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

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It is uncommonly good of the Lord Mayor to stand up for Science, in the
teeth of the row the anti-vivisection pack--dogs and doggesses--are
making.

May his shadow never be less.

We shall be off to the Maloja at the end of this week, if the weather
mends. Thunderstorms here every day, and sometimes two or three a day
for the last ten days.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Monte Generoso, Switzerland, June 25, 1889.

My Lord Mayor,

I greatly regret my inability to be present at the meeting which is to
be held, under your Lordship's auspices, in reference to M. Pasteur and
his Institute. The unremitting labours of that eminent Frenchman during
the last half-century have yielded rich harvests of new truths, and are
models of exact and refined research. As such they deserve, and have
received, all the honours which those who are the best judges of their
purely scientific merits are able to bestow. But it so happens that
these subtle and patient searchings out of the ways of the infinitely
little--of the swarming life where the creature that measures
one-thousandth part of an inch is a giant--have also yielded results of
supreme practical importance. The path of M. Pasteur's investigations
is strewed with gifts of vast monetary value to the silk trades, the
brewer, and the wine merchant. And this being so, it might well be a
proper and graceful act on the part of the representatives of trade and
commerce in its greatest centre to make some public recognition of M.
Pasteur's services, even if there were nothing further to be said about
them. But there is much more to be said. M. Pasteur's direct and
indirect contributions to our knowledge of the causes of diseased
states, and of the means of preventing their recurrence, are not
measurable by money values, but by those of healthy life and diminished
suffering to men. Medicine, surgery, and hygiene have all been
powerfully affected by M. Pasteur's work, which has culminated in his
method of treating hydrophobia. I cannot conceive that any competently
instructed person can consider M. Pasteur's labours in this direction
without arriving at the conclusion that, if any man has earned the
praise and honour of his fellows, he has. I find it no less difficult
to imagine that our wealthy country should be other than ashamed to
continue to allow its citizens to profit by the treatment freely given
at the Institute without contributing to its support. Opposition to the
proposals which your Lordship sanctions would be equally inconceivable
if it arose out of nothing but the facts of the case thus presented.
But the opposition which, as I see from the English papers, is
threatened has really for the most part nothing to do either with M.
Pasteur's merits or with the efficacy of his method of treating
hydrophobia. It proceeds partly from the fanatics of laissez faire, who
think it better to rot and die than to be kept whole and lively by
State interference, partly from the blind opponents of properly
conducted physiological experimentation, who prefer that men should
suffer than rabbits or dogs, and partly from those who for other but
not less powerful motives hate everything which contributes to prove
the value of strictly scientific methods of enquiry in all those
questions which affect the welfare of society. I sincerely trust that
the good sense of the meeting over which your Lordship will preside
will preserve it from being influenced by those unworthy antagonisms,
and that the just and benevolent enterprise you have undertaken may
have a happy issue.

I am, my Lord Mayor, your obedient servant,

T.H. Huxley.

Hotel Kursaal, Maloja, Haute Engadine, July 8, 1889.

My dear Lankester,

Many thanks for your letter. I was rather anxious as to the result of
the meeting, knowing the malice and subtlety of the Philistines, but as
it turned out they were effectually snubbed. I was glad to see your
allusion to Coleridge's impertinences. It will teach him to think twice
before he abuses his position again. I do not understand Stead's
position in the Pall Mall. He snarls but does not bite.

I am glad that the audience (I judge from the "Times" report) seemed to
take the points of my letter, and live in hope that when I see last
week's "Spectator" I shall find Hutton frantic.

This morning a letter marked "Immediate" reached me from Bourne, date
July 3. I am afraid he does not read the papers or he would have known
it was of no use to appeal to me in an emergency. I am writing to him.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[On his return to England, however, a fortnight of London, interrupted
though it was by a brief visit to Mr. and Mrs. Humphry Ward at the
delightful old house of Great Hampden, was as much as he could stand.
"I begin to discover," he writes to Sir M. Foster, "I have a heart
again, a circumstance of which I had no reminder at the Maloja." So he
retreated at once to Eastbourne, which had done him so much good
before.]

4 Marlborough Place, September 24, 1889.

My dear Hooker,

How's a' wi' ye'? We came back from the Engadine early in the month,
and are off to Eastbourne to-morrow. I rejuvenate in Switzerland and
senescate (if there is no such verb, there ought to be) in London, and
the sooner I am out of it the better.

When are you going to have an x? I cannot make out what has become of
Spencer, except that he is somewhere in Scotland.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

We shall be at our old quarters--3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne--from
to-morrow onwards.

[The next letter shows once more the value he set upon botanical
evidence in the question of the influence of conditions in the process
of evolution.]

3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne, September 29, 1889.

My dear Hooker,

I hope to be with you at the Athenaeum on Thursday. It does one good to
hear of your being in such good working order. My knowledge of orchids
is infinitesimally small, but there were some eight or nine species
plentiful in the Engadine, and I learned enough to appreciate the
difficulties. Why do not some of these people who talk about the direct
influence of conditions try to explain the structure of orchids on that
tack? Orchids at any rate can't try to improve themselves in taking
shots at insects' heads with pollen bags--as Lamarck's Giraffes tried
to stretch their necks!

Balfour's ballon d'essai [I.e. touching a proposed Roman Catholic
University for Ireland.] (I do not believe it could have been anything
more) is the only big blunder he has made, and it passes my
comprehension why he should have made it. But he seems to have dropped
it again like the proverbial hot potato. If he had not, he would have
hopelessly destroyed the Unionist party.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[At the end of the year he thanks Lord Tennyson for his gift of
"Demeter":--]

December 26, 1889.

My dear Tennyson,

Accept my best thanks for your very kind present of "Demeter." I have
not had a Christmas Box I valued so much for many a long year. I envy
your vigour, and am ashamed of myself beside you for being turned out
to grass. I kick up my heels now and then, and have a gallop round the
paddock, but it does not come to much.

With best wishes to you, and, if Lady Tennyson has not forgotten me
altogether, to her also.

Believe me, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[A discussion in the "Times" this autumn, in which he joined, was of
unexpected moment to him, inasmuch as it was the starting-point for no
fewer than four essays in political philosophy, which appeared the
following year in the "Nineteenth Century".

The correspondence referred to arose out of the heckling of Mr. John
Morley by one of his constituents at Newcastle in November 1889. The
heckler questioned him concerning private property in land, quoting
some early dicta from the "Social Statics" of Mr. Herbert Spencer,
which denied the justice of such ownership. Comments and explanations
ensued in the "Times"; Mr. Spencer declared that he had since partly
altered that view, showing that contract has in part superseded force
as the ground of ownership; and that in any case it referred to the
idea of absolute ethics, and not to relative or practical politics.

Huxley entered first into the correspondence to point out present and
perilous applications of the absolute in contemporary politics.
Touching on a State guarantee of the title to land, he asks if there is
any moral right for confiscation:--In Ireland, he says, confiscation is
justified by the appeal to wrongs inflicted a century ago; in England
the theorems of "absolute political ethics" are in danger of being
employed to make this generation of land-owners responsible for the
misdeeds of William the Conqueror and his followers. ("Times" November
12.)

His remaining share in the discussion consisted of a brief passage of
arms with Mr. Spencer on the main question [November 18.], and a reply
to another correspondent [November 21.], which brings forward an
argument enlarged upon in one of the essays, namely that if the land
belongs to all men equally, why should one nation claim one portion
rather than another? For several ownership is just as much an
infringement of the world's ownership as is personal ownership.
Moreover, history shows that land was originally held in several
ownership, and that not of the nation, but of the village community.

These signs of renewed vigour induced Mr. Knowles to write him a
"begging letter," proposing an article for the "Nineteenth Century"
either in commendation of Bishop Magee's recent utterances--it would be
fine for eulogy to come from such a quarter after the recent
encounter--or on the general subject of which his "Times" letters dealt
with a part.

Huxley's choice was for the latter. Writing on November 21, he says:--]

Now as to the article. I have only hesitated because I want to get out
a new volume of essays, and I am writing an introduction which gives me
an immensity of trouble. I had made up my mind to get it done by
Christmas, and if I write for you it won't be. However, if you don't
mind leaving it open till the end of this month, I will see what can he
done in the way of a screed about, say, "The Absolute in Practical
Life." The Bishop would come in excellently; he deserves all praises,
and my only hesitation about singing them is that the conjunction
between the "Infidel" and the Churchman is just what the blatant
platform Dissenters who had been at him would like. I don't want to
serve the Bishop, for whom I have a great liking and respect, as the
bear served his sleeping master, when he smashed his nose in driving an
unfortunate fly away!

By the way, has the Bishop published his speech or sermon? I have only
seen a newspaper report.

[Soon after this, he proposed to come to town and talk over the article
with Mr. Knowles. The latter sent him a telegram--reply paid--asking
him to fix a day. The answer named a day of the week and a day of the
month which did not agree; whereupon Mr. Knowles wrote by the safer
medium of the post for an explanation, thinking that the post-office
clerks must have bungled the message, and received the following
reply:--]

3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne, November 26, 1889.

My dear Knowles,

May jackasses sit upon the graves of all telegraph clerks! But the boys
are worse, and I shall have to write to the Postmaster-General about
the little wretch who brought your telegram the other day, when my mind
was deeply absorbed in the concoction of an article for THE Review of
our age.

The creature read my answer, for he made me pay three halfpence extra
(I believe he spent it on toffy), and yet was so stupid as not to see
that meaning to fix next Monday or Tuesday, I opened my diary to give
the dates in order that there should be no mistake, and found Monday 28
and Tuesday 29.

And I suppose the little beast would say he did not know I opened it in
October instead of November!

I hate such mean ways. Hang all telegraph boys!

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Monday December 2, if you have nothing against it, and lunch if Mrs.
Knowles will give me some.

[The article was finished by the middle of December and duly sent to
the editor, under the title of "Rousseau and Rousseauism." But fearing
that this title would surely attract attention among the working-men
for whom it was specially designed, Mr. Knowles suggested instead the
"Natural Inequality of Men," under which name it actually appeared in
January. So, too, in the case of a companion article in March, the
editorial pen was responsible for the change from the arid
possibilities of "Capital and Labour" to the more attractive title of
"Capital the Mother of Labour."

With regard to this article and a further project of extending his
discussion of the subject, he
writes:--]

3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne, December 14, 1889.

My dear Knowles,

I am very glad you think the article will go. It is longer than I
intended, but I cannot accuse myself of having wasted words, and I have
left out several things that might have been said, but which can come
in by and by.

As to title, do as you like, but that you propose does not seem to me
quite to hit the mark. "Political Humbug: Liberty and Equality," struck
me as adequate, but my wife declares it is improper. "Political
Fictions" might be supposed to refer to Dizzie's novels! How about "The
Politics of the Imagination: Liberty and Inequality"?

I should like to have some general title that would do for the
"letters" which I see I shall have to write. I think I will make six of
them after the fashion of my "Working Men's Lectures," as thus: (1)
Liberty and Equality; (2) Rights of Man; (3) Property; (4) Malthus; (5)
Government, the province of the State; (6) Law-making and Law-breaking.

I understand you will let me republish them, as soon as the last is
out, in a cheap form. I am not sure I will not put them in the form of
"Lectures" rather than "Letters."

Did you ever read Henry George's book "Progress and Poverty"? It is
more damneder nonsense than poor Rousseau's blether. And to think of
the popularity of the book! But I ought to be grateful, as I can cut
and come again at this wonderful dish.

The mischief of it is I do not see how I am to finish the introduction
to my Essays, unless I put off sending you a second dose until March.

I will send back the revise as quickly as possible.

Ever yours very truly,

T.H. Huxley.

You do not tell me that there is anything to which Spencer can object,
so I suppose there is nothing.

[And in an undated letter to Sir J. Hooker, he says:--]

I am glad you think well of the "Human Inequality" paper. My wife has
persuaded me to follow it up with a view to making a sort of "Primer of
Politics" for the masses--by and by. "There's no telling what you may
come to, my boy," said the Bishop who reproved his son for staring at
John Kemble, and I may be a pamphleteer yet! But really it is time that
somebody should treat the people to common sense.

[However, immediately after the appearance of this first article on
Human Inequality, he changed his mind about the Letters to Working Men,
and resolved to continue what he had to say in the form of essays in
the "Nineteenth Century".

He then judged it not unprofitable to call public attention to the
fallacies which first found their way into practical politics through
the disciples of Rousseau; one of those speculators of whom he remarks
("Collected Essays" 1 312) that] "busied with deduction from their
ideal 'ought to be,' they overlooked the 'what has been,' the 'what
is,' and the 'what can be.'" "Many a long year ago," [he says in
Natural Rights and Political Rights (1 336)], "I fondly imagined that
Hume and Kant and Hamilton having slain the 'Absolute,' the thing must,
in decency, decease. Yet, at the present time, the same hypostatised
negation, sometimes thinly disguised under a new name, goes about in
broad daylight, in company with the dogmas of absolute ethics,
political and other, and seems to be as lively as ever." This was to
his mind one of those instances of wrong thinking which lead to wrong
acting--the postulating a general principle based upon insufficient
data, and the deduction from it of many and far-reaching practical
consequences. This he had always strongly opposed. His essay of 1871,
"Administrative Nihilism," was directed against a priori individualism;
and now he proceeded to restate the arguments against a priori
political reasoning in general, which seemed to have been forgotten or
overlooked, especially by the advocates of compulsory socialism. And
here it is possible to show in some detail the care he took, as was his
way, to refresh his knowledge and bring it up to date, before writing
on any special point. It is interesting to see how thoroughly he went
to work, even in a subject with which he was already fairly acquainted.
As in the controversy of 1889 I find a list of near a score of books
consulted, so here one note-book contains an analysis of the origin and
early course of the French Revolution, especially in relation to the
speculations of the theorists; the declaration of the rights of man in
1789 is followed by parallels from Mably's "Droits et Devoirs du
Citoyen" and "De la Legislation", and by a full transcript of the 1793
Declaration, with notes on Robespierre's speech at the Convention a
fortnight later. There are copious notes from Dunoyer, who is quoted in
the article, while the references to Rocquain's "Esprit
Revolutionnaire" led to an English translation of the work being
undertaken, to which he contributed a short preface in 1891.

It was the same with other studies. He loved to visualise his object
clearly. The framework of what he wished to say would always be drawn
out first. In any historical matter he always worked with a map. In
natural history he well knew the importance of studying distribution
and its bearing upon other problems; in civil history he would draw
maps to illustrate either the conditions of a period or the spread of a
civilising nation. For instance, among sketches of the sort which
remain, I have one of the Hellenic world, marked off in 25-mile circles
from Delos as centre; and a similar one for the Phoenician world,
starting from Tyre. Sketch maps of Palestine and Mesopotamia, with
notes from the best authorities on the geography of the two countries,
belong in all probability to the articles on "The Flood" and
"Hasisadra's Adventure." To realise clearly the size, position, and
relation of the parts to the whole, was the mechanical instinct of the
engineer which was so strong in him.

The four articles which followed in quick succession on "The Natural
Inequality of Man," "Natural and Political Rights," "Capital the Mother
of Labour," and "Government," appeared in the January, February, March,
and May numbers of the "Nineteenth Century", and, as was said above,
are directed against a priori reasoning in social philosophy. The
first, which appeared simultaneously with Mr. Herbert Spencer's article
on "Justice," in the "Nineteenth Century", assails, on the ground of
fact and history, the dictum that men are born free and equal, and have
a natural right to freedom and equality, so that property and political
rights are a matter of contract. History denies that they thus
originated; and, in fact, "proclaim human equality as loudly as you
like, Witless will serve his brother." Yet, in justice to Rousseau and
the influence he wielded, he adds:--]

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our
beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our
instincts.

Thus if, in their plain and obvious sense, the doctrines which Rousseau
advanced are so easily upset, it is probable that he had in his mind
something which is different from that sense.

[When they sought speculative grounds to justify the empirical truth:--]

that it is desirable in the interests of society, that all men should
be as free as possible, consistently with those interests, and that
they should all be equally bound by the ethical and legal obligations
which are essential to social existence, "the philosophers," as is the
fashion of speculators, scorned to remain on the safe if humble ground
of experience, and preferred to prophesy from the sublime cloudland of
the a priori.

[The second of these articles is an examination of Henry George's
doctrines as set forth in "Progress and Poverty". His relation to the
physiocrats is shown in a preliminary analysis of the term "natural
rights which have no wrongs," and are antecedent to morality, from
which analysis are drawn the results of confounding natural with moral
rights.

Here again is the note of justice to an argument in an unsound shape
(page 369): "There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that
opinions are worthless because they are badly argued." And a trifling
abatement of the universal and exclusive form of Henry George's
principle may make it true, while even unamended it may lead to
opposite conclusions--to the justification of several ownership in land
as well as in any other form of property.

The third essay of the series, "Capital the Mother of Labour"
("Collected Essays" 9 147), was an application of biological methods to
social problems, designed to show that the extreme claims of labour as
against capital are ill-founded.

In the last article, "Government," he traces the two extreme
developments of absolute ethics, as shown in anarchy and regimentation,
or unrestrained individualism and compulsory socialism. The key to the
position, of course, lies in the examination of the premisses upon
which these superstructures are raised, and history shows that:--]

So far from the preservation of liberty and property and the securing
of equal rights being the chief and most conspicuous object aimed at by
the archaic politics of which we know anything, it would be a good deal
nearer the truth to say that they were federated absolute monarchies,
the chief purpose of which was the maintenance of an established church
for the worship of the family ancestors.

[These articles stirred up critics of every sort and kind; socialists
who denounced him as an individualist, land nationalisers who had not
realised the difference between communal and national ownership, or men
who denounced him as an arm-chair cynic, careless of the poor and
ignorant of the meaning of labour. Mr. Spencer considered the chief
attack to be directed against his position; the regimental socialists
as against theirs, and:--]

as an attempt to justify those who, content with the present, are
opposed to all endeavours to bring about any fundamental change in our
social arrangements (ib. page 423).

So far from this, he continues:--]

Those who have had the patience to follow me to the end will, I trust,
have become aware that my aim has been altogether different. Even the
best of modern civilisations appears to me to exhibit a condition of
mankind which neither embodies 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 winning of a greater dominion over Nature which is its consequence,
and the wealth which follows upon that dominion, are to make no
difference in the extent and the intensity of Want, with its
concomitant physical and moral degradation, among the masses of the
people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet, which would
sweep the whole affair away, as a desirable consummation. 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 of the air obey him,
if the vulture of pauperism is eternally to tear his very vitals and
keep him on the brink of destruction?

Assuredly, if I believed that any of the schemes hitherto proposed for
bringing about social amelioration were likely to attain their end, I
should think what remains to me of life well spent in furthering it.
But my interest in these questions did not begin the day before
yesterday; and, whether right or wrong, it is no hasty conclusion of
mine that we have small chance of doing rightly in this matter (or
indeed in any other) unless we think rightly. Further, that we shall
never think rightly in politics until we have cleared our minds of
delusions, and more especially of the philosophical delusions which, as
I have endeavoured to show, have infested political thought for
centuries. My main purpose has been to contribute my mite towards this
essential preliminary operation. Ground must be cleared and levelled
before a building can be properly commenced; the labour of the navvy is
as necessary as that of the architect, however much less honoured; and
it has been my humble endeavour to grub up those old stumps of the a
priori which stand in the way of the very foundations of a sane
political philosophy.

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