John Fiske once called Thomas Huxley an "appreciative iconoclast." That is to say, Huxley was a persistent protester (which is different from a protestant), and at the same time, he was a friend who never faltered and grew faint in time of trouble. Huxley always sniffed the battle from afar and said, Ha! Ha!
There be those who do declare that the success of Huxley was owing to his taking the tide at the flood, and riding into high favor on the Darwinian wave. To say that there would have been no Huxley had there been no Darwin would be one of those unkind cuts the cruelty of which lies in its truth.
It is equally true that if there had been no Lincoln there would have been no Grant; but Grant was a very great man just the same—so why raise the issue!
Darwin summed up and made nebulæ of the truths which Huxley had, up to that time, held only in gaseous form.
Darwin was born in the immortal year Eighteen Hundred Nine. Huxley was born in Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five. When "The Origin of Species" was published in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, Thomas Huxley was thirty-four years old. He had made his four years' trip around the world on the surveying-ship "Rattlesnake," just as Darwin had made his eventful voyage on the "Beagle."
These men in many ways had paralleled each other; but Darwin had sixteen years the start, and during these years he had steadily and silently worked to prove the great truth that he had sensed intuitively years before in the South Seas.
"The Origin of Species" sheds light in ten thousand ways on the fact that all life has evolved from very lowly forms and is still ascending: that species were not created by fiat, but that every species was the sure and necessary result of certain conditions.
Until "The Origin of Species" was published, and for some years afterward, the Immutability of Species was taught in all colleges, and everywhere accepted by the so-called learned men.
Goethe had somewhat dimly prophesied the discovery of the Law of Evolution, but his ideas on natural science were regarded by the schools as quite on a par with those of Dante: neither was taken seriously.
Darwin proved his hypothesis. Doubtless, very many schoolmen would have accepted the theory, but to admit that man was not created outright, complete, and in his present form, or superior to it, seemed to evolve a contradiction of the Mosaic account of Creation, and the breaking up of Christianity. And these things done, many thought, would entail moral chaos, destruction of private interests and moral confusion being one and the same thing to those whose interests are involved. And so for conscience' sake, Darwin was bitterly assailed and opposed.