Professor Huxley

Professor Huxley had an honesty of mind which in itself was genius. He knew poverty from the inside as well as the outside. His people were not very well off, and at Rotherhithe he came into contact with the problem of the slums, which had a great influence on a large part of his life.

He became a naval surgeon and studied biology, but recognition of his work came tardily. He wrote to the girl who was to become his wife to ask whether she would have him sink his ambitions for the sake of the easy competence of a routine employment, or would wait.

There was only one course, he said, which had any hope and peace for him. If he took any other he would have before him the spectre of a wasted life, a vision of the servant who hid his talent in a napkin and buried it.

He was a great teacher as well as a discoverer with a rare faculty of genius in research, and he was presently to emerge into the view of the wider social world, so often indifferent to the discoveries of science but occasionally roused to interest by an idea which runs counter to the accepted view or by its nature appears revolutionary.

Such a discovery was the great generalisation that burst on the world with the publication by Darwin of the Origin of Species. The Darwinian theory was stoned in the marketplace.

A large body of religious opinion was marshalled against it, and many men of scientific authority fiercely criticised it. Huxley became convinced only after searching examination of the facts laid before him. His attitude was well expressed in something he said when the controversy was at its height :

'Belated on a roadless common on a dark night, if a lantern were offered to me should I refuse it because it shed an imperfect light ? I think not, I think not.'

 

Huxley's championship influenced many people to study for themselves what Darwin had said instead of allowing themselves to be rushed off their feet by the indignant but uninformed attacks of antagonists. Huxley could never hear a half-truth with patience, and he carried on the struggle unceasingly.

He neither .denied nor affirmed the immortality of man; to his scientifically trained mind proof was essential to belief. with him truth was religion, and in pursuing it he served the God who made him the man he was.

 

 

 

 

 

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