In his second letter he adduces, on other grounds, his own more favourable impression of Bacon's philosophical influence. A peculiar interest of this letter lies in its testimony to the influence of Huxley's writings even on his elder contemporaries.
From James Spedding.
February 1, 1878.
…When you admit that you study Bacon with a PREJUDICE, you mean of course an unfavourable opinion previously formed on sufficient grounds. Now I am myself supposed to have studied him with a prejudice the other way: but this I cannot admit, in any sense of the word; for when I first made his acquaintance I had no opinion or feeling about him at all—more than the ordinary expectation of a young man to find what he is told to look for. My earliest impression of his character came probably from Thomson—whose portrait of him, except as touched and softened by the tenderer hand of "the sweet-souled poet of the Seasons," did not differ from the ordinary one. It was not long indeed before I did begin to form an opinion of my own; one of those AFTER-judgments which are liable to be mistaken for prejudices by those who judge differently, and which, being formed, do, no doubt, tell upon the balance. For it was not long before I found myself indebted to him for the greatest benefit probably that any man, living or dead, can confer on another. In my school and college days I had been betrayed by an ambition to excel in themes and declamations into the study, admiration, and imitation of the rhetoricians. In the course of my last long vacation—the autumn of 1830—I was inspired with a new ambition, namely, to think justly about everything which I thought about at all, and to act accordingly; a conviction for which I cannot cease to feel grateful, and which I distinctly trace to the accident of having in the beginning of that same vacation given two shillings at a second-hand bookstall for a little volume of Dove's classics, containing the Advancement of Learning. And if I could tell you how many superlatives I have since that time degraded into the positive; how many innumerables and infinities I have replaced by counted numbers and estimated quantities; how many assumptions, important to the argument in hand, I have withdrawn because I found on more consideration that the fact might be explained otherwise; and how many effective epithets I have discarded when I found that I could not fully verify them; you would think it no less than just that I should claim for myself and concede to others the right of being judged by the last edition rather than the first. That a persistent endeavour to free myself from what you regard as Bacon's characteristic vice should have been the fruit of a desire to follow his example, will seem strange to you, but it is fact. Perhaps you will think it not less strange, but it is my real belief, that if your own writings had been in existence and come in my way at the same critical stage of my moral and mental development, they would have taught me the same lesson and inspired me with the same ambition; for in that particular (if I may say it without offence) I look upon you BOTH as eminent examples of the SAME virtue.
To the lecture he refers once more in a letter to Mr. John Morley. The political situation touched on in this and the next letter is that of the end of the Russo-Turkish war and the beginning of the Afghan war.]
Science Schools, South Kensington, February 7, 1878.
My dear Morley,
Many thanks for the cheque, and still more for your good word for the article. [On Harvey.] I knew it would "draw" Hutton, and his ingenuity has as usual made the best of the possibilities of attack. I am glad to find, however, that he does not think it expedient to reiterate his old story about the valuelessness of vivisection in the establishment of the doctrine of the circulation.
I hear that that absurd creature R— goes about declaring that I have made all sorts of blunders. Could not somebody be got to persuade him to put what he has to say in black and white?
Controversy is as abhorrent to me as gin to a reclaimed drunkard; but oh dear! it would be so nice to squelch that pompous imposter.