Many thanks for your notice of Kidd's book. Some vile punsters called it an attempt to put a Kid glove on the iron hand of Nature. I thought it (I mean the book, not the pun) clever from a literary point of view, and worthless from any other. You will see that I have been giving Lord Salisbury a Roland for his Oliver in "Nature". But, as hinted, if we only had been in Section D!
With my wife's and my kind regards and remembrances.
Ever yours very truly,
T.H. Huxley.
Athenaeum Club, December 19, 1894.
My dear Farrer,
I am indebted to you for giving the recording angel less trouble than he might otherwise have had, on account of the worse than usual unpunctuality of the London and Brighton this morning. For I have utilised the extra time in reading and thinking over your very interesting address.
Thanks for your protest against the mischievous a priori method, which people will not understand is as gross an anachronism in social matters as it would be in Hydrostatics. The so-called "Sociology" is honeycombed with it, and it is hard to say who are worse, the individualists or the collectivists. But in your just wrath don't forget that there is such a thing as a science of social life, for which, if the term had not been so hopelessly degraded, Politics is the proper name.
Men are beings of a certain constitution, who, under certain conditions, will as surely tend to act in certain ways as stones will tend to fall if you leave them unsupported. The laws of their nature are as invariable as the laws of gravitation, only the applications to particular cases offer worse problems than the case of the three bodies.
The Political Economists have gone the right way to work—the way that the physical philosopher follows in all complex affairs—by tracing out the effects of one great cause of human action, the desire of wealth, supposing it to be unchecked.