Helen Campbell - "Anne Bradstreet and Her Time"

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Max Brand - "Harrigan"

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Books: The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3

L >> Leonard Huxley >> The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3




If we continue to observe we shall discover another law then coming
into action which also is different, dependent, but in a different
manner, on triangular numbers because a number of points agreeing with
their term may be placed in the form of a triangle, thus:--

(1 dot.) (3 dots in the form of a triangle.) (6 dots in the form of a
triangle.) (10 dots in the form of a triangle.) (one, three, six, ten).

This will continue through about 1430 terms, when a new law is again
introduced over about 950 terms, and this too, like its predecessors,
fails and gives place to other laws which appear at different
intervals."), and asking what effect this phenomenon had upon the
theory of Induction. Huxley replied as follows:--]

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, July 21, 1890.

Dear Sir,

I knew Mr. Babbage, and am quite sure that he was not the man to say
anything on the topic of calculating machines which he could not
justify.

I do not see that what he says affects the philosophy of induction as
rightly understood. No induction, however broad its basis, can confer
certainty--in the strict sense of the word. The experience of the whole
human race through innumerable years has shown that stones unsupported
fall to the ground, but that does not make it certain that any day next
week unsupported stones will not move the other way. All that it does
justify is the very strong expectation, which hitherto has been
invariably verified, that they will do just the contrary.

Only one absolute certainty is possible to man--namely, that at any
given moment the feeling which he has exists.

All other so-called certainties are beliefs of greater or less
intensity.

Do not suppose that I am following Abernethy's famous prescription,
"take my pills," if I refer you to an essay of mine on "Descartes," and
a little book on Hume, for the fuller discussion of these points.
Hume's argument against miracles turns altogether on the fallacy that
induction can give certainty in the strict sense.

We poor mortals have to be content with hope and belief in all matters
past and present--our sole certainty is momentary.

I am yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Sir J.G.T. Sinclair, Bart.

[Except for a last visit to London to pack his books, which proved a
heavier undertaking than he had reckoned upon, Huxley did not leave
Eastbourne this autumn, refusing Sir J. Donnelly's hospitable
invitation to stay with him in Surrey during the move, of which he
exclaims:--]

Thank Heaven that is my last move--except to a still smaller residence
of a subterranean character!

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, September 19, 1890.

My dear Donnelly,

And my books--and watch-dog business generally?

How is that to be transacted whether as in-patient or out-patient at
Firdale? Much hospitality hath made thee mad.

Seriously, it's not to be done nohow. What between papers that don't
come, and profligate bracket manufacturers who keep you waiting for
months and then send the wrong things--and a general tendency of
everybody to do nothing right or something wrong--it is as much as the
two of us will do--to get in, and all in the course of the next three
weeks.

Of course my wife has no business to go to London to superintend the
packing--but I should like to see anybody stop her. However, she has
got the faithful Minnie to do the actual work; and swears by all her
Gods and Goddesses she will only direct.

It would only make her unhappy if I did not make pretend to believe,
and hope no harm may come of it.

Tout a vous,

T.H. Huxley.

[Another discussion which sprang up in the "Times", upon Medical
Education, evoked a letter from him ("Times" August 7), urging that the
preliminary training ought to be much more thorough and exact. The
student at his first coming is so completely habituated to learn only
from books or oral teaching, that the attempt to learn from things and
to get his knowledge at first hand is something new and strange. Thus a
large proportion of medical students spend much of their first year in
learning how to learn, and when they have done that, in acquiring the
preliminary scientific knowledge, with which, under any rational system
of education, they would have come provided.

He urged, too, that they should have received a proper literary
education instead of a sham acquaintance with Latin, and insisted, as
he had so often done, on the literary wealth of their own language.

Every one has his own ideas of what a liberal education ought to
include, and a correspondent wrote to ask him, among other things,
whether he did not think the higher mathematics ought to be included.
He replied:--]

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, August 16, 1890.

I think mathematical training highly desirable, but advanced
mathematics, I am afraid, would be too great a burden in proportion to
its utility, to the ordinary student.

I fully agree with you that the incapacity of teachers is the weak
point in the London schools. But what is to be expected when a man
accepts a lectureship in a medical school simply as a grappling-iron by
which he may hold on until he gets a hospital appointment?

Medical education in London will never be what it ought to be, until
the "Institutes of Medicine," as the Scotch call them, are taught in
only two or three well-found institutions--while the hospital schools
are confined to the teaching of practical medicine, surgery,
obstetrics, and so on.

[The following letters illustrate Huxley's keenness to correct any
misrepresentation of his opinions from a weighty source, amid the way
in which, without abating his just claims, he could make the peace
gracefully.

In October Dr. Abbott delivered an address on "Illusions," in which,
without, of course, mentioning names, he drew an unmistakable picture
of Huxley as a thorough pessimist. A very brief report appeared in the
"Times" of October 9, together with a leading article upon the subject.
Huxley thereupon wrote to the "Times" a letter which throws light both
upon his early days and his later opinions:--]

The article on "Illusions" in the "Times" of to-day induces me to
notice the remarkable exemplification of them to which you have drawn
public attention. The Reverend Dr. Abbott has pointed the moral of his
discourse by a reference to a living man, the delicacy of which will be
widely and justly appreciated. I have reason to believe that I am
acquainted with this person, somewhat intimately, though I can by no
means call myself his best friend--far from it.

If I am right, I can affirm that this poor fellow did not escape from
the "narrow school in which he was brought up" at nineteen, but more
than two years later; and, as he pursued his studies in London, perhaps
he had as many opportunities for "fruitful converse with friends and
equals," to say nothing of superiors, as he would have enjoyed
elsewhere.

Moreover, whether the naval officers with whom he consorted were
book-learned or not, they were emphatically men, trained to face
realities and to have a wholesome contempt for mere talkers. Any one of
them was worth a wilderness of phrase-crammed undergraduates. Indeed, I
have heard my misguided acquaintance declare that he regards his four
years' training under the hard conditions and the sharp discipline of
his cruise as an education of inestimable value.

As to being a "keen-witted pessimist out and out," the Reverend Dr.
Abbott's "horrid example" has shown me the following
sentence:--"Pessimism is as little consonant with the facts of sentient
existence as optimism." He says he published it in 1888, in an article
on "Industrial Development," to be seen in the "Nineteenth Century".
But no doubt this is another illusion. No superior person, brought up
"in the Universities," to boot, could possibly have invented a myth so
circumstantial.

[The end of the correspondence was quite amicable. Dr. Abbott explained
that he had taken his facts from the recently published
"Autobiography," and that the reporters had wonderfully altered what he
really said by large omissions. In a second letter ("Times" October 11)
Huxley says:--]

I am much obliged to Dr. Abbott for his courteous explanation. I myself
have suffered so many things at the hands of so many reporters--of whom
it may too often be said that their "faith, unfaithful, makes them
falsely true"--that I can fully enter into what his feelings must have
been when he contemplated the picture of his discourse, in which the
lights on "raw midshipmen," "pessimist out and out," "devil take the
hindmost," and "Heine's dragoon," were so high, while the "good things"
he was kind enough to say about me lay in the deep shadow of the
invisible. And I can assure Dr. Abbott that I should not have dreamed
of noticing the report of his interesting lecture, which I read when it
appeared, had it not been made the subject of the leading article which
drew the attention of all the world to it on the following day.

I was well aware that Dr. Abbott must have founded his remarks on the
brief notice of my life which (without my knowledge) has been thrust
into its present ridiculous position among biographies of eminent
musicians; and most undoubtedly anything I have said there is public
property. But erroneous suppositions imaginatively connected with what
I have said appear to me to stand upon a different footing, especially
when they are interspersed with remarks injurious to my early friends.
Some of the "raw midshipmen and unlearned naval officers" of whom Dr.
Abbott speaks, in terms which he certainly did not find in my
"autobiography," are, I am glad to say, still alive, and are
performing, or have performed, valuable services to their country. I
wonder what Dr. Abbott would think, and perhaps say, if his youthful
University friends were spoken of as "raw curates and unlearned country
squires."

When David Hume's housemaid was wroth because somebody chalked up "St
David's" on his house, the philosopher is said to have remarked,--"
Never mind, lassie, better men than I have been made saints of before
now." And, perhaps, if I had recollected that "better men than I have
been made texts of before now," a slight flavour of wrath which may be
perceptible would have vanished from my first letter. If Dr. Abbott has
found any phrase of mine too strong, I beg him to set it against "out
and out pessimist" and "Heine's dragoon," and let us cry quits. He is
the last person with whom I should wish to quarrel.

[Two interesting criticisms of books follow; one "The First Three
Gospels", by the Reverend Estlin Carpenter; the other on "Use and
Disuse", directed against the doctrine of use-inheritance, by Mr. Platt
Ball, who not only sent the book but appealed to him for advice as to
his future course in undertaking a larger work on the evolution of man.]

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, October 11, 1890.

My dear Mr. Carpenter,

Accept my best thanks for "The First Three Gospels", which strikes me
as an admirable exposition of the case, full, clear, and calm. Indeed
the latter quality gives it here and there a touch of humour. You say
the most damaging things in a way so gentle that the orthodox reader
must feel like the eels who were skinned by the fair Molly--lost
between pain and admiration.

I am certainly glad to see that the book has reached a second edition;
it will do yeoman's service to the cause of right reason.

A friend of mine was in the habit of sending me his proofs, and I
sometimes wrote on them "no objection except to the whole"; and I am
afraid that you will think what I am about to say comes to pretty much
the same thing--at least if I am right in the supposition that a
passage in your first preface (page 7) states your fundamental
position, and that you conceive that when criticism has done its
uttermost there still remains evidence that the personality of Jesus
was the leading cause--the conditio sine qua non--of the evolution of
Christianity from Judaism.

I long thought so, and having a strong dislike to belittle the heroic
figures of history, I held by the notion as long as I could, but I find
it melting away.

I cannot see that the moral and religious ideal of early Christianity
is new--on the other hand, it seems to me to be implicitly and
explicitly contained in the early prophetic Judaism and the later
Hellenised Judaism; and though it is quite true that the new vitality
of the old ideal manifested in early Christianity demands "an adequate
historic cause," I would suggest that the word "cause" may mislead if
it is not carefully defined.

Medical philosophy draws a most useful and necessary distinction
between "exciting" and "predisposing" causes--and nowhere is it more
needful to keep this distinction in mind than in history--and
especially in estimating the action of individuals on the course of
human affairs. Platonic and Stoical philosophy--prophetic
liberalism--the strong democratic socialism of the Jewish political
system--the existence of innumerable sodalities for religious and
social purposes--had thrown the ancient world into a state of unstable
equilibrium. With such predisposing causes at work, the exciting cause
of enormous changes might be relatively insignificant. The powder was
there--a child might throw the match which should blow up the whole
concern.

I do not want to seem irreverent, still less depreciatory, of noble
men, but it strikes me that in the present case the Nazarenes were the
match and Paul the child.

An ingrained habit of trying to explain the unknown by the known leads
me to find the key to Nazarenism in Quakerism. It is impossible to read
the early history of the Friends without seeing that George Fox was a
person who exerted extraordinary influence over the men with whom he
came in contact; and it is equally impossible (at least for me) to
discover in his copious remains an original thought.

Yet what with the corruption of the Stuarts, the Phariseeism of the
Puritans, and the Sadduceeism of the Church, England was in such a
state, that before his death he had gathered about him a vast body of
devoted followers, whose patient endurance of persecution is a marvel.
Moreover, the Quakers have exercised a prodigious influence on later
English life.

But I have scribbled a great deal too much already. You will see what I
mean.

To Mr. W. Platt Ball.

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, October 27, 1890.

Dear Sir,

I have been through your book, which has greatly interested me, at a
hand-gallop; and I have by no means given it the attention it deserves.
But the day after to-morrow I shall be going into a new house here, and
it may be some time before I settle down to work in it--so that I
prefer to seem hasty, rather than indifferent to your book and still
more to your letter.

As to the book, in the first place. The only criticism I have to
offer--in the ordinary depreciatory sense of the word--is that pages
128 to 137 seem to me to require reconsideration, partly from a
substantial and partly from a tactical point of view. There is much
that is disputable on the one hand, and not necessary to your argument
on the other.

Otherwise it seems to me that the case could hardly be better stated.
Here are a few notes and queries that have occurred to me.

Page 41. Extinction of Tasmanians--rather due to the British colonist,
who was the main agent of their extirpation, I fancy.

Page 67. Birds' sternums are a great deal more than surfaces of origin
for the pectoral muscles--e.g. movable lid of respiratory bellows. This
not taken into account by Darwin.

Page 85. "Inferiority of senses of Europeans" is, I believe, a pure
delusion. Professor Marsh told me of feats of American trappers equal
to any savage doings. It is a question of attention. Consider
wool-sorters, tea-tasters, shepherds who know every sheep personally,
etc. etc.

Page 85. I do not understand about the infant's sole; since all men
become bipeds, all must exert pressure on sole. There is no disuse.

Page 88. Has not "muscardine" been substituted for "pebrine"? I have
always considered this a very striking case. Here is apparent
inheritance of a diseased state through the mother only, quite
inexplicable till Pasteur discovered the rationale.

Page 155. Have you considered that State Socialism (for which I have
little enough love) may be a product of Natural Selection? The
societies of Bees and Ants exhibit socialism in excelsis.

The unlucky substitution of "survival of fittest" for "natural
selection" has done much harm in consequence of the ambiguity of
"fittest"--which many take to mean "best" or "highest"--whereas natural
selection may work towards degradation: vide epizoa.

You do not refer to the male mamma--which becomes functional once in
many million cases, see the curious records of Gynaecomasty. Here
practical disuse in the male ever since the origin of the mammalia has
not abolished the mamma or destroyed its functional potentiality in
extremely rare cases.

I absolutely disbelieve in use-inheritance as the evidence stands.
Spencer is bound to it a priori--his psychology goes to pieces without
it.

Now as to the letter. I am no pessimist--but also no optimist. The
world might be much worse, and it might be much better. Of moral
purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively
human manufacture--and very much to our credit.

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

Therefore, my advice to you is go ahead. You may make more of failing
to get money, and of succeeding in getting abuse--until such time in
your life as (if you are teachable) you have ceased to care much about
either. The job you propose to undertake is a big one, and will tax all
your energies and all your patience.

But, if it were my case, I should take my chance of failing in a worthy
task rather than of succeeding in lower things.

And if at any time I can be of use to you (even to the answering of
letters) let me know. But in truth I am getting rusty in science--from
disuse.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

P.S.--Yes--Mr. Gladstone has dug up the hatchet. We shall see who gets
the scalps.

By the way, you have not referred to plants, which are a stronghold for
you. What is the good of use-inheritance, say, in orchids?

[The interests which had formerly been divided between biology and
other branches of science and philosophy, were diverted from the one
channel only to run stronger in the rest. Stagnation was the one thing
impossible to him; his rest was mental activity without excessive
physical fatigue; and he felt he still had a useful purpose to serve,
as a friend put it, in patrolling his beat with a vigilant eye to the
loose characters of thought. Thus he writes on September 29 to Sir J.
Hooker:--]

I wish quietude of mind were possible to me. But without something to
do that amuses me and does not involve too much labour, I become quite
unendurable--to myself and everybody else.

Providence has, I believe, specially devolved on Gladstone, Gore, and
Co. the function of keeping "'ome 'appy" for me.

I really can't give up tormenting ces droles.

However, I have been toiling at a tremendously scientific article about
the "Aryan question" absolutely devoid of blasphemy.

[This article appeared in the November number of the "Nineteenth
Century" ("Collected Essays" 7 271) and treats the question from a
biological point of view, with the warning to readers that it is
essentially a speculation based upon facts, but not assuredly proved.
It starts from the racial characteristics of skull and stature, not
from simply philological considerations, and arrives at a form of the
"Sarmatian" theory of Aryan origins. And for fear lest he should be
supposed to take sides in the question of race and language, or race
and civilisation, he remarks:--]

The combination of swarthiness with stature above the average and a
long skull, confer upon me the serene impartiality of a mongrel.

The Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, August 12, 1890.

My dear Evans,

I have read your address returned herewith with a great deal of
interest, as I happen to have been amusing myself lately with reviewing
the "Aryan" question according to the new lights (or darknesses).

I have only two or three remarks to offer on the places I have marked A
and B.

As to A, I would not state the case so strongly against the
probabilities of finding pliocene man. A pliocene Homo skeleton might
analogically be expected to differ no more from that of modern men than
the Oeningen Canis from modern Canes, or pliocene horses from modern
horses. If so, he would most undoubtedly be a man--genus Homo--even if
you made him a distinct species. For my part I should by no means be
astonished to find the genus Homo represented in the Miocene, say the
Neanderthal man with rather smaller brain capacity, longer arms and
more movable great toe, but at most specifically different.

As to B, I rather think there were people who fought the fallacy of
language being a test of race before Broca--among them thy servant--who
got into considerable hot water on that subject for a lecture on the
forefathers and forerunners of the English people, delivered in 1870.
Taylor says that Cuno was the first to insist upon the proposition that
race is not co-extensive with language in 1871. That is all stuff. The
same thesis had been maintained before I took it up, but I cannot
remember by whom. [Cp. letter to Max Muller of June 15, 1865 volume 1.]

Won't you refer to the Blackmore Museum? I was very much struck with it
when at Salisbury the other day.

Hope they gave you a better lunch at Gloucester than we did here. We'll
treat you better next time in our own den. With the wife's kindest
regards.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[The remark in a preceding letter about "Gladstone, Gore, and Co."
turned out to be prophetic as well as retrospective. Mr. Gladstone
published this autumn in "Good Words" his "Impregnable Rock of Holy
Scripture," containing an attack upon Huxley's position as taken up in
their previous controversy of 1889.

The debate now turned upon the story of the Gadarene swine. The
question at issue was not, at first sight, one of vital importance, and
one critic at least remarked that at their age Mr. Gladstone and
Professor Huxley might be better occupied than in fighting over the
Gadarene pigs:--]

If these too famous swine were the only parties to the suit, I for my
part (writes Huxley, "Collected Essays" 5 414) should fully admit the
justice of the rebuke. But the real issue (he contends) is whether the
men of the nineteenth century are to adopt the demonology of the men of
the first century, as divinely revealed truth, or to reject it as
degrading falsity.

[A lively encounter followed:--]

The G.O.M. is not murdered [he writes on November 20], only "fillipped
with a three-man beetle," as the fat knight has it.

[This refers to the forthcoming article in the December "Nineteenth
Century", "The Keepers of the Herd of Swine," which was followed in
March 1891 by "Mr. Gladstone's Controversial Methods" (see "Collected
Essays" 5 366 sqq.), the rejoinder to Mr. Gladstone's reply in February.

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

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

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

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