APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

FROM THE WORKS OF T. H. HUXLEY

Selected By Henrietta A. Huxley

1908

PREFACE

APHORISMS and REFLECTIONS

PREFACE

Although a man by his works and personality shall have made his mark upon the age he lives in, yet when he has passed away and his influence with him, the next generation, and still more the succeeding one, will know little of this work, of his ideals and of the goal he strove to win, although for the student his scientific work may always live.

Thomas Henry Huxley may come to be remembered by the public merely as the man who held that we were descended from the ape, or as the apostle of Darwinism, or as the man who worsted Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford.

To prevent such limitation, and to afford more intimate and valuable reasons for remembrance of this man of science and lover of his fellow-men, I have gathered together passages, on widely differing themes, from the nine volumes of his "Essays," from his "Scientific Memoirs" and his "Letters," to be published in a small volume, complete in itself and of a size that can be carried in the pocket.

Some of the passages were picked out for their philosophy, some for their moral guidances, some for their scientific exposition of natural facts, or for their insight into social questions; others for their charms of imagination or genial humour, and many—not the least—for their pure beauty of lucid English writing.

In so much wealth of material it was difficult to restrict the gathering.

My great wish is that this small book, by the easy method of its contents, may attract the attention of those persons who are yet unacquainted with my husband's writings; of the men and women of leisure, who, although they may have heard of the "Essays," do not care to work their way through the nine volumes; of others who would like to read them, but who have either no time to do so or coin wherewith to buy them. More especially do I hope that these selections may attract the attention of the working man, whose cause my husband so ardently espoused, and to whom he was the first to reveal, by his free lectures, the loveliness of Nature, the many rainbow-coloured rays of science, and to show forth to his listeners how all these glorious rays unite in the one pure white light of holy truth.

I am most grateful to our son Leonard Huxley for weeding out the overgrowth of my extracts, for indexing the text of the book and seeing it through the press for me.

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, June 29th, 1907.

APHORISMS and REFLECTIONS

I

There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.

II

Natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality.

III

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

IV

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

V

No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.

VI

Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting.

VII

In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.

VIII

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

IX

Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the "anticipation of Nature."

X

There are three great products of our time.... One of these is that doctrine concerning the constitution of matter which, for want of a better name, I will call "molecular"; the second is the doctrine of the conservation of energy; the third is the doctrine of evolution.

XI

M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus Christianity.

XII

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

XIII

We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.

XIV

The man of science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry, slides from these formulæ and symbols into what is commonly understood by materialism, seems to me to place himself on a level with the mathematician, who should mistake the x's and y's with which he works his problems for real entities—and with this further disadvantage, as compared with the mathematician, that the blunders of the latter are of no practical consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism may paralyse the energies and destroy the beauty of a life.

XV

There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said, "he expressed everybody's thoughts better than anybody." But there are other men who attain greatness because they embody the potentiality of their own day and magically reflect the future. They express the thoughts which will be everybody's two or three centuries after them. Such an one was Descartes.

XVI

"Learn what is true, in order to do what is right." is the summing up of the whole duty of man, for all who are unable to satisfy their mental hunger with the east wind of authority.

XVII

When I say that Descartes consecrated doubt, you must remember that it was that sort of doubt which Goethe has called "the active scepticism, whose whole aim is to conquer itself"; and not that other sort which is born of flippancy and ignorance, and whose aim is only to perpetuate itself, as an excuse for idleness and indifference.

XVIII

What, then, is certain?.... Why, the fact that the thought, the present consciousness, exists. Our thoughts may be delusive, but they cannot be fictitious. As thoughts, they are real and existent, and the cleverest deceiver cannot make them otherwise.

XIX

Thought is existence. More than that, so far as we are concerned, existence is thought, all our conceptions of existence being some kind or other of thought.

XX

It is enough for all the practical purposes of human existence if we find that our trust in the representations of consciousness is verified by