Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work

by Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

Huxley's Activity in Public Affairs—Official in Scientific Societies—Royal Commissions—Vivisection—Characteristics of his Public Speaking—His Method of Exposition—His Essays—Vocabulary—Phrase-Making—His Style Essentially one of Ideas.

A great body of fine work in science and literature has been produced by persons who may be described as typically academic. Such persons confine their interest in life within the boundaries of their own immediate pursuits; they are absorbed so completely by their avocations that the hurly-burly of the world seems needlessly distracting and a little vulgar. No doubt the thoughts of those who cry out most loudly against disturbance by the intruding claims of the world are, for the most part, hardly worth disturbing; the attitude to extrinsic things of those who are absorbed by their work is aped not infrequently by those who are absorbed only in themselves. None the less it is important to recognise that a genuine aversion from affairs is characteristic of many fine original investigators, and it is on such persons that the idea of the simple and childlike nature of philosophers, a simplicity often reaching real incapacity for the affairs of life, is based. There was no trace of this natural isolation in the character of Huxley. He was not only a serious student of science but a keen and zealous citizen, eagerly conscious of the great social and political movements around him, with the full sense that he was a man living in society with other men and that there was a business of life as well as a business of the laboratory. We have seen with what zeal he brought his trained intelligence to bear not only on his own province of scientific education, but on the wider problems of general education, and yet the time he gave to these was only a small part of that which he spared from abstract science for affairs. In scientific institutions as in others, there is always a considerable amount of business, involving the management of men and the management of money, and Huxley's readiness and aptitude led to his being largely occupied with these. For many years he was Dean of the Royal College of Science at South Kensington, and for a considerable time he served the Geological Society and the Royal Society as secretary. In all these posts, Huxley displayed great capacity as a leader of men and as a manager of affairs, and contributed largely to the successful working of the institutions which he served.

In England, when troublesome questions press and seem to call for new legislation, it frequently happens that the collection and sifting of evidence preliminary to legislation is a task for which the methods and routine of Parliament are unsuitable. The Queen, acting through her responsible advisers, appoints a Royal Commission, consisting of a small body of men, to which is entrusted the preliminary task of collecting and weighing evidence, or of making recommendations on evidence already collected. To such honourable posts Huxley was repeatedly called. He served on the following Commissions: 1. Royal Commission on the Operation of Acts relating to Trawling for Herrings on the Coast of Scotland, 1862. 2. Royal Commission to Enquire into the Sea Fisheries of the United Kingdom, 1864-65. 3. Commission on the Royal College of Science for Ireland, 1866. 4. Commission on Science and Art Instruction in Ireland, 1868. 5. Royal Commission on the Administration and Operation of the Contagious Diseases Acts, 1870-71. 6. Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science, 1870-75. 7. Royal Commission on the Practice of Subjecting Live Animals to Experiments for Scientific Purposes, 1876. 8. Royal Commission to Enquire into the Universities of Scotland, 1876-78. 9. Royal Commission on the Medical Acts, 1881-82. 10. Royal Commission on Trawl, Net, and Beam-Trawl Fishing, 1884. This is a great record for any man, especially for one in whose life work of this kind was outside his habitual occupation. It was no doubt in special recognition of the important services given his country by such work, as well as in general recognition of his distinction in science, that he was sworn a member of Her Majesty's Privy Council, so attaining a distinction more coveted than the peerage.

The voluminous reports of the Commissions shew that Huxley, very far from being a silent member of them, took a large part in framing the questions which served to direct witnesses into useful lines, and that his clear and orderly habit of thought proved as useful in the elucidation of these subjects as they were in matters of scientific research. For the most part, the problems brought before the Commissions have lost their interest for readers of later years, but there are matters still unsettled on which the opinions of Huxley as expressed then remain useful. The Commission of 1876, for instance, dealt with vivisection, a matter on which the conscience of the ordinary man is not yet at rest. Although Huxley was intensely interested in the problems of physiology, and although at one time he hoped to devote his life to them, fortune directed otherwise, and the investigations for which he is famed did not in any way involve the kind of experiments known as vivisection. The greater part of his work was upon the remains of creatures dead for thousands of years or upon the lifeless skeletons of modern forms. On the other hand, he was keenly interested in the progress of physiological science, he had personal acquaintance with most of the distinguished workers in physiology of his time at home and abroad, and from this knowledge of their character and aspirations he was well able to judge of the wholesale and reckless accusations brought against them. He was a man full of the finest humanity, with an unusual devotion to animals as pets, and with knowledge of the degrees of pain involved in experimenting on living creatures. He insisted strongly on the necessity of limiting or abolishing pain, wherever it was possible; he agreed that any experiments which involved pain should not be permitted for the purpose of demonstrating known elementary facts. But, from his knowledge of the incalculable benefits which had been gained from experimental research, and from his confidence in those who conducted it, he declined to give support to the misguided fanatics who desired to make such experimental research a penal offence, even when conducted by the most skilled experts for the highest purposes.

Huxley contributed his share to the great questions which agitated the public not only by service on Commissions, but by delivering a large number of public addresses and writing a large number of essays on topics of special interest. Much of his work on scientific, educational, and general subjects took its first shape in the form of addresses given to some public audience. University audiences in England, Scotland, and America were familiar to him, and from time to time he addressed large gatherings of a mixed character. But probably his favourite audience was composed of working men, and he had the greatest respect for the intelligence and sympathy of hearers who like himself passed the greater portion of their time in hard work. Professor Howes, his pupil, friend, and successor, writes of him:

"He gave workmen of his best. The substance of Man's Place in Nature, one of the most successful and popular of his writings, and of his Crayfish, perhaps the most perfect zoölogical treatise ever published, was first communicated to them. In one of the last communications I had with him, I asked his views as to the desirability of discontinuing the workmen's lectures at Jermyn Street, since the development of workmen's colleges and institutes was regarded by some as rendering their continuance unnecessary. He replied, almost with indignation, 'With our central situation and resources we ought to be in a position to give the workmen that which they cannot get elsewhere,' adding that he would deeply deplore any such discontinuance."

Huxley had no natural facility for speech. He tells us that at first he disliked it, and that he had a firm conviction that he would break down every time he opened his mouth. The only two possible faults of a public speaker which he believed himself to be without, were "talking at random and indulging in rhetoric." With practice, he lost this earlier hesitancy, and before long became known as one of the finest speakers of his time. Certain natural gifts aided him; his well-set figure and strong features, of which the piercing eyes and firm, trap-like mouth were the most striking, riveted attention, while his voice had a wide range and was beautifully modulated. But it was above all things the matter and not the manner of his speech that commanded success. He cared little or nothing for the impression he might make—everything for the ideas which he wished to convey. He was concerned only to set forth these ideas in their clear and logical order, convinced in his own mind that, were the facts as he knew them placed before the minds of his hearers, only one possible result could follow. The facts had convinced him: they must equally convince any honest and intelligent person placed in possession of them. He had not the smallest intention of overbearing by authority or of swaying by skilfully aroused emotion. Such weapons of the orator seemed to him dishonest in the speaker and most perilous to the audience. For him, speaking on any subject was merely a branch of scientific exposition; when emotion was to be roused or enthusiasm to be kindled the inspiration was to come from the facts and not from the orator. The arts he allowed himself were those common to all forms of exposition; he would explain a novel set of ideas by comparison with simpler ideas obvious to all his listeners; and he sought to arrest attention or to drive home a conclusion by some brilliant phrase that bit into the memory. These two arts, the art of the phrase-maker and the art of explaining by vivacious and simple comparison, he brought to a high perfection. The fundamental method of his exposition was simply the method of comparative anatomy, the result of a habit of thinking which makes it impossible to have any set of ideas brought into the mind without an immediate, almost unconscious, overhauling of the memory for any other ideas at all congruous. In a strict scientific exposition Huxley would choose from the multitude of possible comparisons that most simple and most intelligible to his audience; when in a lighter vein, he gave play to a natural humour in his choice. Instances of his method of exposition by comparison abound in his published addresses. Let us take one or two. In the course of an address to a large mixed audience so early in his public career as 1854, in making plain to them the proposition, somewhat novel for those days, that the natural history sciences had an educational value, he explained that the faculties employed in that subject were simply those of the common sense of every-day life.

"The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practised by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones. Nor does that process of induction and deduction by which a lady, finding a stain of a peculiar kind on her dress, concludes that somebody has upset the inkstand thereon, differ in any way, in kind, from that by which Adams and Leverrier discovered a new planet."

In one of his addresses to working men on Man's Place in Nature he shewed that from time to time in the history of the world average persons of the human race have accepted some kind of answer to the insoluble riddles of existence, but that from time to time the race has outgrown the current answers, ceasing to take comfort from them.

"In a well-worn metaphor a parallel is drawn between the life of man and the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly; but the comparison may be more just as well as more novel, if for its former term we take the mental progress of the race. History shews that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another, itself but temporary. Truly, the imago state of man seems to be terribly distant, but every moult is a step gained, and of such there have been many."