Huxley's work in education was his direct contribution to the social
improvement of the world. Not instruction merely--for, "though
under-instruction is a bad thing, it is not impossible that
over-instruction may be a worse"--but through education, the bringing
out of the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual
citizen, which is the one condition of the success of a State. And
this condition, resting on the basic faith in veracity, he felt to be
above all the work of science, the Cinderella of thought. For, as he
wrote:--
If the diseases of Society consist in the weakness of its
faith in the existence of the God of the theologians, in a
future state, and in uncaused volitions, the indication, as
the doctors say, is to suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose
bickerings about things of which they know nothing have
been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that
evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the
unknowable.
Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these
high matters. She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and
provides the dinner; and is rewarded by being told that she is
a base creature, devoted to low and material interests. But in
her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken of the pair
of shrews who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the order
which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great
drama of evolution, with its full share of pity and terror,
but also with abundant goodness and beauty, unrolls itself
before her eyes; and she learns, in her heart of hearts, the
lesson, that the foundation of morality is to have done, once
and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that
for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible
propositions about things beyond the possibilities of
knowledge.
She knows that the safety of morality lies neither in the
adoption of this or that philosophical speculation, or this
or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in
that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization
upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical
disease after physical trespasses. And of that firm and lively
faith it is her high mission to be the priestess.
In a world the elements of which are thus mixed with pity and terror,
goodness and beauty, he held himself, like the majority of men, as
neither optimist nor pessimist. "The world is neither so good, nor so
bad, as it conceivably might be; and as most of us have reason, now
and again, to discover that it can be."
On the one side, the optimistic dogma that this is the best of all
possible worlds is little better than a libel on possibility. On
behalf of the modified optimism that benevolence is on the whole the
regulating principle of the sentient world, it may be granted that
there are hosts of subtle contrivances devoted to the production of
pleasure and the avoidance of pain; but, if so, why is it not equally
proper to say of the equally numerous arrangements, the no less
necessary result of which is the production of pain, that they are
evidences of malevolence? Translating these facts into moral
terms, the goodness of the hand that aids Blake's "little lamb" is
neutralized by the wickedness of the other hand that eggs on his
"tiger burning bright," and the course of nature will appear to be
neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral.
On the other side, though this may not be the best of all possible
worlds, to say that it is the worst is "mere petulant nonsense."
With a courage based on hours and days of personal knowledge, he
exclaims:--
There can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person
that mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly well
with vastly less happiness and far more misery than find their
way into the lives of nine people out of ten. If each and
all of us had been visited by an attack of neuralgia, or
of extreme mental depression, for one hour in every
twenty-four--a supposition which many tolerably vigorous
people know, to their cost, is not extravagant--the burden
of life would have been immensely increased without much
practical hindrance to its general course. Men with any
manhood in them find life quite worth living under worse
conditions than these.
Moreover, another fact utterly contradicts the hypothesis that the
sentient world is directed by malevolence:--
A vast multitude of pleasures, and these among the purest and
the best, are superfluities, bits of good which are, to all
appearance, unnecessary as inducements to live, and are, so
to speak, thrown into the bargain of life. To those who
experience them, few delights can be more entrancing than
such as are afforded by natural beauty, or by the arts, and
especially by music; but they are products of, rather than
factors in, evolution, and it is probable that they are known,
in any considerable degree, to but a very small proportion of
mankind.
To speak, then, of the course and intention of nature in terms
of human thought, we must say that its governing principle is
intellectual and not moral. It is a logical process materialized, with
pleasures and pains that fall, in most cases, without the slightest
reference to moral desert.
From the moralist's point of view the animal world, in which our own
cosmic nature has been severely trained for millions of years, is no
better than a gladiatorial show, and we cannot expect, within a few
centuries, to subdue the masterfulness of this inborn tendency, in
part necessary to our existence, to purely ethical ends. So deep
rooted is it that the struggle may last till the end of time. But, he
exclaims with a ringing note--
I see no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will,
guided by sound principles of investigation, and organized in
common effort, may modify the conditions of existence for a
period longer than that now covered by history. And much may
be done to change the nature of man himself. The intelligence
which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful
guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards
curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.
In the long struggle pain and sorrow are inevitable. The aim of man
is not to escape these, but rather to earn peace and self-respect. To
this he added a special point, in a letter of 1890:--
If you will accept the results of the experience of an old
man who has had a very chequered existence--and has nothing
to hope for except a few years of quiet downhill--there
is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human
affections), nothing that satisfies quiet reflection, except
the sense of having worked according to one's capacity and
light, to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of
all sorts. That was the lesson I learned from Carlyle's books
when I was a boy, and it has stuck by me all my life.
The animal world, then, having the principle of its existence in a
state of war, society was created by the first men who substituted
the state of mutual peace for the state of mutual war. The object of
society was the limitation of the struggle for existence. That shape
of society most nearly approaches perfection in which the war of
individual against individual is most strictly limited. Happiness
and freedom of action are restricted to a sphere where they do not
interfere with the happiness and freedom of others; the common weal
becomes an essential part of individual welfare. In short, even if
under the most perfect conditions "Witless will always serve his
master," man aims to escape from his place in the animal kingdom,
founded on the free development of the principle of non-moral
evolution, and to establish a kingdom of Man governed upon the
principle of moral evolution. For society not only has a moral end,
but in its perfection social life is embodied morality. Moral purpose
is "an article of exclusively human manufacture--and very much to our
credit."
To society, then, its members owe a vital debt; for society, the work
of the ethical man, has slowly and painfully built up around us a
fabric of defence against barbarism, the work of the non-ethical man.
This debt we are bound to repay by furthering in ourselves the good
work of human fellowship, and by striving to improve the conditions
of our social life; and the means thereto are self-discipline,
self-support, intelligent effort, not unreasoning violence with its
disruption of the defences against anarchic barbarism.
Yet if society, in making life easier, multiplies the species in
excess of the means of subsistence, it raises up within itself, in
the intensest form, the unlimited struggle for existence. "This is the
true riddle of the Sphinx, and every nation which does not solve
it will, sooner or later, be devoured by the monster itself has
generated."
Improvement there has been during the historical period: with goodwill
and clear thought Huxley looked for ever-accelerating improvement,
though contemporary civilizations seemed neither to embody any worthy
ideal nor even to possess the merit of stability. In the atmosphere
of plain verity, where, as he said, "my business is to teach my
aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts
harmonize with my aspirations," he confidently looked for the hopes of
the future; but were it not so, he solemnly declared--
If there is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of
the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the
increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over
Nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows
that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and
the intensity of want, with its concomitant physical and moral
degradation among the masses of the people, I should hail the
advent of some kindly comet which would sweep the whole affair
away as a desirable consummation.
In the matter of personal conduct he rejected the notions that the
moral government of the world is imperfect without a system of future
rewards and punishments, and that such a system is indispensable to
practical morality. "I believe," he said, "that both these dogmas are
very mischievous lies."
There is no need for future compensation because, so he firmly
believed, "the Divine Government--if we may use such a phrase to
express the sum of the 'customs of matter'--is wholly just....But for
this to be clear we must bear in mind what almost all forget, that
the rewards of life are contingent upon obedience to the _whole_
law--physical as well as moral--and that moral obedience will not
atone for physical sin, or _vice versâ_." Thus he could declare "the
more I know intimately of the lives of other men (to say nothing of my
own), the more obvious it is that the wicked does _not_ flourish, nor
is the righteous punished." "The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as
certain as that of the earth to the sun, and more so--for experimental
proof of the fact is within reach of us all--nay, is before us all in
our own lives, if we had but the eyes to see it." Nevertheless--
It is to be recollected, in view of the apparent discrepancy
between men's acts and their rewards, that Nature is juster
than we are. She takes into account what a man brings with him
into this world, which human justice cannot do. If I, born a
bloodthirsty and savage brute, inheriting these qualities from
others, kill you, my fellow-men will very justly hang me; but
I shall not be visited with the horrible remorse which would
be my real punishment if, my nature being higher, I had done
the same thing.