Let the jubilant but uninstructed and comparatively ignorant amateur materialist therefore beware, and bethink himself twice or even thrice before he conceives that he understands the universe and is competent to pour scorn upon the intuitions and perceptions of great men in what may be to him alien regions of thought and experience.
Let him explain, if he can, what he means by his own identity, or the identity of any thinking or living being, which at different times consists of a totally different set of material particles. Something there clearly is which confers personal identity and constitutes an individual: it is a property characteristic of every form of life, even the humblest; but it is not yet explained or understood, and it is no answer to assert gratuitously that there is some fundamental substance or material basis on which that identity depends, any more than it is an explanation to say that it depends upon a soul. These are all forms of words. As Hume says, quoted by Huxley with approval, in the work already cited, p. 194:—
“It is impossible to attach any definite meaning to the word ‘substance,’ when employed for the hypothetical substratum of soul and matter. … If it be said that our personal identity requires the assumption of a substance which remains the same while the accidents of perception shift and change, the question arises what is meant by personal identity? … A plant or an animal, in the course of its existence, from the condition of an egg or seed to the end of life, remains the same neither in form, nor in structure, nor in the matter of which it is composed: every attribute it possesses is constantly changing, and yet we say that it is always one and the same individual” (p. 194).
And in his own preface to the Hume volume Huxley expresses himself forcibly thus—equally antagonistic as was his wont to both ostensible friend and ostensible foe, as soon as they got off what he considered the straight path:—
“That which it may be well for us not to forget is, that the first-recorded judicial murder of a scientific thinker [Socrates] was compassed and effected, not by a despot, nor by priests, but was brought about by eloquent demagogues. … Clear knowledge of what one does not know is just as important as knowing what one does know. …
“The development of exact natural knowledge in all its vast range, from physics to history and criticism, is the consequence of the working out, in this province, of the resolution to ‘take nothing for truth without clear knowledge that it is such’; to consider all beliefs open to criticism; to regard the value of authority as neither greater nor less, than as much as it can prove itself to be worth. The modern spirit is not the spirit ‘which always denies,’ delighting only in destruction; still less is it that which builds castles in the air rather than not construct; it is that spirit which works and will work ‘without haste and without rest,’ gathering harvest after harvest of truth into its barns, and devouring error with unquenchable fire” (p. viii).
The harvesting of truth is a fairly safe operation, for if some falsehood be inadvertently harvested along with the grain we may hope that, having a less robust and hardy nature, it will before long be detected by its decaying odour; but the rooting up and devouring of error with unquenchable fire is a more dangerous enterprise, inasmuch as flames are apt to spread beyond our control; and the lack of infallibility in the selection of error may to future generations become painfully apparent.
The phrase represents a good healthy energetic mood however, and in a world liable to become overgrown with weeds and choked with refuse, the cleansing work of a firebrand may from time to time be a necessity, in order that the free wind of heaven and the sunlight may once more reach the fertile soil.
But it is unfair to think of Huxley even when young as a firebrand, though it is true that he was to some extent a man of war, and though the fierce and consuming mood is rather more prominent in his early writings than in his later work.
A fighting attitude was inevitable forty years ago, because then the truths of biology were being received with hostility, and the free science and philosophy of a later time seemed likely to have a poor chance of life. But the world has changed or is changing now, the wholesome influences of fire have done their work, and it would be a rather barbarous anachronism to apply the same agency among the young green shoots of healthy learning which are springing up in the cleared ground.
OLIVER LODGE.
1906.
Among the earlier published works of T. H. Huxley (1825–1895), and of the essays contained in this volume: “The Darwinian Hypothesis” first appeared in the Times, Dec. 26, 1859; “On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences” (Address given at St. Martin’s Hall), was published in 1854; “Time and Life” (Macmillan’s Magazine), Dec. 1859; “The Origin of Species” (Westminster Review), April 1860; “A Lobster: or, The Study of Zoology,” 1861. “Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life” (Address to Geological Society), 1862, was re-published in “Lay Sermons,” vol. viii.; “Six Lectures to Working Men on the Phenomena of Organic Nature,” 1863, in “Collected Essays,” vol. vii. “Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature,” 1863. Of his other works, the translation by Huxley and Busk of “Kölliker’s Manual of Human Histology,” appeared in 1853. “Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy,” “Elementary Atlas of Comparative Osteology”; two Science Lectures, “The Circulation of the Blood” and “Corals and Coral Reefs,” and “Lessons in Elementary Physiology,” in 1866. “Introduction to the Classification of Animals,” 1869. “Lay Sermons, Essays, and Reviews,” 1870. “Critiques and Addresses,” 1873. “On Yeast: A Lecture,” 1872. “A Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals,” 1871. “Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals,” 1877. “American Addresses,” 1877. “Physiography,” 1877. “Hume” in “English Men of Letters,” 1878. “The Crayfish: an Introduction to the Study of Zoology,” 1880. “Science and Culture, and other Essays,” 1881. “Essays upon some Controverted Questions,” 1892. “Evolution and Ethics” (the Romanes Lecture), 1893. Huxley also assisted in editing the series of Science Primers published by Messrs. Macmillan, and contributed the introductory volume himself. The “Collected Essays,” in nine vols., containing all that he cared to preserve, 1893. “The Scientific Memoirs of T. H. Huxley,” edited by Professor Michael Foster and Professor E. Ray Lankester, in five vols., 1898–1903. His “Life and Letters,” edited by his son, Leonard Huxley, was published in 1900.
HUXLEY’S ESSAYS
I
ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE MAN-LIKE APES.
Ancient traditions, when tested by the severe processes of modern investigation, commonly enough fade away into mere dreams: but it is singular how often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presaging a reality. Ovid foreshadowed the discoveries of the geologist: the Atlantis was an imagination, but Columbus found a western world: and though the quaint forms of Centaurs and Satyrs have an existence only in the realms of art, creatures approaching man more nearly than they in essential structure, and yet as thoroughly brutal as the goat’s or horse’s half of the mythical compound, are now not only known, but notorious.
I have not met with any notice of one of these Man-like Apes of earlier date than that contained in Pigafetta’s “Description of the Kingdom of Congo,”[1] drawn up from the notes of a Portuguese sailor, Eduardo Lopez, and published in 1598.