Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley Part 17

CCLx.x.xII

That State action always has been more or less misdirected, and always will be so, is, I believe, perfectly true. But I am not aware that it is more true of the action of men in their corporate capacity than it is of the doings of individuals. The wisest and most dispa.s.sionate man in existence, merely wis.h.i.+ng to go from one stile in a field to the opposite, will not walk quite straight--he is always going a little wrong, and always correcting himself; and I can only congratulate the individualist who is able to say that his general course of life has been of a less undulatory character. To abolish State action, because its direction is never more than approximately correct, appears to me to be much the same thing as abolis.h.i.+ng the man at the wheel altogether, because, do what he will, the s.h.i.+p yaws more or less. "Why should I be robbed of my property to pay for teaching another man's children?" is an individualist question, which is not unfrequently put as if it settles the whole business. Perhaps it does, but I find difficulties in seeing why it should. The parish in which I live makes me pay my share for the paving and lighting of a great many streets that I never pa.s.s through; and I might plead that I am robbed to smooth the way and lighten the darkness of other people. But I am afraid the parochial authorities would not let me off on this plea; and I must confess I do not see why they should.

CCLx.x.xIII

I cannot speak of my own knowledge, but I have every reason to believe that I came into this world a small reddish person, certainly without a gold spoon in my mouth, and in fact with no discernible abstract or concrete "rights" or property of any description. If a foot was not set upon me at once, as a squalling nuisance, it was either the natural affection of those about me, which I certainly had done nothing to deserve, or the fear of the law which, ages before my birth, was painfully built up by the society into which I intruded, that prevented that catastrophe. If I was nourished, cared for, taught, saved from the vagabondage of a wastrel, I certainly am not aware that I did anything to deserve those advantages. And, if I possess anything now, it strikes me that, though I may have fairly earned my day's wages for my day's work, and may justly call them my property--yet, without that organization of society, created out of the toil and blood of long generations before my time, I should probably have had nothing but a flint axe and an indifferent hut to call my own; and even those would be mine only so long as no stranger savage came my way.

So that if society, having, quite gratuitously, done all these things for me, asks me in turn to do something towards its preservation--even if that something is to contribute to the teaching of other men's children--I really, in spite of all my individualist learnings, feel rather ashamed to say no. And, if I were not ashamed, I cannot say that I think that society would be dealing unjustly with me in converting the moral obligation into a legal one. There is a manifest unfairness in letting all the burden be borne by the willing horse.

CCLx.x.xIV

It is impossible to insist too strongly upon the fact that efficient teachers of science and of technology are not to be made by the processes in vogue at ordinary training colleges. The memory loaded with mere bookwork is not the thing wanted--is, in fact, rather worse than useless--in the teacher of scientific subjects. It is absolutely essential that his mind should be full of knowledge and not of mere learning, and that what he knows should have been learned in the laboratory rather than in the library.

CCLx.x.xV

The attempt to form a just conception of the value of work done in any department of human knowledge, and of its significance as an indication of the intellectual and moral qualities of which it was the product, is an undertaking which must always be beset with difficulties, and may easily end in making the limitations of the appraiser more obvious than the true worth of that which he appraises. For the judgment of a contemporary is liable to be obscured by intellectual incompatibilities and warped by personal antagonisms; while the critic of a later generation, though he may escape the influence of these sources of error, is often ignorant, or forgetful, of the conditions under which the labours of his predecessors have been carried on. He is p.r.o.ne to lose sight of the fact that without their clearing of the ground and rough-hewing of the foundation-stones, the stately edifice of later builders could not have been erected.

CCLx.x.xVI

The vulgar ant.i.thesis of fact and theory is founded on a misconception of the nature of scientific theory, which is, or ought to be, no more than the expression of fact in a general form. Whatever goes beyond such expression is hypothesis; and hypotheses are not ends, but means. They should be regarded as instruments by which new lines of inquiry are indicated; or by the aid of which a provisional coherency and intelligibility may be given to seemingly disconnected groups of phenomena. The most useful of servants to the man of science, they are the worst of masters. And when the establishment of the hypothesis becomes the end, and fact is alluded to only so far as it suits the "Idee," science has no longer anything to do with the business.

CCLx.x.xVII

Scientific observation tell us that living birds form a group or cla.s.s of animals, through which a certain form of skeleton runs; and that this kind of skeleton differs in certain well-defined characters from that of mammals. On the other hand, if anyone utterly ignorant of osteology, but endowed with the artistic sense of form, were set before a bird skeleton and a mammalian skeleton, he would at once see that the two were similar and yet different. Very likely he would be unable to give clear expression to his just sense of the differences and resemblances; perhaps he would make great mistakes in detail if he tried.

Nevertheless, he would be able to draw from memory a couple of sketches, in which all the salient points of likeness and unlikeness would be reproduced with sufficient accuracy. The mere osteologist, however accurately he might put the resemblances and differences into words, if he lacked the artistic visualising faculty, might be hopelessly incompetent to perform any such feat; lost in details, it might not even occur to him that it was possible; or, still more probably, the habit of looking for differences might impair the perception of resemblances.

Under these circ.u.mstances, the artist might be led to higher and broader views, and thus be more useful to the progress of science than the osteological expert. Not that the former attains the higher truth by a different method; for the way of reaching truth is one and indivisible.

Whether he knows it or not, the artist has made a generalization from two sets of facts, which is perfectly scientific in form; and trustworthy so far as it rests upon the direct perception of similarities and dissimilarities. The only peculiarity of the artistic application of scientific method lies in the artist's power of visualizing the result of his mental processes, of embodying the facts of resemblance in a visible "type," and of showing the manner in which the differences may be represented as modifications of that type; he does, in fact, instinctively, what an architect, who desires to demonstrate the community of plan in certain ancient temples, does by the methodical construction of plans, sections, and elevations; the comparison of which will furnish him with the "type" of such temples.

Thus, what I may term the artistic fas.h.i.+on of dealing with anatomy is not only perfectly legitimate, but has been of great utility. The harm of it does not begin until tine attempt is made to get more out of this visual projection of thought than it contains; until the origin of the notion of "type" is forgotten and the speculative philosopher deludes himself with the supposition that the generalization suggested by fact is an "Idea" of the Pure Reason, with which fact must, somehow or other, be made to agree.

CCLx.x.xVIII

Flowers are the primers of the morphologist; those who run may read in them uniformity of type amidst endless diversity, singleness of plan with complex multiplicity of detail. As a musician might say, every natural group of flowering plants is a sort of visible fugue, wandering about a central theme which is never forsaken, however it may, momentarily, cease to be apparent.

CCLx.x.xIX

Like all the really great men of literature, Goethe added some of the qualities of the man of science to those of the artist, especially the habit of careful and patient observation of Nature. The great poet was no mere book-learned speculator. His acquaintance with mineralogy, geology, botany and osteology, the fruit of long and wide studies, would have sufficed to satisfy the requirements of a professoriate in those days, if only he could have pleaded ignorance of everything else.

Unfortunately for Goethe's credit with his scientific contemporaries, and, consequently, for the attention attracted by his work, he did not come forward as a man of science until the public had ranged him among the men of literature. And when the little men have thus cla.s.sified a big man, they consider that the last word has been said about him; it appears to the thought hardly decent on his part if he venture to stray beyond the speciality they have a.s.signed to him. It does not seem to occur to them that a clear intellect is an engine capable of supplying power to all sorts of mental factories; nor to admit that, as Goethe somewhere pathetically remarks, a man may have a right to live for himself as well as for the public; to follow the line of work that happens to interest him, rather than that which interests them.

On the face of the matter it is not obvious that the brilliant poet had less chance of doing good service in natural science than the dullest of dissectors and nomenclators. Indeed, as I have endeavoured to indicate, there was considerable reason, a hundred years ago, for thinking that an infusion of the artistic way of looking at things might tend to revivify the somewhat mummified body of technical zoology and botany. Great ideas were floating about; the artistic apprehension was needed to give these airy nothings a local habitation and a name; to convert vague suppositions into definite hypotheses. And I apprehend that it was just this service which Goethe rendered by writing his essays on the intermaxillary bone, on osteology generally, and on the metamorphoses of plants.

CCXC

All this is mere justice to Goethe; but, as it is the unpleasant duty of the historian to do justice upon, as well as to, great men, it behoves me to add that the germs of the worst faults of later ioeculative morphologists are no less visible in his writings than their great merits. In the artist-philosopher there was, at best, a good deal more artist than philosopher; and when Goethe ventured into the regions which belong to pure science, this excess of a virtue had all the consequences of a vice. "Trennen und zahlen lag nicht in meiner Natur," says he; but the mental operations of which "a.n.a.lysis and numeration" are partial expressions are indispensable for every step of progress beyond happy glimpses, even in morphology; while, in physiology and in physics, failure in the most exact performance of these operations involves sheer disaster, as indeed Goethe was afforded abundant opportunity of learning. Yet he never understood the sharp lessons he received, and put down to malice, or prejudice, the ill-reception of his unfortunate attempts to deal with purely physical problems.

CCXCI

There was never any lack of the scientific imagination about the great anatomist; and the charge of indifference to general ideas, sometimes brought against him, is stupidly unjust. But Cuvier was one of those happily endowed persons in whom genius never parts company with common-sense; and whose perception of the importance of sound method is so great that they look at even a truth, hit upon by those who pursue an essentially vicious method, with the sort of feeling with which an honest trader regards the winnings of a gambler. They hold it better to remain poor than obtain riches by the road that, as a rule, leads to ruin.

CCXCII

The irony of history is nowhere more apparent than in science. Here we see the men, over whose minds the coming events of the world of biology cast their shadows, doing their best to spoil their case in stating it; while the man who represented sound scientific method is doing his best to stay the inevitable progress of thought and bolster up antiquated traditions. The progress of knowledge during the last seventy years enables us to see that neither Geoffroy, nor Cuvier, was altogether right nor altogether wrong; and that they were meant to hunt m couples instead of pulling against one another. Science has need of servants of very different qualifications; of artistic constructors no less than of men of business; of people to design her palaces and of others to see that the materials are sound and well-fitted together; of some to spur investigators, and of others to keep their heads cool. The only would-be servants, who are entirely unprofitable, are those who do not take the trouble to interrogate Nature, but imagine vain things about her; and spin, from their inner consciousness, webs, as exquisitely symmetrical as those of the most geometrical of spiders, but alas! as easily torn to pieces by some inconsidered bluebottle of a fact.

CCXCIII

There is always a Cape Horn in one's life that one either weathers or wrecks one's self on.

CCXCIV

A Local Museum should be exactly what its name implies, viz., "Local"--ill.u.s.trating local Geology, local Botany, local Zoology, and local Archaeology.

Such a museum, if residents who are interested in these sciences take proper pains, may be brought to a great degree of perfection and be unique of its kind. It will tell both natives and strangers exactly what they want to know, and possess great scientific interest and importance.

Whereas the ordinary lumber-room of clubs from New Zealand, Hindoo idols, sharks' teeth, mangy monkeys, scorpions, and conch sh.e.l.ls--who shall describe the weary inutility of it? It is really worse than nothing, because it leads the unwary to look for the objects of science elsewhere than under their noses. What they want to know is that their "America is here," as Wilhelm Meister has it.

CCXCV

A man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly that which he knows, and that which he believes, will always enlist the good-will and the respect, however much he may fail in winning the a.s.sent, of his fellow men.

CCXCVI

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

CCXCVII

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.

I have no _a priori_ objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about _a 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.

CCXCVIII