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

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

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

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

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

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, March 27, 1892.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

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

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, April 11, 1892.

My dear Lankester,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am glad my opinion is already on record.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[And again:--]

The Association scheme is undoubtedly a compromise--but it is a
compromise which takes us the right way, while the former schemes led
nowhere except to chaos.

[He writes to Sir W.H. Flower:--]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, June 27, 1892.

My dear Flower,

I had quite given up the hope that anything but some wretched
compromise would come of the University Commission, when I found, to my
surprise, no less than gratification, that a strong party among the
younger men were vigorously taking the matter up in the right (that is,
MY) sense.

In spite of all my good resolves to be a "hermit old in mossy cell," I
have enlisted--for ambulance service if nothing better.

The move is too important to spare oneself if one can be of any good.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Of his work in this position Professor Karl Pearson says, in a letter
to me:--

Professor Huxley gallantly came to lead a somewhat forlorn hope,--that
of establishing a really great university in London. He worked, as may
naturally be supposed, with energy and persistence, and one, who like
myself was not in full sympathy with the lines he took, can but admire
the vigour he threw into the movement. Nothing came of it
practically;...but Professor Huxley's leadership did, at any rate, a
great deal to unite the London teachers, and raise their ideal of a
true university, while at the same time helping to repress the
self-interests of many persons and institutions which had been before
very much to the front.

Clearly this is the sort of thing referred to in a letter of December
20:--]

Got through the Association business very well, but had to show that I
am the kind of head that does not lend itself to wagging by the tail.

[The Senate of the University of London showed practical unanimity in
accepting the idea of taking on teaching functions if the Commission
should think it desirable, though the Medical Schools were still
desirous of getting their degree granted on the mere license
examination of the Royal Colleges, without any evidence of general
culture or academical training, and on July 28 Huxley writes:--]

The decision of the representatives of the Medical Schools is just such
as I should have expected. I always told my colleagues in the Senate of
the University of London that such was their view, and that, in the
words of Pears' advertisement, they "would not be happy till they got
it."

And they won't get it unless the medical examining bodies are connected
into a distinct degree-giving body.

[In the course of the autumn matters seemed to be progressing. He
writes to Sir M. Foster, November 9:--]

I am delighted to say that Paget [Sir James Paget, Vice-Chancellor of
the University.] has taken up the game, and I am going to a committee
of the University this day week to try my powers of persuasion. If the
Senate can only be got to see where salvation lies and strike hard
without any fooling over details, we shall do a great stroke of
business for the future generations of Londoners.

[And by the end of the year he writes:--]

I think we are going to get something done, as the Senate of the
University of London has come into line with us, and I hope University
College will do the same.

[Meanwhile he was asked if he would appear before the Commission and
give evidence--to "talk without interrogation" so as to convince the
Commission of the inadequacy of the teaching of science in general and
of the absence of means and appliances for the higher teaching. This he
did early in January 1893, representing partly his own views, partly
those of the Association, to whom he read what he proposed to say,
before being authorised to speak on their behalf.

His position is finally defined by the following letter:--]

February 9, 1893.

Dear Professor Weldon,

I wish anything I have said or shall say about the organisation of the
New University to be taken in connection with the following postulates
which I conceive to be of primary importance:

1. The New University is not to be a separate body from the present
University of London.

2. All persons giving academic instruction of a certain rank are to be
"University Professors."

3. The Senate is to contain a large proportion of representatives of
the "University Professors" with a limited term of office (say five
years).

4. The University chest is to receive all fees and other funds for
University purposes; and the Professors are to be paid out of it,
according to work done for the University--thus putting an end to the
present commercial competition of teaching institutions.

5. In all questions of Teaching, Examination, and Discipline the
authority of the Senate is to be supreme--(saving appeal to the Privy
Council).

Your questions will be readily answered if these postulates are kept in
view.

In the case you put, the temptation to rivalry would not exist; and I
should imagine that the Senate would refuse funds for the purpose of
duplicating an existing Institution, unless very strong grounds for so
doing could be shown. In short, they would adopt the plan which
commends itself to you.

That to which I am utterly opposed is the creation of an Established
Church Scientific, with a hierarchical organisation and a professorial
Episcopate. I am fully agreed with you that all trading competition
between different teaching institutions is a thing to be abolished (see
Number 4 above).

On the other hand, intellectual competition is a very good thing, and
perfect freedom of learning and teaching the best of all things.

If you put a physical, chemical, or biological bishop at the head of
the teachers of those sciences in London, you will do your best to
destroy that freedom. My bar to any catastrophe of that sort lies in
Number 3. Let us take the case of Biology. I suppose there will be, at
least, half a dozen Professoriates in different branches of this
subject each Professor will be giving the same amount of time and
energy to University work, and will deserve the same pay. Each, if he
is worth his salt, will be a man holding his own views on general
questions, and having as good a right as any other to be heard. Why is
one to be given a higher rank and vastly greater practical influence
than all the rest? Why should not each be a "University Professor" and
have his turn on the Senate in influencing the general policy of the
University? The nature of things drives men more and more into the
position of specialists. Why should one specialist represent a whole
branch of science better than another, in Council or in Administration?

I am afraid we cannot build upon the analogy of Cambridge. In the first
place, London is not Cambridge; and, in the second, Michael Fosters do
not grow on every bush.

The besetting sin of able men is impatience of contradiction and of
criticism. Even those who do their best to resist the temptation, yield
to it almost unconsciously and become the tools of toadies and
flatterers. "Authorities," "disciples," and "schools" are the curse of
science; and do more to interfere with the work of the scientific
spirit than all its enemies.

Thus you will understand why I have so strongly opposed "absorption."
No one can feel more strongly than I the need of getting the present
chaos into order and putting an end to the absurd waste of money and
energy. But I believe that end may be attained by the method of
unification which I have suggested; without bringing in its train the
evils which will inevitably flow from "absorptive" regimentation.

What I want to see is such an organisation of the means and appliances
of University instruction in all its branches, as will conduce to the
largest possible freedom of research, learning, and teaching. And if
anybody will show me a better way to that end than through the measures
I have suggested, I will gladly leave all and follow him.

I am yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

P.S.--Will you be so kind as to let Professor Lankester see this
letter, as I am writing to him and shirk the labour of going over the
whole ground again.

[His last public activity, indeed, was on behalf of University reform,
when in January 1895 he represented not only the Association, but, in
the enforced absence of Sir James Paget, the Senate of the University
also, on a deputation to Lord Rosebery, then Prime Minister, to whom he
wrote asking if he were willing to receive such a deputation.]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, December 4, 1894.

Dear Lord Rosebery,

A number of scientific people, in fact I think I may say all the
leading men of science, and especially teachers in the country, are
very anxious to see the University of London reorganised upon the
general principles set forth in the Report of the last Royal Commission.

To this end nothing is wanted but the institution of a strong Statutory
Commission; and we have all been hoping that a Bill would be introduced
for that purpose.

It is rumoured that there are lions in the path. But even lions are
occasionally induced to retreat by the sight of a large body of
beaters. And some of us think that such a deputation as would willingly
wait on you, might hasten the desired movement.

We proposed something of the kind to Mr. Acland months ago, but nothing
has come of the suggestion--not, I am sure, from any want of good will
to our cause on his part.

Within the last few days I have been so strongly urged to bring the
matter before you, that in spite of some doubts as to the propriety of
going beyond my immediate chief the V.P. [The Vice-President of the
Committee of Council, Mr. Acland.] even in my private capacity I
venture to make this appeal.

I am, dear Lord Rosebery, faithfully yours,

T.H. Huxley.

CHAPTER 3.10.

1892.

[Several letters of this year touch on educational subjects. The
following advice as to the best training for a boy in science, was
addressed to Mr. Briton Riviere, R.A.]

Hodeslea, June 19, 1892.

My dear Riviere,

Touching the training of your boy who wants to go in for science, I
expect you will have to make a compromise between that which is
theoretically desirable and that which is practically most
advantageous, things being as they are.

Though I say it that shouldn't, I don't believe there is so good a
training in physical science to be got anywhere as in our College at
South Kensington. But Bernard could hardly with advantage take this up
until he is seventeen at least. What he would profit by most as a
preliminary, is training in the habit of expressing himself well and
clearly in English; training in mathematics and the elements of
physical science; in French and German, so as to read those languages
easily--especially German; in drawing--not for hifalutin art, of which
he will probably have enough in the blood--but accurate dry
reproduction of form--one of the best disciplines of the powers of
observation extant.

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