Thomas Henry Huxley was born ten years after Waterloo, while the
country was still in the backwash of the long-drawn Napoleonic wars.
It was a time of material reconstruction and expansion, while social
reconstruction lagged sadly and angrily behind. The year of his birth
saw the first railway opened in England; it was seven years before
electoral reform began, with its well-meant but dispiriting sequel
in the new Poor Law. The defeat of the political and aggressive cause
which had imposed itself upon the revolutionary inspiration of freedom
strengthened the old orthodoxies here. Questioning voices were raised
at their proper peril.
Thomas Henry was the seventh child of George Huxley and Rachel
Withers, his wife. He was born on May 4, 1825, at half-past nine in
the morning, according to the entry in the family Bible, at Ealing,
where his father was senior assistant-master in the well-known school
of Dr. Nicholas, of Wadham College, Oxford. The good doctor, who
had succeeded his father-in-law here in 1791, was enough of a public
character to have his name parodied by Thackeray as Dr. Tickleus.
"I am not aware," writes Huxley playfully in an autobiographical
sketch,
that any portents preceded my arrival in this world; but in
my childhood I remember hearing a traditional account of the
manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great
practical value. The windows of my mother's room were open, in
consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the same
reason, probably, a neighbouring bee-hive had swarmed, and the
new colony, pitching on the window-sill, was making its way
into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. If
that well-meaning woman had only abstained from her ill-timed
interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and
I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence
which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth,
capacity, or honest work, to the highest places in Church and
State. But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged
to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the
plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no
habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement.
The fact that he received the name of the doubting apostle was by no
means one of those superhuman coincidences in which some naive people
see portents. In later years my father used to make humorous play
with its appropriateness, but in plain fact he was named after his
grandfather, Thomas Huxley. I have not traced the origin of the Henry.
Both parents were of dark complexion, and all the children were
dark-haired and dark-eyed. The father was tall, and, I believe, well
set-up: a miniature shows him with abundant, brown, curling hair
brushed high above a good forehead, giving the effect, so fashionable
in 1830, of a high-peaked head. The features are well cut and regular;
the nose rather long and inclined to be aquiline; the cheeks well
covered; the eyes, under somewhat arched brows, expressive and
interesting. Outwardly, there is a certain resemblance traceable
between the miniature and a daguerrotype of Huxley at nineteen;
but the debt, physical and mental, owed to either parent is thus
recorded:--
Physically, I am the son of my mother so completely--even
down to peculiar movements of the hands, which made their
appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed
them--that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself,
except an inborn faculty for drawing, which, unfortunately
in my case, has never been cultivated; a hot temper, and
that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers
sometimes call obstinacy.
My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and
energetic temperament, and possessed of the most piercing
black eyes I ever saw in a woman's head. With no more
education than other women of the middle classes in her day,
she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing
characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought. If one
ventured to suggest that she had not taken much time to arrive
at any conclusion, she would say: "I cannot help it; things
flash across me." That peculiarity has been passed on to me
in full strength; it has often stood me in good stead; it
has sometimes played me sad tricks, and it has always been a
danger. But, after all, if my time were to come over again,
there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my
inheritance of mother-wit.
Restless, talkative, untiring to the day of her death, she was at
sixty-six "as active and energetic as a young woman." To her he was
devoted.
As a child my love for her was a passion. I have lain awake
for hours crying because I had a morbid fear of her death;
her approbation was my greatest reward, her displeasure my
greatest punishment.
About his childhood, he writes,
I have next to nothing to say. In after years my mother,
looking at me almost reproachfully, would sometimes say, "Ah!
you were such a pretty boy!" whence I had no difficulty in
concluding that I had not fulfilled my early promise in the
matter of looks. In fact, I have a distinct recollection of
certain curls of which I was vain, and of a conviction that
I closely resembled that handsome, courtly gentleman, Sir
Herbert Oakley, who was vicar of our parish, and who was as a
god to us country folk because he was occasionally visited
by the then Prince George of Cambridge. I remember turning my
pinafore wrong side forwards in order to represent a surplice,
and preaching to my mother's maids in the kitchen as nearly as
possible in Sir Herbert's manner one Sunday morning, when
the rest of the family were at church. That is the earliest
indication of the strong clerical affinities which my friend
Mr. Herbert Spencer has always ascribed to me, though I fancy
they have, for the most part, remained in a latent state.
He was not a precocious child, nor pushed forward by early
instruction. His native talent for drawing, had it been cultivated,
might have brought him into the front rank of artists; but on the
perverse principle, then common, that training is either useless to
native capacity or ruins it, he remained untaught, and his vigorous
draughtsmanship, invaluable as it was in his scientific career, never
reached its full technical perfection. But the sketches which he
delighted to make on his travels reveal the artist's eye, if not his
trained hand.
His regular schooling was of the scantiest. For two years, from the
age of eight to ten, he was at the Ealing school. It was a semi-public
school of the old unreformed type. What did a little boy learn there?
The rudiments of Latin, of arithmetic, and divinity may be regarded as
certain. Greek is improbable, and, in fact, I think my father had no
school foundation to build upon when he took up Greek at the age of
fifty-five in order to read in the original precisely what Aristotle
had written, and not what he was said to have written, about his
dissection of the heart.
For the rest, his experience of such a school, before Dr. Arnold's
reforming spirit had made itself felt over the country, is eloquent
testimony to the need of it.
Though my way of life [he writes] has made me acquainted
with all sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the
lowest, I deliberately affirm that the society I fell into at
school was the worst I have ever known. We boys were average
lads, with much the same inherent capacity for good and evil
as any others; but the people who were set over us cared about
as much for our intellectual and moral welfare as if they were
baby-farmers. We were left to the operation of the struggle
for existence among ourselves; bullying was the least of the
ill practices current among us.
One bright spot in these recollections was the licking of an
intolerable bully, a certain wild-cat element in him making up for
lack of weight. But, alas for justice, "I--the victor--had a black
eye, while he--the vanquished--had none, so that I got into disgrace
and he did not." A dozen years later he ran across this lad in
Sydney, acting as an ostler, a transported convict who had, moreover,
undergone more than one colonial conviction.
This brief school career was ended by the break-up of the Ealing
establishment. After Dr. Nicholas's death, his sons tried to carry on
the school; but the numbers fell off, and George Huxley, about 1835,
returned to his native town of Coventry as manager of the Coventry
Savings Bank, while his daughters eked out the slender family
resources by keeping school.
Meantime, it does not seem that the boy Tom, as he was generally
called, received much regular instruction. On the other hand, he
learned a great deal for himself. He had an inquiring mind, and a
singularly early turn for metaphysical speculation. He read everything
he could lay hands on in his father's library. We catch a glimpse
of him at twelve, lighting his candle before dawn, and, with blanket
pinned round his shoulders, sitting up in bed to read Hutton's
_Geology_. We see him discussing all manner of questions with his
parents and friends; and, indeed, his eager and inquiring mind made it
possible for him to have friends considerably older than himself. One
of these was his brother-in-law, Dr. Cooke of Coventry, who married
his sister Ellen in 1839. Through Dr. Cooke he became, as a boy,
interested in human anatomy, with results that deeply affected his
career for good and for evil.
The extraordinary attraction [he writes] I felt towards the
intricacies of living structure proved nearly fatal to me at
the outset. I was a mere boy--I think between thirteen and
fourteen years of age--when I was taken by some older student
friends of mine to the first _post-mortem_ examination I ever
attended. All my life I have been most unfortunately sensitive
to the disagreeables which attend anatomical pursuits, but on
this occasion my curiosity overpowered all other feelings,
and I spent two or three hours in gratifying it. I did not cut
myself, and none of the ordinary symptoms of dissection-poison
supervened; but poisoned I was somehow, and I remember sinking
into a strange state of apathy. By way of a last chance, I
was sent to the care of some good, kind people, friends of
my father's, who lived in a farmhouse in the heart of
Warwickshire. I remember staggering from my bed to the window,
on the bright spring morning after my arrival, and throwing
open the casement. Life seemed to come back on the wings of
the breeze, and to this day the faint odour of wood-smoke,
like that which floated across the farmyard in the early
morning, is as good to me as the "sweet south upon a bed of
violets." I soon recovered; but for years I suffered from
occasional paroxysms of internal pain, and from that time
my constant friend, hypochondriacal dyspepsia, commenced his
half-century of co-tenancy of my fleshly tabernacle.
In this life-long recurrence of suffering he was like his great friend
and leader, Darwin. Each worked to his utmost under a severe handicap,
which, it must be remembered, in Darwin's case, was by far the
more constant and more disabling, though, happily, an ample fortune
absolved him from the troubles of pecuniary stress.
Years afterwards, one of these "good, kind friends" calls up the
picture of "Tom Huxley looking so thin and ill, and pretending to make
hay with one hand, while in the other he held a German book."
How did he come thus early to teach himself German, a study which was
to have undreamed-of consequences in his future? He learned it so well
that, while still a young man, he could read it--rare faculty--almost
as swiftly as English; and he was one of the swiftest readers I have
known. Thus equipped, he had the advantage of being one of the
few English men of science who made it a practice to follow German
research at first hand, and turn its light upon their own work.
The learning of German was one half of the debt he owed to Carlyle,
the other being an intense hatred of shams of every sort and kind. He
had begun to read the fiery-tongued prophet in his earliest teens, and
caught his inspiration at once. _Sartor Resartus_ was for many years
his Enchiridion (he says), while the translations from the German, the
references to German literature and philosophy, fired him to read the
originals.
As to other languages, his testimonials in 1842 record that he reads
French with facility, and has a fair knowledge of Latin. Thus he took
the _Suites à Buffon_ with him on the _Rattlesnake_ as a reference
book in zoology. As to Latin, he was not content with a knowledge of
its use in natural science. Beyond the minimum knowledge needful
to interpret, or to confer, the "barbarous binomials" of scientific
nomenclature, he was led on to read early scientific works published
in Latin; and in philosophy, something of Spinoza; and later,
massive tomes of the Fathers, whether to barb his exquisite irony in
dissecting St. George Mivart's exposition of the orthodox Catholic
view of Evolution, or in the course of his studies in Biblical
criticism. Of Greek, mention has already been made. He employed his
late beginnings of the language not only to follow Aristotle's work
as an anatomist, but to aid his studies in Greek philosophy and New
Testament criticism, and to enjoy Homer in the original. In middle
life, too, he dipped sufficiently into Norwegian and Danish to grapple
with some original scientific papers. When he was fifteen, Italian as
well as German is set down by him in his list of things to be
learnt, though for some time the pressure of preparing for the London
matriculation barred the way; and on the voyage of the _Rattlesnake_
he spent many hours making out Dante with the aid of a dictionary.
No doubt, also, he must have read some Italian poetry with his wife
during their engagement and early married days, for she had a fair
acquaintance with Italian, as well as equalling his knowledge of
German. When he was past sixty and ill-health, cutting short his old
activities, had sent him to seek rest and change in Italy, he took
up Italian again, and plunged into the authorities on the very
interesting prehistoric archæology of Italy.
To return to his early development. There is extant a fragmentary
little journal of his, begun when he was fifteen, and kept irregularly
for a couple of years. Here the early bent of his mind is clearly
revealed; it prefigures the leading characteristics of his mature
intellect. He jots down any striking thought or saying he comes across
in the course of his reading; he makes practical experiments to test
his theories; above all, his insatiable curiosity to find out the
"why" and "how" of things makes him speculate on their causes, and
discuss with his friends the right and wrong of existing institutions.
This curiosity to make out how things work is common to most healthy
boys; to probe deep into the reasoned "why" is rare. It makes the
practical mechanic into the man of science. Possessing both these
qualities as he did, it is easy to understand his own description of
his early ambitions:--
As I grew older, my great desire was to be a mechanical
engineer, but the fates were against this; and, while very
young, I commenced the study of medicine under a medical
brother-in-law. But, though the Institute of Mechanical
Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I
have not all along been a sort of mechanical engineer _in
partibus infidelium_. I am now occasionally horrified to think
how little I ever knew or cared about medicine as the art of
healing. The only part of my professional course which
really and deeply interested me was physiology, which is
the mechanical engineering of living machines; and,
notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper
business, I am afraid there is very little of the genuine
naturalist in me. I never collected anything, and species
work was always a burden to me; what I cared for was the
architectural and engineering part of the business, the
working out the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands
and thousands of diverse living constructions, and the
modifications of similar apparatuses to serve diverse ends.
One or two typical extracts may be given from the _Journal_, which
opens with a quotation from Novalis: "Philosophy can bake no bread;
but it can prove for us God, freedom, and immortality. Which, now, is
more practical, Philosophy or Economy?" Later comes a quotation from
Lessing, which involved a cardinal principle that he claimed for
himself, and demanded of his pupils: accept no authority without
verifying it for yourself:--
I hate all people who want to found sects. It is not error,
but sects--it is not error, but sectarian error, nay, and even
sectarian truth, which causes the unhappiness of mankind.
Electricity interests him specially; among other experiments,
while theorizing upon them, he makes a galvanic battery "in view
of experiment to get crystallized carbon: got it deposited, but not
crystallized."
He is a young Radical in his opposition to anything like injustice,
though frankly admitting that youth is not infallible. One of his
boyish speculations was as to what would become of things if their
qualities were taken away. While on this quest, he got hold of Sir
William Hamilton's _Logic_, and read it to such good effect that when,
years afterwards, he sat down to the greater philosophers, he found
that he already had a clear notion of where the key of metaphysics
lay. The following extract from the _Journal_ shows that he already
had a characteristic point of view:--
Had a long talk with my mother and father about the right to
make Dissenters pay church rates, and whether there ought to
be any Establishment. I maintain that there ought not in both
cases--I wonder what will be my opinion ten years hence? I
think now that it is against all laws of justice to force
men to support a church with whose opinions they cannot
conscientiously agree. The argument that the rate is so small
is very fallacious. It is as much a sacrifice of principle to
do a little wrong as to do a great one.
His friend, George Anderson May, with whom the boy of fifteen has "a
long argument on the nature of the soul and the difference between
it and matter," was then a man of six and twenty, in business at
Hinckley.
I maintained that it could not be proved that matter is
_essentially_, as to its base, different from soul. Mr. M.
wittily said soul was the perspiration of matter.
We cannot find the absolute basis of matter; we only know it
by its properties; neither know we the soul in any other way.
_Cogito ergo sum_ is the only thing that we _certainly_ know.
Why may not soul and matter be of the same substance (i.e.,
basis whereon to fix qualities; for we cannot suppose a
quality to exist _per se_, it must have a something to
qualify), but with different qualities?
Hamilton's analysis of the Absolute, once learned, was never
forgotten. It was a philosophic touchstone, understood by the
boy, applied by the man. With the Absolute, an entity stripped of
perceptible qualities, an "hypostatized negation," he could have no
traffic. The Cartesian motto of thought as the essence of existence
became another fixed point for him, and his last questioning phrase
half suggests the line of reasoning which, as he afterwards put
it, asserts that, philosophically speaking, materialism is but
spiritualism turned inside out.