Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 2

1842.

January 30, Sunday evening.

I have for some time been pondering over a cla.s.sification of knowledge.

My scheme is to divide all knowledge in the first place into two grand divisions.

1. Objective--that for which a man is indebted to the external world; and

2. Subjective--that which he has acquired or may acquire by inward contemplation.

Subjective.

/ Metaphysics.

/ Metaphysics proper, Mathematics, Logic, Theology, Morality.

Objective.

/ Morality, History, Physiology, Physics.

Metaphysics comes immediately, of course, under the first (2) head--that is to say, the relations of the mind to itself; of this Mathematics and Logic, together with Theology, are branches.

I am in doubt under which head to put morality, for I cannot determine exactly in my own mind whether morality can exist independent of others, whether the idea of morality could ever have arisen in the mind of an isolated being or not. I am rather inclined to the opinion that it is objective.

Under the head of objective knowledge comes first Physics, including the whole body of the relations of inanimate unorganised bodies; secondly, Physiology. Including the structure and functions of animal bodies, including language and Psychology; thirdly comes History.

One object for which I have attempted to form an arrangement of knowledge is that I may test the amount of my own acquirements. I shall form an extensive list of subjects on this plan, and as I acquire any one of them I shall strike it out of the list. May the list soon get black! though at present I shall hardly be able, I am afraid, to spot the paper.

(A prophecy! a prophecy, 1845!).

[April 1842 introduces a number of quotations from Carlyle's Miscellaneous Writings, "Characteristics," some clear and crisp, others sinking into Carlyle's own vein of speculative mysticism, e.g.]

"In the mind as in the body the sign of health is unconsciousness."

"Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation."

"Genius is ever a secret to itself."

"The healthy understanding, we should say, is neither the argumentative nor the Logical, but the Intuitive, for the end of understanding is not to prove and find reasons but to know and believe" (!)

"The ages of heroism are not ages of Moral Philosophy. Virtue, when it is philosophised of, has become aware of itself, is sickly and beginning to decline."

[At the same time more electrical experiments are recorded; and theories are advanced with pros and cons to account for the facts observed.

The last entry was made three years later:--]

October 1845.--I have found singular pleasure--having accidentally raked this Buchlein from a corner of my desk--in looking over these sc.r.a.ps of notices of my past existence; an ill.u.s.tration of J. Paul's saying that a man has but to write down his yesterday's doings, and forthwith they appear surrounded with a poetic halo.

But after all, these are but the top skimmings of these five years'

living. I hardly care to look back into the seething depths of the working and boiling ma.s.s that lay beneath all this froth, and indeed I hardly know whether I could give myself any clear account of it.

Remembrances of physical and mental pain...absence of sympathy, and thence a choking up of such few ideas as I did form clearly within my own mind.

Grief too, yet at the misfortune of others, for I have had few properly my own; so much the worse, for in that case I might have said or done somewhat, but here was powerless.

Oh, Tom, trouble not thyself about sympathy; thou hast two stout legs and young, wherefore need a staff?

Furthermore, it is twenty minutes past two, and time to go to bed.

Buchlein, it will be long before my secretiveness remains so quiet again; make the most of what thou hast got.

CHAPTER 1.2.

1841-1846.

[The migration to Rotherhithe, noted under date of January 9, 1841, was a fresh step in his career. In 1839 both his sisters married, and both married doctors. Dr. Cooke, the husband of the elder sister, who was settled in Coventry, had begun to give him some instruction in the principles of medicine as early as the preceding June. It was now arranged that he should go as a.s.sistant to Mr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, a practical preliminary to walking the hospitals and obtaining a medical degree in London. His experiences among the poor in the dock region of the East of London--for Dr. Chandler had charge of the parish--supplied him with a grim commentary on his diligent reading in Carlyle. Looking back on this period, he writes:--]

The last recorded speech of Professor Teufelsdrockh proposes the toast 'Die Sache der Armen in Gottes und Teufelsnamen' (The cause of the Poor in Heaven's name and --'s.) The cause of the Poor is the burden of "Past and Present," "Chartism," and "Latter-Day Pamphlets." To me...this advocacy of the cause of the poor appealed very strongly...because...I had had the opportunity of seeing for myself something of the way the poor live. Not much, indeed, but still enough to give a terrible foundation of real knowledge to my speculations.

[After telling how he came to know something of the East End, he proceeds:--]

I saw strange things there--among the rest, people who came to me for medical aid, and who were really suffering from nothing but slow starvation. I have not forgotten--am not likely to forget so long as memory holds--a visit to a sick girl in a wretched garret where two or three other women, one a deformed woman, sister of my patient, were busy s.h.i.+rt-making. After due examination, even my small medical knowledge sufficed to show that my patient was merely in want of some better food than the bread and bad tea on which these people were living. I said so as gently as I could, and the sister turned upon me with a kind of choking pa.s.sion. Pulling out of her pocket a few pence and halfpence, and holding them out, "That is all I get for six and thirty hours' work, and you talk about giving her proper food."

Well, I left that to pursue my medical studies, and it so happened the shortest way between the school which I attended and the library of the College of Surgeons, where my spare hours were largely spent, lay through certain courts and alleys, Vinegar Yard and others, which are now nothing like what they were then. n.o.body would have found robbing me a profitable employment in those days, and I used to walk through these wretched dens without let or hindrance. Alleys nine or ten feet wide, I suppose, with tall houses full of squalid drunken men and women, and the pavement strewed with still more squalid children. The place of air was taken by a steam of filthy exhalations; and the only relief to the general dull apathy was a roar of words--filthy and brutal beyond imagination--between the closed-packed neighbours, occasionally ending in a general row. All this almost within hearing of the traffic of the Strand, within easy reach of the wealth and plenty of the city.

I used to wonder sometimes why these people did not sally forth in ma.s.s and get a few hours' eating and drinking and plunder to their hearts'

content, before the police could stop and hang a few of them. But the poor wretches had not the heart even for that. As a slight, wiry Liverpool detective once said to me when I asked him how it was he managed to deal with such hulking ruffians as we were among, "Lord bless you, sir, drink and disease leave nothing in them."

[This early contact with the sternest facts of the social problem impressed him profoundly. And though not actively employed in what is generally called "philanthropy," still he did his part, hopefully but soberly, not only to throw light on the true issues and to strip away make-believe from them, but also to bring knowledge to the working cla.s.ses, and to inst.i.tute machinery by which capacity should be caught and led to a position where it might be useful instead of dangerous to social order.

After some time, however, he left Mr. Chandler to join his second brother-in-law (John G.o.dwin Scott.), who had set up in the north of London, and to whom he was duly apprenticed, as his brother James had been before him. This change gave him more time and opportunity to pursue his medical education. He attended lectures at the Sydenham College, and, as has been seen, began to prepare for the matriculation examination of the University of London. At the Sydenham College he met with no little success, winning, besides certificates of merit in other departments, a prize--his first prize--for botany. His vivid recollections, given below, of this entry into the scientific arena are taken from a journal he kept for his fiancee during his absence from Sydney on the cruises of the "Rattlesnake."]

ON BOARD H.M.S. "RATTLESNAKE," CHRISTMAS 1847.

Next summer it will be six years since I made my first trial in the world. My first public compet.i.tion, small as it was, was an epoch in my life. I had been attending (it was my first summer session) the botanical lectures at Chelsea. One morning I observed a notice stuck up--a notice of a public compet.i.tion for medals, etc., to take place on the 1st August (if I recollect right). It was then the end of May or thereabouts. I remember looking longingly at the notice, and some one said to me, "Why don't you go in and try for it?" I laughed at the idea, for I was very young, and my knowledge somewhat of the vaguest.

Nevertheless I mentioned the matter to S. [his brother-in-law.] when I returned home. He likewise advised me to try, and so I determined I would. I set to work in earnest, and perseveringly applied myself to such works as I could lay my hands on, Lindley's and De Candolle's "Systems" and the "Annales des Sciences Naturelles" in the British Museum. I tried to read Schleiden, but my German was insufficient.

For a young hand I worked really hard from eight or nine in the morning until twelve at night, besides a long hot summer's walk over to Chelsea two or three times a week to hear Lindley. A great part of the time I worked till sunrise. The result was a sort of ophthalmia which kept me from reading at night for months afterwards.

The day of the examination came, and as I went along the pa.s.sage to go out I well remember dear Lizzie [His eldest sister, Mrs. Scott.], half in jest, half in earnest, throwing her shoe after me, as she said, for luck. She was alone, beside S., in the secret, and almost as anxious as I was. How I reached the examination room I hardly know, but I recollect finding myself at last with pen and ink and paper before me and five other beings, all older than myself, at a long table. We stared at one another like strange cats in a garret, but at length the examiner (Ward) entered, and before each was placed the paper of questions and sundry plants. I looked at my questions, but for some moments could hardly hold my pen, so extreme was my nervousness; but when I once fairly began, my ideas crowded upon me almost faster than I could write them. And so we all sat, nothing heard but the scratching of the pens and the occasional crackle of the examiner's "Times" as he quietly looked over the news of the day.

The examination began at eleven. At two they brought in lunch. It was a good meal enough, but the circ.u.mstances were not particularly favourable to enjoyment, so after a short delay we resumed our work. It began to be evident between whom the contest lay, and the others determined that I was one man's compet.i.tor and Stocks [John Ellerton Stocks, M.D., London, distinguished himself as a botanist in India. He travelled and collected in Beloochistan and Scinde; died 1854.] (he is now in the East India service) the other. Scratch, scratch, scratch! Four o'clock came, the usual hour of closing the examination, but Stocks and I had not half done, so with the consent of the others we pet.i.tioned for an extension.

The examiner was willing to let us go on as long as we liked. Never did I see man write like Stocks; one might have taken him for an attorney's clerk writing for his dinner. We went on. I had finished a little after eight, he went on till near nine, and then we had tea and dispersed.

Great were the greetings I received when I got home, where my long absence had caused some anxiety. The decision would not take place for some weeks, and many were the speculations made as to the probabilities of success. I for my part managed to forget all about it, and went on my ordinary avocations without troubling myself more than I could possibly help about it. I knew too well my own deficiencies to have been either surprised or disappointed at failure, and I made a point of shattering all involuntary "castles in the air" as soon as possible. My worst antic.i.p.ations were realised. One day S. came to me with a sorrowful expression of countenance. He had inquired of the Beadle as to the decision, and ascertained on the latter's authority that all the successful candidates were University College men, whereby, of course, I was excluded. I said, "Very well, the thing was not to be helped," put my best face upon the matter, and gave up all thoughts of it. Lizzie, too, came to comfort me, and, I believe, felt it more than I did. What was my surprise on returning home one afternoon to find myself suddenly seized, and the whole female household vehemently insisting on kissing me. It appeared an official-looking letter had arrived for me, and Lizzie, as I did not appear, could not restrain herself from opening it.

I was second, and was to receive a medal accordingly, and dine with the guild on the 9th November to have it bestowed.

[Silver Medal of the Pharmaceutical Society, 9th November 1842. Another botanical prize is a book--"La Botanique," by A. Richard--with the following inscription:--

THOMAE HUXLEY In Exercitatione Botanices Apud Scholam Collegii Sydenhamiensis Optime Merenti Hunc librum dono dedit RICARDUS D. HOBLYN, Botanices Professor.]

I dined with the company, and bore my share in both pudding and praise, but the charm of success lay in Lizzie's warm congratulation and sympathy. Since then she always took upon herself to prophesy touching the future fortunes of "the boy."