Thomas Henry Huxley

“ I say history, in the modern sense of the word, that is, not barely a chronicle of events and record of current traditions or venerable myths, but a narrative based upon evidence which has been critically sifted, and in which the narrator endeavors to trace, amid the tangled occurrences of human life, the thread of natural causation which connects them with the needs and the passions of men. The chronicler is more or less of a gossip, the historian more or less of a man of science. ”

“ The scholastic philosophy is a wonderful monument of the patience and ingenuity with which the human mind toiled to build up a logically consistent theory of the universe, out of such materials. And that philosophy is by no means dead and buried, as many vainly suppose. On the contrary, numbers of men of no mean learning and accomplishment, and sometimes of rare power and subtilty of thought, hold by it as the best theory of things which has yet been stated. And, what is still more remarkable, men who speak the language of modern philosophy nevertheless think the thoughts of the schoolmen. ”

“ But those parts of physical science which deal with heat, electricity, and magnetism, and, above all, chemistry, in the modern sense, can hardly be said to have had an existence. No one knew that two of the old elemental bodies, air and water, are compounds, and that a third, fire, is not a substance but a motion. The great industries that have grown out of the applications of modern scientific discoveries had no existence, and the man, who should have foretold their coming into being in the days of his son, would have been regarded as a mad enthusiast. ”

“ But it would be no less absurd if we were to set about teaching biology by putting into the hands of boys a series of definitions of the classes and orders of the animal kingdom, and making them repeat them by heart. That is a very favorite method of teaching, so that I sometimes fancy the spirit of the old classical system has entered into the new scientific system, in which case I would much rather that any pretense at scientific teaching were abolished altogether. What really has to be done is to get into the young mind some notion of what animal and vegetable life is. ”

“ Nevertheless, it is as certain as any thing can be, that Joseph Priestley was no gloomy fanatic, but as cheerful and kindly a soul as ever breathed, the idol of children; a man who was hated only by those who did not know him, and who charmed away the bitterest prejudices in personal intercourse; a man who never lost a friend, and the best testimony to whose worth is the generous and tender warmth with which his many friends vied with one another in rendering him substantial help, in all the crises of his career. ”

“ Indeed, to any one acquainted with the scope of physical science, it is not at all evident. Considering progress only in the "intellectual and spiritual sphere," I find myself wholly unable to admit that either nations or individuals will really advance if their common outfit draws nothing from the stores of physical science. I should say that an army without weapons of precision, and with no particular base of operations, might more hopefully enter upon a campaign on the Rhine than a man, devoid of a knowledge of what physical science has done in the last century, upon the criticism of life. ”

“ Institutions do not make men, any more than organization makes life; and even the ideal university we have been dreaming about will be but a superior piece of mechanism, unless each student strive after the ideal of the scholar. And that ideal, it seems to me, has never been better embodied than by the great poet, who, though lapped in luxury, the favorite of a court, and the idol of his country-men, remained, through all the length of his honored years, a scholar in art, in science, and in life:
Wouldst shape a noble life? ”

“ For my own part, I would not raise a finger, if I could thereby introduce mere book-work in science into every arts curriculum in the country. Let those who want to study books devote themselves to literature, in which we have the perfection of books, both as to substance and as to form. If I may paraphrase Hobbes's well-known aphorism, I would say that "books are the money of literature, but only the counters of science," science (in the sense in which I now use the term) being the knowledge of fact, of which every verbal description is but an incomplete and symbolic expression. ”

“ There is no side of the intellect which it does not call into play, no region of human knowledge into which either its roots, or its branches, do not extend; like the Atlantic between the Old and the New Worlds, its waves wash the shores of the two worlds of matter and of mind; its tributary streams flow from both; through its waters, as yet unfurrowed by the keel of any Columbus, lies the road, if such there be, from the one to the other ”

“ Now, let us turn to a proposition which no one can possibly deny—namely, that there is a distinct sense in which man is an animal. There is not the smallest doubt of that proposition. If anybody entertains a misgiving on that point, he has simply to walk through the museum close by in order to see that man has a structure and a framework which may be compared, point for point and bone for bone, with those of the lower animals. There is not the smallest doubt, moreover, that, as to the manner of his becoming, man is developed, step by step, in exactly the same way as they are. ”

“ Under our own pale and faintly-lighted sky, such bare hills and rugged cliffs as those which bound the prospect here and everywhere in Upper Egypt would fitly represent the abomination of desolation. But, framed as they are in an atmosphere of limpid purity, with lights and shades and tints endlessly varying in shape and hue, from hour to hour, and almost from minute to minute, as the sun runs his course, they have a strange and unique beauty. ”

“ And be assured that no teaching of science is worth any thing, as a mental discipline, which is not based upon direct perception of the facts, and practical exercise of the observing and logical faculties upon them. Even in such a simple matter as the mere comprehension of form, ask the most practised and widely-informed anatomist what is the difference between his knowledge of a structure which he has read about and his knowledge of the same structure when he has seen it for himself, and he will tell you that the two things are not comparable—the difference is infinite. ”

“ For all these ages, day after day, the shadow, as it lengthened eastward, has swept over the weary heads of thousands upon thousands of orderly, cheerful, hard-working men, women, and children, who have been plundered, starved, beaten, decimated, now to serve the ambition or gratify the superstitious vanity of an ancient Pharaoh, and now to enable some thinly varnished savage of a modern Khedive to subsidize his opera troupe in Cairo, and squander the price of their blood among foreign harlots and foreign swindlers. ”

“ All universities recognize literature in the sense of the old rhetoric, which is art incarnate in words. Some, to their credit, recognize art in its narrower sense, to a certain extent, and confer degrees for proficiency in some of its branches. If there are doctors of music, why should there be no masters of painting, of sculpture, of architecture? I should like to see professors of the fine arts in every university; and instruction in some branch of their work made a part of the arts curriculum. ”

“ In an ideal university, as I conceive it, a man should be able to obtain instruction in all forms of knowledge, and discipline in the use of all the methods by which knowledge is obtained. In such a university, the force of living example should fire the student with a noble ambition to emulate the learning of learned men, and to follow in the footsteps of the explorers of new fields of knowledge. ”

“ They work to pass, not to know; and outraged Science takes her revenge. They do pass, and they don't know. I have passed sundry examinations in my time, not without credit, and I confess I am ashamed to think how very little real knowledge underlay the torrent of stuff which I was able to pour out on paper. In fact, that which examination, as ordinarily conducted, tests, is simply a man's power of work under stimulus, and his capacity for rapidly and clearly producing that which, for the time, he has got into his mind. ”

“ Everybody has heard the story of the pitiless microscopist, who ruined the peace of mind of one of these mild enthusiasts by showing him the animals moving in a drop of the water with which, in the innocency of his heart, he slaked his thirst; and the unsuspecting devotee of plain common sense may look for as unexpected a shock when the magnifier of severe logic reveals the germs, if not the full-grown shapes, of lively metaphysical postulates rampant amid his most positive and matter-of-fact notions. ”

“ I speak in the presence of those who know practically what medical education is; for I may assume that a large proportion of my hearers are more or less advanced students of medicine. I appeal to the most industrious and conscientious among you, to those who are most deeply penetrated with a sense of the extremely serious responsibilities which attach to the calling of a medical practitioner, when I ask whether, out of the four years which you devote to your studies, you ought to spare even so much as an hour for any work which does not tend directly to fit you for your duties? ”

“ Mother Nature is serenely obdurate to honeyed words; only those who understand the ways of things, and can silently and effectually handle them, get any good out of her.
And now, having, as I hope, justified my assumption of a place among handicraftsmen, and put myself right with you as to my qualification, from practical knowledge, to speak about technical education, I will proceed to put before you the results of my experience as a teacher of a handicraft, and tell you what sort of education I should think best adapted for a boy whom one wanted to make a professional anatomist. ”

“ Moreover, this scientific "criticism of life" presents itself to us with different credentials from any other. It appeals not to authority, nor to what anybody may have thought or said, but to nature. It admits that all our interpretations of natural fact are more or less imperfect and symbolic, and bids the learner seek for truth not among words but among things. It warns us that the assertion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunder but a crime.
The purely classical education advocated by the representatives of the Humanists in our day gives no inkling of all this. ”

“ Descartes said, "I have clear evidence that the nervous system acts mechanically without the intervention of consciousness, and without the intervention of the will, it may be in opposition to it." Why, then, may I not extend this idea further? As actions of a certain amount of complexity are brought about in this way, why may not actions of still greater complexity be so produced? Why, in fact, may it not be that the whole of man's physical actions are mechanical, his mind living apart, like one of the gods of Epicurus, but unlike them occasionally, interfering by means of his volition? ”

“ The whole fabric of paleontology, in fact, falls to the ground unless we admit the validity of Zadig's great principle, that like effects imply like causes; and that the process of reasoning from a shell, or a tooth, or a bone, to the nature of the animal to which it belonged, rests absolutely on the assumption that the likeness of this shell, or tooth, or bone to that of some animal with which we are already acquainted, is such that we are justified in inferring a corresponding degree of likeness in the rest of the two organisms. ”

“ Within the last twenty years, Oxford alone has sunk more than a hundred and twenty thousand pounds in building and furnishing physical, chemical, and physiological laboratories, and a magnificent museum, arranged with an almost luxurious regard for the needs of the student. Cambridge, less rich, but aided by the munificence of her chancellor, is taking the same course; and, in a few years, it will be for no lack of the means and appliances of sound teaching, if the mass of English university men remain in their present state of barbarous ignorance of even the rudiments of scientific culture. ”