Cambridge and Concord had seven men who induced the Muses to come to America and take out papers.
These men of the Barbizon School tinted the entire art world: Millet, Rousseau, Daubigny, Corot, Diaz. And the people who worked a complete revolution in the theological thought of Christendom were these: Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Tyndall, Wallace, Huxley and, yes, George Eliot, who bolstered the brain of Herbert Spencer when he was learning to think for himself.
When the victory had become a rout, there were many others who joined forces with the evolutionists; but at first the thinkers named above stood together and received the rather unsavory gibes and jeers of those who get their episcopopagy and science from the same source.
Darwin was the only man in the group who was a university graduate, and he once said that he owed nothing to his Alma Mater, save the stimulus derived from her disapproval.
For the work these men had to do there was no precedent: no one had gone before and blazed a trail.
Learning, like capital, is timid; but ignorance coupled with a desire to know, is bold. Do I then make a plea for ignorance? Yes, most assuredly. It is just as well not to know so much, as to be a theologian and know so many things that are not true.
Learning and institutions of learning subdue men into conformity; only the man who belongs to nothing is free; and ignorance, as well as a certain indifference to what the world has said and done, is a necessary factor in the character of him who would do a great work. It was the combined ignorance and boldness of Columbus that made it possible for him to give the world a continent.
Yet the man who has not had a college training often feels he has somehow missed something valuable: there is timidity and hesitation when he is in the presence of those who have had "advantages." And Huxley felt this loss, more or less, up to his thirty-fifth year, when Fate had him cross swords with college men, and then the truth became his that if he had had the regular university training, it was quite probable that he would have accepted the doctrines the universities taught, and would then have been in the camp of the "enemy," instead of with what he called the "blessed minority."
Isolation is a great aid to the thinker. Some of the best books the world has ever known were written behind prison-bars; exile has done much for literature, and a protracted sea-voyage has allowed many a good man to roam the universe in imagination. Some of Macaulay's best essays were written on board slow-going sailing-ships that were blown by vagrant winds from England to India. Darwin, Hooker and Huxley, all got their scientific baptism on board of surveying-ships, where time was plentiful and anything but fleeting, and most everything else was scarce.
Huxley was only assistant surgeon on the "Rattlesnake," and above him was a naturalist who much of his time lay in his bunk and read treatises on this and also on that.