Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 31

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, October 15, 1890.

My dear Foster,

Best thanks for the third part of the "Physiology," which I found when I ran up to town for a day or two last week. What a grind that book must be.

How's a' wi' you? Let me have a line.

We ought to have been in our house a month ago, but fitters, paperers, and polishers are like bugs or c.o.c.kroaches, you may easily get 'em in, but getting 'em out is the deuce. However, I hope to clear them out by the end of this week, and get in by the end of next week.

One is obliged to have names for houses here. Mine will be "Hodeslea,"

which is as near as I can go to "Hodesleia," the poetical original shape of my very ugly name.

There was a n.o.ble scion of the house of Huxley of Huxley who, having burgled and done other wrong things (temp. Henry IV.), asked for benefit of clergy. I expect they gave it him, not in the way he wanted, but in the way they would like to "benefit" a later member of the family.

[Rough sketch of one priest hauling the rope taut over the gallows, while another holds a crucifix before the suspended criminal.]

Between this gentleman and my grandfather there is unfortunately a complete blank, but I have none the less faith in him as my ancestor.

My wife, I am sorry to say, is in town--superintending packing up--no stopping her. I have been very uneasy about her at times, and shall be glad when we are quietly settled down. With kindest regards to Mrs.

Foster.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[His own princ.i.p.al task was in getting his library ready for the move.]

Most of my time [he writes on November 16] for the last fortnight has been spent in arranging books and tearing up papers till my back aches and my fingers are sore.

[However, he did not take all his books with him. There was a quant.i.ty of biological works of all sorts which had acc.u.mulated in his library and which he was not likely to use again; these he offered as a parting gift to the Royal College of Science. On December 8, the Registrar conveys to him the thanks of the Council for "the valuable library of biological works," and further informs him that it was resolved:--

That the library shall be kept in the room formerly occupied by the Dean, which shall be called "The Huxley Laboratory for Biological Research," and be devoted to the prosecution of original researches in Biological Science, with which the name of Professor Huxley is inseparably a.s.sociated.

Huxley replied as follows:--]

Dear Registrar,

I beg you convey my hearty thanks to the Council for the great kindness of the minute and resolution which you have sent me. My mind has never been greatly set on posthumous fame; but there is no way of keeping memory green which I should like so well as that which they have adopted towards me.

It has been my fate to receive a good deal more vilipending than (I hope) I deserve. If my colleagues, with whom I have worked so long, put too high a value upon my services, perhaps the result may be not far off justice.

Yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

In addition to the directly controversial articles in the early part of the year, two other articles on controversial subjects belong to 1891.

"Hasisadra's Adventure," published in the "Nineteenth Century" for June, completed his long-contemplated examination of the Flood myth. In this he first discussed the Babylonian form of the legend recorded upon the clay tablets of a.s.surbanipal--a simpler and less exaggerated form as befits an earlier version, and in its physical details keeping much nearer to the bounds of probability.

The greater part of the article, however, is devoted to a wider question--How far does geological and geographical evidence bear witness to the consequences which must have ensued from a universal flood, or even from one limited to the countries of Mesopotamia? And he comes to the conclusion that these very countries have been singularly free from any great changes of the kind for long geological periods.

The sarcastic references in this article to those singular reasoners who take the possibility of an occurrence to be the same as scientific testimony to the fact of its occurrence, lead up, more or less, to the subject of an essay, "Possibilities and Impossibilities," which appeared in the "Agnostic Annual" for 1892, actually published in October 1891, and to be found in "Collected Essays", 5 192.

This was a restatement of the fundamental principles of the agnostic position, arising out of the controversies of the last two years upon the demonology of the New Testament. The miraculous is not to be denied as impossible; as Hume said, "Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstrative argument or abstract reasoning a priori,"

and these combinations of phenomena are perfectly conceivable.

Moreover, in the progress of knowledge, the miracles of to-day may be the science of to-morrow. Improbable they are, certainly, by all experience, and therefore they require specially strong evidence. But this is precisely what they lack; the evidence for them, when examined, turns out to be of doubtful value.]

I am anxious [he says] to bring about a clear understanding of the difference between "impossibilities" and "improbabilities," because mistakes on this point lay us open to the attacks of ecclesiastical apologists of the type of the late Cardinal Newman.

When it is rightly stated, the Agnostic view of "miracles" is, in my judgment, una.s.sailable. We are NOT justified in the a priori a.s.sertion that the order of nature, as experience has revealed it to us, cannot change. In arguing about the miraculous, the a.s.sumption is illegitimate, because it involves the whole point in dispute.

Furthermore, it is an a.s.sumption which takes us beyond the range of our faculties. Obviously, no amount of past experience can warrant us in anything more than a correspondingly strong expectation for the present and future. We find, practically, that expectations, based upon careful observations of past events, are, as a rule, trustworthy. We should be foolish indeed not to follow the only guide we have through life. But, for all that, our highest and surest generalisations remain on the level of justifiable expectations; that is, very high probabilities.

For my part, I am unable to conceive of an intelligence shaped on the model of that of men, however superior it might be, which could be any better off than our own in this respect; that is, which could possess logically justifiable grounds for certainty about the constancy of the order of things, and therefore be in a position to declare that such and such events are impossible. Some of the old mythologies recognised this clearly enough. Beyond and above Zeus and Odin, there lay the unknown and inscrutable Fate which, one day or other, would crumple up them and the world they ruled to give place to a new order of things.

I sincerely hope that I shall not be accused of Pyrrhonism, or of any desire to weaken the foundations of rational certainty. I have merely desired to point out that rational certainty is one thing, and talk about "impossibilities," or "violation of natural laws," another.

Rational certainty rests upon two grounds; the one that the evidence in favour of a given statement is as good as it can be; the other, that such evidence is plainly insufficient. In the former case, the statement is to be taken as true, in the latter as untrue; until something arises to modify the verdict, which, however properly reached, may always be more or less wrong, the best information being never complete, and the best reasoning being liable to fallacy.

To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life, with due thought for the morrow, because no man can be sure he will be alive an hour hence. Such are the conditions imposed upon us by nature, and we have to make the best of them. And I think that the greatest mistake those of us who are interested in the progress of free thought can make is to overlook these limitations, and to deck ourselves with the dogmatic feathers which are the traditional adornment of our opponents.

Let us be content with rational certainty, leaving irrational certainties to those who like to muddle their minds with them.

[As for the difficulty of believing miracles in themselves, he gives in this paper several examples of a favourite saying of his, that Science offers us much greater marvels than the miracles of theology; only the evidence for them is very different.

The following letter was written in acknowledgment of a paper by the Reverend E. McClure, which endeavoured to place the belief in an individual permanence upon the grounds that we know of no leakage anywhere in nature; that matter is not a source, but a transmitter of energy; and that the brain, so far from originating thought, is a mere machine responsive to something external to itself, a revealer of something which it does not produce, like a musical instrument. This "something" is the universal of thought, which is identified with the general logos of the fourth gospel. Moral perfection consists in a.s.similation to this; sin is the falling short of perfect revealing of the eternal logos.

Huxley's reply interested his correspondent not only for the brief opinion on the philosophic question, but for the personal touch in the explanation of the motives which had guided his life-work, and his "kind feeling towards such of the clergy as endeavoured to seek honestly for a natural basis to their faith."

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, March 17, 1891.

Dear Mr. McClure,

I am very much obliged for your letter, which belongs to a different category from most of those which I receive from your side of the hedge that, unfortunately, separates thinking men.

So far as I know myself, after making due deduction for the ambition of youth and a fiery temper, which ought to (but unfortunately does not) get cooler with age, my sole motive is to get at the truth in all things.

I do not care one straw about fame, present or posthumous, and I loathe notoriety, but I do care to have that desire manifest and recognised.

Your paper deals with a problem which has profoundly interested me for years, but which I take to be insoluble. It would need a book for full discussion. But I offer a remark only on two points.

The doctrine of the conservation of energy tells neither one way nor the other. Energy is the cause of movement of body, i.e. things having ma.s.s. States of consciousness have no ma.s.s, even if they can be conceded to be movable. Therefore even if they are caused by molecular movements, they would not in any way affect the store of energy.

Physical causation need not be the only kind of causation, and when Cabanis said that thought was a function of the brain, in the same way as bile secretion is a FUNCTION of the liver, he blundered philosophically. Bile is a product of the transformation of material energy. But in the mathematical sense of the word "function," thought may be a function of the brain. That is to say, it may arise only when certain physical particles take on a certain order.

By way of a coa.r.s.e a.n.a.logy, consider a parallel-sided piece of gla.s.s through which light pa.s.ses. It forms no picture. Shape it so as to be bi-convex, and a picture appears in its focus.

Is not the formation of the picture a "function" of the piece of gla.s.s thus shaped?

So, from your own point of view, suppose a mind-stuff--logos---a noumenal cosmic light such as is shadowed in the fourth gospel. The brain of a dog will convert it into one set of phenomenal pictures, and the brain of a man into another. But in both cases the result is the consequence of the way in which the respective brains perform their "functions."

Yet one point.