From 1880 onwards till the very end of his life, Huxley was continuously occupied in a controversial campaign against orthodox beliefs. As Professor W. F. R. Weldon justly said of his earlier polemics: “They were certainly among the principal agents in winning a larger measure of toleration for the critical examination of fundamental beliefs, and for the free expression of honest reverent doubt.” He threw Christianity overboard bodily and with little appreciation of its historic effect as a civilizing agency. He thought that “the exact nature of the teachings and the convictions of Jesus is extremely uncertain” (Essays, v. 348). “What we are usually pleased to call religion nowadays is, for the most part, Hellenized Judaism” (Essays, iv. 162). His final analysis of what “since the second century, has assumed to itself the title of Orthodox Christianity” is a “varying compound of some of the best and some of the worst elements of Paganism and Judaism, moulded in practice by the innate character of certain people of the Western world” (Essays, v. 142). He concludes “That this Christianity is doomed to fall is, to my mind, beyond a doubt; but its fall will neither be sudden nor speedy” (l.c.). He did not omit, however, to do justice to “the bright side of Christianity,” and was deeply impressed with the life of Catherine of Siena. Failing Christianity, he thought that some other “hypostasis of men’s hopes” will arise (Essays, v. 254). His latest speculations on ethical problems are perhaps the least satisfactory of his writings. In 1892 he wrote: “The moral sense is a very complex affair—dependent in part upon associations of pleasure and pain, approbation and disapprobation, formed by education in early youth, but in part also on an innate sense of moral beauty and ugliness (how originated need not be discussed), which is possessed by some people in great strength, while some are totally devoid of it” (Life, ii. 305). This is an intuitional theory, and he compares the moral with the aesthetic sense, which he repeatedly declares to be intuitive; thus: “All the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and this is ugly” (Essays, ix. 80). In the Romanes Lecture delivered in 1894, in which this passage occurs, he defines “law and morals” to be “restraints upon the struggle for existence between men in society.” It follows that “the ethical process is in opposition to the cosmic process,” to which the struggle for existence belongs (Essays, ix. 31). Apparently he thought that the moral sense in its origin was intuitional and in its development utilitarian. “Morality commenced with society” (Essays, v. 52). The “ethical process” is the “gradual strengthening of the social bond” (Essays, ix. 35). “The cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends” (l.c. p. 83); “of moral purpose I see no trace in nature. That is an article of exclusive human manufacture” (Life, ii. 268). The cosmic process Huxley identified with evil, and the ethical process with good; the two are in necessary conflict. “The reality at the bottom of the doctrine of original sin” is the “innate tendency to self-assertion” inherited by man from the cosmic order (Essays, ix. 27). “The actions we call sinful are part and parcel of the struggle for existence” (Life, ii. 282). “The prospect of attaining untroubled happiness” is “an illusion” (Essays, ix. 44), and the cosmic process in the long run will get the best of the contest, and “resume its sway” when evolution enters on its downward course (l.c. p. 45). This approaches pure pessimism, and though in Huxley’s view the “pessimism of Schopenhauer is a nightmare” (Essays, ix. 200), his own philosophy of life is not distinguishable, and is often expressed in the same language. The cosmic order is obviously non-moral (Essays, ix. 197). That it is, as has been said, immoral is really meaningless. Pain and suffering are affections which imply a complex nervous organization, and we are not justified in projecting them into nature external to ourselves. Darwin and A. R. Wallace disagreed with Huxley in seeing rather the joyous than the suffering side of nature. Nor can it be assumed that the descending scale of evolution will reproduce the ascent, or that man will ever be conscious of his doom.
As has been said, Huxley never thoroughly grasped the Darwinian principle. He thought “transmutation may take place without transition” (Life, i. 173). In other words, that evolution is accomplished by leaps and not by the accumulation of small variations. He recognized the “struggle for existence” but not the gradual adjustment of the organism to its environment which is implied in “natural selection.” In highly civilized societies he thought that the former was at an end (Essays, ix. 36) and had been replaced by the “struggle for enjoyment” (l.c. p. 40). But a consideration of the stationary population of France might have shown him that the effect in the one case may be as restrictive as in the other. So far from natural selection being in abeyance under modern social conditions, “it is,” as Professor Karl Pearson points out, “something we run up against at once, almost as soon as we examine a mortality table” (Biometrika, i. 76). The inevitable conclusion, whether we like it or not, is that the future evolution of humanity is as much a part of the cosmic process as its past history, and Huxley’s attempt to shut the door on it cannot be maintained scientifically.
Authorities.—Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, by his son Leonard Huxley (2 vols., 1900); Scientific Memoirs of T. H. Huxley (4 vols., 1898-1901); Collected Essays by T. H. Huxley (9 vols., 1898); Thomas Henry Huxley, a Sketch of his Life and Work, by P. Chalmers Mitchell, M.A. (Oxon., 1900); a critical study founded on careful research and of great value.
(W. T. T.-D.)
[1] Nature, lxiii. 127.
HUY (Lat. Hoium, and Flem. Hoey), a town of Belgium, on the right bank of the Meuse, at the point where it is joined by the Hoyoux. Pop. (1904), 14,164. It is 19 m. E. of Namur and a trifle less west of Liége. Huy certainly dates from the 7th century, and, according to some, was founded by the emperor Antoninus in A.D. 148. Its situation is striking, with its grey citadel crowning a grey rock, and the fine collegiate church (with a 13th-century gateway) of Notre Dame built against it. The citadel is now used partly as a depot of military equipment and partly as a prison. The ruins are still shown of the abbey of Neumoustier founded by Peter the Hermit on his return from the first crusade. He was buried there in 1115, and a statue was erected to his memory in the abbey grounds in 1858. Neumoustier was one of seventeen abbeys in this town alone dependent on the bishopric of Liége. Huy is surrounded by vineyards, and the bridge which crosses the Meuse at this point connects the fertile Hesbaye north of the river with the rocky and barren Condroz south of it.
HUYGENS, CHRISTIAAN (1629-1695), Dutch mathematician, mechanician, astronomer and physicist, was born at the Hague on the 14th of April 1629. He was the second son of Sir Constantijn Huygens. From his father he received the rudiments of his education, which was continued at Leiden under A. Vinnius and F. van Schooten, and completed in the juridical school of Breda. His mathematical bent, however, soon diverted him from legal studies, and the perusal of some of his earliest theorems enabled Descartes to predict his future greatness. In 1649 he accompanied the mission of Henry, count of Nassau, to Denmark, and in 1651 entered the lists of science as an assailant of the unsound system of quadratures adopted by Gregory of St Vincent. This first essay (Exetasis quadraturae circuli, Leiden, 1651) was quickly succeeded by his Theoremata de quadratura hyperboles, ellipsis, et circuli; while, in a treatise entitled De circuli magnitudine inventa, he made, three years later, the closest approximation so far obtained to the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle.