The award of the Royal Medal was felt by Huxley to be a turning-point.
It was something which convinced the "practical" people who used to
scoff at his "dreamy" notions, and brought them to urge him on a more
"dreamy" course than ever he dreamed of. "However," he remarks, "I
take very much my own course now, even as I have done before--Huxley
all over." Without being blinded by any vanity, he saw in the award
and the general estimate in which it was held a finger-post showing
as clearly as anything can what was the true career lying open before
him. Ambitious in the current sense of worldly success he was not. The
praise of men stirred a haunting mistrust of their judgment and his
own worthiness. Honours he valued as evidences of power; but no more.
What possessed him was, as he confessed in a letter meant only for
the eye of his future wife, "an enormous longing after the highest and
best in all shapes--a longing which haunts me and is the demon which
ever impels me to work, and will let me have no rest unless I am doing
his behests." With the sense of power stirring within him, he
refused to be beholden to any man. Patronage he abhorred in an ago
of patronage. He was ready to accept a helping hand from any one who
thought him capable of forwarding the great cause in ever so small a
way; but on no other terms. If the time had come to speak out on any
matter, he was resolved to let no merely personal influence restrain
him. He cared only for the praise or blame of the understanding few.
Whatever the popular judgment, he knew there was a work to be done and
that he had power to do it; and this was his personal ambition--to
do that work in the world, and to do it without cant and humbug and
self-seeking. Such were the aims that, newly returned to England, he
confides to the sister who had ever prophesied great things of "her
boy"; and in the end he made good the works spoken so boldly, yet
surely in no mere spirit of boasting. He "left his mark somewhere,
clear and distinct," without taint of the insincerities which he had
an almost morbid dread of discovering in any act of his own.
It was not every one who could dare to range so far and wide as Huxley
did from the original line of investigation he had taken up. Friends
warned him against what appeared to be a scattering of his energies.
If he devoted himself to that morphology of the Invertebrates in which
his new and illuminating conceptions had promptly earned the Royal
Medal, he would easily be the first in his field. But what he did was
in great part of set purpose. He was no mere collector of specimens,
no mere describer of species. He sought the living processes which
determined natural groups; the theories he formed needed verification
in various directions. These excursions from the primary line of
research were of great value in broadening the basis of his knowledge.
He also deliberately set aside the years 1854-60 as a period in which
to make himself master of the branches of science cognate to his own,
so that he should be ready for any special pursuits in any of them.
For he did not know what was to be his task after the work that had
fallen to him, not of his own choice, at the School of Mines. He was
to ground himself in each department by monographic work, and by
1860 might fairly look forward to fifteen or twenty years of
"Meisterjahre," when, with the comprehensive views arising from such
training, it should be possible to give a new and healthier direction
to all biological science. Meanwhile, opportunities must be seized at
the risk of a reputation for desultoriness.
But the irony of circumstances diverted much of his energy into yet
more diverse fields. When Sir Henry de la Beche first offered him the
posts of Palæontologist and Lecturer on Natural History vacated by
Professor Forbes, he says:--
I refused the former point blank, and accepted the latter
only provisionally, telling Sir Henry that I did not care for
fossils, and that I should give up Natural History as soon as
I could get a physiological post. But I held the office
for thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has been
palæontological.
Palæontology was his business, and he became a Master in it also,
with the result that he forged himself a mighty weapon for use in the
struggle over the Origin of Species.
In one of his later Essays he compares the study of human physiology
to the Atlantic Ocean:--
Like the Atlantic between the Old and the New Worlds, its
waves wash the shores of the two worlds of matter and of mind;
its tributary streams flow from both; through its waters, as
yet unfurrowed by the keel of any Columbus, lies the road, if
such there be, from the one to the other; far away from that
North-West Passage of mere speculation in which so many brave
souls have been helplessly frozen up.
Such was the spirit in which, after his long day's work, he added to
his labours in physical science a search in another, and to his notion
a cognate province of thought and speculation. Many a sleepless night
in these years the candle was lighted beside his bed, and for a couple
of hours after midnight he would devour works on philosophy--English,
German, and French, and occasionally Latin. To a mind at once
constructive and intensely critical of unsound construction he added a
quality possessed by few professed philosophers--a large knowledge of
the workings of life, of the human thinking machine, in addition
to various other branches of physical science. As he put it, the
laboratory is the forecourt to the temple of philosophy. For the
method of the laboratory is but the strict application of the one
sound and fruitful mode of reasoning--the method of verification by
experiment. Evidence must be tested before being trusted. The first
duty of such a method is to question in order to find good reason;
Goethe's "tätige Skepsis," a scepticism or questioning which seeks to
overcome itself by finding good standing-ground beyond. Authority as
such is nothing till verified anew. The creeds of ancient sages, the
dogmas of more modern date, must equally bear the light of widening
knowledge and the tests that prove the gold or clay of their
foundations, the stability of the successive steps by which they
proceed.
In all this reading Huxley found nothing to shake what he had learnt
long before from Hamilton--the limits set to human knowledge and
the impossibility of attaining to the ultimate reality behind the
phenomena presented to our cognition. The problems of philosophy, set
forth with unsurpassed clearness for all who will read in our great
English writers, were not solved by soaring into intellectual mists.
To those who declared they had attained this ultimate knowledge by
their own inner light or through an alleged revelation in historical
experience, the question remained to be put: How do you verify your
assertion? Is the historical evidence on which you build trustworthy?
And if in certain departments this evidence is clearly untenable,
what guarantee have you that in other departments evidence of similar
character is tenable? The fine-spun abstractions of the Platonists
and their kin, unchecked by a natural science which had not yet the
appliances necessary for its growth; the orthodoxies of the various
churches, so singularly differentiated in the course of development
from the simplicity of their nominal founder--these were based upon
assumptions for which the seeker after reasoned evidence could find no
valid support. Ten years before he coined the word "Agnostic" to label
his attitude towards the unproved, whether likely or unlikely, in
contradistinction to the Gnostics, who professed to "know" from within
apart from external proof, Huxley described the Agnostic position he
had already reached--the position of suspending judgment where actual
proof is not possible; the attitude of mind which regards the words
"I believe" as a momentous assertion, not to be uttered on incomplete
grounds. Writing to Charles Kingsley in 1860, he says:--
I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no
reason for believing in it; but, on the other hand, I have no
means of disproving it.
Pray understand that I have no à priori objections to the
doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature
can trouble himself about à priori difficulties. Give me such
evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and
I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half
so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the
indestructibility of matter. Whoso clearly appreciates
all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have
no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its
marvellousness. But the longer I live the more obvious it is
to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say
and to feel, "I believe such and such to be true." All the
greatest rewards, and all the heaviest penalties of existence,
cling about that act. The universe is one and the same
throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling
some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I
shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not
rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great
mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms.
It is of no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities.
I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the
inverse square, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon
weaker convictions. I dare not if I would.
From such a point of view intellectual veracity takes on a moral
aspect; indeed, it is a pillar of morality. Disregard of it has led
to incalculable social wrong and individual suffering, oppressions and
persecutions, unprogressive obscurantism, joined with perverted ideals
and intellectual arrest. "Ecrasez l'infâme," cried the reforming
Voltaire; his "infamous" was very much this perverting influence,
exaggerated and armed with power, which had made the great
organization of the Roman Church in his time a monstrous instrument of
autocratic tradition, cruel, rapacious, blindly intolerant, jealous
of light and liberty. In England the growth of political liberty had
deprived the darkest lights of the Church of almost all power for
active interference in the administration of the State, though the
pressure of traditionalism exercised itself less crudely, if scarce
less surely, in the Universities, the Press, religious opinion, and
the army of conventional respectability. So strong was it in social
influence that a man, openly professing to make a guide of his reason
instead of his parson, was liable to be pushed outside the pale.