Thomas Henry Huxley

“ I have never yet had the good fortune to hear any valid reason alleged why that corporation of individuals we call the State may not do what voluntary effort fails in doing, either from want of intelligence or lack of will. And here it cannot be alleged that the action of the State is always hurtful. On the contrary, in every country in Europe, universities, public libraries, picture galleries, museums, and laboratories, have been established by the State, and have done infinite service to the intellectual and moral progress and the refinement of mankind. ”

“ How is a man to keep up his acquaintance with all that is doing in the physiological world—in a world advancing with enormous strides every day and every hour—if he has to be distracted with the cares of practice? You know very well it must be impracticable to do so. Our men of ability join our medical schools with an eye to the future. They take the Chairs of Anatomy or of Physiology; and by and by they leave those Chairs for the more profitable pursuits into which they have drifted by professional success, and so they become clothed, and physiology is bare. ”

“ And, on the other hand, if the blind acceptance of authority appears to him in its true colours, as mere private judgment in excelsis, and if he have the courage to stand alone, face to face with the abyss of the Eternal and Unknowable, let him be content, once for all, not only to renounce the good things promised by "Infallibility," but even to bear the bad things which it prophesies; content to follow reason and fact in singleness and honesty of purpose, wherever they may lead, in the sure faith that a hell of honest men will, to him, be more endurable than a paradise full of angelic shams. ”

“ Misery is a match that never goes out; genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow; and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run a-muck among friends and foes. What gives force to the socialistic movement which is now stirring European society to its depths, but a determination on the part of the naturally able men among the proletariat, to put an end, somehow or other, to the misery and degradation in which a large proportion of their fellows are steeped? ”

“ Now, I do not think that is a desirable state of things. I cannot understand why physiology should not be taught—in fact, you have here abundant evidence that it can be taught—with the same definiteness and the same precision as anatomy is taught. And you may depend upon this, that the only physiology which is to be of any good whatever in medical practice, or in its application to the study of medicine, is that physiology which a man knows of his own knowledge; just as the only anatomy which would be of any good to the surgeon is the anatomy which he knows of his own knowledge. ”

“ And who that attends, even in the most superficial way, to the conditions upon which the stability of modern society—and especially of a society like ours, in which recent legislation has placed sovereign authority in the hands of the masses, whenever they are united enough to wield their power—can doubt that every man of high natural ability, who is both ignorant and miserable, is as great a danger to society as a rocket without a stick is to the people who fire it? ”

“ For, leaving aside the more far-seeing minority on each side, what the "religious" party is crying for is mere theology, under the name of religion; while the "secularists" have unwisely and wrongfully admitted the assumption of their opponents, and demand the abolition of all "religious" teaching, when they only want to be free of theology—Burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches!
But my belief is, that no human being, and no society composed of human beings, ever did, or ever will, come to much, unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal. ”

“ Even when the eyes are shut, the darkness of which one is conscious, carries with it the notion of outness. One looks, so to speak, into a dark space. Common language expresses the common experience of mankind in this matter. A man will say that a smell is in his nose, a taste in his mouth, a singing in his ears, a creeping or a warmth in his skin ”

“ I do not quite see, myself, how, if the action of natural selection is certain, the occurrence of evolution is only probable; inasmuch as the development of a new species by natural selection is, so far as it goes, evolution. However, it is not worth while to quarrel with the precise terms of a sentence which shows that the high watermark of intelligence among those most respectable of Britons, the readers of the Quarterly Review, has now reached such a level that the next tide may lift them easily and pleasantly on the once-dreaded shore of evolution. ”

“ Every fossil which takes an intermediate place between forms of life already known, may be said, so far as it is intermediate, to be evidence in favour of evolution, inasmuch as it shows a possible road by which evolution may have taken place. But the mere discovery of such a form does not, in itself, prove that evolution took place by and through it, nor does it constitute more than presumptive evidence in favour of evolution in general. Suppose A, B, C to be three forms, while B is intermediate in structure between A and C. Then the doctrine of evolution offers four possible alternatives. ”

“ Much as the notion of a "social contract" has been ridiculed, it nevertheless seems to be clear enough, that all social organization whatever depends upon what is substantially a contract, whether expressed or implied, between the members of the society. No society ever was, or ever can be, really held together by force. It may seem a paradox to say that a slaveholder does not make his slaves work by force, but by agreement. ”

“ If the positive advancement of the peace, wealth, and the intellectual and moral development of its members, are objects which the Government, as the representative of the corporate authority of society, may justly strive after, in fulfilment of its end—the good of mankind; then it is clear that the Government may undertake to educate the people. For education promotes peace by teaching men the realities of life and the obligations which are involved in the very existence of society ”

“ I may say that the hypothesis of evolution explains the facts of Miocene, Pliocene, and Recent distribution, and that no other supposition even pretends to account for them. It is, indeed, a conceivable supposition that every species of Rhinoceros and every species of Hyaena, in the long succession of forms between the Miocene and the present species, was separately constructed out of dust, or out of nothing, by supernatural power; but until I receive distinct evidence of the fact, I refuse to run the risk of insulting any sane man by supposing that he seriously holds such a notion. ”

“ Ethnology, as thus defined, is a branch of anthropology, the great science which unravels the complexities of human structure; traces out the relations of man to other animals; studies all that is especially human in the mode in which man's complex functions are performed; and searches after the conditions which have determined his presence in the world. And anthropology is a section of zoology, which again is the animal half of biology—the science of life and living things. ”

“ The lowest savages are as devoid of any such conceptions as the brutes themselves. What sort of conceptions of space and time, of form and number, can be possessed by a savage who has not got so far as to be able to count beyond five or six, who does not know how to draw a triangle or a circle, and has not the remotest notion of separating the particular quality we call form, from the other qualities of bodies? None of these capacities are exhibited by men, unless they form part of a tolerably advanced society. ”

“ I define this doctrine as follows:—
"Those who hold these views support them by two lines of argument. They enforce them deductively by arguing from an assumed axiom, that the State has no right to do anything but protect its subjects from aggression. The State is simply a policeman, and its duty, neither more nor less than to prevent robbery and murder and enforce contracts. It is not to promote good, nor even to do anything to prevent evil, except by the enforcement of penalties upon those who have been guilty of obvious and tangible assaults upon purse or person. ”

“ But, for those who hold the doctrine of evolution, all the Catholic verities about the creation of living beings must be no less false. For them, the assertion that the progenitors of all existing plants were made on the third day, of animals on the fifth and sixth days, in the forms they now present, is simply false. Nor can they admit that man was made suddenly out of the dust of the earth; while it would be an insult to ask an evolutionist whether he credits the preposterous fable respecting the fabrication of woman to which Suarez pins his faith. ”

“ But if apes possess three out of the four kinds of states of consciousness which we discover in ourselves, what possible reason is there for denying them the fourth? If they are capable of sensation, emotion, and volition, why are they to be denied thought (in the sense of predication) ?
No answer has ever been given to these questions. And as the law of continuity is as much opposed, as is the common sense of mankind, to the notion that all animals are unconscious machines, it may safely be assumed that no sufficient answer ever will be given to them. ”

“ Or, when that thread breaks, archaeology, which is the interpretation of the unrecorded remains of man's works, belonging to the epoch since the world has reached its present condition, may still guide him. And, when even the dim light of archaeology fades, there yet remains paleontology, which, in these latter years, has brought to daylight once more the exuvia of ancient populations, whose world was not our world, who have been buried in river beds immemorially dry, or carried by the rush of waters into caves, inaccessible to inundation since the dawn of tradition. ”

“ But the eye of man has not beheld that State, and is not likely to behold it for some time to come. What we do see, in fact, is that States are made up of a considerable number of the ignorant and foolish, a small proportion of genuine knaves, and a sprinkling of capable and honest men, by whose efforts the former are kept in a reasonable state of guidance, and the latter of repression. And, such being the case, I do not see how any limit whatever can be laid down as to the extent to which, under some circumstances, the action of Government may be rightfully carried. ”

“ So far as the laws of conduct are determined by the intellect, I apprehend that they belong to science, and to that part of science which is called morality. But the engagement of the affections in favour of that particular kind of conduct which we call good, seems to me to be something quite beyond mere science. And I cannot but think that it, together with the awe and reverence, which have no kinship with base fear, but arise whenever one tries to pierce below the surface of things, whether they be material or spiritual, constitutes all that has any unchangeable reality in religion. ”

“ The denial that a man acts morally because he does not think whether he does so or not, may be put upon the same footing as the denial of the title of an arithmetician to the calculating boy, because he did not know how he worked his sums. If mankind ever generally accept and act upon Mr. Mivart's axiom, they will simply become a set of most unendurable prigs; but they never have accepted it, and I venture to hope that evolution has nothing so terrible in store for the human race. ”

“ If you want to break in a colt, surely the first thing to do is to catch him and get him quietly to face his trainer; to know his voice and bear his hand; to learn that colts have something else to do with their heels than to kick them up whenever they feel so inclined; and to discover that the dreadful human figure has no desire to devour, or even to beat him, but that, in case of attention and obedience, he may hope for patting and even a sieve of oats. ”

“ Spencer's essay, Miss Helen Taylor assails me—though, I am bound to admit, more in sorrow than in anger—for what she terms, my "New Attack on Toleration." It is I, this time, who may complain of misinterpretation, if the greater part of Miss Taylor's article (with which I entirely sympathise) is supposed to be applicable to my "intolerance." Let us have full-toleration, by all means, upon all questions in which there is room for doubt, or which cannot be distinctly proved to affect the welfare of mankind. ”

“ Mivart's axiom, the man who, seeing another struggling in the water, leaps in at the risk of his own life to save him, does that which is "destitute of the most incipient degree of real goodness," unless, as he strips off his coat, he says to himself, "Now mind, I am going to do this because it is my duty and for no other reason;" and the most beautiful character to which humanity can attain, that of the man who does good without thinking about it, because he loves justice and mercy and is repelled by evil, has no claim on our moral approbation. ”

“ Philosophy will accept as her final decision.
Suppose that a piano were conscious of sound, and of nothing else. It would become acquainted with a system of nature entirely composed of sounds, and the laws of nature would be the laws of melody and of harmony. It might acquire endless ideas of likeness and unlikeness, of succession, of similarity and dissimilarity, but it could attain to no conception of space, of distance, or of resistance; or of figure, or of motion. ”

“ All that I have to say is, that, in my belief, consciousness and molecular action are capable of being expressed by one another, just as heat and mechanical action are capable of being expressed in terms of one another. Whether we shall ever be able to express consciousness in foot-pounds, or not, is more than I will venture to say; but that there is evidence of the existence of some correlation between mechanical motion and consciousness, is as plain as anything can be. ”

“ Individually, I have no love for academies on the continental model, and still less for the system of decorating men of distinction in science, letters, or art, with orders and titles, or enriching them with sinecures. What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work; and most of us, I suspect, would be well content if, for our days and nights of unremitting toil, we could secure the pay which a first-class Treasury clerk earns without any obviously trying strain upon his faculties. ”

“ But coal is as much an essential condition of this growth and development as carbonic acid is for that of a club-moss. Wanting coal, we could not have smelted the iron needed to make our engines, nor have worked our engines when we had got them. But take away the engines, and the great towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire vanish like a dream. Manufactures give place to agriculture and pasture, and not ten men can live where now ten thousand are amply supported. ”

“ Admit that Negroes and Australians, Negritos and Mongols are distinct species, or distinct genera, if you will, and you may yet, with perfect consistency, be the strictest of Monogenists, and even believe in Adam and Eve as the primaeval parents of all mankind.
It is to Mr. Darwin we owe this discovery: it is he who, coming forward in the guise of an eclectic philosopher, presents his doctrine as the key to ethnology, and as reconciling and combining all that is good in the Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools. ”