Of the other two discourses referred to, one is the opening address which he delivered as Principal at the South London Working Men's College on January 4, "A Liberal Education, and Where to Find It." This is not a brief for science to the exclusion of other teaching; no essay has insisted more strenuously on the evils of a one-sided education, whether it be classical or scientific; but it urged the necessity for a strong tincture of science and her method, if the modern conception of the world, created by the spread of natural knowledge, is to be fairly understood. If culture is the "criticism of life," it is fallacious if deprived of knowledge of the most important factor which has transformed the medieval into the modern spirit.
Two of his most striking passages are to be found in this address; one the simile of the force behind nature as the hidden chess player; the other the noble description of the end of a true education.
Well known as it is, I venture to quote the latter as an instance of his style:—]
That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear cold logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.
Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education, for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with nature. He will make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely; she as his ever-beneficent mother; he as her mouth-piece, her conscious self, her minister and interpreter.
[The third of these discourses is the address "On the Physical Basis of
Life," of which he writes to Haeckel on January 20, 1869:—]
You will be amused to hear that I went to the holy city, Edinburgh itself, the other day, for the purpose of giving the first of a series of Sunday lectures. I came back without being stoned; but Murchison (who is a Scotchman you know), told me he thought it was the boldest act of my life. The lecture will be published in February, and I shall send it to you, as it contains a criticism of materialism which I should like you to consider.
[In it he explains in popular form a striking generalisation of scientific research, namely, that whether in animals or plants, the structural unit of the living body is made up of similar material, and that vital action and even thought are ultimately based upon molecular changes in this life-stuff. Materialism! gross and brutal materialism! was the mildest comment he expected in some quarters; and he took the opportunity to explain how he held] "this union of materialistic terminology with the repudiation of materialistic philosophy," [considering the latter] "to involve grave philosophic error."
[His expectations were fully justified; in fact, he writes that some persons seemed to imagine that he had invented protoplasm for the purposes of the lecture.
Here, too, in the course of a reply to Archbishop Thompson's confusion of the spirit of modern thought with the system of M. Comte, he launched his well-known definition of Comtism as Catholicism MINUS Christianity, which involved him in a short controversy with Mr. Congreve (see "The Scientific Aspects of Positivism," "Lay Sermons" page 162), and with another leading Positivist, who sent him a letter through Mr. Darwin. Huxley replied:—]