Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 55

It's rather a rollicking epistle, I must say, but as my wife (who sends her love) says she thinks she is the only person who has a right to complain (and she does not), I do not know why it should not be published.

P.S.--I fancy very few people will catch the allusion about not contradicting me. But perhaps it would be better to take the opinion of some impartial judge on that point.

I do not care the least on my own account, but I see my words might be twisted into meaning that you had told me something about your previous guest, and that I referred to what you had said.

Of course you had done nothing of the kind, but as a wary old fox, experienced sufferer from the dodges of the misrepresenter, I feel bound not to let you get into any trouble if I can help it.

A regular lady's P.S. this.

P.S.--Letter returned herewith.

To Mr. Leslie Stephen.

Hodeslea, October 16, 1894.

My dear Stephen,

I am very glad you like to have my omnium gatherum, and think the better of it for gaining me such a pleasant letter of acknowledgment.

It is a great loss to me to be cut off from all my old friends, but sticking closely to my hermitage, with fresh air and immense quant.i.ties of rest, have become the conditions of existence for me, and one must put up with them.

I have not paid all the debt incurred in my Oxford escapade yet--the last "little bill" being a sharp attack of lumbago, out of which I hope I have now emerged. But my deafness alone should bar me from decent society. I have not the moral courage to avoid making shots at what people say, so as not to bore them; and the results are sometimes disastrous.

I don't see there is any real difference between us. You are charitable enough to overlook the general immorality of the cosmos on the score of its having begotten morality in one small part of its domain.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

To Mr. G-- S--. [See above.]

Hodeslea, October 31, 1894.

Dear Mr. S--,

"Liver," "lumbago," and other small ills the flesh is heir to, have been making me very lazy lately, especially about letter-writing.

You have got into the depths where the comprehensible ends in the incomprehensible--where the symbols which may be used with confidence so far begin to get shaky.

It does not seem to me absolutely necessary that matter should be composed of solid particles. The "atoms" may be persistent whirlpools of a continuous "substance"--which substance, if at rest, could not affect us (all sensory impression being dependent on motion) and subsequently would FOR US = 0. The evolution of matter would be the getting under weigh of this "nothing for us" until it became the "something for us," the different motions of which give us the mental states we call the qualities of things.

But it needs a very steady head to walk safely among these abysses of thought, and the only use of letting the mind range among them is as a corrective to the hasty dogmatism of the so-called materialists, who talk just as glibly of that of which they know nothing as the most bigoted of the orthodox.

[Here also stand two letters to Lord Farrer, one before, the other after, his address at the Statistical Society on the Relations between Morals, Economics and Statistics, which touch on several philosophical and social questions, always, to his mind, intimately connected, and wherein wrong modes of thought indubitably lead to wrong modes of action. Noteworthy is a defence of the fundamental method of Political Economy, however much its limitations might be forgotten by some of its exponents. The reference to the Church agitation to introduce dogmatic teaching into the elementary schools has also a lasting interest.]

Hodeslea, November 6, 1894.

My dear Farrer,

Whenever you get over the optimism of your youthful const.i.tution (I wish I were endowed with that blessing) you will see that the Gospels and I are right about the Devil being "Prince" (note the distinction--not "king") of the Cosmos.

The a priori road to scientific, political, and all other doctrine is H.R.H. Satan's invention--it is the intellectual, broad, and easy path which leadeth to Jehannum.

The king's road is the strait path of painful observation and experiment, and few they be that enter thereon.

R.G. Latham, queerest of men, had singular flashes of insight now and then. Forty years ago he gravely told me that the existence of the Established Church was to his mind one of the best evidences of the recency of the evolution of the human type from the simian.

How much there is to confirm this view in present public opinion and the intellectual character of those who influence it!

It explains all your difficulties at once, and I regret that I do not seem to have mentioned it at any of those mid-day symposia which were so pleasant when you and I were younger.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

P.S.--Apropos of Athelstan Riley and his friends--I fool rather obliged to them. I a.s.sented to the compromise (1) because I felt that English opinion would not let us have the education of the ma.s.ses at any cheaper price; (2) because, with the Bible in lay hands, I was satisfied that the teaching from it would gradually become modified into harmony with common sense.

I do not doubt that this is exactly what has happened, and is the ground of the alarm of the orthodox.

But I do not repent of the compromise in the least. Twenty years of reasonably good primary education is "worth a ma.s.s."

Moreover the Diggleites stand to lose anyhow, and they will lose most completely and finally if they win at the elections this month. So I am rather inclined to hope they may.

Hodeslea, Staveley Road, Eastbourne, November 3, 1894.

My dear Mr. Clodd,

They say that the first thing an Englishman does when he is hard up for money is to abstain from buying books. The first thing I do when I am liver-y, lumbagy, and generally short of energy, is to abstain from answering letters. And I am only just emerging from a good many weeks of that sort of flabbiness and poverty.

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 const.i.tution, 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.