If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be (under due limitations) obeyed; why the few who are steered by it move the mass in whom it is weak? I can only reply by putting another question—Why do the few in whom the sense of beauty is strong—Shakespere, Raffaele, Beethoven, carry the less endowed multitude away? But they do, and always will. People who overlook that fact attend neither to history nor to what goes on about them.
Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, kindly man. I have a great respect for him. The force of genial common-sense respectability could no further go. George Fox was the very antipodes of all this, and yet one understands how he came to move the world of his day, and Franklin did not.
As to whether we can all fulfil the moral law, I should say hardly any of us. Some of us are utterly incapable of fulfilling its plainest dictates. As there are men born physically cripples, and intellectually idiots, so there are some who are moral cripples and idiots, and can be kept straight not even by punishment. For these people there is nothing but shutting up, or extirpation.
I am, yours faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[The peaceful aspect of the "Irenicon" seems to have veiled to most readers the unbroken nature of his defence, and he writes to his son-in-law, the Hon. John Collier, suggesting an alteration in the title of the essay:—]
Hodeslea, Eastbourne, November 8, 1892.
My dear Jack,
It is delightful to find a reader who "twigs" every point as acutely as your brother has done. I told somebody—was it you?—I rather wished the printer would substitute o for e in Irenicon. So far as I have seen any notices, the British critic (what a dull ass he is) appears to have been seriously struck by my sweetness of temper.
I sent you the article yesterday, so you will judge for yourself.