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Updated: May 11, 2025
The most touching act of friendship, and one which assuredly gave personal point to Huxley's remark in another connection, "Darwin is in all things noble and generous one of those people who think it a privilege to let him help," took place when Huxley's health had utterly broken down in 1873, and he was as depressed in mind as in body.
Huxley's Writings, passim. Haeckel's "Natural History of Creation." Weismann's "Studies in the Theory of Descent" and subsequent papers. Romanes's "Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution." Lankester's "Degeneration." Fiske's "Darwinism and Other Essays." For adverse criticism of Darwin, read Mivart's "Genesis of Species," and the Duke of Argyll's "Unity of Nature."
I am glad to say that the Royal Society was represented by four of its chief officers, and nine of the commonalty, including myself. Tennyson has a right to that, as the first poet since Lucretius who has understood the drift of science. No parts of the Life and Letters are more enjoyable than those concerning the "Happy Family," as a friend of Huxley's names his household.
"Another gap is between the nature of the animal and the self-conscious, reasoning, and moral nature of man." First, as to the gap between death and life; this is what Dr. Stirling calls the "gulf of all gulfs, which Mr. Huxley's protoplasm is as powerless to efface as any other material expedient that has ever been suggested." This gulf Mr. Darwin does not attempt to bridge over.
On that grand star we shall lead lives worth while, and justify Huxley's belief that men exist somewhere compared to whom we should "be as black beetles compared to us." The excitement of meeting our brothers from other planets as they move up to the sun in batchcs will be great.
Huxley's conclusion may be justly designated as a failure of science to interpret the greatest things of life. Before culture, civilisation, and morality become possible, a new point of departure has to take place within human consciousness, and the attempt to move in an ethical direction is as much hindered as helped by the natural course of the physical universe.
"A rash clergyman once, without further equipment in natural science than desultory reading, attacked the Darwinian theory in some sundry magazine articles, in which he made himself uncommonly merry at Huxley's expense.
It is significant that, as has already been noted, Matthew Arnold's argument that Wordsworth is the greatest English poet after Shakespeare and Milton, and Huxley's argument that the physical basis of animal and plant life is the same, are both used in a book of examples of exposition.
The most important single influence in that course had been the growth of Natural Science. It was, for instance, in 1870 that Huxley's Lay Sermons were collected and published.
Nevertheless, as those words were the words of Christ, they were a thunderbolt which reverberates through all time and space, and still makes Pharisees of every name and nation tremble. Huxley's Irenicum will not do. Men who are assiduously poisoning the fountains of religion, morality, and social order, cannot be let alone. Haeckel's Irenicum amounts to much the same as that of Professor Huxley.
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