Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1

by Thomas Henry Huxley

I have a great respect for all the old bottles, and if the new wine can be got to go into them and not burst them I shall be very glad—I confess I do not see my way to it; on the contrary, the longer I live and the more I learn the more hopeless to my mind becomes the contradiction between the theory of the universe as understood and expounded by Jewish and Christian theologians, and the theory of the universe which is every day and every year growing out of the application of scientific methods to its phenomena.

Whether astronomy and geology can or cannot be made to agree with the statements as to the matters of fact laid down in Genesis—whether the Gospels are historically true or not—are matters of comparatively small moment in the face of the impassable gulf between the anthropomorphism (however refined) of theology and the passionless impersonality of the unknown and unknowable which science shows everywhere underlying the thin veil of phenomena.

Here seems to me to be the great gulf fixed between science and theology—beside which all Colenso controversies, reconcilements of Scripture a la Pye Smith, etc., cut a very small figure.

You must have thought over all this long ago; but steeped as I am in scientific thought from morning till night, the contrast has perhaps a greater vividness to me. I go into society, and except among two or three of my scientific colleagues I find myself alone on these subjects, and as hopelessly at variance with the majority of my fellow-men as they would be with their neighbours if they were set down among the Ashantees. I don't like this state of things for myself—least of all do I see how it will work out for my children. But as my mind is constituted, there is no way out of it, and I can only envy you if you can see things differently.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Jermyn Street, May 5, 1863.

My dear Kingsley,

My wife and children are away at Felixstow on the Suffolk coast, and as I run down on Saturday and come back on Monday your MS. has been kept longer than it should have been. I am quite agreed with the general tenor of your argument; and indeed I have often argued against those who maintain the intellectual gulf between man and the lower animals to be an impassable one, by pointing to the immense intellectual chasm as compared to the structural differences between two species of bees or between sheep and goat or dog and wolf. So again your remarks upon the argument drawn from the apparent absence of progression in animals seem to me to be quite just. You might strengthen them much by reference to the absence of progression in many races of men. The West African savage, as the old voyagers show, was in just the same condition two hundred years ago as now—and I suspect that the modern Patagonian is as nearly as possible the unimproved representative of the makers of the flint implements of Abbeville.

Lyell's phrase is very good, but it is a simple application of Darwin's views to human history. The advance of mankind has everywhere depended on the production of men of genius; and that production is a case of "spontaneous variation" becoming hereditary, not by physical propagation, but by the help of language, letters and the printing press. Newton was to all intents and purposes a "sport" of a dull agricultural stock, and his intellectual powers are to a certain extent propagated by the grafting of the "Principia," his brain-shoot, on us.