Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 28

As to being a "keen-witted pessimist out and out," the Reverend Dr.

Abbott's "horrid example" has shown me the following sentence:--"Pessimism is as little consonant with the facts of sentient existence as optimism." He says he published it in 1888, in an article on "Industrial Development," to be seen in the "Nineteenth Century".

But no doubt this is another illusion. No superior person, brought up "in the Universities," to boot, could possibly have invented a myth so circ.u.mstantial.

[The end of the correspondence was quite amicable. Dr. Abbott explained that he had taken his facts from the recently published "Autobiography," and that the reporters had wonderfully altered what he really said by large omissions. In a second letter ("Times" October 11) Huxley says:--]

I am much obliged to Dr. Abbott for his courteous explanation. I myself have suffered so many things at the hands of so many reporters--of whom it may too often be said that their "faith, unfaithful, makes them falsely true"--that I can fully enter into what his feelings must have been when he contemplated the picture of his discourse, in which the lights on "raw mids.h.i.+pmen," "pessimist out and out," "devil take the hindmost," and "Heine's dragoon," were so high, while the "good things"

he was kind enough to say about me lay in the deep shadow of the invisible. And I can a.s.sure Dr. Abbott that I should not have dreamed of noticing the report of his interesting lecture, which I read when it appeared, had it not been made the subject of the leading article which drew the attention of all the world to it on the following day.

I was well aware that Dr. Abbott must have founded his remarks on the brief notice of my life which (without my knowledge) has been thrust into its present ridiculous position among biographies of eminent musicians; and most undoubtedly anything I have said there is public property. But erroneous suppositions imaginatively connected with what I have said appear to me to stand upon a different footing, especially when they are interspersed with remarks injurious to my early friends.

Some of the "raw mids.h.i.+pmen and unlearned naval officers" of whom Dr.

Abbott speaks, in terms which he certainly did not find in my "autobiography," are, I am glad to say, still alive, and are performing, or have performed, valuable services to their country. I wonder what Dr. Abbott would think, and perhaps say, if his youthful University friends were spoken of as "raw curates and unlearned country squires."

When David Hume's housemaid was wroth because somebody chalked up "St David's" on his house, the philosopher is said to have remarked,--"

Never mind, la.s.sie, better men than I have been made saints of before now." And, perhaps, if I had recollected that "better men than I have been made texts of before now," a slight flavour of wrath which may be perceptible would have vanished from my first letter. If Dr. Abbott has found any phrase of mine too strong, I beg him to set it against "out and out pessimist" and "Heine's dragoon," and let us cry quits. He is the last person with whom I should wish to quarrel.

[Two interesting criticisms of books follow; one "The First Three Gospels", by the Reverend Estlin Carpenter; the other on "Use and Disuse", directed against the doctrine of use-inheritance, by Mr. Platt Ball, who not only sent the book but appealed to him for advice as to his future course in undertaking a larger work on the evolution of man.]

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, October 11, 1890.

My dear Mr. Carpenter,

Accept my best thanks for "The First Three Gospels", which strikes me as an admirable exposition of the case, full, clear, and calm. Indeed the latter quality gives it here and there a touch of humour. You say the most damaging things in a way so gentle that the orthodox reader must feel like the eels who were skinned by the fair Molly--lost between pain and admiration.

I am certainly glad to see that the book has reached a second edition; it will do yeoman's service to the cause of right reason.

A friend of mine was in the habit of sending me his proofs, and I sometimes wrote on them "no objection except to the whole"; and I am afraid that you will think what I am about to say comes to pretty much the same thing--at least if I am right in the supposition that a pa.s.sage in your first preface (page 7) states your fundamental position, and that you conceive that when criticism has done its uttermost there still remains evidence that the personality of Jesus was the leading cause--the conditio sine qua non--of the evolution of Christianity from Judaism.

I long thought so, and having a strong dislike to belittle the heroic figures of history, I held by the notion as long as I could, but I find it melting away.

I cannot see that the moral and religious ideal of early Christianity is new--on the other hand, it seems to me to be implicitly and explicitly contained in the early prophetic Judaism and the later h.e.l.lenised Judaism; and though it is quite true that the new vitality of the old ideal manifested in early Christianity demands "an adequate historic cause," I would suggest that the word "cause" may mislead if it is not carefully defined.

Medical philosophy draws a most useful and necessary distinction between "exciting" and "predisposing" causes--and nowhere is it more needful to keep this distinction in mind than in history--and especially in estimating the action of individuals on the course of human affairs. Platonic and Stoical philosophy--prophetic liberalism--the strong democratic socialism of the Jewish political system--the existence of innumerable sodalities for religious and social purposes--had thrown the ancient world into a state of unstable equilibrium. With such predisposing causes at work, the exciting cause of enormous changes might be relatively insignificant. The powder was there--a child might throw the match which should blow up the whole concern.

I do not want to seem irreverent, still less depreciatory, of n.o.ble men, but it strikes me that in the present case the Nazarenes were the match and Paul the child.

An ingrained habit of trying to explain the unknown by the known leads me to find the key to Nazarenism in Quakerism. It is impossible to read the early history of the Friends without seeing that George Fox was a person who exerted extraordinary influence over the men with whom he came in contact; and it is equally impossible (at least for me) to discover in his copious remains an original thought.

Yet what with the corruption of the Stuarts, the Phariseeism of the Puritans, and the Sadduceeism of the Church, England was in such a state, that before his death he had gathered about him a vast body of devoted followers, whose patient endurance of persecution is a marvel.

Moreover, the Quakers have exercised a prodigious influence on later English life.

But I have scribbled a great deal too much already. You will see what I mean.

To Mr. W. Platt Ball.

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, October 27, 1890.

Dear Sir,

I have been through your book, which has greatly interested me, at a hand-gallop; and I have by no means given it the attention it deserves.

But the day after to-morrow I shall be going into a new house here, and it may be some time before I settle down to work in it--so that I prefer to seem hasty, rather than indifferent to your book and still more to your letter.

As to the book, in the first place. The only criticism I have to offer--in the ordinary depreciatory sense of the word--is that pages 128 to 137 seem to me to require reconsideration, partly from a substantial and partly from a tactical point of view. There is much that is disputable on the one hand, and not necessary to your argument on the other.

Otherwise it seems to me that the case could hardly be better stated.

Here are a few notes and queries that have occurred to me.

Page 41. Extinction of Tasmanians--rather due to the British colonist, who was the main agent of their extirpation, I fancy.

Page 67. Birds' sternums are a great deal more than surfaces of origin for the pectoral muscles--e.g. movable lid of respiratory bellows. This not taken into account by Darwin.

Page 85. "Inferiority of senses of Europeans" is, I believe, a pure delusion. Professor Marsh told me of feats of American trappers equal to any savage doings. It is a question of attention. Consider wool-sorters, tea-tasters, shepherds who know every sheep personally, etc. etc.

Page 85. I do not understand about the infant's sole; since all men become bipeds, all must exert pressure on sole. There is no disuse.

Page 88. Has not "muscardine" been subst.i.tuted for "pebrine"? I have always considered this a very striking case. Here is apparent inheritance of a diseased state through the mother only, quite inexplicable till Pasteur discovered the rationale.

Page 155. Have you considered that State Socialism (for which I have little enough love) may be a product of Natural Selection? The societies of Bees and Ants exhibit socialism in excelsis.

The unlucky subst.i.tution of "survival of fittest" for "natural selection" has done much harm in consequence of the ambiguity of "fittest"--which many take to mean "best" or "highest"--whereas natural selection may work towards degradation: vide epizoa.

You do not refer to the male mamma--which becomes functional once in many million cases, see the curious records of Gynaecomasty. Here practical disuse in the male ever since the origin of the mammalia has not abolished the mamma or destroyed its functional potentiality in extremely rare cases.

I absolutely disbelieve in use-inheritance as the evidence stands.

Spencer is bound to it a priori--his psychology goes to pieces without it.

Now as to the letter. I am no pessimist--but also no optimist. The world might be much worse, and it might be much better. Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture--and very much to our credit.

If you will accept the results of the experience of an old man who has had a very chequered existence--and has nothing to hope for except a few years of quiet downhill--there is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human affections), nothing that satisfies quiet reflection--except the sense of having worked according to one's capacity and light, to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts. That was the lesson I learned from Carlyle's books when I was a boy, and it has stuck by me all my life.

Therefore, my advice to you is go ahead. You may make more of failing to get money, and of succeeding in getting abuse--until such time in your life as (if you are teachable) you have ceased to care much about either. The job you propose to undertake is a big one, and will tax all your energies and all your patience.

But, if it were my case, I should take my chance of failing in a worthy task rather than of succeeding in lower things.

And if at any time I can be of use to you (even to the answering of letters) let me know. But in truth I am getting rusty in science--from disuse.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

P.S.--Yes--Mr. Gladstone has dug up the hatchet. We shall see who gets the scalps.

By the way, you have not referred to plants, which are a stronghold for you. What is the good of use-inheritance, say, in orchids?

[The interests which had formerly been divided between biology and other branches of science and philosophy, were diverted from the one channel only to run stronger in the rest. Stagnation was the one thing impossible to him; his rest was mental activity without excessive physical fatigue; and he felt he still had a useful purpose to serve, as a friend put it, in patrolling his beat with a vigilant eye to the loose characters of thought. Thus he writes on September 29 to Sir J.

Hooker:--]

I wish quietude of mind were possible to me. But without something to do that amuses me and does not involve too much labour, I become quite unendurable--to myself and everybody else.