gravitation is already in the mind of the observer. 2 
 The roots of every system of philosophy lie deep 
 among the facts of physiology. No one can doubt 
 that the organs and the functions of sensation are as 
 much a part of the province of the physiologist as 
 are the organs and functions of motion or those of 
 digestion ; and yet it is impossible to gain an ac- 
 quaintance with even the rudiments of the physiology 
 of sensation without being led straight to one of the 
 most fundamental of all metaphysical problems. In 
 fact, the sensory operations have been, from time im- 
 memorial, the battle-ground of philosophers. 3 
 
 Wherefore, in the preface to the latest edition of 
 Hume, he caustically advises those " who desire to 
 discourse fluently and learnedly about philosophical 
 questions to begin with the lonians and to work 
 steadily through to the latest speculative treatise ; " 
 while for those who " are animated by the much rarer 
 desire for real knowledge," and who want to get a 
 clear conception of the " deepest problems set before 
 
 1 Ante, p. 3. 2 Coll. Essays, vi. p. 62. Coll. Essays, vi. p. 291.
 
 152 HUXLEY 
 
 the intellect of man," he sees no need to travel out- 
 side " the limits of the English tongue." For this 
 purpose " three authors will suffice, namely, Berkeley, 
 Hume, and Hobbes." To which select company 
 there may be added himself, with advice to master the 
 sixth volume of Collected Essays and the papers on 
 Descartes. 1 
 
 A materialist, as commonly understood, holds that 
 the universe is made-up of matter, of which all forms 
 of activity, whether mechanical or spiritual, are prod- 
 ucts. The substance called matter is thus the sub- 
 stance of all things. This shallow view Huxley 
 wholly repudiated, but not without protest against the 
 vulgar idea of matter entertained by the majority of 
 persons. In an appendix to a paper on the " Meta- 
 physics of Sensation " he shows that what is loosely 
 and ignorantly spoken of as dead or inert and alto- 
 gether base a notion due to Platonists and to the- 
 ologians, both of the East and West throbs with 
 rhythmic movements of incredible rapidity, and is 
 charged with that element of true mystery wherein 
 wonder has its abiding source. 
 
 The handful of soil is a factory thronged with 
 swarms of busy workers ; the rusty nail is an aggre- 
 gation of millions of particles moving with incon- 
 ceivable velocity in a dance of infinite complexity, 
 
 1 Ib., i. pp. 166-250.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 153 
 
 yet perfect measure ; harmonic with like perform- 
 ances throughout the solar system. If there is good 
 ground for any conclusion, there is such for the belief 
 that the substance of these particles has existed, and 
 will exist, that the energy which stirs them has per- 
 sisted, and will persist, without assignable limit, either 
 in the past or in the future. . . . Those who are 
 thoroughly imbued with this view of what is called 
 " matter " find it a little difficult to understand why 
 that which is termed " mind " should give itself such 
 airs of superiority over the twin sister, to whom, so 
 far as our planet is concerned, it might be hazardous 
 to deny the right of primogeniture. 
 
 Accepting the ordinary view of mind, it is a sub- 
 stance the properties of which are states of conscious- 
 ness, on the one hand, and energy of the same order 
 as that of the material world (or else it would not be 
 able to effect the latter) on the other hand. It is ad- 
 mitted that chance has no more place in the world of 
 mind than it has in that of matter. Sensations, emo- 
 tions, intellections are subject to an order as strict and 
 inviolable as that which obtains among material 
 things. 1 
 
 The question follows, "What can we know of 
 what we call matter or of what we call mind ? " 
 And the answer is, So far as the ultimate nature of 
 either is concerned, nothing. Our knowledge of 
 both is inferential ; it is limited to the impressions 
 conveyed by the senses to the brain : in Huxley's 
 words, " our knowledge is restricted to those feelings 
 of which we assume external phenomena to be the 
 
 cause." 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, vi. p. 285.
 
 154 HUXLEY 
 
 The senses are the gateways of knowledge, and we 
 assume that impulses vibrating from without enter 
 these, and are conveyed by the nerves to the central 
 nervous system the seat of consciousness, or of 
 knowledge of what goes on in the mind. We see, 
 we smell, we hear, we taste, we touch ; but the 
 colour, the scent, the sound, the flavour, the hardness 
 or softness, the warmth or coldness, are not in the 
 things which we assume to be the cause of these sen- 
 sations. They are in what is called " states of con- 
 sciousness." How the passage is effected from the 
 nerve-cells to consciousness we have no means of 
 knowing. The thing is an insoluble mystery. The 
 mutual dependence of what we call the body and 
 what we call the mind is certain. We know nothing 
 of mind apart from matter. We know that the brain 
 is the organ of thought, and we cannot conceive of 
 changes in the nerve-cells being produced by con- 
 sciousness, so that the psychical seems wholly sub- 
 ordinate to the physical. Every feeling, every 
 thought, is accompanied by molecular changes, and 
 Huxley expressed the belief, which the "new psy- 
 chology " may justify, that " we shall, sooner or later, 
 arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, 
 just as we have arrived at a mechanical equivalent of 
 heat." ' That marvellous faculty by which things are 
 1 Colt. Essays, i. p. 191.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 155 
 
 remembered appears to be due to molecular changes 
 " which give rise to a state of consciousness, leaving 
 a more or less persistent structural modification, 
 through which the same molecular changes may be 
 regenerated by other agencies than the cause which 
 first produced them." l 
 
 Of course no sane person doubts the existence of 
 an external world, or cosmos, built up, in Lord 
 Kelvin's phrase, " of coarse-grained matter." Atoms 
 are not, as Professor Rucker skilfully argued in his 
 Presidential Address on the " Fundamental Concepts 
 of Physics " to the British Association at Glasgow in 
 1901, "merely helps to puzzled mathematicians, but 
 physical realities," probably made up of simpler parts, 
 modifications of one prima materia. And in respect 
 of force, the several modes of motion are explicable 
 only on the assumption that particles of matter are 
 being moved. Hence the atomic theory, despite 
 recent attacks, holds the field. 2 Concerning these 
 things, the common consciousness of mankind brings 
 the same report, but the fact no less remains that we 
 can only assume the existence of beings with minds 
 like our own. For they are a part of the phenomena 
 whose ultimate nature, as was said above, we cannot 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 215. 
 
 2 For Professor Rucker's Address, see Times, September 12, 
 1901.
 
 156 HUXLEY 
 
 know. There is " only one abstract certainty possi- 
 ble to man namely, that at any given moment the 
 feeling which he has exists. All other so-called cer- 
 tainties are beliefs of greater or less intensity." l The 
 poet-astronomer of Naishapur stretches " lame hands" 
 across the ages to the modern psychologist : 
 
 " We are no other than a moving row 
 Of Magic Shadow-Shapes that come and go 
 Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held 
 In Midnight by the Master of the Show." 
 
 But, as Huxley points out, although it is of small con- 
 sequence whether we speak of the phenomena of 
 matter in terms of spirit, or of those of spirit in terms 
 of matter, since matter may be regarded as a form of 
 thought, and thought may be regarded as a property 
 of matter, there is every reason for using the mate- 
 rialistic terminology : 
 
 For it connects thought with the other phenomena 
 of the universe, and suggests inquiry into the nature 
 of those physical conditions, or concomitants of 
 thought, which are more or less accessible to us, and 
 a knowledge of which may help us to exercise the 
 same kind of control over the world of thought as we 
 already possess in respect of the material world : 
 whereas the alternative, or spiritualistic, terminology 
 is utterly barren, and leads to nothing but obscurity 
 and confusion of ideas. . . . But the man of 
 science who, forgetting the limits of philosophical in- 
 
 'II. 262.
 
 THE INTERPRETER 157 
 
 quiry, slides from these formulae and symbols into what 
 is commonly understood by materialism, seems to me 
 to place himself on a level with the mathematician 
 who should mistake the x's and y's with which he 
 works his problems for real entities, and with this 
 further disadvantage, as compared with the mathema- 
 tician, that the blunders of the latter are of no prac- 
 tical consequence, while the errors of systematic ma- 
 terialism may paralyse the energies and destroy the 
 beauty of a life. 1 
 
 In his repudiation of the coarser materialistic views 
 of the universe, and in his recognition what insoluble 
 mystery attends the connection between the thoughts 
 of a man and the organ of those thoughts, Huxley 
 was under no delusion that he had disarmed old prej- 
 udices, or secured any deserters from the orthodox 
 camp. For, in place of conceding anything, he had 
 only made clearer his hostility towards the super- 
 natural explanations in which alone his opponents 
 found rest and satisfaction. And seeing to what nar- 
 row dimensions the region once covered by those ex- 
 planations had shrunk before the advance of the forces 
 of natural knowledge, he pressed on to conquest of 
 what remained. 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, i. pp. 164, 165.
 
 IV 
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 
 
 IN a letter to his wife, written at Baden, in 1873, 
 Huxley says : 
 
 We are in the midst of a gigantic movement, 
 greater than that which preceded and produced the 
 Reformation, and really only the continuation of that 
 movement. But there is nothing new in the ideas 
 which lie at the bottom of the movement, nor is any 
 reconcilement possible between free thought and tra- 
 ditional authority. One or other will have to suc- 
 cumb after a struggle of unknown duration, which 
 will have as side issues vast political and social 
 troubles. I have no more doubt that free thought 
 will win in the long-run than I have that I sit here 
 writing to you, or that this free thought will organise 
 itself into a coherent system, embracing human life 
 and the world as one harmonious whole. But this 
 organisation will be the work of generations of men, 
 and those who further it most will be those who teach 
 men to rest in no lie, and to rest in no verbal delu- 
 sions. I may be able to help a little in this direction 
 perhaps I may have helped already. 1 
 
 Until his retirement, twelve years afterwards, that 
 help was, perforce, rendered only fitfully ; but, once 
 master of his time, Huxley said that whether it was 
 
 1 1. 397- 
 158
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 159 
 
 long or short, he should devote it to the work out- 
 lined in the papers on the " Evolution of Theology." 1 
 There was to be no truce with " that ecclesiastical 
 spirit, that clericalism, which is the deadly enemy of 
 science." The battle had gone on, intermittently, 
 for a quarter of a century. A fortnight after the 
 famous duel with Wilberforce, when writing to 
 Hooker about a proposed scientific quarterly, Huxley 
 jocosely said that its tone would be " mildly episco- 
 pophagous," 2 and in 1889 he asks Professor Ray 
 Lankester if he sees " any chance of educating the 
 white corpuscles of the human race to destroy the 
 theological bacteria which are bred in parsons." 3 
 The author of Lay Sermons, let it be said, had the 
 making of a preacher in him. In the fragment of 
 autobiography reprinted in the first volume of the 
 Collected Essays, he tells how in early childhood he 
 turned his pinafore wrong side forwards to represent a 
 surplice, and held forth to his mother's kitchenmaids. 
 And the impression of his homiletic gifts has sly ref- 
 erence in Bishop Thirlwall's Letters to a Friend,* 
 when, speaking of the Metaphysical Society (founded 
 in 1869), he says that "among the contributors to its 
 proceedings have been Archbishop Huxley and Pro- 
 fessor Manning." 
 
 ' Coll. Essays, iv. chap. viii. * I. 210. 
 
 II. 234. P. 317-
 
 160 HUXLEY 
 
 Polemics, as Huxley said, " are always more or 
 less an evil." But the lukewarmness which lets error 
 and corruption pursue their baneful course is a greater 
 evil. And in the questions at issue between the ex- 
 ponents of the doctrine of Evolution and the defend- 
 ers of orthodoxy and privilege there was no place for 
 indifference or compromise. It was guerre a outrance. 
 The supremacy of clericalism involves the thraldom 
 of the mind, because its submission to an authority 
 claiming supernatural origin, and, therefore, one not 
 to be questioned, save at the soul's peril, was de- 
 manded. In ordinary matters, the claimant to author- 
 ity submits his credentials, on the verification of which 
 his claim is admitted or rejected. And in matters of 
 such high import as the beliefs which rule a man's 
 life, it would seem that the same method should apply. 
 Yet the notion is widespread, even among intelligent 
 persons, that the credentials required in mundane 
 things are not to be demanded in what are deemed 
 higher things. The spiritual " powers that be " 
 bishops, priests, and deacons " are ordained of God," 
 and the documents on which their claims are based 
 are exempt from scrutiny. The prevalence of such a 
 notion is explicable only by the fact that the majority 
 of people govern their workaday lives on principles 
 different from those which operate in the creeds which 
 they profess. They rely, in lazy acquiescence, upon
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST l6l 
 
 the assurances of the official defenders of the faith 
 that the " Church's one foundation " remains un- 
 shaken. " Their faith," in the words of Professor 
 W. James, " is faith in some one else's faith, and in 
 the greatest matters this is most the case." For in- 
 quiry involves effort, and there is ease in travelling 
 along the line of least resistance. 
 
 In opposition, wide as the poles asunder, to this, 
 
 the improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses 
 to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepti- 
 cism is the highest of duties ; blind faith the one un- 
 pardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for 
 every great advance in natural knowledge has involved- 
 the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of 
 the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit 
 of blind faith ; and the most ardent votary of science 
 holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he 
 most venerates hold them, not because their verity is 
 testified by portents and wonders ; but because his ex- 
 perience teaches him that whenever he chooses to 
 bring these convictions into contact with their primary 
 source, Nature whenever he thinks fit to test them 
 by appealing to experiment and to observation Na- 
 ture will confirm them. The man of science has 
 learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by 
 verification. 1 
 
 And it was because clericalism demanded accept- 
 ance of its claims in " blind faith " that Huxley 
 would make no terms with it. 
 
 1 Coll. E-ssays, i. pp. 40, 41.
 
 162 HUXLEY 
 
 u I am very glad," he writes to a correspondent, 
 " that you see the importance of doing battle with the 
 clericals. I am astounded at the narrowness of view 
 of many of our colleagues on this point ! They shut 
 their eyes to the obstacles which clericalism raises in 
 every direction against scientific ways of thinking, 
 which are even more important than scientific discov- 
 eries. 
 
 u I desire that the next generation may be less fet- 
 tered by the gross and stupid superstitions of ortho- 
 doxy than mine has been." l 
 
 He observed that the conversion of a man into a 
 " clerk in holy orders " was not attended with any ad- 
 dition to his intelligence. On the contrary, it leads 
 to the cramping of his intellect, since at a fluent pe- 
 riod of life, when he is on the threshold of its problems, 
 he is required to stunt the further development of his 
 mind by declaring that he accepts certain beliefs as 
 final. 2 Nor does the clothing him with a shovel-hat, 
 apron, and gaiters " in the smallest degree augment 
 such title to respect as his opinions may intrinsically 
 possess." 3 The emphasising of this in the case of 
 
 1 II. 234. 
 
 *" If the clergy are bound down, and the laity unbound ; if the 
 teacher may not seek the Truth, and the taught may ; if the Church 
 puts the Bible in the hand of one as a living spirit and in the hand 
 of the other as a dead letter what is to come of it ? I love the 
 Church of England. But what is to become of such a monstrous 
 system, such a Godless lie as this?" (To Professor Dawkins, 
 1862.) Letters of (the then Rev.) John Richard Green, p. no. 
 
 Coll. Essays, i. p. 249 ; and see Morley's Diderot, ii. p. 50 
 (note).
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 163 
 
 bishops was the more necessary because the degree 
 of importance with which the lay mind invests any 
 statement by a cleric is regulated by his position in 
 the Church. Huxley's " episcopophagy " took hu- 
 morous form in the story of a country school lad who 
 came near the boundary-line in an examination, one 
 of his blunders consisting in putting the mitral valve, 
 so-called from its resemblance to a mitre, on the right 
 side of the heart instead of on the left side. " On 
 appeal, Huxley let him through, observing, l Poor 
 little beggar, I never got them (the valves) correctly 
 myself until I reflected that a bishop was never in the 
 right.' " l 
 
 In opening the campaign, Huxley did not waste 
 powder and shot on that irreconcilable enemy of 
 knowledge and the liberty which is its fruit, the 
 Roman Catholic Church, " the one great spiritual 
 organisation which is able to resist, and must, as a 
 matter of life and death, resist the progress of science 
 and modern civilisation." 2 He divided the clergy of 
 the Established Church into three sections : " an im- 
 mense body who are ignorant, and speak out ; a small 
 proportion who know and are silent ; and a minute 
 minority who know and speak according to their 
 knowledge." Only with the last-named had he any- 
 thing in common ; but his intellectual honesty caused 
 1 II. 415. * Coll. Essays, iii. p. I2O.
 
 164 HUXLEY 
 
 him to sympathise less with the "half-and-half senti- 
 mental school," represented by divines of the type of 
 Dean Farrar, than " with thoroughgoing orthodoxy," 
 as represented by the late Mr. Spurgeon. Of one 
 and all of them it may be said that his thoughts were 
 not their thoughts, nor his ways their ways. He 
 dealt with facts ; they played with phrases. They 
 acted as if " the analysis of terms is the right way of 
 knowledge, and mistook the multiplication of proposi- 
 tions for the discovery of fresh truth." l And he 
 thought them lacking in straightforwardness. His 
 conversation was " Yea, yea," or " Nay, nay " ; theirs 
 was evasive, or qualifying, when a direct question was 
 put to them. To him they seemed to confuse much 
 and to explain nothing. And he felt that if men of 
 science have not lightened our darkness concerning 
 many things, theologians have only deepened it. To 
 mix with them was to inhale a relaxing air wherein 
 the fibres of veracity were loosened. 
 
 Some time before his death, the decay of dogmatic 
 theology, which a changed intellectual atmosphere had 
 brought about, was followed by a revival of sacerdotal- 
 ism, the force of which has increased rather than 
 abated. The result is a general materialising of 
 "aids to faith." Churches and services are more 
 ornate ; the sensuous stimuli of music, incense, and 
 1 Kousseau, by John Morley, ii. p. 338.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 165 
 
 colour are brought into play ; greater stress is laid on 
 the importance of baptismal and other sacramental 
 rites, with the consequent aggrandisement of the sac- 
 erdotalist as their divinely authorised administrator. 
 The emotions have unwholesome excitation ; the rea- 
 son is drugged. A sermon if it be not a sleeping- 
 draught makes appeals to the intellect ; it may 
 convert, or it may fail to convince. But a rite 
 requires unquestioning acceptance of its supernatural 
 obligation and nature as the condition of its efficacy. 
 To partake in it demands no mental effort. This 
 thaumaturgy in religion has its correlatives in the 
 pseudo-mysticism of the present day, as in the spuri- 
 ous remedies of " Christian Science " for diseases ; in 
 the trickeries of spiritualism, whose phenomena, were 
 they true, would, as Huxley said, " furnish an addi- 
 tional argument against suicide " ; ' in the charlatanry 
 of palmistry, astrology, and other quackeries, eviden- 
 cing how superficial are the changes in human nature. 
 " So little trouble," says Thucydides, " do men take 
 in search after truth ; so readily do they accept what- 
 ever comes first to hand." 2 
 
 Huxley was well equipped in historical knowledge. 
 When Dr. St. George Mivart cited Suarez and other 
 schoolmen in his criticisms on the Origin of Species, 
 
 1 I. 420; and see Coll. Essays, v. pp. 341, 342. 
 
 2 I. 20 (Jowett's Trans.).
 
 1 66 HUXLEY 
 
 he found his match in Huxley. The outlines of the 
 course of events following the death of Jesus, which 
 he gives in his essays on the " Evolution of Theol- 
 ogy," show that he knew ecclesiastical history better 
 than many ecclesiastics themselves, for these too 
 often know it only in the idealised or partisan forms 
 presented by orthodox historians. No thoughtful 
 student of the past, with all its cross-currents and 
 complexities, will make the shameful story of religious 
 wars and persecutions an occasion of reproach against 
 the Churches of to-day. Humanity has a terrible in- 
 dictment against theology, but the charge cannot be 
 laid at the door of our contemporaries. Neverthe- 
 less, in the degree that the Church has not purged 
 herself of the old Adam of the anti-progressive 
 spirit, she stands condemned before the modern world, 
 and with no such plea as antiquity might offer. Her 
 condemnation is complete. Taking history no farther 
 back than the last century, it will be found that there 
 was not a movement, political, social, or intellectual, 
 having as its aim the bettering of the condition of the 
 people, which she did not oppose tooth and nail. She 
 lifted no voice against the barbaric criminal code 
 under which, well within the nineteenth century, two 
 hundred offences were punishable with death ; ' her 
 
 1 OLD BAILEY William Keep, a lad of fourteen years of age, 
 was indicted for stealing a Bank of England note out of a letter
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 167 
 
 bishops opposed the measures for the abolition of 
 theological tests for public offices, for the removal of 
 disabilities on Roman Catholics, Jews, and Dissenters; 
 in the abolition of slavery in British possessions, and 
 in the reform of the incredibly horrible state of 
 prisons, and of the inhuman treatment of lunatics in 
 this kingdom, she took no initiative; she fought 
 against unsectarian elementary education ; she still 
 wages bitter war to enforce the teaching of her dis- 
 credited dogmas ; and, to her even greater shame, 
 fans and fosters the spirit of militarism in temples on 
 whose walls are inscribed, " On earth peace, and 
 goodwill towards men." And, withal, trading on the 
 ignorance of the multitude, her ministers have the 
 audacity to claim credit for the removal of unjust and 
 brutal measures from the statute-book of the realm, 
 and for the general spread of human itarianism ; 
 whereas it is solely to the development of sympathy 
 born of knowledge that these are due, The Church 
 has tardily followed where these have led. For these 
 reasons, written clear on the page of history, Huxley 
 called the " ecclesiastical spirit the deadly enemy of 
 science." 
 
 But for the confusion which men make between 
 
 which had come into his possession in consequence of his having 
 been employed in the General Post Office as a sorter of letters. 
 The jury found the prisoner Guilty Death. Times, 
 Nov. I, 1801. The death-sentences were sometimes commuted.
 
 l68 HUXLEY 
 
 the letter and the spirit it should be needless to say 
 that Huxley had no quarrel who can have ? with 
 religion, defining this as "a consciousness of the 
 limitations of man and a sense of an open secret 
 which is impenetrable," l and as " the reverence and 
 love for an ethical ideal, and the desire to realise that 
 ideal in life which every man ought to feel." 2 The 
 ideal will be low or high according to the standard 
 reached by a community, but, whatever that standard 
 may be, it represents the attitude towards unseen or 
 envisaged powers which affect men deeply and con- 
 stantly. No religion, however repellent it may be to 
 refined natures, has taken root which did not adjust 
 itself to, and answer, some need of the human heart. 
 And the measure of our knowledge of the various 
 faiths of mankind will be the measure of our sym- 
 pathy. What quarrel the evolutionist may have is 
 with the letter of theology, " which killeth," not with 
 the spirit of religion, which "giveth life." As 
 Huxley says : 
 
 The antagonism between science and religion, 
 about which we hear so much, appears to me to be 
 purely factitious fabricated, on the one hand, by 
 short-sighted religious people who confound a certain 
 branch of science, theology, with religion ; and, on 
 the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people 
 who forget that science takes for its province only 
 
 Coll. Essays, i. p. 33. Ib., v. p. 250.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 169 
 
 that which is susceptible of clear intellectual com- 
 prehension. . . . The antagonism of science is 
 to the heathen survivals and the bad philosophy under 
 which religion herself is often well-nigh crushed. 
 And I trust that this antagonism will never cease ; but 
 that, to the end of time, true science will continue to 
 fulfil one of her most beneficent functions, that of 
 relieving men from the burden of false science, 
 which is imposed upon them in the name of Re- 
 ligion. 1 
 
 Superfluous to add, therefore, that Huxley was no 
 iconoclast ; no man who is imbued with the spirit of 
 the doctrine of evolution, which links us to the past 
 as its products and finds a warrant for all that yet has 
 been, can be that. Regulation, not suppression, of 
 human nature, was his aim. He was as anxious as 
 any defender of the faith can be that religion should 
 " bring forth the peaceable fruits of righteousness " ; 
 his care was to afford it free play by the removal of 
 the accretions which make it unlovely and a reproach 
 before the world. In an address delivered as far back 
 as 1871, he said that he could 
 
 conceive the existence of an Established Church 
 which should be a blessing to the community. A 
 Church in which, week by week, services should be 
 devoted, not to the 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 
 
 i Coll. Essays, iv. pp. 1 60, 163.
 
 iyO HUXLEY 
 
 cares should find a moment's rest in the contempla- 
 tion 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. ' 
 
 And he not only looked with no favour upon 
 criticism that is wholly destructive ; he demurred, 
 " both as a matter of principle and one of policy, to a 
 great deal of what appears as l free thought ' litera- 
 ture." 
 
 Heterodox ribaldry disgusts me, I confess, rather 
 more than orthodox fanaticism. It is at once so 
 easy ; so stupid ; such a complete anachronism in 
 England, and so thoroughly calculated to disgust and 
 repel the very thoughtful and serious people whom it 
 ought to be the great aim to attract. Old Noll knew 
 what he was about when he said that it was of no use 
 to try to fight the gentlemen of England with tapsters 
 and serving-men. It is quite as hopeless to fight 
 Christianity with scurrility. We want a regiment of 
 Ironsides. 2 
 
 The mode of attack thus rightly censured is well- 
 nigh obsolete. The old fatuous alternatives, which 
 presented Jesus as a divine being or an impostor, and 
 the Bible as an inspired book or a forgery, rarely 
 enter into modern methods of controversy. The age 
 may not be very earnest, but it is not flippant, in 
 
 1 lb. t i. p. 284. * II. 331.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST IJI 
 
 these matters. Beliefs are no longer only attacked, 
 they are explained. Religions are no longer treated 
 as wholly true or as wholly false, as the inventions of 
 designing priests or as of supernatural origin ; but as 
 the product of man's crude speculations concerning 
 himself and his surroundings, and of his spiritual 
 needs, no matter in what repulsive form these are sat- 
 isfied. And a survey shows how each one, with its 
 outcome in creed and ritual, falls into line with the 
 processes of evolution ; how, like organisms, all 
 spring from common elements ; how, like these, they 
 bear within themselves the traces of their stages of 
 development ; how natural selection acts upon them, 
 their survival depending on their power of adaptation, 
 and how, this failing, they perish and become fos- 
 silised in the strata of obsolete creeds. 
 
 Beyond the general remark that religion arises, 
 41 like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action 
 and interaction of man's mind with that which is not 
 in man's mind, and takes the intellectual coverings 
 of Fetichism or Polytheism ; of Theism or Atheism, 
 of Superstition or Rationalism," ' Huxley refrained 
 from speculations as to the particular primary im- 
 pulses which gave this or that shape to it. All such 
 speculations and history, both past and present, has 
 seen many of them are foredoomed to failure, be- 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, i. p. 138.
 
 172 HUXLEY 
 
 cause the "Natural! seed of Religion" as Hobbes 
 calls it, ' is the product of roots that lie too deep 
 down for discovery. They are intertwined with 
 man's psychical development; they are fed from the 
 same sources whence arise the psychical faculties of 
 animals ; and as the student of comparative mythology 
 and comparative theology must take counsel with the 
 anthropologist and folk-lorist, so must all of them 
 take counsel with the comparative psychologist and 
 the comparative physiologist. 
 
 In such spirit, then, Huxley advanced to an exam- 
 ination of the "venerable record of ancient life, mis- 
 called a book," 2 on which clericalism rests its claims 
 and its creeds. A quarter of a century earlier there 
 had been talk about prosecuting Jowett for the heret- 
 ical article in Essays and Reviews wherein he laid 
 down what seemed the irreverent canon, " Interpret 
 the Scripture like any other book." 3 It would be 
 difficult to say in what other way the Bible could be 
 interpreted, and, since 1860, the comparative method, 
 which has yielded valuable results in all departments 
 of research, has been applied unchallenged to the 
 sacred text : 
 
 From my present point of view [said Huxley, in 
 the opening pages of his essays on the " Evolution of 
 
 Leviathan : " Of Man," ch. xii. pt. i. 
 
 Coll. Essays, iv. p. 289. P. 377 (1861 edition).
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 173 
 
 Theology,"] theology is regarded as a natural product 
 of the operations of the human mind, under the con- 
 ditions of its existence, just as any other branch of 
 science, or the arts of architecture, or music, or paint- 
 ing, are such products. Like them, theology has a 
 history. Like them also, it is to be met with in 
 certain simple and rudimentary forms; and these can 
 be connected by a multitude of gradations, which 
 exist, or have existed, among people of various ages 
 and races, with the most highly developed theologies 
 of past and present times. 
 
 We are all likely to be more familiar with the theo- 
 logical history of the Israelites than with that of any 
 other nation. We may therefore fitly make it the 
 first object of our studies ; and it will be convenient 
 to commence with that period which lies between the 
 invasion of Canaan and the early days of the mon- 
 archy, and answers to the eleventh and twelfth cen- 
 turies B. c., or thereabouts. The evidence on which 
 any conclusion as to the nature of Israelitic theology 
 in those days must be based is wholly contained in 
 the Hebrew Scriptures an agglomeration of docu- 
 ments which certainly belong to very different ages, 
 but of the exact dates and authorship of any one of 
 which (except perhaps a few of the prophetical wri- 
 tings) there is no evidence, either internal or external, 
 so far as I can discover, of such a nature as to justify 
 more than a confession of ignorance, or, at most, an 
 approximate conclusion. In these we have the strati- 
 fied deposits (often confused, and even with their 
 natural order inverted) left by the stream of the intel- 
 lectual and moral life of Israel during many centuries. 
 And, embedded in these strata, there are numerous 
 remains of forms of thought which once lived, and 
 which, though often unfortunately mere fragments, 
 are of priceless value to the anthropologist. Our task 
 is to rescue these from their relatively unimportant
 
 174 HUXLEY 
 
 surroundings, and by careful comparison with existing 
 forms of theology to make the dead world which they 
 record live again. In other words, our problem is 
 palsontological, and the method pursued must be the 
 same that is employed in dealing with other fossil 
 
 From these rich deposits of ancient life-forms Hux- 
 ley chose that which occurs in the twenty-eighth chap- 
 ter of the first book of Samuel, and which tells the 
 story of Saul's visit to the witch of Endor. 
 
 On the eve of a decisive battle between the Israel- 
 ites and the Philistines, Saul, in despair because 
 Jahveh had " answered him not, neither by dreams, 
 nor by Urim, nor by prophets," sought counsel (despite 
 his having banished wizards and their kin) of a woman 
 " that had a familiar spirit," literally, " a woman mis- 
 tress of 0," which word means primitively a leather 
 bottle, such as a wine-skin, and is applied alike to the 
 necromancer and to the spirit evoked. It may be 
 compared with the sacred snake-skin bags or the 
 magic drums which form part of the apparatus of the 
 Red Indian medicine-men or sorcerers, the use of Ob 
 being probably suggested " by the likeness of the hol- 
 low sound emitted by a half-empty skin when struck 
 to the sepulchral tones in which the oracles of the 
 evoked spirits were uttered by the medium." 2 Dis- 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, iv. pp. 288, 289. 
 
 8 Coll. Essays, iv. p. 295. For various meanings of Ob see Art. 
 " Divination " in Encyclopedia Biblica.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 175 
 
 guising himself, Saul sought the woman, who, at his 
 request, called up the prophet Samuel from Sheol, the 
 under-world. The apparition is visible to her, but 
 invisible to the king (who had thrown off his disguise), 
 to whose inquiry she replies, " I see Elohim (god or 
 gods) coming up out of the earth." A conversation, 
 through the woman as medium, follows between Saul 
 and Samuel, who, reproaching the king for disquieting 
 him, says, " Jahveh will deliver Israel also with thee 
 into the hands of the Philistines, and to-morrow shalt 
 thou and thy sons be with me " (/'. *., in Sheol). 
 
 The story throws a flood of light upon ancient 
 Israelitic belief in necromancy and other forms of 
 magic, and in the abode of the dead. This last had 
 nothing in common with the elaborate conception of 
 a future state of rewards and punishments which was 
 incorporated into Hebrew eschatology during the Cap- 
 tivity. The belief in Sheol may be equated with that 
 of the Greek belief in Hades, both these being sur- 
 vivals of barbaric ideas about the fate of the departed. 
 " The small and great are there, and the servant is 
 free from his master." The ancient Israelites thought 
 that a man consists of body and soul, and that after 
 death the soul continued to exist as a ghost in the 
 under-world, whence it could be summoned by the art 
 of the necromancer, retaining, on its appearance, some 
 shadowy outline in form and feature by which it could
 
 176 HUXLEY 
 
 be identified. As for Elohim, a term translated 
 " god " (in contrast to Jahveh or Jehovah, translated 
 44 Lord "), that word, as was seen above, is applied to 
 ghosts, and also to various grades of gods. Its use 
 by the woman is of importance, as showing that the 
 ghost had become in some degree deified, a process of 
 apotheosis which marks the beginnings of ancestor- 
 worship. The existence of this widespread cult 
 among the Israelites is evidenced by the rude human 
 images known as Teraphim. The reference to Urim 
 shows the prevalence of divination. The Urim and 
 Thummim appear to have been lots which were car- 
 .ried by the high priest in the pocket of his 44 breast- 
 plate," worn on the ephod. Besides these, there are 
 evidences of other modes of ascertaining the will of 
 heaven, as by rods, 1 pointless arrows, 2 and dreams, 3 
 while the important part played by sacrifices, usually 
 burnt-offerings, in old Israelitic ritual, is too well 
 known to need more than allusion here. 
 
 The theological system thus outlined offers to the 
 anthropologist no feature which is devoid of a par- 
 allel in the known theologies of other races of man- 
 kind, even of those who inhabit parts of the world 
 most remote from Palestine. And the foundation of 
 the whole, the ghost-theory, is exactly that theological 
 
 i Hosea iv. 12. Ezekiel xxi. 23. 
 
 * Genesis xx. 3, xxxi. 24 ; Judges vii. 13, etc.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 177 
 
 speculation which is the most widely spread of all, 
 and the most deeply rooted among uncivilised men. 1 
 
 There is nothing new in the foregoing to readers 
 of Kuenen's great work on the Religion of Israel, nor 
 to those who have compared the archaic elements in 
 the Bible with the details of belief and ritual among 
 the lower races given in books of the type of Tylor's 
 Primitive Culture and Frazer's Golden Bough. But, 
 apart from the need of restating the obvious, Hux- 
 ley's purpose and skill were shown in his focussing 
 one or more salient features of the old Israelitic 
 theology for comparison with active beliefs among 
 lower races of whom he knew something at first hand, 
 or concerning whom he had cogent testimony. For 
 the first of these he drew on his Rattlesnake experi- 
 ences. In December, 1848, that vessel was anchored 
 off" Mount Ernest, an island in Torres Straits. Hux- 
 ley and a shipmate, whom he calls B., went ashore, 
 and in course of time became intimate with an old 
 native named Paouda. The old man took to B. be- 
 cause he believed him to be his father-in-law. 
 
 His grounds for that singular conviction were very 
 remarkable. We had made a long stay at Cape York 
 hard by : and in accordance with a theory which is 
 widely spread among the Australians, that white men 
 are the incarnated spirits of black men, B. was held 
 to be the ghost of a certain Mount Ernest native, one 
 1 Coll. Essays, iv. p. 317.
 
 178 HUXLEY 
 
 Antarki, who had lately died, on the ground of some 
 real or fancied resemblance to the latter. Now Paouda 
 had taken to wife a daughter of Antarki's, named 
 Domani, and as soon as B. informed him that he was 
 the ghost of Antarki, Paouda at once admitted the re- 
 lationship and acted upon it. For, as all the women 
 on the island had hidden away in fear of the ship, and 
 we were anxious to see what they were like, B. 
 pleaded pathetically with Paouda that it would be very 
 unkind not to let him see his daughter and grandchil- 
 dren. After a good deal of hesitation and the exac- 
 tion of pledges of deep secrecy, Paouda consented to 
 take B., and myself as B.'s friend, to see Domani 
 and the three daughters, by whom B. was received 
 quite as one of the family, while I was courteously 
 welcomed on his account. This scene made an im- 
 pression upon me which is not yet effaced. It left no 
 question on my mind of the sincerity of the strange 
 ghost-theory of these savages, and of the influence 
 which their belief has on their practical life. 1 
 
 For the second, Huxley cites Mariner's Account of 
 the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific 
 Ocean, published in 1816. When he was quite a 
 youth William Mariner joined the Port-au-Prince, a 
 private ship of war commissioned to cruise for prizes 
 in certain latitudes, and, failing success in that, to 
 search for whales. 2 Her fate was to be boarded, 
 plundered, and destroyed by the natives of Lafooga, 
 one of the Tonga islands, where Mariner, to whom 
 Finow, the chief, had taken a fancy, spent four years 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, iv. p. 317, 318. 
 * Introd. to Mariner, i. p. xxv.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 179 
 
 before making his escape. He learned the language 
 and lived the life of the islanders, familiarising him- 
 self with their beliefs and customs. Concerning their 
 theology, he says : 
 
 The human soul, after its separation from the body, 
 is termed a hotooa (a god or spirit ; hotooa is the same 
 as the better-known atua), and is believed to exist in 
 the shape of the body ; to have the same propensities 
 as during life, but to be corrected by a more enlight- 
 ened understanding, by which it readily distinguishes 
 good from evil, truth from falsehood, right from 
 wrong ; having the same attributes as the original 
 gods, but in a minor degree, and having its dwelling 
 forever in the happy regions of Bolotoo, holding the 
 same rank in regard to other souls as during this life : 
 it has, however, the power of returning to Tonga to 
 inspire priests, relations, or others, or to appear in 
 dreams to those it wishes to admonish ; and some- 
 times to the external eye in the form of a ghost or 
 apparition ; but this power of reappearance at Tonga 
 particularly belongs to the souls of chiefs than of 
 matabooles (a kind of " clients " in the Roman sense, 
 as Huxley explains in a footnote). 1 
 
 The "atuas " include gods good and evil, home and 
 foreign, as well as the souls . of men, so that they 
 " are exactly equivalent " to the " Elohim " of the 
 old Israelites, while the description of the incidents 
 attending the " inquiry of" an atua, as the paroxysm 
 and excitation of the priest, correspond "with the 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, iv. p. 323 ; and Mariner, ii. p. 99 ff. (edition 
 1827).
 
 l8o HUXLEY 
 
 manifestations of abnormal mental states among our- 
 selves, and furnish a most instructive commentary 
 npon the story of the witch of Endor." Bolotoo 
 answers to Sheol ; among the several hundred gods 
 recognised by " the Tongan theologians " one was 
 greater than all, as among the Israelites Jahveh was 
 "god of gods." And both in Palestine and the 
 Pacific Ocean the anger of the deities was believed 
 to be manifest as strongly in the case of neglect of 
 ritual as for offences against the moral law. The re- 
 sult of these and other comparisons noted in the 
 " Evolution of Theology " is to show how little is 
 left to choose between them. 
 
 One may read from the beginning of the book of 
 Judges to the end of the books of Samuel without dis- 
 covering that the old Israelites had a moral standard 
 which differs, in any essential respect (except perhaps 
 in regard to the chastity of unmarried women) from 
 that of the Tongans. Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, 
 and David are strong-handed men, some of whom are 
 not outdone by any Polynesian chieftain in the matter 
 of murder and treachery. . But it is surely 
 needless to carry the comparison further. Out of the 
 abundant evidence at command I think that sufficient 
 has been produced to furnish ample grounds for the 
 belief that the old Israelites of the time of Samuel en- 
 tertained theological conceptions which were on a 
 level with those current among the more civilised of 
 the Polynesian islanders, though their ethical code may 
 possibly, in some respects, have been more advanced. 1 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, iv. pp. 340, 345.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST l8l 
 
 Therefore, to whatever high spiritual altitudes the 
 Israelites attained, and however distinctive may have 
 been their genius for religion, a genius which shaped 
 their traditions, whether native or borrowed, in ac- 
 cordance with their belief in their special mission as 
 instruments and witnesses of Jehovah among man- 
 kind, and which inspired their prophets to utterances 
 unsurpassed in grandeur of expression and in loftiness 
 of moral tone, the documents of their religion evi- 
 dence that they passed through stages of develop- 
 ment corresponding to those of other races ; stages 
 of crude and coarse conceptions of the gods, attended 
 by a bloody ritual and a low morality. 
 
 While Huxley was busy over this subject, there 
 appeared the article by Mr. Gladstone, to the invigo- 
 rating effects of which reference was made on page 
 56. In his notice of M. Reville's book Mr. Glad- 
 stone took exception to the statement that while the 
 Creation story and other narratives in the Pentateuch 
 " possess a value of the highest order, they are not to 
 be regarded as other than a venerable fragment, well 
 deserving attention, of the great genesis of mankind." 
 This was reducing them to the level of ordinary 
 secular history, and hence Mr. Gladstone sought to 
 prove that, instead of "merely a lofty poem or a 
 skilfully constructed narrative," we have, in the He- 
 brew cosmogony and all that follows it, "a reve-
 
 1 82 HUXLEY 
 
 lation of truth from God," and the "great founda- 
 tion-chapter of the entire Scriptures, New as well as 
 Old." After defending the astounding theory of the 
 creation of something out of nothing, he contended 
 that the fourfold order of the appearance of living 
 things set forth in the Hebrew cosmogony is con- 
 firmed by " natural science." He cited a few anti- 
 quated authorities, the greatest among these being 
 Cuvier. But, as Huxley pointed out 
 
 Cuvier has been dead more than half a century ; 
 and the palaeontology of our day is related to that of 
 his very much as the geography of the sixteenth 
 century is related to that of the fourteenth. Since 
 1832, when Cuvier died, not only a new world, but 
 new worlds of ancient life, have been discovered, and 
 those who have most faithfully carried on the work 
 of the chief founder of palaeontology have done most 
 to invalidate the essentially negative grounds of his 
 speculative adherence to tradition. If Mr. Glad- 
 stone's latest information on these matters is derived 
 from the famous discourse prefixed to the " Ossemens 
 Fossiles" I can understand the position he has taken 
 up ; if he has ever opened a respectable modern 
 manual of palaeontology or geology, I cannot. For 
 the facts which demolish his whole argument are of 
 the commonest notoriety. 1 
 
 Concerning the controversy, "It was not," Sir 
 Mountstuart Grant-Duff said, " so much a battle as a 
 massacre." Nevertheless, after annihilation, as it 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, iv. p. 144.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 183 
 
 seemed to the onlooker, by Huxley's intellectual 
 dynamite, Mr. Gladstone reappeared, as if never dis- 
 turbed therefrom, on the Impregnable Rock of Holy 
 Scripture, as he called it. In that book he reaffirmed, 
 in ingenious variation of phrase, all that Huxley had 
 disproved concerning the succession of life-forms, 
 and, passing from the organic to the inorganic, con- 
 tended that " the nebular theory supplies a new and 
 remarkable establishment of accord between natural 
 science on the one hand (so far as its reasoning has 
 proceeded) and the Book of Genesis on the other." * 
 Mr. Gladstone had no sympathy with the invertebrate 
 theologians who would transfer Christianity from a 
 historical to a psychological base. "We are," he 
 says, " professors of a religion which rests not so 
 much on abstract principles as on matters of fact, 
 inseparable from the revelation itself." Such physical 
 facts are the Creation, the Incarnation, the Resur- 
 rection. 2 As to the validity of these, no doubt had 
 ever possessed him. He writes as a man of apparently 
 open mind, but throughout life every avenue had been 
 shut against the admission of anything telling against 
 preconceptions which were theological to the core. 
 
 1 Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, chap, vi., " On Recent 
 Corroborations of Scripture from the Regions of History and Nat- 
 ural Science." 
 
 2 Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, chap, ii., " The Creation 
 Story."
 
 184 HUXLEY 
 
 Mr. George Russell wrote a pamphlet on " Mr. 
 Gladstone's Religious Development." It should 
 have been issued in blank, for Mr. Gladstone never 
 had any such development. He was in the nineties 
 what he was in the thirties, save that with advancing 
 years he attached greater importance to ritual observ- 
 ances. One evidence of this is his resignation of 
 membership of the Folklore Society in 1896, when 
 the Presidential Address of that year, dealing with 
 the significance of that portion of Dr. Frazer's 
 Golden Bough which treats of the large body of bar- 
 baric rites connected with " eating the god," pointed 
 out the relation of these to the sacrament. His 
 whilom colleague and brother-Churchman, Lord Sel- 
 borne, said of him that "he was too readily influenced 
 by opinions which fell in with his own wishes or 
 feelings, and by the men who held them, and was im- 
 patient of the dry light of facts when facts told the 
 other way. He could see into millstones farther than 
 other men, and, on the other hand, he had a wonder- 
 ful power of not seeing what he did not like." ! 
 
 The facts of natural science were accepted by him 
 only in so far as they were shown to be in accord 
 with the statements of Scripture ; and, as they could 
 not be ignored, the instruments of ambiguity and 
 evasiveness, which perform their disingenuous work in 
 1 Memorials : Personal and Political, 1865-1895.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 185 
 
 political controversy, were employed to bring these 
 facts into seeming harmony with revelation. Hence 
 the serious limitations to which Mr. John Morley 
 bore witness when unveiling .a statue to Mr. Glad- 
 stone at Manchester in October last year. 
 
 Something [he says] was left out in the wide circle 
 of his interests ; natural science in all its speculations 
 and extensions and increase of scientific truth, ex- 
 tension of scientific methods all that no doubt con- 
 stitute the central activities, the intellectual activities 
 of England and Europe during the last forty years of 
 his life to all that he was not entirely open. 1 
 
 I remember once going with him one Sunday after- 
 noon to pay a visit to Mr. Darwin. It was in the 
 seventies. As I came away I felt that no impression 
 had reached him that that intellectual, modest, single- 
 minded lover of truth that searcher of the secrets 
 of nature was one who from his Kentish hilltop 
 was shaking the world. But the omission of scien- 
 tific interest was made up for. The thought with 
 which he rose in the morning and went to rest at 
 night was of the universe as a sublime moral theatre, 
 on which the Omnipotent Dramaturgist used king- 
 doms and rulers, laws and policies, to exhibit a sover- 
 eign purpose for good, to light up what I may call the 
 prose of politics with a ray from the Diviner Mind, 
 and exalted his ephemeral discourses in a sort of visible 
 relation to the counsels of all time. 
 
 While Mr. Gladstone, as well-nigh the last of the 
 old school of reconcilers, was renewing the hopeless 
 
 i " Of natural science he was strangely ignorant." Mr. Bryce, 
 " On some Traits of Mr. Gladstone," Fortnightly Review, January, 
 1902, p. 13.
 
 1 86 HUXLEY 
 
 attempt to harmonise, by verbal legerdemain, Genesis 
 and Geology, contending, for example, that the six 
 days meant " six chapters in the history of the crea- 
 tion," liberal theologians were surrendering belief in 
 the historical character of the so-called " Mosaic " 
 writings. 
 
 u I cannot deny," said Canon Bonney, speaking at 
 the Church Congress held in 1895 at Norwich, "that 
 the increase of scientific knowledge has deprived parts 
 of the earlier books of the Bible of the historical 
 value which was generally attributed to them by our 
 forefathers. The story of the creation in Genesis, 
 unless we play fast and -loose either with words or 
 with science, cannot be brought into harmony with 
 what we have learned from geology. Its ethnological 
 statements are imperfect, if not sometimes inaccurate. 
 The stories of the flood and of the Tower of Babel 
 are incredible in their present form. Some historical 
 elements may underlie many of the traditions in the 
 first eleven chapters of that book, but this we cannot 
 hope to recover." 
 
 In his essay on " Hebrew Authority " in Authority 
 and Arcb&ology, Dr. Driver, Regius Professor of He- 
 brew in the University of Oxford, and sitting, there- 
 fore, in the chair of Pusey, says that 
 
 the general result of the archaeological and anthro- 
 pological researches of the past half-century has been 
 to take the Hebrews out of the isolated position 
 which, as a nation, they seemed previously to hold, 
 and to demonstrate their affinities with, and often their
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 187 
 
 dependence upon, the civilisations by which they 
 were surrounded. . . . The civilisation which, 
 in spite of the long residence of the Israelites in 
 Egypt, left its mark, however, most distinctly upon 
 the culture and literature of the Hebrews was that of 
 Babylonia. It was in the East that the Hebrew tra- 
 ditions placed both the cradle of humanity and the 
 more immediate home of their own ancestors ; and it 
 was Babylonia which, as we now know, exerted dur- 
 ing many centuries an influence, once unsuspected, 
 over Palestine itself. . . . Thus the beliefs (of 
 the Hebrews) about the origin and early history of the 
 world, their social usages, their code of civil and 
 criminal law, their religious institutions, can no longer 
 be viewed, as was once possible, as differing in kind 
 from those of other nations, and determined in every 
 feature by a direct revelation from Heaven ; all, it is 
 now known, have substantial analogies among other 
 peoples, the distinctive character which they exhibit 
 among the Hebrews consisting in the spirit with 
 which they are infused, and the higher principles of 
 which they are made the exponent. Their literature, 
 moreover, it is now apparent, was not exempt from 
 the conditions to which the literature of other nations 
 was subject ; it embraces, for instance, narratives re- 
 lating to what we should term the prehistoric age, 
 similar in character and scope to those occurring in 
 the literature of other countries. There are many 
 representations and statements in the Old Testament 
 which only appear in their proper perspective when 
 viewed in the light thrown upon them by archaeology. 
 And in some cases it is not possible to resist the con- 
 clusion that they must be interpreted in a different 
 sense from that in which past generations have com- 
 monly understood them. 1 
 
 1 Pp. 7. 8.
 
 I 88 HUXLEY 
 
 The Creation-story, with which the book of Gene- 
 sis opens, can no longer be regarded " as possessing 
 any value as a scientific exposition of the past history 
 of the earth." There is now no question whatever 
 that it was derived from the Babylonian epic, the gro- 
 tesque polytheism of which is, in the Hebrew variant, 
 superseded by " a severe and dignified monotheism." 
 The Sabbath is, in all probability, an institution ulti- 
 mately of Babylonian origin, not then as a rest-day 
 for man, but " a day when the gods rested from their 
 anger." Among the Hebrews it was made subserv- 
 ient to human needs and religious purposes ; but " its 
 sanctity is explained unhistorically, and ante-dated." 
 
 Instead of the Sabbath, closing the week, being 
 sacred, because God rested upon it after His six days' 
 work of Creation, the work of Creation was distrib- 
 uted among six days, followed by a day of rest ; 
 because the week, ended by the Sabbath, already ex- 
 isted as an institution, and the writer wished to adjust 
 artificially the work of Creation to it. In other 
 words, the week determined the " days " of Creation, 
 not the "days" of Creation the week. 1 
 
 The story of Paradise and the Fall, on the validity 
 of which a fundamental part of Christian dogma rests, 
 " exhibits also points of contact with Babylonia, 
 though not so definite or complete as those presented 
 by the first Creation-story." " Eden itself," remarks 
 
 Authority and Archeology, p. 18.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 1 89 
 
 Professor Sayce, " is the Babylonian Eden or Chal- 
 dean ' plain ' ; its garden with the Tree of Knowledge 
 is celebrated in an old Babylonian poem (and depicted 
 on Assyrian monuments), and two of the rivers that 
 water it are the Tigris and Euphrates." l The 
 cherubim are " clearly no native Hebrew conception," 
 and are probably derived either from the Hittite griffin 
 or the Babylonian divine winged bulls. 2 
 
 In the story of the Flood, " we have a direct and 
 interesting parallel from Babylonia," the original of 
 which was discovered in 1872. Canon Driver sup- 
 plies an admirable resume of the epic, whose subject is 
 the exploits of the hero Gilgamesh, told in twelve 
 cantos. The Deluge-story forms the eleventh of 
 these cantos. 
 
 There are of course differences ; the Biblical ac- 
 count of the Deluge was not, any more than the 
 Biblical account of Creation, transcribed directly from 
 a Babylonian source j but by some channel or other 
 we can but speculate by what the Babylonian story 
 found its way into Israel ; details were forgotten or 
 modified : it assumed, of course, a Hebrew complex- 
 ion, being adapted to the spirit of Hebrew monothe- 
 ism, and made a vehicle for the higher teaching of the 
 Hebrew religion ; but the main outline remained the 
 same, and the substantial identity of the two narra- 
 tives is unquestionable. 3 
 
 1 The Temple Bible, Introd. p. xiv. 
 3 Encyclopedia Biblica, Art. " Cherubim." 
 
 3 Authority and Archeology , p. 27 ; and see Coll. Essays, iv. pp. 
 239-286.
 
 I 9O HUXLEY 
 
 As for the historical existence of the " Father of 
 the Faithful " and other ancestors of Israel, Canon 
 Driver animadverts as follows on the assumptions of 
 pseudo-concessionists of the type of Professor Sayce : 
 
 Mr. Tomkins and Professor Sayce have produced 
 works on The Age of Abraham and Patriarchal Pales- 
 tine, full of interesting particulars, collected from the 
 monuments, respecting the condition, political, social, 
 and religious, of Babylonia, Palestine, and Egypt, in 
 the centuries before the age of Moses ; but neither of 
 these volumes contains the smallest evidence that 
 either Abraham or the other patriarchs ever actually 
 existed. Patriarchal Palestine, in fact, opens with a 
 fallacy. Critics, it is said, have taught " that there 
 were no Patriarchs and no Patriarchal age, but, the 
 critics notwithstanding, the Patriarchal age has actually 
 existed," and "it has been shown by modern discov- 
 ery to be a fact." Modern discovery has shown no 
 such thing. It has shown, indeed, that Palestine had 
 inhabitants before the Mosaic age, that Babylonians, 
 Egyptians, and Canaanites, for instance, visited it, or 
 made it their home ; but that the Hebrew patriarchs 
 lived in it there is no tittle of monumental evidence 
 whatever. They may have done so ; but our knowl- 
 edge of the fact depends at present entirely upon what 
 is said in the Book of Genesis. Not one of the 
 many facts adduced by Professor Sayce is independent 
 evidence that the Patriarchs visited Palestine or even 
 that they existed at all. 1 
 
 Canon Driver will find materials for stronger 
 criticism of Professor Sayce in the Introduction con- 
 tributed by the latter to the Temple Bible, wherein not 
 1 Authority and Archaeology, p. 149.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 19 1 
 
 only Abraham, but Adam and Noah, are said "to 
 form successive links in the chain of Divine educa- 
 tion, which with each fresh starting-point becomes 
 less general and more personal." 1 In the third of 
 his Yale Lectures on Modern Criticism and the 
 Preaching of the Old Testament^ Professor G. A. 
 Smith is in agreement with Canon Driver : 
 
 While archaeology has richly illustrated the main out- 
 lines of the Book of Genesis from Abraham to 
 Joseph, it has not one whit of proof to offer for the 
 personal existence or characters of the Patriarchs 
 themselves. This is the whole change archaeology 
 has wrought ; it has given us a background and an 
 atmosphere for the stories of Genesis ; it is unable to 
 recall or to certify their heroes. 
 
 The legendary character of the patriarchal age, 
 which may be compared with the heroic age in 
 Greece, was demonstrated by Kuenen, Knappert, and 
 other Continental scholars thirty years ago. " Actual 
 ancestors are never distinctly traceable," says Dill- 
 mann, a sound statement pushed to extremes by 
 Goldziher, who, following the late Professor Max 
 Muller's philological methods, resolved Abraham, 
 Isaac, and Jacob into sun and sky myths, Jacob's 
 twelve sons being the moon and eleven stars. 
 Steinthal, with more warrant, converted Samson, the 
 " shining one," into a solar hero whose labours cor- 
 
 >P. 15-
 
 IQ2 HUXLEY 
 
 respond to those of Hercules. But such speculations 
 are of slight importance, since the major fact of the 
 unhistorical foundation of the early Hebrew narra- 
 tives is admitted. Canon Driver represents the views 
 accepted by every modern scholar having claim to 
 authority. They are adopted by the contributors to 
 the Encyclopedia Biblical a work in which Huxley 
 would have found the justification of all for which he 
 contended: they are in course of adoption in text- 
 books, and will, at no long interval, be quietly ad- 
 mitted into " Bible helps " and such like manuals 
 issued by the orthodox publishing societies. In the 
 preface to the most recent History of the Hebrews, its 
 author, the Rev. R. L. Ottley, says: "It is well to 
 recognise the fact that the patriarchal period is de- 
 scribed to us in narratives which were compiled in 
 their present form about a thousand years later than 
 the events they describe, and of which, therefore, as 
 Professor G. A. Smith truly observes, * it is simply 
 impossible for us at this time of day to establish the 
 accuracy.' " 
 
 When the source of the cosmogonic and other 
 legends was discovered, it was assumed that their 
 presence in the Old Testament was due to the con- 
 
 1 Edited by Canon Cheyne, Oriel Professor of the Interpretation 
 of Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford, and J. Sutherland 
 Black, LL. D.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 193 
 
 tact of the Jews with Babylonian ideas during the 
 Exile. But this did not account for the very great 
 modifications which the legends had undergone before 
 their adoption into the final redaction of the 
 Pentateuch ; modifications involving long processes 
 of elimination of polytheistic elements. Happily, 
 the discovery of a number of cuneiform tablets at 
 Tel-el-Amarna in Egypt in 1887 throws light upon 
 the difficulty. They show that, at about 1400 B.C., 
 
 Palestine and the neighbouring countries formed an 
 Egyptian province under the rule of Egyptian 
 governors, stationed in the principal towns, and 
 (what is more remarkable) communicating with their 
 superiors in the Babylonian language, thus affording 
 conclusive evidence that for long previously Canaan 
 had been under Babylonian influence. l 
 
 It is therefore in the highest degree probable that 
 the Babylonian legends had been imported into 
 Canaan before the fifteenth century B.C., and that on 
 the settlement of the Israelites in that country, they 
 incorporated these legends into their stock of tradi- 
 tions. Down to the eighth century B.C., the materials 
 of Israelitic history existed only in fragmentary and 
 unsettled form, made up of songs celebrating the 
 deeds and prowess of heroes ; of scraps of law ; and 
 of legendary and actual history gathered from different 
 sources and spread over many centuries. To these 
 1 Authority and ArcJucology, p. 72.
 
 194 HUXLEY 
 
 inchoate materials priestly and prophetic hands gave 
 shape, the one laying stress on the ceremonial law, 
 the other laying stress on the moral law, but both 
 emphasising the supremacy of Jahveh, who, after 
 slow emergence from the nature-stage as a mountain- 
 god, manifest in fire and burning-bush, had become 
 invested with an awful holiness. Every song and 
 saga was adapted to " the law, the prophets, and the 
 writings," and charged with the conviction of the 
 mission of Israel as the chosen nation ; and hence its 
 religion must be studied in the light of its history, 
 and its history in the light of its religion. Despite 
 these admissions, of which sufficing examples have 
 been given, we find Canon Driver and his brother 
 theologians still justifying Huxley's gravamen in de- 
 voting themselves 
 
 to the end of keeping the name of " Inspiration " to 
 suggest the divine source, and consequent infallibility, 
 of more or less of the Biblical literature, while care- 
 fully emptying the term of any definite sense. For 
 " plenary inspiration " we are asked to substitute a 
 sort of " inspiration with limited liability," the limit 
 being susceptible of indefinite fluctuation in corres- 
 pondence with the demands of scientific criticism. 
 When this advances that at once retreats. 
 
 This Parthian policy is carried out with some 
 dexterity ; but, like other such manoeuvres in the face 
 of a strong foe, it seems likely to end in disaster. It 
 is easy to say, and sounds plausible, that the Bible was 
 not meant to teach anything but ethics and religion,
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 195 
 
 and that its utterances on other matters are mere 
 obiter dicta : it is also a specious suggestion that in- 
 spiration, filtering through human brains, must 
 undergo a kind of fallibility contamination ; and that 
 this human impurity is responsible for any errors, the 
 existence of which has to be admitted, however un- 
 willingly. 
 
 But how does the apologist know what the Biblical 
 writers intended to teach, and what they did not in- 
 tend to teach ? And even if their authority is re- 
 stricted to matters of faith and morals, who is pre- 
 pared to deny that the story of the fabrication of Eve, 
 that of the lapse of innocence effected by a talking 
 snake, that of the Deluge and demonological legends, 
 have exercised, and still exercise, a profound influence 
 on Christian theology and Christian ethics ? l 
 
 Here Huxley again reaches the core of the matter. 
 There was a consistency in the old theory of verbal 
 inspiration ; there is none in the theory of a divine 
 and human element in the Scriptures, since there is 
 no possible test by which the one can be distinguished 
 from the other. And the decision as to what is, and 
 as to what is not, revelation, would hardly have been 
 left by the Holy Spirit to the creed-makers and the 
 critics. When Canon Driver speaks of the " spirit 
 of the legend of the Creation being changed in the 
 light of revelation," and of the Israelite writer as 
 "gifted by the Holy Spirit"; when Professor Sayce 
 says that " the language of Genesis rises to the height 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, iv. p. viii.
 
 196 HUXLEY 
 
 of the revelation it contains," and when Mr. Ottley 
 talks of the " inspiration which we justly attribute to 
 the Old Testament writers," they are each playing 
 with names to which there are no correspondent reali- 
 ties. As Professor Goldwin Smith puts it : 
 
 If it was from the Holy Spirit that these narratives 
 emanated, how can the Holy Spirit have failed to let 
 mankind know that in reality they were allegories ? 
 How could it allow them to be received as literal 
 truths, to mislead the world for ages, to bar the ad- 
 vance of science, and, when science at last prevailed, 
 to discredit revelation by the exposure ? Besides, to 
 maintain the symbolical truths of Genesis is almost 
 as hard as to maintain its literal truth. 1 
 
 Obviously, the effort to retain the saving clause of 
 a revelation in a miscellaneous collection of writings 
 of uncertain date and authorship, and of disputed 
 meaning, is due to the fact that the Christian doctrine 
 of the Atonement is bound up with the story of the 
 Fall. The legend of Eden is the keystone of the 
 arch which supports the whole Christian scheme of 
 redemption, and the evidence of palaeontology has dis- 
 proved the Pauline teaching that "death came into 
 the world by sin." 
 
 But, in the meantime, while the learned among 
 them still hesitate to follow facts to their only possi- 
 
 1 Guesses at the Riddle of Existence, p. 55.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 197 
 
 ble conclusion, the great mass of the unlearned clergy 
 will have warrant for the indiscriminate reading of the 
 legends of a talking ass ; an arrested sun ; of the 
 stories of Simeon and Levi's treachery and Jehu's 
 butcheries; of the high ethical teaching of the 
 Prophets ; and of the beatitudes on the meek, the 
 peacemakers, and the pure in heart ; as equally in- 
 tegral parts of writings inspired u by the Holy Spirit." 
 Every Sunday in thousands of churches their congre- 
 gations are still told that " God Himself spake all 
 these words," saying, " In six days the Lord made 
 heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and 
 rested the seventh day, wherefore the Lord blessed the 
 Sabbath day, and hallowed it." l Thus, as Emerson 
 says, " a vast carcass of tradition is exhibited every 
 year with as much solemnity as a new revelation." 
 
 Criticism was not to be arrested by the blank page 
 which separates Malachi from Matthew ; but oppro- 
 brium greeted the critic. 2 
 
 1 The clergy " are either propagating what they may easily 
 know, and therefore are bound to know, to be falsities ; or, if they 
 use the words in some non-natural sense, they fall below the moral 
 standard of the much-abused Jesuit." Coll. Essays, ii. p. 146. 
 
 2 Bishop (then Canon) Gore admits that the same criticism must 
 be applied to the New Testament as is applied to the Old, but he 
 qualifies this with the cryptic remark that " because the historical 
 and literary conditions in the two cases are in general very differ- 
 ent, the result also will be in general very different." Pilot, loth 
 Aug., 1901.
 
 198 HUXLEY 
 
 Destroy the foundation of most forms of dogmatic 
 Christianity contained in the second chapter of Gen- 
 esis, if you will ; the new ecclesiasticism undertakes 
 to underpin the structure, and make it, at any rate to 
 the eye, as firm as ever; but let him be anathema who 
 applies exactly the same canons of criticism to the 
 opening chapters of "Matthew" or of "Luke." 
 School children may be told that the world was by no 
 means made in six days, and that implicit belief in 
 the story of Noah's Ark is permissible only, as a mat- 
 ter of business, to their toymakers ; but they are to 
 hold for the certaintest of truths, to be doubted only 
 at peril of their salvation, that their Galilean fellow- 
 child Jesus, nineteen centuries ago, had no human 
 father. 1 
 
 In treating the Old Testament "like any other 
 book," Huxley chose as a test case the interview of 
 Saul with the ghost of Samuel through the medium 
 of a witch. In treating the New Testament " like 
 any other book," he chose as a test case the story of 
 Jesus exorcising demons from a man and permitting 
 them to enter into two thousand swine, " to the great 
 loss and damage of the innocent Gadarene owners." 
 In both cases, therefore, the question of the existence 
 of spirits is raised. His reason for the selection was 
 that in the course of discussions in the years 1889- 
 1891 "it had been maintained by the defenders of 
 ecclesiastical Christianity that the demonology of the 
 books of the New Testament is an essential and in- 
 
 Coll. Essays, v. p. xi.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 199 
 
 tegral part of the revelation of the nature of the 
 spiritual world promulgated by Jesus of Nazareth." 
 So far he was in agreement with them. 
 
 Belief in spirits, good and bad, guardian angels and 
 maliceful demons, beings filling an intermediate place 
 as lower than gods and greater than men, is a survival 
 of savage ideas as to the presence of innumerable 
 spirits everywhere, and an impulse in certain direc- 
 tions was given to this belief among the Jews during 
 the Exile. The ancient Babylonian idea that disease 
 is due to demons (a belief common to barbaric peo- 
 ples, among whom disease and death are not regarded 
 as natural events), whose expulsion was the business 
 of the exorcist, struck root in Judaism, and hence we 
 find that the references to evil spirits are more fre- 
 quent in the New Testament than in the Old. " Be- 
 lief in possession is distinctive of late Jewish times," l 
 as is that in angels, who become the appointed " mes- 
 sengers " between Jahveh and men ; on whose duties 
 as servants before the heavenly throne the prophets, 
 notably Ezekiel and Zechariah, enlarge ; and whose 
 presence as attendants on the " Son of Man " at the 
 Judgment-Day, is dwelt upon by Jesus. 
 
 It is plain as language can make it, that the writers 
 of the Gospels believed in the existence of Satan and 
 the subordinate ministers of evil as strongly as they 
 
 1 Encyclopedia Biblica : Art. " Demons."
 
 200 HUXLEY 
 
 believed in that of God and the angels ; and that they 
 had an unhesitating faith in possession and in exor- 
 cism. No reader of the first three Gospels can hesi- 
 tate to admit that, in the opinion of those persons 
 among whom the traditions out of which they are 
 compiled arose, Jesus held, and constantly acted upon, 
 the same theory of the spiritual world. Nowhere do 
 we find the slightest hint that he doubted the theory, 
 or questioned the efficacy of the curative operations 
 based upon it. 1 
 
 The writer of the article " Demons " in the Ency- 
 clopedia Biblica says : " there is no sign on the part 
 of Jesus, any more than on the part of the evangelists, 
 of mere accommodation to the current belief. It is 
 true that l Satan ' is used metaphorically in the rebuke 
 of Peter (Matt. xvi. 23) and that l unclean spirit ' is 
 figurative in Matt. xii. 43. Acceptance of the cur- 
 rent belief is clearly at the basis of the argument of 
 Jesus with the Pharisees (Luke xi. 16-26); . . . 
 and that He believed in the power of others besides 
 Himself and His disciples to expel demons, in some 
 sense at any rate, seems clear in the presence of such 
 passages as Matt. xii. 27 and Luke xi. 19, where He 
 attributes the power to the disciples of the Pharisees. 
 He recognises also the fact that similar success was 
 attained by some who used His name without actually 
 following Him (Mark ix. 38) or without being more 
 
 1 Coll. Eaays, v. p. 193.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 2OI 
 
 than professed disciples." 1 And the author of Ex- 
 ploratio Evangelica says that " it is probable Jesus ac- 
 cepted the hypothesis of demoniac possession as easily 
 as He accepted the hypothesis that the sun moves 
 round the earth." 2 In the declaration that He cast 
 out devils (Luke xiii. 32), and His bestowal of the like 
 power upon His disciples (Luke ix. i) ; in the story 
 of the temptation ; in the warning that the wicked 
 would depart into everlasting fire, prepared for the 
 devil and his angels (" the doctrine of eternal damna- 
 tion is a Judaistic survival of grossly immoral char- 
 acter " 3 ) no ingenuity can distort the fact that Jesus 
 shared the common demonological belief of His time 
 and people. 
 
 And the issue which Huxley raised is as clear as it 
 is serious : 
 
 When such a story as that about the Gadarene 
 swine is placed before us, the importance of the de- 
 cision, whether it is to be accepted or rejected, cannot 
 be overestimated. If the demonological part of it is 
 to be accepted, the authority of Jesus is unmistakably 
 pledged to the demonological system current in Judea 
 in the first century. The belief in devils, who pos- 
 sess men and can be transferred from men to pigs, 
 
 1 See quotation to the same effect, from Dr. Alexander's Bibl. 
 Cyclopedia, given in Coll. Essays, v. p. 217. 
 
 2 P. 225. 
 
 *A Critical History of a Future Life. By R. H. Charles, 
 D.D., p. 311.
 
 2O2 HUXLEY 
 
 becomes as much a part of Christian dogma as any 
 article of the creeds. If it is to be rejected, there are 
 two alternative conclusions. Supposing the Gospels 
 to be historically accurate, it follows that Jesus shared 
 in the errors respecting the nature of the spiritual 
 world prevalent in the age in which He lived, and 
 among the people of His nation. If, on the other 
 hand, the Gospel traditions give us only a popular 
 version of the sayings and doings of Jesus, falsely col- 
 oured, and distorted by the superstitious imaginings of 
 the minds through which it had passed,. what guaran- 
 tee have we that a similar unconscious falsification, in 
 accordance with preconceived ideas, may not have 
 taken place in respect of other reported sayings and 
 doings ? What is to prevent a conscientious inquirer 
 from finding himself at last in a purely agnostic posi- 
 tion with respect to the teachings of Jesus, and con- 
 sequently with respect to the fundamentals of Chris- 
 tianity ? ' 
 
 The old argument that miracles are impossible, be- 
 cause contrary to the order of nature, is no longer 
 advanced, since its force is limited to what we infer 
 from our experience of that order. The fact that a 
 certain thing has not happened within our knowledge 
 is no proof that it never happened in the past, or that 
 it can never happen in the future. Nothing, as 
 Huxley points out, is to be declared " impossible," 
 except contradictions in terms, as a round square, a 
 present past, or the intersection of two parallel lines. 
 None of us have seen a centaur or a griffin, but the 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, v. pp. 193, 194 ; and see p. 218.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 203 
 
 existence of such monsters is conceivable ; so with the 
 miracles reported in the Old and New Testaments or in 
 the Acta Sanctorum ; they are conceivable by the im- 
 agination, however repellent to the reason. And the 
 argument which alone has force against miracles is, 
 that as their alleged occurrence is an event lying outside 
 our experience of an unbroken uniformity of nature, 
 belief in them must be determined by the validity of the 
 evidence. And the more improbable the character of 
 the alleged miracle, the more cogent must be the evi- 
 dence in its support. Dealing with the miracles 
 narrated in the Gospels, it would seem only reason- 
 able, before accepting the truth of the story, to expect 
 that in the case of documents for which inspiration 
 is claimed there should be no discrepancies in the 
 record ; that the Holy Spirit would have protected the 
 revelation from error and obscurity. Under this test 
 the evidence breaks down. An examination of a 
 work published by the Religious Tract Society, under 
 the unconsciously ironical title, Harmony of the 
 Gospels^ brings out the discord between them. Upon 
 a matter so momentous in its assumed bearings on 
 human destiny as the Virgin Birth (to which the ear- 
 liest of the Synoptics makes no reference), there is no 
 agreement ; while the accounts of the character of 
 the last supper, of the last hours of Jesus on the 
 cross, and of the events following His alleged resur-
 
 204 HUXLEY 
 
 rection, vary irreconcilably. A recent defender of 
 the faith remarks that u the tale of the physical resur- 
 rection of Jesus belongs evidently to the same circle 
 of thought as that of the miraculous birth. It shows a 
 love of the marvellous ; is deeply tinged with material- 
 ism ; and rests on a historical substruction which falls 
 to pieces on a careful examination." ' So with the 
 Gadarene story ; so with the story of the feeding of 
 several thousand with a few loaves, with the result that 
 " the quantity of the fragments of the meal left over 
 amounted to much more than the original store " : 
 the reports differ. The explanation, hitherto arrested 
 and darkened by theories of inspiration, is obvious. 
 With the abandonment of those theories, every diffi- 
 culty vanishes. The Gospels are the handiwork of 
 men who lived in an age when any conception of the 
 uniformity of nature was foreign to the mind ; men 
 in whom the critical faculty of weighing of evidence 
 was wholly lacking, and who set down, each in his 
 own fashion, stories of events said to have happened 
 many years before stories which had therefore filtered 
 through many channels; fallible hearers repeating 
 them to fallible writers, whose honesty and sincerity 
 are not doubted, but whose competency is questioned. 
 As Dr. Sutherland Black says in his admirably com- 
 pendious article on the " Gospels " in Cbambers's 
 1 Exploratio Evangelica, p. 255.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 2O5 
 
 Encyclopedia^ " no one of them is a primary document 
 in the sense of having been written in its present 
 form from direct personal knowledge ; and it is ob- 
 vious that each succeeding evangelist, in availing him- 
 self of the labours of his predecessors, did so with a 
 feeling of perfect freedom, not claiming for himself, 
 nor according to his fellows, nor expecting for either 
 from the church, any title to authority as infallible." 
 That authority was claimed for them by the framers 
 of the Canon, fallible men determining what is in- 
 fallible ; men whose critical capacity and materials for 
 decision are hardly warrant for the burden which they 
 have for centuries, unchallenged, laid upon more com- 
 petent judges. " The times of the first Church were 
 times of excitement ; when the appeal was not to the 
 questioning, thinking understanding, but to unheed- 
 ing, all-venturing emotion, to that lower class ' from 
 whom faiths ascend ' ; not to the cultivated class by 
 whom they are criticised." * Huxley's tribute to the 
 service rendered to human kind by the Bible (see ante, 
 p. 38) adds emphasis to his protest against the evil of 
 which the doctrine of its infallibility has been fruitful. 
 
 The pretension to infallibility, by whomsoever 
 made, has done endless mischief; with impartial ma- 
 lignity it has proved a curse alike to those who have 
 made it and those who have accepted it : and its most 
 
 1 Literary Studies. By Walter Bagehot, ii. p. 46.
 
 2O6 HUXLEY 
 
 baneful shape is book infallibility. For sacerdotal 
 corporations and schools of philosophy are able, under 
 due compulsion of opinion, to retreat from positions 
 that have become untenable ; while the dead hand of 
 a book sets and stiffens, amidst texts and formulae, 
 until it becomes a mere petrifaction, fit only for the 
 function of stumbling-block which it so admirably 
 performs. Wherever bibliolatry has prevailed, bigotry 
 and cruelty have accompanied it. It lies at the root 
 of the deep-seated, sometimes disguised, but newer 
 absent, antagonism of all the varieties of ecclesiasti- 
 cism to the freedom of thought and to the spirit of 
 scientific investigation. For those who look upon 
 ignorance as one of the chief sources of evil, and hold 
 veracity, not merely in act, but in thought, to be the 
 one condition of true progress, whether moral or in- 
 tellectual, it is clear that the Biblical idol must go the 
 way of all other idols. Of infallibility in all shapes, 
 lay or clerical, it is needful to iterate with more than 
 Catonic pertinacity, Delenda est. 1 
 
 In the controversy over the Gadarene story, the 
 authenticity of which was defended by Dr. Wace and 
 Mr. Gladstone, Huxley raised the question whether 
 the ever-accumulating experience of mankind concern- 
 ing the non-intrusion of the supernatural in the se- 
 quence of phenomena was to be regarded as of no 
 account as against the story of demon-possessed pigs. 
 For history shows that all advance in knowledge has 
 caused recession of belief in miracle, and that the 
 farther back inquiry is pushed the more active is that 
 belief. And the argument that miracles ceased at a 
 Co& Essays, iv. p. IO.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 2OJ 
 
 certain stage, the date of which is a hotly debated 
 question among ecclesiastics, has no force if they were 
 wrought as signs and wonders to remove unbelief, 
 since if that was their purpose the need of them is 
 greater than ever. As was his wont, Huxley went 
 straight to the point. 
 
 I am not more certain about anything than I am 
 that the evidence tendered in favour of the demon- 
 ology of which the Gadarene story is a typical ex- 
 ample is utterly valueless. 1 
 
 Everything that I know of physiological and patho- 
 logical science leads me to entertain a very strong 
 conviction that the phenomena ascribed to possession 
 are as purely natural as those which constitute small- 
 pox ; everything that I know of anthropology leads 
 me to think that the belief in demons and demoniacal 
 possession is a mere survival of a once universal 
 superstition, and that its persistence at the present 
 time is pretty much in the inverse ratio of the general 
 instruction, intelligence, and sound judgment of the 
 population among whom it prevails. Everything that 
 I know of law and justice convinces me that the 
 wanton destruction of other people's property is a 
 misdemeanour of evil example. Again, the study of 
 history, and especially of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and 
 seventeenth centuries, leaves no shadow of doubt on my 
 mind that the belief in the reality of possession and 
 of witchcraft, justly based, alike by Catholics and 
 Protestants, upon this and innumerable other passages 
 in both the Old and New Testaments, gave rise, 
 through the special influence of Christian ecclesiastics, 
 to the most horrible persecutions and judicial murders 
 pf thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women, 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 206.
 
 208 HUXLEY 
 
 and children. And when I reflect that the record of 
 a plain and simple declaration upon such an occasion 
 as this, that the belief in witchcraft and possession is 
 wicked nonsense, would have rendered the long agony 
 of medieval humanity impossible, I am prompted to 
 reject, as dishonouring, the supposition that such 
 declaration was withheld out of condescension to 
 popular error. 1 
 
 The Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Apoc- 
 alypse assert the existence of the devil, of his 
 demons and of hell, as plainly as they do that of God 
 and His angels and heaven. It is plain that the Mes- 
 sianic and the Satanic conceptions of the writers of 
 these books are the obverse and the reverse of the 
 same intellectual coinage. If we turn from Scripture 
 to the traditions of the Fathers and the confessions 
 of the Churches, it will appear that, in this one par- 
 ticular, at any rate, time has brought about no im- 
 portant deviation from primitive belief. From Justin 
 onwards it may often be a fair question whether God, 
 or the devil, occupies a larger share of the attention 
 of the Fathers. It is the devil who instigates the 
 Roman authorities to persecute; the gods and god- 
 desses of paganism are devils, and idolatry itself is an 
 invention of Satan ; if a saint falls away from grace, 
 it is by the seduction of the demon ; if heresy arises, 
 the devil has suggested it ; and some of the Fathers 
 go so far as to challenge the pagans to a sort of exor- 
 cising match, by way of testing the truth of Chris- 
 tianity. Medieval Christianity is at one with patristic, 
 on this head. The masses, the clergy, the theo- 
 logians, and the philosophers alike, live and move and 
 have their being in a world full of demons, in which 
 sorcery and possession are every-day occurrences. 
 
 >/<*.. pp. 215, 216.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 2OQ 
 
 Nor did the Reformation make any difference. 
 Whatever else Luther assailed, he left the traditional 
 demonology untouched ; nor could any one have 
 entertained a more hearty and uncompromising belief 
 in the devil, than he and, at a later period, the Cal- 
 vinistic fanatics of New England did. Finally, in 
 these last years of the nineteenth century, the demon- 
 ological hypotheses of the first century are, explicitly 
 or implicitly, held and occasionally acted upon by the 
 immense majority of Christians of all confessions. 1 
 
 But although this be so with the loose adherents of 
 current creeds ; although the man who smiles when 
 he hears the story of the demons passing into the 
 bodies of terrified swine has a trembling of soul when 
 he hears of the temptation of Jesus by the devil, so 
 that, feeling scepticism to be somewhat perilous, he 
 carries his belief in demonology to a " suspense ac- 
 count," Huxley added that he ventured "to doubt 
 whether, at this present moment, any Protestant 
 theologian who has a reputation to lose will say that 
 he believes the Gardarene story." 
 
 Dr. Wace at once retorted that, so far as he was 
 concerned, the doubt had no foundation. " I repeat," 
 he said, " that I believe it, and that Mr. Huxley has 
 removed the only objection to my believing it," 
 namely, that to reject it would be denial of the 
 veracity of Jesus. While humorously disclaiming 
 any responsibility for the confirmation of Dr. Wace's 
 Coll. Essays, v. pp. 322, 323.
 
 210 HUXLEY 
 
 belief that " the spiritual world comprises devils, who, 
 under certain circumstances, may enter men and be 
 transferred from them to four-footed beasts," ' 
 Huxley could but admire the courage, whatever might 
 be the opinion he held of the intelligence, of his 
 opponent. " Dr. Wace," he said, " has raised for 
 himself a monument are perennius." Huxley was 
 charitably silent as to the appropriate inscription to be 
 put on it. 
 
 In the attack upon agnosticism which led to the 
 controversy, Dr. Wace accused the agnostics of thus 
 dubbing themselves to avoid the " unpleasant signifi- 
 cance " attaching to the term " infidel," which, like 
 " freethinker," strange as it may seem in this 
 twentieth century, still appears to convey reproach. 
 And he added, in minatory tartness, that " it is, and 
 ought to be, an unpleasant thing for a man to have to 
 say plainly that he does not believe in Jesus Christ." * 
 Whatever vague threat the word "unpleasant" 
 might convey, whether hints of the secular arm, or 
 social ostracism, or eternal punishment, any possible 
 penalty was not likely to weigh with Huxley. He 
 retorted that the proposition 
 
 that " it ought to be " unpleasant for any man to say 
 
 anything which he sincerely and, after due deliberation, 
 
 believes, is, to my mind, of the most profoundly 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 415. * Coll. Essays, v. p. 21O.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 211 
 
 immoral character. I verily believe that the great 
 good which has been effected in the world by Chris- 
 tianity has been largely counteracted by the pestilent 
 doctrine on which all the Churches have insisted, that 
 honest disbelief in their more or less astonishing 
 creeds is a moral offence, indeed, a sin of the deepest 
 dye, deserving and involving the same future retribu- 
 tion as murder and robbery. If we could only see, 
 in one view, the torrents of hypocrisy and cruelty, 
 the lies, the slaughter, the violations of every obliga- 
 tion of humanity, which have flowed from this source 
 along the course of the history of Christian nations, 
 our worst imaginations of hell would pale beside the 
 vision. 1 
 
 As to the use of the term " agnostic," Huxley 
 says 
 
 When I reached intellectual maturity and began to 
 ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a 
 pantheist ; a materialist or an idealist ; a Christian or 
 a freethinker ; I found that the more I learned and 
 reflected, the less ready was the answer ; until, at 
 last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art 
 nor part with any of these denominations, except the 
 last. The one thing in which most of these good 
 people were agreed was the one thing in which I 
 differed from them. They were quite sure they had 
 attained a certain " gnosis," had, more or less suc- 
 cessfully, solved the problem of existence ; while I 
 was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong con- 
 viction that the problem was insoluble. 2 
 
 At any rate, whatever explanation of the universe 
 there may be, Huxley was satisfied that theology had 
 1 Ib. % p. 241. Coll. Essays, v. p. 238.
 
 212 HUXLEY 
 
 not supplied it. Joining the Metaphysical Society, 
 he found in that " remarkable confraternity of 
 antagonists" every variety of philosophical and 
 theological opinion represented, most of the members 
 being "-M/J of one sort or another." So, nameless 
 himself, he " conceived the appropriate title of 
 4 agnostic.' " " It came," he says, " into my head as 
 suggestively antithetic to the 'gnostic' of Church 
 history, who professed to know so much about the 
 very things of which I was ignorant." But, as the 
 word implies, it connotes neither confession of faith 
 nor doctrinal formula ; neither affirmation nor denial. 
 " And dares stamp nothing false where he finds noth- 
 ing sure." * 
 
 Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, 
 the essence of which lies in the rigorous application 
 of a single principle. That principle is of great 
 antiquity ; it is as old as Socrates ; as old as the writer 
 who said, " Try all things, hold fast by that which is 
 good ; " it is the foundation of the Reformation, 
 which simply illustrated the axiom that every man 
 should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in 
 him ; it is the great principle of Descartes ; it is the 
 fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively, 
 the principle may be expressed : In matters of the 
 intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, 
 without regard to any other consideration. And 
 negatively : In matters of the intellect do not pre- 
 tend that conclusions are certain which are not dem- 
 
 1 Matthew Arnold, EmptdocUs.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 213 
 
 onstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the 
 agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and un- 
 defiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe 
 in the face, whatever the future may have in store for 
 him. 1 - 
 
 It was no hard matter to show that the vagueness 
 was on the other side. The phrase " belief in Jesus 
 Christ " has as many meanings as there are sects. 
 The Episcopalian has one definition of it; the Uni- 
 tarian has another. And Huxley showed what diffi- 
 culty attends any effort to construct a consistent 
 portrait of Jesus from the Synoptics and the gospel 
 of John, and then to reconcile this with the Jesus of 
 the creeds. The New Testament witnesses to dis- 
 ruptions on the question of "belief" in him soon 
 after his death. His immediate followers were 
 " Nazarenes," who acknowledged his brother James 
 as their head, and who conformed to the Jewish law, 
 differing from their copatriots only in believing that 
 the Messiah had already come in the person of Jesus. 
 The division of the disciples of the Master into 
 Nazarenes and Christians, which latter appellation is 
 said to have been first used at Antioch, arose through 
 the contention of Paul and Barnabas that the com- 
 mands regarding circumcision and abstinence from 
 certain foods were abrogated. So the "primitive 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 245, and see ante, p. 40.
 
 214 HUXLEY 
 
 Church," around whose story ecclesiastical historians 
 have cast a halo, was " no dogmatic dovecot pervaded 
 by the most loving unity and doctrinal harmony." 
 Nazarenism became " a damnable heresy, while the 
 younger doctrine throve and pushed out its shoots 
 into that endless variety of sects, of which the three 
 strongest survivors are the Roman and Greek 
 Churches and modern Protestantism." 1 
 
 A masterly summary of the rise and development 
 of Christianity, of the foreign influences which shaped 
 it, and of the mythologies, the pagan rites and cere- 
 monies, themselves of barbaric origin, which it incor- 
 porated, is given in the essay on the " Evolution of 
 Theology." 2 This should be read in conjunction 
 with the prologue to the fifth volume of Collected 
 Essays (of which Huxley wrote to a friend : " It cost 
 me more time and pains than any equal number of 
 pages I have ever written " 3 ), in which the history of 
 the struggle between Naturalism and Supernaturalism 
 is outlined, and the evidence on which the doctrine 
 of Evolution rests, set forth. Both papers will help 
 to clear away the haze which hangs round questions 
 in the discussion of which the spirit of the advocate 
 rather than of the truth-seeker is present. Strauss 
 said that " the true criticism of dogma is its history," 
 because in this are to be found the indictment of hu- 
 
 Coll. Essays, v. p. 231. Ib., pp. 367-371. * II. 298.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 215 
 
 manity against creeds between which and the facts of 
 life and nature there is no correspondence, since they 
 remain puzzles to the head and strangers to the heart. 
 As Emerson says, " The prayers and dogmas of our 
 Church are like the zodiac of Denderah and the as- 
 tronomical monuments of the Hindoos, wholly in- 
 sulated from anything now extant in the life and the 
 business of the people." 1 
 
 In place of the " tangled Trinities," the logoma- 
 chies which only bewilder and perplex, Huxley asked 
 the Churches to revive " a conception of religion 
 which," he says, " appears to me as wonderful an in- 
 spiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the 
 science of Aristotle. l And what doth the Lord re- 
 quire of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, 
 and to walk humbly with thy God ? ' If any so- 
 called religion takes away from this great saying of 
 Micah, I think it wantonly mutilates, while, if it 
 adds thereto, I think it obscures the perfect ideal of 
 religion." 2 
 
 All that is best in the ethics of the modern world, 
 in so far as it has not grown out of Greek thought, or 
 Barbarian manhood, is the direct development of the 
 ethics of old Israel. There is no code of legislation, 
 ancient or modern, at once so just and so merciful, so 
 tender to the weak and poor, as the Jewish law ; and 
 if the Gospels are to be trusted, Jesus of Nazareth 
 
 i " The American Scholar." Coll. Essays, iv, p. 161.
 
 2l6 HUXLEY 
 
 Himself declared that He taught nothing but that 
 which lay implicitly, or explicitly, in the religious and 
 ethical system of His people. 
 
 And the scribe said unto Him, Of a truth, Teacher, 
 Thou hast well said that he is one ; and there is none 
 other but he, and to love him with all the heart, and 
 with all the understanding, and with all the strength, 
 and to love his neighbor as himself, is much more 
 than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices (Mark 
 xii- 32, 33)- 
 
 Here is the briefest of summaries of the teaching 
 of the prophets of Israel of the eighth century ; does 
 the Teacher, whose doctrine is thus set forth in His 
 presence, repudiate the exposition ? Nay ; we are 
 told, on the contrary, that Jesus saw that He " an- 
 swered discreetly," and replied, " Thou art not far 
 from the kingdom of God." 
 
 So that I think that even if the creeds, from the 
 so-called " Apostles' " to the so-called " Athanasian," 
 were swept into oblivion ; and even if the human 
 race should arrive at the conclusion that, whether a 
 bishop washes a cup or leaves it unwashed, is not a 
 matter of the least consequence, it will get on very 
 well. The causes which have led to the development 
 of morality in mankind, which have guided or im- 
 pelled us all the way from the savage to the civilised 
 state, will not cease to operate because a number of 
 ecclesiastical hypotheses turn out to be baseless. 
 And, even if the absurd notion that morality is more 
 the child of speculation than of practical necessity 
 and inherited instinct had any foundation ; if all the 
 world is going to thieve, murder, and otherwise mis- 
 conduct itself as soon as it discovers that certain por- 
 tions of ancient history are mythical ; what is the 
 relevance of such arguments to any one who holds by 
 the Agnostic principle ? l 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 316.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST . 217 
 
 Turning briefly to Mr. Gladstone's intervention in 
 the controversy, his chief concern was about Hux- 
 ley's charge against Jesus as wantonly destroying other 
 people's property. He was sceptical as to the pigs 
 numbering two thousand, and in a foot-note to the 
 concluding chapter of the Impregnable Rock of Holy 
 Scripture suggests that "so large a number may be 
 due to the error of a copyist, or very possibly a 
 marginal gloss, which afterwards crept into the text." 
 But as the existence of demons was accepted by Mr. 
 Gladstone as a matter of course, the statistics as to 
 the pigs are of minor importance, except as they may 
 affect the question of an inspired text. What he 
 sought to prove was that the keepers of the swine 
 were Jews, and that therefore they were justly pun- 
 ished for their breach of the Mosaic law. Josephus 
 is quoted as evidence. But Huxley showed con- 
 clusively that Mr. Gladstone had misread Josephus, 
 and he established beyond question that Gadara was a 
 Gentile, and not a Jewish city. All in vain. Mr. 
 Gladstone stuck to his statements, and as edition after 
 edition of the Impregnable Rock was issued without 
 modification, there can be little wonder that while in 
 publicly criticising these methods Huxley called them 
 " peculiar," in private correspondence he spoke of the 
 man who practised them as a " copious shuffler," l 
 
 1 II. 122. In a letter to Colonel Ingersoll, written in March,
 
 2l8 HUXLEY 
 
 and bracketed him with Owen and Bishop Wilber- 
 force as belonging " to a very curious type of human- 
 ity, with many excellent and even great qualities, and 
 one fatal defect utter untrustworthiness." ' It is in- 
 teresting to note here that in a conversation with Mr. 
 Lionel Tollemache, Mr. Gladstone " denied genius to 
 Huxley, but allowed it to Owen and Romanes " ! 2 
 
 Among the outside criticisms which the controversy 
 provoked was that which suggested that both dispu- 
 tants " might be better occupied than in fighting over 
 the Gadarene pigs." Upon this Huxley pertinently 
 commented : 
 
 If these too famous swine were the only parties to 
 the suit, I, for my part, should fully admit the justice 
 of the rebuke. But, under the beneficent rule of the 
 Court of Chancery, in former times, it was not un- 
 common that a quarrel about a few perches of worth- 
 less land ended in the ruin of ancient families and the 
 engulfing of great estates ; and I think that our ad- 
 monisher failed to observe the analogy to note the 
 momentous consequences of the judgment which may 
 be awarded in the present apparently insignificant 
 action in re the swineherds of Gadara. 
 
 The immediate effect of such judgment will be the 
 decision of the question, whether the men of the nine- 
 teenth century are to adopt the demonology of the 
 
 1889, Huxley says : " Gladstone's attack on you is one of the best 
 things he has written. I do not think there is more than fifty per 
 cent, more verbiage than is necessary, nor any sentence with more 
 than two meanings." Literary Guide, December, 1901. 
 
 II. 341. Talks with Mr. Gladstone.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 2IQ 
 
 men of the first century, as divinely revealed truth, or 
 to reject it, as degrading falsity. 1 
 
 Yet, complete as is the discomfiture of the current 
 theology in its conflict with historical criticism of its 
 documents, the Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture re- 
 mains in demand, and Dr. Wace is, we suppose, still 
 a power in the pulpit. The chains of custom and 
 tradition still bind, and indifference still paralyses, the 
 souls of men. In this, and not in active and deep 
 conviction of the truth of its creeds, the strength of 
 orthodoxy lies. It has made unto itself a more sure 
 habitation in yielding to " the form and pressure " of 
 the time ; its official representatives have never aban- 
 doned that defence of privilege which is of greater 
 moment than defence of what is left of the faith, and 
 the roots of ecclesiastical institutions have become 
 more closely intertwined with those of the body 
 politic, so that attack upon the one is menace to the 
 other. 
 
 Nevertheless, " wisdom is justified of her children." 
 " Much water has flowed under the bridges " since 
 1864, when a number of clergymen, consistently 
 enough, formulated a declaration of faith that Jesus 
 taught the doctrine of everlasting punishment, and 
 begged their brethren to sign it "for the love of 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 414.
 
 220 HUXLEY 
 
 God"; 1 or even since 1891, when another group, 
 who had not bowed the knee to the Baal of modern 
 scholarship, affirmed their belief that " the canonical 
 scriptures of the Old and New Testaments declare 
 incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all rec- 
 ords, both of past events and of the delivery of pre- 
 dictions to be thereafter fulfilled." 2 In fact, the 
 abrasion of incredible and inhuman dogmas has gone 
 on at so rapid a rate that belief in them might be 
 thought to be limited to the vulgar and illiterate, 
 were it not for restatements of the following order, 
 which is quoted from the widely circulated worldly 
 and other-worldly British Weekly. In commenting 
 on certain articles in the Encyclopedia Biblica the 
 reader is advised to " take the Gospels, the Acts, and 
 the Epistles, and erase from them as incredible every- 
 thing that does not affirm miracle. He will find that 
 the narrative of miracle is so welded with facts and 
 words and inferences, that to cut it out is to reduce 
 the whole to a rag-heap." But these strident voices 
 are softened in the atmosphere of the new knowledge. 
 Dogmas are dying very slowly as other supersti- 
 tions have died, because they cannot adapt themselves 
 to changed conditions. They are explained, and their 
 explanation is their doom. 
 
 1 Life and Letters of Dean Stanley, ii. p. 158. 
 Coll. Eaays, v. p. 23.
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 221 
 
 Truly, " wisdom is justified of her children " : 
 well-nigh all for which Huxley contended is conceded, 
 and the rest will follow in due time. The admissions 
 as to the unhistorical element in the Bible which are 
 made by modern theologians are not limited to the 
 Old Testament. The great Dictionary of the Bible 
 already referred to, in which the best scholarship of 
 Britain and the Continent is embodied, and which has 
 as its chief editor " the Oriel Professor of the In- 
 terpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford," contains 
 articles, as quotations have shown already (see p. 199, 
 200), which a generation ago would have given the 
 Dean of Arches a busy time over trials for heresy. 
 In the article on " Jesus " he is spoken of by the late 
 Dr. Bruce as " the child of his time and people," 
 and, concerning the Passion, the same writer says, 
 11 For modern criticism the story, even in its most 
 historic version, is not pure truth, but truth mixed 
 with doubtful legend," although, " when examined 
 with a critical microscope, not a few of the relative 
 incidents stand the test." In the article on the 
 " Gospels " Professor Schmiedel doubts " whether any 
 credible elements are to be found in them," and from 
 the entire body of the reported sayings of Jesus he 
 chooses five passages which, it is suggested, may form 
 " foundation-pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus," 
 in whom, Professor Schmiedel adds, " we have to do
 
 222 HUXLEY 
 
 with a completely human being. The divine is to be 
 sought in him only in the form in which it is capable 
 of being found in a man." Of the Fourth Gospel, 
 which he places towards the latter half of the second 
 century, this estimate is given 
 
 A book which begins by declaring Jesus to be the 
 logos of God, and ends by representing a cohort of 
 Roman soldiers as falling to the ground at the majesty 
 of His appearance, and by representing one hundred 
 pounds of ointment as having been used at His em- 
 balming, ought by these facts alone to be spared such 
 a misunderstanding of its true character as would be 
 implied in supposing that it meant to be a historical 
 work. 
 
 After such strong meat it would seem but the offer- 
 ing of milk to babes for the writers to suggest that 
 the narrative of the blasting of the fig-tree by Jesus 
 has "improbabilities which are obvious and cannot 
 be explained away," or that in the Zaccheus incident 
 " there are difficulties in the way of conceding more 
 than an ideal truth to this delightful story." 
 
 From these concessions there is but a short step to 
 the larger concessions of the school of Schleier- 
 macher, revived by Sabatier, Gardner, and others, who 
 base Christianity on the facts of religious experience, 
 transferring, as the last-named writer explains, " the 
 support of Christian doctrine from history to psychol-
 
 THE CONTROVERSIALIST 
 
 22 3 
 
 ogy, from the history of facts to the history of ideas." 
 Upon which the obvious comment is that the ad- 
 herents of every other religion may find equal validity 
 for it in the facts of their experience.
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 
 
 IN the prologue to his Controversial Essays Huxley 
 says, " I have hitherto dwelt upon scientific Natural- 
 ism chiefly in its critical and destructive aspect. But 
 the present incarnation of the spirit of the Renascence 
 differs from its predecessor in the eighteenth century 
 in that it builds up as well as pulls down." l What 
 the structure should be is indicated in his controversy 
 with Mr. Gladstone, and to this may be added a pas- 
 sage from a letter to Mr. Romanes : 
 
 I have a great respect for the Nazarenism of Jesus 
 very little for later " Christianity." But the only 
 religion that makes appeal to me is prophetic Judaism. 
 Add to it something from the best Stoics, and some- 
 thing from Spinoza, and something from Goethe, and 
 there is a religion for men. Some of these days I 
 think I will make a cento out of the works of these 
 people. 8 
 
 The Hebrew prophets made special appeal to Him, 
 since, "to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk 
 humbly before thy God " was to base religion on the 
 stable foundation of human relations. There would 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, v. p. 41. * II. 339. 
 
 224
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 225 
 
 be no need to omit the last words of that verse, be- 
 cause the doctrine of evolution is not necessarily 
 anti-theistic. 
 
 It does not even come into contact with Theism, 
 considered as a philosophical doctrine. That with 
 which it does collide, and with which it is absolutely 
 inconsistent, is the conception of creation which the- 
 ological speculators have based upon the history nar- 
 rated in the opening of the book of Genesis. There 
 is a great deal of talk and not a little lamentation 
 about the so-called religious difficulties which physical 
 science has created. In theological science, as a mat- 
 ter of fact, it has created none. Not a solitary 
 problem presents itself to the philosophical Theist at 
 the present day, which has not existed from the time 
 that philosophers began to think out the logical 
 grounds and the logical consequences of Theism. 
 All the real or imaginary perplexities which flow from 
 the conception of the universe as a determinate mech- 
 anism, are equally involved in the assumption of an 
 Eternal, Omnipotent, and Omniscient Deity. The 
 theological equivalent of the scientific conception of 
 order is Providence ; and the doctrine of determinism 
 follows as surely from the attributes of foreknowledge 
 assumed by the theologian, as from the universality of 
 natural causation assumed by the man of science. 
 The angels in ' Paradise Lost ' would have found the 
 task of enlightening Adam upon the mysteries of 
 "Fate, Foreknowledge, and Free-will" not a whit 
 more difficult, if their pupil had been educated in a 
 " Real-schule," and trained in every laboratory of a 
 modern university. In respect of the great problems 
 of philosophy the post-Darwinian generation is, in 
 one sense, exactly where the prae-Darwinian gener- 
 ation were. They remain insoluble. But the present
 
 226 HUXLEY 
 
 generation has the advantage of being better provided 
 with the means of freeing itself from the tyranny of 
 certain sham solutions. 1 
 
 What Renan says of Marcus Aurelius applies to 
 Huxley : " he resolutely severed moral beauty from all 
 definite theology ; he did not permit duty to depend 
 on any metaphysical opinions concerning a First 
 Cause." Hence his opposition to the theory of 
 morals as innate, and as of supernatural origin. 
 Every man, it is held by the intuitive school, is born 
 with the faculty of discerning right from wrong, 
 while, superfluous as this would seem, the declaration 
 of what actions are right and what actions are wrong 
 is to be found in divinely given codes, of which that 
 of the Ten Words or Commandments is cited as an 
 example. Hence springs the well-nigh universal be- 
 lief in the interdependence of morals and dogma; the 
 belief that to err in the one is to err in the other. 
 Hence, also, the historical accuracy of the narrative 
 being assumed, the belief that man's power of choice 
 as a free agent between good and evil was first exer- 
 cised in Eden. 2 Less momentous, according to cur- 
 
 1 Huxley's chapter in Darwin's Life and Letters, ii. p. 203 ; and 
 cf. ii. p. 302. 
 
 The essence of that which is improperly called the freewill 
 doctrine is that occasionally, at any rate, human volition is self- 
 caused, that is to say, not caused at all ; for to cause oneself one 
 must have anteceded oneself which is, to say the least of it, diffi- 
 cult to imagine. Coll. Essays, ix. p. 142.
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 22y 
 
 rent theories of the consequence of Adam's fall to 
 mankind, but more impressive, was the scene at the 
 foot of Mount Sinai, when Jahveh made known 
 through Moses that He would appear in " a thick 
 cloud," so that the people might hear Him when He 
 spoke to their leader. And they beheld, the writer of 
 Exodus narrates, the descent of the god in fire upon 
 the mountain, when " God spake all these words " of 
 the Ten Commandments, and wrote them with His 
 own finger upon two tables of stone. Thus, in a 
 code, the legend of whose divine origin is accepted 
 throughout Christendom, the making of images and 
 murder, the breaking of the seventh day of the week 
 as a rest-day and theft, are put upon the same plane 
 of ethics, and the confusion between sin against man 
 and offences against ritual emphasised. 
 
 Human nature being what it is, the supersession of 
 theories of ethical codes as integral parts of revelation 
 seems as far off as the Greek Kalends. Nevertheless, 
 some advance towards rational theories of morals is 
 being made, and in this matter Herbert Spencer, in 
 his Data of Ethics^ and Huxley, in more fugitive 
 form, have done much. That death is not the penalty 
 of sin is proved by the indisputable evidence of the 
 fossil-yielding rocks ; but wrong-doing is still held to 
 be an infraction of divine law, and to involve pains 
 and penalties in a future state. As opposed to this,
 
 228 HUXLEY 
 
 wrong-doing is held, under the doctrine of evolution, 
 to be an infraction of human law. 
 
 The actions we call sinful are as much the conse- 
 quence of the order of nature as those we call virtu- 
 ous. They are all part and parcel of the struggle for 
 existence through which all living things have passed, 
 and they have become sins because man alone seeks a 
 higher life in voluntary association. 1 
 
 We are in ignorance alike as to the beginnings of 
 consciousness and the beginnings of ethics. But as 
 we trace the evolution of the nervous system from 
 irritability in the lowest organisms to sensibility in its 
 ever-increasing complexity, till the higher we ascend 
 the more acute do we find the feelings associated with 
 pain and pleasure, so it is permissible to trace the 
 germs of morality, which lie in sympathy, among the 
 social animals. Into the marvels of their organisa- 
 tion, perhaps more astounding among invertebrates, 
 as ants and bees, than among the higher gregarious 
 mammals, there is neither need nor space to enter here ; 
 enough that the links in the chain of psychical life of 
 man and the creatures beneath him are unbroken. 
 Moreover, the evidences as to the social bases of 
 ethics are contained in human history. 2 The terms 
 
 II. 282. 
 
 * To whatever extent Mr. Balfour may draw untenable inferences 
 from such premises, the admission made in the new edition of 
 his Foundations of Belief is significant. He says that "study of
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 229 
 
 " good " and " evil " have no meaning till communal 
 life begins. Where there is no society there is no 
 sin. A solitary man on an uninhabited island can do 
 no wrong, but when Robinson Crusoe meets Friday, 
 the question of behaviour of one to the other arises ; 
 and conduct is ethic. Restraint on individual action 
 begins ; and the morality of the action is determined 
 by circumstances ; hence the relativity of morals, and 
 the origin of artificial codes which, ruled solely by 
 conventions, make a breach of etiquette a less 
 pardonable offence than the seduction of a woman. 
 
 Upon the general basis of ethics Huxley speaks 
 with no uncertain sound : 
 
 Moral duty consists in the observance of those 
 rules of conduct which contribute to the welfare of 
 society, and, by implication, of the individuals who 
 compose it. 
 
 The end of society is peace and mutual protection, 
 so that the individual may reach the fullest and 
 highest life attainable by man. The rules of conduct 
 by which this end is to be attained are discoverable 
 like the other so-called laws of Nature by observa- 
 tion and experiment, and only in that way. 
 
 Some thousands of years of such experience have 
 
 evolution and modern anthropology is making us realise that the 
 beginnings of morality are lost among the self-preserving and 
 race-prolonging instincts which we share with the animal creation; 
 that religion in its higher forms is a development of infantine and 
 often brutal superstitions ; and that in the pedigree of the noblest 
 and most subtle of our emotions are to be discerned primitive 
 strains of coarsest quality."
 
 230 HUXLEY 
 
 led to the generalisations that stealing and murder, for 
 example, are inconsistent with the ends of society. 
 There is no more doubt that they are so than that 
 unsupported stones tend to fall. The man who 
 steals or murders breaks his implied contract with 
 society, and forfeits all protection. He becomes an 
 outlaw, to be dealt with as any other feral creature. 
 Criminal law indicates the ways which have proved 
 most convenient for dealing with him. 
 
 All this would be true if men had no " moral 
 sense " at all, just as there are rules of perspective 
 which must be strictly observed by a draughtsman, 
 and are quite independent of his having any artistic 
 sense. 
 
 The moral sense is a very complex affair de- 
 pendent in part upon associations of pleasure and 
 pain, approbation and disapprobation, formed by 
 education in early youth, but in part also on an in- 
 nate sense of moral beauty and ugliness (how origi- 
 nated need not be discussed), which is possessed by 
 some people in great strength, while some are totally 
 devoid of it just as some children draw, or are en- 
 chanted by music while mere infants, while others do 
 not know " Cherry Ripe " from " Rule Britannia," 
 nor can represent the form of the simplest thing to 
 the end of their lives. 1 
 
 Now for this sort of people there is no reason why 
 they should discharge any sort of moral duty, ex- 
 cept from fear of punishment in all its grades, from 
 mere disapprobation to hanging, and the duty of 
 society is to see that they live under wholesome fear 
 of such punishment, short, sharp, and decisive. 
 
 For the people with a keen innate sense of moral 
 
 beauty there is no need of any other motive. What 
 
 thev want is knowledge of the things they may do 
 
 and must leave undone, if the welfare of society is 
 
 1 Cf. Coll. Assays, vi. p. 239.
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 
 
 2 3 I 
 
 to be attained. Good people so often forget this that 
 some of them occasionally require hanging as much 
 as the bad. 
 
 If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be 
 (under due limitations) obeyed, and why the few who 
 are steered by it move the mass in whom it is weak ? 
 I can only reply by putting another question, Why 
 do the few in whom the sense of beauty is strong 
 Shakespeare, Raffaele, Beethoven carry the less en- 
 dowed multitude away ? But they do, and always 
 will. People who overlook that fact attend neither 
 to history nor to what goes on about them. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, kindly 
 man. I have a great respect for him. The force of 
 genial common-sense respectability could no further 
 go. George Fox was the very antipodes of all this, 
 and yet one understands how he came to move the 
 world of his day, and Franklin did not. 
 
 As to whether we can all fulfil the moral law, I 
 should say hardly any of us. Some of us are utterly 
 incapable of fulfilling its plainest dictates. As there 
 are men bo'rn physically cripples and intellectually 
 idiots, so there are some who are moral cripples and 
 idiots, and can be kept straight not even by punish- 
 ment. For these people there is nothing but shut- 
 ting-up, or extirpation. 1 
 
 In the early stages of man's history ethics had no 
 connection with theology. 
 
 With the advance of civilisation, and the growth 
 of cities and of nations by the coalescence of families 
 and of tribes, the rules which constitute the common 
 foundation of morality and of law become more nu- 
 merous and complicated, and the temptations to break 
 
 i II. 305, 306.
 
 232 HUXLEY 
 
 or evade many of them stronger. In the absence of a 
 clear apprehension of the natural sanctions of these 
 rules, a supernatural sanction was assumed ; and 
 imagination supplied the motives which reason was 
 supposed to be incompetent to furnish. Religion, at 
 first independent of morality, gradually took morality 
 under its protection ; and the supernaturalists have 
 ever since tried to persuade mankind that the ex- 
 istence of ethics is bound up with that of super- 
 naturalism. 1 
 
 It has been so much the worse for both. For if 
 the ethical code is low, the conception of the god 
 who is assumed to be its author suffers as the ethical 
 ideal advances ; and if the ethics are made dependent 
 upon a theology which becomes discredited, they 
 stand or fall with it. Doubtless, in rude and turbu- 
 lent ages, no small gain accrued through the associa- 
 tion of a humane code of conduct with supernatural 
 dogmas, but the engine of aggrandisement which this 
 put into the hands of sacerdotalism rendered the 
 divorce imperative as society advanced. 
 
 Theological apologists who insist that morality will 
 vanish if their dogmas are exploded, would do well to 
 consider the fact that, in the matter of intellectual 
 veracity, science is already a long way ahead of the 
 Churches; and that, in this particular, it is exerting 
 an educational influence on mankind of which the 
 Churches have shown themselves utterly incapable. 2 
 
 " Coll. Essays, v. p. 53., and cf. iv. p. 361. 
 Coll. Essays, v. p. 142.
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 
 
 233 
 
 Moreover, a code of morals resting on the assumption 
 of supernatural authority seeks to enforce its decrees 
 by threats of penalties inflicted under supernatural 
 conditions, threats which are found to be feebly 
 operative upon conduct. Discarding such assump- 
 tion, the evolutionist appeals to more tangible mo- 
 tives ; to the fact that actions make or mar other 
 lives, and retard or quicken the progress of mankind. 
 He shows that the law of causation operates in the 
 moral sphere, and that the consequences of our deeds 
 are immediate, or, in large degree, measurable. The 
 brevity of life thus becomes a sharper spur to duty, 
 and the ultimate destiny of the race, as predicted by 
 science, a stimulus to smooth its career. 
 It may, Huxley says, 
 
 be well to remember that the highest level of moral 
 aspiration recorded in history was reached by a few 
 ancient Jews Micah, Isaiah, and the rest who took 
 no count whatever of what might or might not happen 
 to them after death. It is not obvious to me why 
 the same point should not by-and-by be reached by 
 the Gentiles. 1 
 
 This all-important question of social ethics filled 
 much of his thought from the old Rotherhithe days to 
 the end. It inspired the noble Romanes Lecture, 
 concerning which he wrote to the founder, " Of 
 
 1 II. 304.
 
 234 HUXLEY 
 
 course I will keep absolutely clear of theology. But 
 I have long had fermenting in my head some notions 
 about the relations of ethics and evolution (or rather 
 the absence of such as are commonly supposed) 
 which, I think, will be interesting to such an audi- 
 ence as I may expect." 1 The discourse provoked 
 much controversy and even more misunderstanding, 
 causing Huxley regret that he did not remember 
 Faraday's useful precept to lecturers, to assume that 
 even "select and cultivated" listeners knew nothing 
 whatever of the subject. 2 
 
 Some of Huxley's audience took the lecture as a 
 senile recantation of the faith as it is in Evolution ; 
 while, since there is no logical halting-point between 
 Agnosticism and Catholicism, the late Professor St. 
 George Mivart, whose fate it was to be excommuni- 
 cated by his Church because he refused to sign a 
 monstrous assent to everything in the Bible, wel- 
 comed the lecture as indicating a possible reconcilia- 
 tion of Huxley with the Vatican. 3 
 
 Ethics and Evolution, to the preparation of which 
 Huxley gave the utmost care, and which will abide as 
 a masterpiece of sonorous English prose, was the 
 amplification of arguments used by him in various 
 previous utterances. It was an effort, he explained 
 
 1 II- 35- Coll. ssa?s, ix. p. vii. 
 
 Nineteenth Century, Aug., 1893, p. 210.
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 235 
 
 to more than one correspondent, " to put the Christian 
 doctrine, that Satan is the Prince of this world, upon 
 a scientific foundation " ! The main thesis was briefly 
 sketched in an essay, published five years previously 
 (in 1888), on the "Struggle for Existence in Human 
 Society," and appropriately reprinted in the volume 
 containing the Romanes Lecture. 
 
 In the strict sense of the word " nature," it denotes 
 the sum of the phenomenal world, of that which has 
 been, and is, and will be ; and society, like art, is 
 therefore a part of nature. But it is convenient to 
 distinguish those parts of nature in which man plays 
 the part of immediate cause, as something apart; and, 
 therefore, society, like art, is usefully to be considered 
 as distinct from nature. It is the more desirable, and 
 even necessary, to make this distinction, since society 
 differs from nature in having a definite moral object; 
 whence it comes about that the course shaped by the 
 ethical man the member of society or citizen 
 necessarily runs counter to that which the non-ethical 
 man the primitive savage, or man as a mere mem- 
 ber of the animal kingdom tends to adopt. The 
 latter fights out the struggle for existence to the bitter 
 end', like any other animal ; the former devotes his 
 best energies to the object of setting limits to the 
 struggle. . . . The ideal of the ethical man is 
 to limit his freedom of action to a sphere in which he 
 does not interfere with the freedom of others ; he 
 seeks the common weal as much as his own, and in- 
 deed, as an essential part of his own welfare. Peace 
 is both end and means with him ; and he founds his 
 life on a more or less complete self-restraint, which 
 is the negation of the unlimited struggle for existence.
 
 236 HUXLEY 
 
 He tries to escape from his place in the animal king- 
 dom, founded on the free development of the prin- 
 ciple of non-moral evolution, and to establish a king- 
 dom of Man, governed solely upon the principle of 
 moral evolution. For society not only has a moral 
 end, but, in its perfection, social life is embodied 
 morality. 1 
 
 In 1890 Huxley writes : " Of moral purpose I see 
 no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively 
 human manufacture and very much to our credit. 2 
 George Meredith gives rhythmic expression to that 
 view in his great poem on man's relation to Nature: 
 
 " He may entreat, aspire, 
 He may despair, and she has never heed ; 
 She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need, 
 Not his desire." * 
 
 To the many the argument seemed paradoxical, for 
 how, it was asked, could ethical nature, as the off- 
 spring of cosmic nature, be at enmity with it? In a 
 Prolegomena, 4 which is longer than the lecture, Hux- 
 ley contended that the seeming paradox is a truth. 
 
 Taking, as an example, the ground on which his 
 house was built, he shows how the industry of man 
 has converted a patch of weed-choked, economically 
 unproductive soil into a fruitful garden, and how, if 
 
 > ColL Essays, ix. pp. 202, 205. * II. 268. 
 
 Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, p. 119. 
 Coll. Essays, ix. pp. 1^45.
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 237 
 
 the skill and labour by which this has been done are 
 withdrawn, nature, whose action never pauses, will 
 reassert sway, and convert the place into a wilderness. 
 The garden is a work of art, as is the house which 
 stands in it ; as is everything that man has produced. 
 And the effect of all that he does is to oppose, and, 
 for a time, arrest, the cosmic process, limiting the 
 area of ceaseless struggle and competition. Applying 
 this to human society, which, " at its origin, was as 
 much a product of organic necessity as that of the 
 bees," the " ape and tiger " instincts are found domi- 
 nant. It was based on selfishness. The race was to 
 the swift, and the battle to the strong. Even then, 
 however, in the earliest grouping of a few families 
 into clans or gentes, the blood-tie, whose source is in 
 the parent, engendered a sympathy which assured 
 unity, and, therefore, some restraint on individual as- 
 sertion. For sympathy is the germ-plasm of ethics. 
 Knowledge, the only begetter of a wider sympathy, 
 breaks down tribal divisions, and with the obvious 
 advantage which cooperation secures, enlarges the 
 narrow borders of primitive altruism, limits the area 
 of conflict, and mitigates the horrors of a state of 
 warfare which, at the outset, was chronic. But the 
 cosmic process is checked only locally and intermit- 
 tently. To this the state of mankind, after thou- 
 sands of years of advance from the feral state, wit-
 
 238 HUXLEY 
 
 nesses, since only in the minority of all who have 
 ever lived has that advance been made, and even 
 among these there needs small provocation to arouse 
 the lightly sleeping " tiger." Hence, wherever self- 
 restraint is practised, there is checking of the cosmic 
 process of bitter struggle by the ethical, defined by 
 Huxley as the u evolution of the feelings out of which 
 the primitive bonds of human society are so largely 
 forged into the organised and personified sympathy we 
 call conscience." l Then comes into play the golden 
 rule of Jesus, of Confucius, and of Plato: "May I 
 do to others as I would that they should do to me." 3 
 If the ethical process is not a part of the cosmical 
 process, it must have been imported, and is therefore 
 to be referred to supernatural intervention. But as 
 opposing one action against another, it has its corre- 
 spondences in man's checks upon the operation of 
 natural selection, and in the forces at play within the 
 cosmos itself. For the equilibrium towards which all 
 things in the universe are tending is arrested by the 
 activity of the conflicting agencies of repulsion and at- 
 traction ; and in all the mechanical means whereby 
 human life is strengthened and lengthened, the action 
 of natural selection is retarded. And, as already ob- 
 served, the rudiments of ethics are found deep down 
 in the animal world. "Among birds and mammals 
 CoU. Essays, ix. p. 30. Laws, xi. 913 (Jowett's trans.).
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 239 
 
 societies are formed of which the bond in many cases 
 seems to be purely psychological that is to say, it 
 appears to depend upon the liking of the individuals 
 for one another's company. Love and fear come into 
 play, and enforce a greater or less renunciation of 
 self-will." ' 
 
 But " the theory of evolution encourages no millen- 
 nial anticipations." As the story of the formation 
 and dissolution of the solar system and kindred aggre- 
 gations is but a chapter in a history which had no be- 
 ginning and will have no end, so life as a whole upon 
 this globe is but a brief chapter of that history, and 
 the life of man a momentary episode in the chapter. 
 
 Neither optimist nor pessimist in a world which he 
 confessed was "a hopeless riddle," 2 Huxley was no 
 dweller at ease in a scientific Zion. As in the intel- 
 lectual sphere he had exercised the spirit of inquiry 
 by which alone advance in knowledge is possible, so 
 in the moral sphere he gave expression to the spirit of 
 discontent by which alone amelioration is possible. 
 
 There are [he said] two things I really care about 
 one is the progress of scientific thought, and the 
 other is the bettering of the condition of the masses of 
 the people by bettering them in the way of lifting them- 
 selves out of the misery which has hitherto been the 
 lot of the majority of them. Posthumous fame is 
 not particularly attractive to me, but, if I am to be 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, ix. p. 115. t n. 134.
 
 240 HUXLEY 
 
 remembered at all, I would rather it should be as u a 
 man who did his best to help the people " than by any 
 other title. 
 
 Even the best of modern civilisations appears to me 
 to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither em- 
 bodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit 
 of stability. I do not hesitate to express my opinion 
 that, if there is no hope of a large improvement of 
 the condition of the greater part of the human family ; 
 if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the win- 
 ning of a greater dominion over Nature which is its 
 consequence, and the wealth which follows on that 
 dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and 
 the intensity of Want, with its concomitant physical 
 and moral degradation, among the masses of the peo- 
 ple, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet, 
 which would sweep the whole affair away, as a desir- 
 able consummation. 
 
 What profits it to the human Prometheus that he 
 has stolen the fire of heaven to be his servant, and 
 that the spirits of the earth and the air obey him, if 
 the vulture of pauperism is eternally to tear his very 
 vitals and keep him on the brink of destruction ? l 
 
 Moved by these gloomy facts to " work while it is 
 yet day," Huxley found little, save for adverse criti- 
 cism, in the social reform schemes which u have in- 
 fested political thought for centuries." He had no 
 belief in " leaders " and " saviours " of society, or in 
 the " fanatical individualism of our time which at- 
 tempts to apply the analogy of cosmic nature to so- 
 ciety, and seriously debates whether the members of a 
 
 1 Coll. E$says t i. p. 423 ; and cf. v. p. 256.
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 24! 
 
 community are justified in using their strength to con- 
 strain one of their number to contribute his share to 
 the maintenance of it, or even to prevent him from 
 doing his best to destroy it," ' and which would limit 
 the exercise of State rights to the protection of its 
 subjects from aggression. 2 Here, once more, he had 
 stirred up a hornet's nest of criticism from various 
 quarters, the argument often taking the usual form of 
 expletives. But, as he reminded his opponents, his 
 interest in these questions " did not begin the day be- 
 fore yesterday " ; reflection and observation had only 
 deepened conviction, and the later essays on Gov- 
 ernment, Capital, and the Struggle for Existence, em- 
 phasised the position which he had taken up a quar- 
 ter of a century earlier. Now, as then, he went to 
 the heart of the matter in insisting on the funda- 
 mental importance of dealing with the population 
 question, since with short commons and lack of 
 elbow-room there was quick shunting of the ethical 
 process. 
 
 For the effort of ethical man to work towards a 
 moral end by no means abolished, perhaps hardly 
 modified, the deep-seated organic impulses which 
 impel the natural man to follow his non-moral course. 
 One of the most essential conditions, if not the chief 
 cause, of the struggle for existence, is the tendency to 
 multiply without limit, which man shares with all 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, ix. p. 83. * It>., i. p. 258.
 
 242 HUXLEY 
 
 living things. It is notable that " increase and mul- 
 tiply " is a commandment traditionally much older 
 than the ten ; and that it is, perhaps, the only one 
 which has been spontaneously and ex anirno obeyed by 
 the great majority of the human race. .But, in civ- 
 ilised society, the inevitable result of such obedience 
 is the reestablishment, in all its intensity, of that 
 struggle for existence the war of each against all 
 the mitigation or abolition of which was the chief 
 end of social organisation. 1 
 
 " There is no discharge in that war," and the strug- 
 gle has rather increased in force than lessened since 
 Huxley wrote these words. Competition becomes 
 sharper ; and the cry for protection is a return to the 
 narrow ethics of the tribe. The community that 
 trusts to old repute and disdains new methods, and 
 that artificially reduces each member of its industrial 
 classes to a common level, will be worsted in a battle 
 where the wounded receive no quarter, and where 
 starvation is the penalty of surrender. There sur- 
 vives in many parts of the globe, notably in thickly- 
 peopled China, the practice of partly meeting the dif- 
 ficulty of excess of population over means of sub- 
 sistence by infanticide; while in former days, all the 
 world over, the ravages wrought by famine, war, and 
 pestilence were unchecked. But the progress of 
 private and public morality has steadily tended to re- 
 move the effects of those scourges, and the finer 
 
 1 Coll. Essays, ix. p. 205.
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 243 
 
 spirits of the race dream of a society where no man 
 shall die of hunger, and no family mourn a member 
 slain in battle ; when the Golden Age of ancient 
 legend shal^ be fulfilled on the earth. 
 
 Dealing with these islands, Huxley admits the jus- 
 tice of the " insolent reproach " cast by Buonaparte. 
 On a soil which can feed less than half the popula- 
 tion, we are compelled to be " a nation of shopkeep- 
 ers." The shopkeeping implies buying and selling, 
 and if the goods offered are inferior to those of com- 
 petitors, a ruinous reduction in exports will follow, 
 leaving a large proportion of the population, whose 
 only salvation is by work, with nothing to eat. A 
 further condition must be social stability. There 
 must be healthy homes, a cultivation of thrift, the at- 
 tainment of a fair standard of material comfort, for 
 where la miser e reigns there is inefficiency and handi- 
 capping of the worker. And in remarking upon the 
 absence of these conditions in many quarters of great 
 industrial centres from London downwards, Huxley 
 drives home the fact that here, suspending their dif- 
 ferences, " natural science and religious enthusiasm " 
 may work in concord towards one aim. He passes 
 from the importance of State-endowed education, into 
 which no theology shall intrude, to technical training, 
 the cost of which he suggests should be borne by the 
 districts benefited by it. But that is a detail, the im-
 
 244 HUXLEY 
 
 portant thing being to catch the " small percentage of 
 the population which is born with that most excellent 
 quality, a desire for excellence, or with special apti- 
 tude of some sort or another, and turn <them to ac- 
 count for the good of society," whose highest aim 
 should be the making of men, not of millionaires; 
 the development of character, not the equation of 
 " success " with the " accumulation of cash." " For 
 the increase of wealth that is, of the means of com- 
 fort is not, necessarily, good in itself; everything 
 depends on the way in which the wealth is distributed 
 and its effect on the moral character of the nation." l 
 
 No man can say where they will crop up ; like their 
 opposites, the fools and the knaves, they appear some- 
 times in the palace and sometimes in the hovel ; but 
 the great thing to be aimed at I was almost going to 
 say, the most important end of all social arrangements 
 is to keep these glorious sports of Nature from 
 being either corrupted by luxury or starved by poverty, 
 and to put them into the position in which they can 
 do the work for which they are specially fitted. 2 
 
 Throughout the papers on social subjects which fill 
 portions of the first, third, and ninth volumes of the 
 Collected Essays, criticism is followed by definite sug- 
 gestion. And so it was with all matters, both prac- 
 tical and speculative, with which he dealt ; the order 
 
 1 Letters from John Chinaman, p. 27. 
 Coll, Essays, ix. p. aio.
 
 THE CONSTRUCTOR 245 
 
 of his mind was architectonic. To regard Huxley 
 as a compound of Boanerges and Iconoclast is to 
 show entire misapprehension of the aims which in- 
 spired his labours. In Biology his discovery of the 
 structure of the Medusae laid the foundations of 
 modern zoology ; his theory of the origin of the skull 
 gave a firm basis to vertebrate morphology ; and his 
 luminous exposition of the pedigree of man imported 
 order where confusion had reigned. In the more im- 
 portant matter of Education he formulated principles 
 whose adoption would bring out the best that is in 
 every scholar, and inspire him with love of whatever 
 "is of good report"; while his invention of the 
 laboratory system of zoological teaching has been 
 adopted with the best results in every school and uni- 
 versity of repute. In Theology he separated the 
 accidental elements from the essential, leaving as 
 residuum a religion that, coordinated with the needs 
 and aspirations of human nature, would find its high- 
 est motive and its permanency in an ethic based on 
 sympathy.
 
 NOTE ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE 
 UNKNOWABLE. 
 
 SINCE the passing of the foregoing pages through 
 the press, the following extracts from letters from 
 Huxley to Mr. F. C. Gould, written in 1889, have 
 appeared in the Literary Guide of January, 1902. 
 They are an interesting addition to the remarks quoted 
 on page 141 : 
 
 As between Mr. Spencer and myself, the question 
 is not one of "a dividing line," but of an entire and 
 complete divergence as soon as we leave the founda- 
 tions laid by Hume, Kant, and Hamilton, who are 
 my philosophical forefathers. To my mind, the 
 " Absolute " philosophies were finally knocked on the 
 head by Hamilton ; and the " Unknowable," in Mr. 
 Spencer's sense, is merely the Absolute redivivus, a 
 sort of ghost of an extinct philosophy, the name of a 
 negation hocus-pocussed into a sham thing. If I am 
 to talk about that of which I have no knowledge at 
 all, I prefer the good old word God, about which there 
 is no scientific pretence. 
 
 I have long been aware of the manner in which my 
 views have been confounded with those of Mr. 
 Spencer, though no one was more fully aware of our 
 divergence than the latter. Perhaps I have done 
 wrongly in letting the thing slide so long, but I was 
 anxious to avoid a breach with an old friend. . . . 
 346
 
 NOTE ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE UNKNOWABLE 247 
 
 Whether the Unknowable or any other Noumenon 
 exists or does not exist, I am quite clear I have no 
 knowledge either way. So with respect to whether 
 there is anything behind Force or not, I am ignorant ; 
 I neither affirm nor deny. The tendency of the 
 human mind to idolatry is so strong that, faute de 
 mieux, it falls down and worships negative abstrac- 
 tions, as much the creation of the mind as the stone 
 idol of the hands. The one object of the Agnostic 
 (in the true sense) is to knock this tendency on the 
 head whenever or wherever it shows itself. Our 
 physical science is full of it.
 
 INDEX 
 
 AGNOSTIC, 211. 
 
 Britschli, Professor, 147. 
 
 Agnosticism, 212. 
 
 Brown-Sequard, Dr., 45. 
 
 Allman, Professor, 76. 
 
 Bunsen, 148. 
 
 American Civil War, 25. 
 
 
 Amphibia, 80. 
 Anaximander, 116. 
 
 CANON, 205. 
 
 Ancestor-worship, 179. 
 Ape and man, 113, 118, 121. 
 Argyll, Duke of, 51. 
 
 Carlyle, 3, 15. 
 Carpenter, Dr., 4, 107, 128. 
 Cell-unit, 69, 78. 
 Cherubim, 189. 
 
 Aristotle, 67. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 2. 
 Articulate speech, 136. 
 Ascidian, 77. 
 Atomic theory, 155. 
 
 Chimpanzee, 113. 
 Christianity, 214. 
 Church and reforms, 167. 
 Clericalism, 54, 161, 172. 
 Coelomata 7C. 
 
 Authority, 1 60, 205. 
 
 Consciousness, 154, 228. 
 
 BABYLONIA, 190, 199. 
 Backbone of man, 114. 
 
 Copernicus, 138. 
 Cowper-Temple clause, 40. 
 Cranks IQ. 
 
 Ba^ehot, Walter, 17, 105. 
 Balfour, Mr. A. J., 6l, 228. 
 Bathybius, 50. 
 
 Creation story, 181, 188, 196. 
 Cunningham, Professor, 123, 
 
 Bible in Board Schools, 38. 
 " Huxley's tribute to, 38-40. 
 
 I 35 *37- 
 Cuvier, 68, 70, 182. 
 
 Biological time, 91. 
 
 
 Black, Dr. Sutherland, 192, 204. 
 
 DARWIN, 7, 24, 60, 72, 97, 107, 
 
 Bonney, Canon, 186. 
 
 185- 
 
 Brain structure, 121. 
 
 Death sentences, 166. 
 
 " of man and ape, 21, 22, 
 
 Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, 27. 
 
 122. 
 
 De la Beche, Sir Henry, n. 
 
 British Association at 
 
 Deluge story, 189, 195. 
 
 Belfast, 49, 142. 
 
 Demonology, 198-200, 206. 
 
 Glasgow, 123, 155. 
 
 Descartes, 49, 130, 152, 212. 
 
 Liverpool, 45. 
 
 Descent of Man, 1 10. 
 
 Oxford, 20, 59, 108. 
 
 Donnelly, Sir J., 19. 
 
 York, 79. ' 
 
 Draper, Dr., 21. 
 
 British Weekly, 220. 
 
 Driver, Dr., 186, 189, 190, 192. 
 
 249 

 
 2 5 
 
 Dubois, Dr., 132. 
 
 EARTH, AGE OF THE, 88. 
 Eden story, 1 88, 196, 226. 
 Edinburgh, 24. 
 Edinburgh Review, 23. 
 Education, 32-38, 245. 
 Elohim, 175, 179- 
 Embryology, vertebrate, 77. 
 Emerson, 197, 215. 
 Encyclopedia Biblica, 192, 200, 
 
 220. 
 
 Established Church, 163. 
 Ethics, bases of, 55, 228, 229- 
 
 232. 
 
 Ethics and Evolution, 59, 234. 
 Evolution and Theism, 225. 
 Exile in Babylon, 193, 199. 
 Exploratio Evangelica, 201. 
 
 FARADAY, 73. 
 Fayrer, Sir J., 6. 
 Fishes, fossil, 79. 
 Fiske, John, 116. 
 Flower, Sir W. H., 83. 
 Forbes, Dr. Edward, II, 78. 
 Forster, W. E., 40. 
 Fossil man, 131. 
 Foster, Sir M., 64, 80, 95. 
 Fourth Gospel, 222. 
 Frazer, Dr., 178, 184. 
 Free will, 226. 
 
 GADARENB SWINE, 201, 204, 
 
 217, 218. 
 
 Garnett, Dr. R., 64. 
 Geological time, 91. 
 Ghost-theory, 176, 179. 
 Gibbon, Edward, 2, 13. 
 Gibbon, the, 117. 
 Gladstone, Mr., 25, 56, 61, 181, 
 
 206, 217. 
 Goethe, 19, 84. 
 Gore, Bishop, 56, 197. 
 Gorilla, 115. 
 
 Gospels, 199, 203, 208, 220. 
 Greek speculation, 105. 
 Green, J. R., 162. 
 
 INDEX 
 
 HADES, 175. 
 Haeckel, Ernst, 76. 
 Hartley, David, 135. 
 Harvey, 69. 
 Heathorn, Miss, 8, II. 
 Hebrews, 186, 190. 
 Hobbes, 29, 152, 172. 
 Hooker, Sir J., 7, 29, 62, 99, 
 
 108. 
 
 Horse, 52, 81-83. 
 Huggins, Sir W., 149. 
 Hume, 130, 150. 
 " Huxley's layer," 6. 
 
 Impregnable Rock of Holy 
 Scripture, 183, 217. 
 
 Infancy, human, 1 17. 
 
 Infanticide, 242. 
 
 Inspiration, 194. 
 
 Israelites, 173, 193. 
 
 " and Polynesians, 177. 
 " ethics of, 215, 226. 
 
 JAHVEH (Jehovah), 175, 181, 
 
 194, 227. 
 
 Jamaica Committee, 26. 
 Java, 132. 
 Jesus, 199-202, 209, 210, 213, 
 
 216. 
 
 Jex Blake, Miss, 26. 
 owett, Professor, 41, 165, 172. 
 
 KELVIN, LORD, 88,89, 9' I 5S- 
 Kingsley, Charles, 2, 16, 106. 
 Kirchhoff, 149. 
 Kuenen, 177. 
 
 LABYRINTHODONTS, 80. 
 
 Lamarck, 68, 70. 
 
 Lancelet, 77. 
 
 Lankester, Professor Ray, 64, 
 
 77-95' 59- 
 
 Lefevre, Mr. Shaw, 44. 
 Leibnitz, 129. 
 Lessing, 3, 1 8. 
 Life, origin of, 146. 
 " physical basis of, 49, 77, 
 
 142. 
 Linnaeus, 68, 86, 113.
 
 INDEX 
 
 2 5 I 
 
 Linnean Society, 99. 
 Literature and science, 34. 
 Lowell, J. R., 18. 
 Lyell, Sir Charles, 71, 98, no, 
 112. 
 
 MALLOCK, MR. W. H., 51. 
 
 Malpighi, 68. 
 Malthus, 97. 
 Man and ape, 113-122. 
 
 " brute, 125. 
 
 " gorilla, 115. 
 Man's Place in Nature, 24, 28, 
 
 112, 131. 
 
 Mariner, William, 178. 
 Marsh, Professor, 82. 
 Materialism, 130, 144, 152. 
 Mathematics, 90. 
 Matter, 140, 141, 147. 
 Medusae, 9, 65, 74, 76, 245. 
 Mental apparatus, 126. 
 Meredith, George, 236. 
 Metaphysical Society, 159, 212. 
 Metaphysics, 151. 
 Micah, 215. 
 Miracles, 202, 206. 
 Mitchell, Mr. Chalmers, 65, 
 
 113. 
 
 Mitral valve, 163. 
 Mrvart, Dr. St. George, 128, 
 
 165, 234. 
 Morals, 226-234. 
 Morley, John, 106, 162, 164, 
 185. 
 
 NAZARENES, 213, 224. 
 Necromancy, 175. 
 Neo-Darwinism, 103. 
 Neo-Lamarckism, 103. 
 Nervous system, 130. 
 New Testament. See Gospels. 
 New York, 51, 82. 
 
 OKEN, 19, 84. 
 
 Origin of Species, 20, 23, 67, 
 
 69. 79. 97. I0 4. I0 7 I 39. 
 
 165. 
 Origin of Species, Coming of 
 
 Age of the, 28, 59- 
 
 Osborn, Professor, 118. 
 Ourang-utan, 116. 
 Owen, 20, 58, 71, 84, 107, 218. 
 " and Huxley, 20, 22, 85, 
 
 I2 3- 
 
 Oxford, 20, 59. 
 Oxford, Bishop of, 21, 23, 107, 
 
 ai& 
 
 PAGET, SIR JAMES, 129. 
 Palaeontology, 79, 86. 
 Patriarchal age, 190-192. 
 Pentateuch, 72, 181, 186. 
 Perry, Professor, 94. 
 Picton, Mr. Allanson, 42. 
 Pithecanthropus erectus, 132. 
 Population question, 242. 
 Preformation, 129. 
 Primates, 113, 118. 
 Protoplasm, 69, 142, 144. 
 Psychical identities between ' 
 
 man and brute, 126. 
 Pusey, Dr., 58, 186. 
 
 Quarterly Review, 23, 102, 107. 
 
 RATTLESNAKE, 7, 66, 76, 177. 
 Religion and science, 168. 
 Reville, Dr., 56, 181. 
 Richardson, Sir J., 7. 
 Rileyism, 41. 
 Rocks, age of, 91. 
 Romanes, Dr., 218, 224. 
 Romanes Lecture, 59, 235. 
 Royal College of Science, 53, 57. 
 
 " Commissions, 47. 
 
 " Society, 9, 44. 48, 53. 6, 
 
 86. 
 Russell, Mr. George, 184. 
 
 SABBATH, 188. 
 
 Sacerdotalism, 164. 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, 59, 6l, 92. 
 
 Salvation Army, 27. 
 
 Sartor Resartus, 3, 15. 
 
 Saul, 174. 
 
 Sayce, Professor, 189, 190. 
 
 Schleiden, 74. 
 
 School Board for London, 31. 
 
 Schwann, 74, 77.
 
 2 5 2 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Science and religion, 168. 
 
 Science, training in, 5, 32. 
 
 Selborne, Lord, 184. 
 
 Sense-impressions, 154. 
 
 Sheol, 175, 1 80. 
 
 Skull, origin of, 19, 84, 245. 
 
 Slavery, 25. 
 
 Smith, Dr. G., 196. 
 
 Solar heroes, 191. 
 
 Soul, origin of, 129. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 2, 4, 24, 71, 
 
 104, 140, 227, 246. 
 Spirit and matter, 156. 
 Spirits, belief in, 199. 
 Spiritualism, 165. 
 Stanley, Bishop, 7, 9. 
 
 Captain, 7. 
 
 Stars, constitution of, 149. 
 Stephen, Leslie, 61. 
 Style, 28. 
 Sun's age, 90. 
 
 " constitution, 149. 
 
 TECHNICAL TRAINING, 35, 243. 
 
 Tel-el-Amarna, 193. 
 
 Ten Commandments, 226. 
 
 Teraphim, 176. 
 
 Theology, characteristics of, 37, 
 
 Theology, Evolution of, 159, 
 
 166, 172, 214. 
 Theology in schools, 37. 
 
 Thirlwall, Bishop, 159. 
 Thiselton-Dyer, Sir W. T., 16. 
 Thummhn, 176. 
 Tidal friction, 89. 
 Titles, 56. 
 Tonga Islands, 178. 
 Tristram, Canon, 106. 
 Tyndall, 49, 51. 
 
 UNKNOWABLE DOCTRINE OF 
 THE, 140, 247. 
 
 Urim, 174, 176. 
 
 VERTEBRATE SKULL, 19, 84. 
 Victory, the, 6, 58. 
 Virchow, Professor, 9. 
 Vivisection, 45-47. 
 Von Baer, 69, 74, 75. 
 
 WACE, DR., 206, 209, 219. 
 Wallace, A. R., 91, 98, 116, 
 
 127, 144. 
 Weismann, 103. 
 Westminister Review, 101. 
 Whewell, Dr., 107. 
 Wilberforce, Bishop, 21, 23, 
 
 107, 218. 
 Witchcraft, 208. 
 Witch of Endor, 174. 
 Women, emancipation of, 26. 
 
 YALE COLLEGE, 52.
 
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