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Updated: May 11, 2025
In Huxley's admirable biography, written by his son, you may read of a 'longshoreman who, thanks to reasonably short hours of work and a little leisure, took up the study of scientific subjects. He was aided by Huxley, who lent him a microscope, and ultimately this common 'longshoreman's researches were of real value to the scientific world.
Some time afterwards he joined a committee, with the late Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Mayor Fowler, and other religious worthies, whose object was to raise a testimonial to Samuel Kinns, an obscure author who has written a stupid volume on "Moses and Geology" for the purpose of showing that the book of Genesis, to use Huxley's expression, contains the beginning and the end of sound science.
Huxley's illustrations do not help his argument. "Protoplasm," he says, "is the clay of the potter; which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod." Clay is certainly the physical basis of the potter's art, but would there be any pottery in the world if it contained only clay?
Theism is a doctrine of final causes, and in arguing that it is absurd to express an opinion upon the subject Professor Huxley was adding a good reason in support of the position he believed himself to be destroying. Huxley's other objection to Atheism is that it perpetuates the absurdity of trying to prove there is no God. How far is that true? Or in what sense is it true?
Although there is nothing extraordinary to talk about in the way of scientific discovery at present, workers in science are not idle, and are steadily pursuing their investigations. Mr Huxley's paper in the Philosophical Transactions is also a remarkable one one of those which really constitute progress.
But in that year M. von Hasselt, happening to examine a transparent animal of this class, found to his infinite surprise that after the heart had beat a certain number of times, it stopped, and then began beating the opposite way, so as to reverse the course of the current, which returned by-and-by to its original direction. Huxley's Lay Sermons, p. 95.
H. R. Marshall's little book, Mind and Conduct, which shows how difficult it is to mark intuitions off sharply, and to treat them as if they had nothing in common with reason. Huxley's essay, Evolution and Ethics, might be read. The "Prolegomena" to the essay is, however, much more valuable than the essay itself.
It should therefore be regarded as the introductory part of the argument; and as a matter of fact it does not get to Huxley's positive proof, but is occupied with disposing of the other theories. This refutation finished, Huxley was then at liberty to go ahead with the affirmative argument, as he indicates in the last paragraph of the lecture.
That was good enough to bring her a little money, as an illustrator, designer of Christmas cards, etc.; and she filled most of her spare time with it. But now she feverishly looked out some of her old books Pater's "Studies," a volume of Huxley's Essays, "Shelley" and "Keats" in the "Men of Letters" series.
Here was one of the cases where Huxley's firm resolution applied to speak out if necessary, regardless of consequences; indeed, he felt sure that all the evil things prophesied would not be so painful to him as the giving up that which he had resolved to do upon grounds which he conceived to be right.
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