Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work

by Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

As Huxley, on that great occasion, ascended the rostrum in the Sheldonian theatre, very white and frail in his scarlet doctor's robes, there must have been present in his mind memories of the occasion, four-and-thirty years before, when he first addressed an audience in the University of Oxford. Then he was a young man, almost unknown, rising to lead what seemed a forlorn hope for an idea utterly repugnant to most of his hearers. Now, and largely by his own efforts, the idea had become an inseparable part of human thought, and Huxley himself was the guest to whom the whole University was doing honour. Graduates from all parts of England had come to hear what, it was feared, might be his last public speech, and practically every member of the University who could gain admission was present. The press of the world attended to report his words as if they were those of a great political leader, about to decide the fate of nations. Although his voice had lost much of its old sonorous reach, and although the old clear rhythms were occasionally broken by hesitancies, the magic of his personality oriented to him every face.

It is a curious and striking circumstance, a circumstance fully recognised by Huxley himself, that in this exposition of his ethical conception of the Cosmos he reconstructed, on the lines of his evolutionary philosophy one of the oldest and most widespread theories, a theory again and again reached by men of different civilisations and epochs. Manes, the Persian, from whose name the word "Manicheism" has been coined to denote his doctrine, taught in perhaps the most explicit fashion that the Cosmos was the battle-ground of two contending powers,—Ahriman, the principle of evil, and Ormuzd, the principle of good. This doctrine in some form or other is implicit in most of the greater religions, some of which have assumed an ultimate triumph for the principle of good, while others have left the issue doubtful. The Ahriman of Huxley, the principle of evil, is what he termed the cosmic process, that great play of forces, by which, in a ruthless struggle for existence, the fittest (by which is meant the most suited to the surrounding conditions and not necessarily the ethically best) have survived at the expense of the less fit. The Ormuzd, the principle of good, is what Huxley called the Ethical process, the process by which sentient, intelligent, and moral man has striven to replace the "old ape and tiger methods" of the cosmic process, by methods in which justice and mercy, sacrifice and consideration for others have a part.

To explain clearly the distinction he made between the ethical and cosmic processes. Huxley, in the prefatory essay ("Prolegomena") published in the volume with his Romanes lecture, developed the analogy of a cultivated garden reclaimed from surrounding wild nature. He described how the countryside, visible from his windows at Eastbourne, had certainly been in a "state of nature" about two thousand years ago when Cæsar had set foot in Britain and had made the Roman camps, the remains of which still mark the chalk downs of England.

"Except, it may be, by raising a few sepulchral mounds, such as those which still, here and there, break the flowing contours of the Downs, man's hands had made no mark upon it; and the thin veil of vegetation which overspread the broad-backed heights and the shelving sides of the coombs was unaffected by his industry. The native grasses and weeds, the scattered patches of gorse, contended with one another for possession of the scanty surface soil; they fought against the droughts of summer, the frosts of winter, and the furious gales, which swept with unbroken force, now from the Atlantic, and now from the North Sea, at all times of the year; they filled up, as they best might, the gaps made in their ranks by all sorts of overground and underground ravagers. One year with another, an average population, the floating balance of the unceasing struggle for existence among the indigenous plants, maintained itself. It is as little to be doubted that an essentially similar state of nature prevailed in this region for many thousand years before the coming of Cæsar; and there is no assignable reason for denying that it might continue to exist through an equally prolonged futurity except for the intervention of man."

This present state of nature, he explained, is only a fleeting phase of a process that has gone on for millions of years. Under the thin layer of soil are the chalk cliffs, hundreds of feet thick and witnesses of the entirely different phases of the struggle that went on while the cliffs were being formed at the bottom of the chalk sea, when the vegetation of the nearest land was as different from the existing vegetation as that is different from the trees and flowers of an African forest.

"Before the deposition of the chalk, a vastly longer period elapsed, throughout which it is easy to follow the traces of the same process of ceaseless modification and of the same internecine struggle for existence of living things; and when we can go no further back, it is not because there is any reason to think we have reached the beginning, but because the trail of the most ancient life remains hidden or has become obliterated."

The state of nature, then, is a fleeting and impermanent process.

"That which endures is not one or other association of living forms, but the process of which the Cosmos is the product and of which these are among the transitory expressions. And in the living world, one of the most characteristic features of this cosmic process is the struggle for existence, the competition of each with all, the result of which is the selection, that is to say, the survival of those forms which, on the whole, are best adapted to the conditions which at any period obtain; and which are, therefore, in that respect, and only in that respect, the fittest. The acme reached by the cosmic process in the vegetation of the Downs is seen in the turf with its weeds and gorse. Under the conditions, they have come out of the struggle victorious; and, by surviving, have proved that they are the fittest to survive."

For three or four years, the state of nature in a small portion of the Downs surrounding Huxley's house had been put an end to by the intervention of man.