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Updated: May 11, 2025
But with the fresh incentive and new vision of responsibility I set to work with a will, and soon had mastered the ten required subjects sufficiently to pass the examination with credit. But I must say here that Professor Huxley's criticisms of English public school teaching of that period were none too stringent.
Have something to say, and say it, was the Duke of Wellington's theory of style; Huxley's was to say that which has to be said in such language that you can stand cross-examination on each word. Be clear, though you may be convicted of error. If you are clearly wrong, you will run up against a fact sometime and get set right.
Huxley, "as an illustration of God's methods of dealing with sin, has an account of an event that never happened?" Such an admonition, he says, is "morally about on a level with telling a naughty child that a bogy is coming to fetch it away." Let us apply this maxim to some of Mr. Huxley's homilies:
I may reply that there are a number of Harvard students who will not have to work for their bread and whose parents would be glad to have them follow the course that I have recommended. It is not too much to hope, therefore, that among these there are, to use Huxley's words, "glorious sports of nature" who will not be "corrupted by luxury" but will become industrious historians.
There is more wit than science in Huxley's question, "What better philosophical status has vitality than aquosity?"
In connection with the comment on these essays is the following quotation which gives one interesting information as to Huxley's method of obtaining a clear style:
I am sorry to have to insist upon this fact: but till Professor Huxley's dream and mine is fulfilled, and our schools deign to teach, in the intervals of Latin and Greek, some slight knowledge of this planet, and of those of its productions which are most commonly in use, even this fact may need to be re-stated more than once.
All that Atheism necessarily involves is that all forms of Theism are logically untenable, and consequently the only effective method of destroying Atheism is to establish its opposite. Professor Huxley's treatment of Atheism proceeds on similar lines to that already dealt with, but is more elaborate in character.
Vegetable and animal organisms do, it is true, adapt themselves to the environment; but their adaptation is essentially a method of using and modifying the environment in their own favor, precisely as is the case with human action. Therefore Huxley's sharp distinction between natural plant life and man's artificial garden is misleading.
And, from a multitude of scientific works, we recommend also to the general reader Huxley's Autobiography and his Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews, partly because they are excellent expressions of the spirit and methods of science, and partly because Huxley as a writer is perhaps the clearest and the most readable of the scientists.
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