Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work

by Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

"A great lawyer-statesman and philosopher of a former age—I mean Francis Bacon—said that truth came out of error much more rapidly than out of confusion. There is a wonderful truth in that saying. Next to being right in this world, the best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because you will come out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of these days, have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against a fact, and that sets you all straight again. So I will not trouble myself as to whether I may be right or wrong in what I am about to say, but at any rate I hope to be clear and definite; and then you will be able to judge for yourselves whether, in following out the train of thought I have to introduce, you knock your heads against facts or not."

The particular suggestions to which these remarks were the characteristic introduction related to definite problems of education, that is to say, to questions upon which some action was urgent. It was in all cases of life, in science or affairs, that Huxley was resolute for clear ideas and definite courses of conduct. As a matter of fact, no one ever took greater care to satisfy himself as best he could as to what was right and what was wrong; but where action rather than reflection was needed, then his principle was to act, and to know definitely and clearly why you acted and for what you acted. In matters of opinion, on the other hand, he was all for not coming to a definite opinion when the facts obtainable did not justify such an opinion. In thought, agnosticism, the refusal to accept any ideas or principles except on sufficient evidence; in action, positivism, to act promptly in definite and known directions for definite and known objects: these were his principles.

Another aspect of the same trait of character, he shewed in an address to medical students at a distribution of prizes. After congratulating the victors he confessed to "an undercurrent of sympathy for those who have not been successful, for those valiant knights who have been overthrown in their tourney, and have not made their appearance in public." After recounting an early failure of his own, he proceeded:

"I said to myself, 'Never mind; what's the next thing to be done?' And I found that policy of 'never minding' and going on to the next thing to be done, to be the most important of all policies in the conduct of practical life. It does not matter how many tumbles you have in this life, so long as you do not get dirty when you tumble; it is only the people who have to stop to be washed and made clean, who must necessarily lose the race. You learn that which is of inestimable importance—that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are. You learn to put your trust, by and by, in an economy and frugality of the exercise of your powers both moral and intellectual; and you very soon find out, if you have not found it out before, that patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness."

All Huxley's work was marked by a quality which may be called conscientiousness or thoroughness. Looking through his memoirs, written many years ago, the subjects of which have since been handled and rehandled by other writers with new knowledge and with new methods at their disposal, one is struck that all the observations he made have stood their ground. With new facts new generalisations have often been reached, and some of the positions occupied by Huxley have been turned. But what he saw and described had not to be redescribed; the citations he made from the older authorities were always so chosen as to contain the exact gist of the writers. These qualities, admirable in scientific work, became at once admirable and terrible in his controversial writings. His own exactness made him ruthless in exposing any inexactness in his adversaries, and there were few disputants who left an argument with Huxley in an undamaged condition. The consciousness which he had of his own careful methods, added to a natural pugnacity, gave him an intellectual courage of a very high order. As he knew himself to have made sure of his premisses, he did not care whither his conclusions might lead him, against whatsoever established doctrine or accepted axiom.

There was, however, a strong spice of natural combativeness in his nature, the direct result of his native and highly trained critical faculty. He tells us that in the pre-Darwinian days he was accustomed to defend the fixity of species in the company of evolutionists and in the presence of the orthodox to attack the same doctrine. Later in life, when evolution had become fashionable, and the principles of Darwinism were being elevated into a new dogmatism, he was as ready to criticise the loose adherents of his own views as he had been to expose the weakness of the conventional dogmatists.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Huxley's work as a whole was its infectious nature. His vigorous and decided personality was reflected on all the subjects to which he gave attention, and in the same fashion as his presence infected persons with a personal enthusiasm so his writings stimulated readers to efforts along the same lines. His great influence is clear in the number and distinction of the biologists who came under his personal care, and in the great army of writers and thinkers who have been inspired by his views and methods on general questions. His position as an actual contributor to science has to a certain extent been lost sight of for two reasons. In the first place, his effect on the world as an expositor of the scientific method in its general application to life has overshadowed his exact work; in the second place, his exact work itself has been partly lost sight of in the new discoveries and advances to which it gave rise. It is therefore necessary to reiterate that, apart from all his other successes, he had made for himself an extremely distinguished position in the annals of exact science. Sir Michael Foster and Prof. Ray Lankester, in their preface to the collected edition of his scientific memoirs, make a just claim for him. These memoirs, they wrote, show that, "apart from the influence exerted by his popular writings, the progress of biology during the present century was largely due to labours of his of which the general public knew nothing, and that he was in some respects the most original and most fertile in discovery of all his fellow workers in the same branch of science."

There can be little question that it was no accident that determined the direction of Huxley's career. He was a naturalist by inborn vocation. The contrast between a natural bent and an acquired habit of life was well seen in the case of Huxley and Macgillivray, his companion on the Rattlesnake. The former was appointed as a surgeon, and it was no part of his duties to busy himself with the creatures of the sea; and yet his observations on them made a series of real contributions to biological science and laid the sure foundation of a world-wide and enduring reputation. The latter was the son of a naturalist, a naturalist by profession, and appointed to the expedition as its official naturalist; and yet he made only a few observations and a limited collection of curiosities, and even his exiguous place in the annals of zoölogy is the accidental result of his companionship with Huxley. The special natural endowments which Huxley brought to the study of zoölogy were, in the first place, a faculty for the patient and assiduous observation of facts; in the second, a swift power of discriminating between the essential and the accessory among facts; in the third, the constructive ability to arrange these essentials in wide generalisations which we call laws or principles and which, within the limits necessarily set by inductive principles, are the starting-point for new deductions. These were the faculties which he brought to his science, but there were added to them two personal characteristics without which they would not have taken him far. They were impelled by a driving force which distinguishes the successful man from the muddler and without which the finest mental powers are as useless as a complicated machine disconnected from its driving-wheel. They were directed by a lofty and disinterested enthusiasm, without which the most talented man is a mere self-seeker, useless or dangerous to society. The faculties and qualities which made Huxley great as a zoölogist were practically those which he applied to the general questions of biological theory, to the problems of education and of society, and to philosophy and metaphysics. A comparison between his sane and forcible handling of questions that lay outside the special province to which the greater part of his life was devoted, with the dubious and involved treatment given such questions by the professional politicians to whom the English races tend to entrust their destinies, is a useful comment on that value of science as discipline to which Huxley so strenuously called attention.

There can be no better way of ending this sketch of Huxley's life and work than by quoting his own account of the objects to which he had devoted himself consciously. These were: