Chapter M: O. B. C (4)

HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY (1825-1895), English biologist, was born on the 4th of May 1825 at Ealing, where his father, George Huxley, was senior assistant-master in the school of Dr Nicholas. This was an establishment of repute, and is at any rate remarkable for having produced two men with so little in common in after life as Huxley and Cardinal Newman. The cardinal's brother, Francis William, had been "captain" of the school in 1821. Huxley was a seventh child (as his father had also been), and the youngest who survived infancy. Of Huxley's ancestry no more is ascertainable than in the case of most middle-class families. He himself thought it sprang from the Cheshire Huxleys of Huxley Hall. Different branches migrated south, one, now extinct, reaching London, where its members were apparently engaged in commerce. They established themselves for four generations at Wyre Hall, near Edmonton, and one was knighted by Charles II. Huxley describes his paternal race as "mainly Iberian mongrels, with a good dash of Norman and a little Saxon."[1] From his father he thought he derived little except a quick temper and the artistic faculty which proved of great service to him and reappeared in an even more striking degree in his daughter, the Hon. Mrs Collier. "Mentally and physically," he wrote, "I am a piece of my mother." Her maiden name was Rachel Withers. "She came of Wiltshire people," he adds, and describes her as "a typical example of the Iberian variety." He tells us that "her most distinguishing characteristic was rapidity of thought.... That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength" (_Essays_, i. 4). One of the not least striking facts in Huxley's life is that of education in the formal sense he received none. "I had two years of a pandemonium of a school (between eight and ten), and after that neither help nor sympathy in any intellectual direction till I reached manhood" (_Life_, ii. 145). After the death of Dr Nicholas the Ealing school broke up, and Huxley's father returned about 1835 to his native town, Coventry, where he had obtained a small appointment. Huxley was left to his own devices; few histories of boyhood could offer any parallel. At twelve he was sitting up in bed to read Hutton's _Geology_. His great desire was to be a mechanical engineer; it ended in his devotion to "the mechanical engineering of living machines." His curiosity in this direction was nearly fatal; a _post-mortem_ he was taken to between thirteen and fourteen was followed by an illness which seems to have been the starting-point of the ill-health which pursued him all through life. At fifteen he devoured Sir William Hamilton's _Logic_, and thus acquired the taste for metaphysics, which he cultivated to the end. At seventeen he came under the influence of Thomas Carlyle's writings. Fifty years later he wrote: "To make things clear and get rid of cant and shows of all sorts. This was the lesson I learnt from Carlyle's books when I was a boy, and it has stuck by me all my life" (_Life_, ii. 268). Incidentally they led him to begin to learn German; he had already acquired French. At seventeen Huxley, with his elder brother James, commenced regular medical studies at Charing Cross Hospital, where they had both obtained scholarships. He studied under Wharton Jones, a physiologist who never seems to have attained the reputation he deserved. Huxley said of him: "I do not know that I ever felt so much respect for a teacher before or since" (_Life_, i. 20). At twenty he passed his first M.B. examination at the University of London, winning the gold medal for anatomy and physiology; W. H. Ransom, the well-known Nottingham physician, obtaining the exhibition. In 1845 he published, at the suggestion of Wharton Jones, his first scientific paper, demonstrating the existence of a hitherto unrecognized layer in the inner sheath of hairs, a layer that has been known since as "Huxley's layer."

Something had to be done for a livelihood, and at the suggestion of a fellow-student, Mr (afterwards Sir Joseph) Fayrer, he applied for an appointment in the navy. He passed the necessary examination, and at the same time obtained the qualification of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was "entered on the books of Nelson's old ship, the 'Victory,' for duty at Haslar Hospital." Its chief, Sir John Richardson, who was a well-known Arctic explorer and naturalist, recognized Huxley's ability, and procured for him the post of surgeon to H.M.S. "Rattlesnake," about to start for surveying work in Torres Strait. The commander, Captain Owen Stanley, was a son of the bishop of Norwich and brother of Dean Stanley, and wished for an officer with some scientific knowledge. Besides Huxley the "Rattlesnake" also carried a naturalist by profession, John Macgillivray, who, however, beyond a dull narrative of the expedition, accomplished nothing. The "Rattlesnake" left England on the 3rd of December 1846, and was ordered home after the lamented death of Captain Stanley at Sydney, to be paid off at Chatham on the 9th of November 1850. The tropical seas teem with delicate surface-life, and to the study of this Huxley devoted himself with unremitting devotion. At that time no known methods existed by which it could be preserved for study in museums at home. He gathered a magnificent harvest in the almost unreaped field, and the conclusions he drew from it were the beginning of the revolution in zoological science which he lived to see accomplished.

Baron Cuvier (1769-1832), whose classification still held its ground, had divided the animal kingdom into four great _embranchements_. Each of these corresponded to an independent archetype, of which the "idea" had existed in the mind of the Creator. There was no other connexion between these classes, and the "ideas" which animated them were, as far as one can see, arbitrary. Cuvier's groups, without their theoretical basis, were accepted by K. E. von Baer (1792-1876). The "idea" of the group, or archetype, admitted of endless variation within it; but this was subordinate to essential conformity with the archetype, and hence Cuvier deduced the important principle of the "correlation of parts," of which he made such conspicuous use in palaeontological reconstruction. Meanwhile the "Naturphilosophen," with J. W. Goethe (1749-1832) and L. Oken (1779-1851), had in effect grasped the underlying principle of correlation, and so far anticipated evolution by asserting the possibility of deriving specialized from simpler structures. Though they were still hampered by idealistic conceptions, they established morphology. Cuvier's four great groups were Vertebrata, Mollusca, Articulata and Radiata. It was amongst the members of the last class that Huxley found most material ready to his hand in the seas of the tropics. It included organisms of the most varied kind, with nothing more in common than that their parts were more or less distributed round a centre. Huxley sent home "communication after communication to the Linnean Society," then a somewhat somnolent body, "with the same result as that obtained by Noah when he sent the raven out of the ark" (_Essays_, i. 13). His important paper, _On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of Medusae_, met with a better fate. It was communicated by the bishop of Norwich to the Royal Society, and printed by it in the _Philosophical Transactions_ in 1849. Huxley united, with the Medusae, the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps, to form a class to which he subsequently gave the name of Hydrozoa. This alone was no inconsiderable feat for a young surgeon who had only had the training of the medical school. But the ground on which it was done has led to far-reaching theoretical developments. Huxley realized that something more than superficial characters were necessary in determining the affinities of animal organisms. He found that all the members of the class consisted of two membranes enclosing a central cavity or stomach. This is characteristic of what are now called the Coelenterata. All animals higher than these have been termed Coelomata; they possess a distinct body-cavity in addition to the stomach. Huxley went further than this, and the most profound suggestion in his paper is the comparison of the two layers with those which appear in the germ of the higher animals. The consequences which have flowed from this prophetic generalization of the _ectoderm_ and _endoderm_ are familiar to every student of evolution. The conclusion was the more remarkable as at the time he was not merely free from any evolutionary belief, but actually rejected it. The value of Huxley's work was immediately recognized. On returning to England in 1850 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the following year, at the age of twenty-six, he not merely received the Royal medal, but was elected on the council. With absolutely no aid from any one he had placed himself in the front rank of English scientific men. He secured the friendship of Sir J. D. Hooker and John Tyndall, who remained his lifelong friends. The Admiralty retained him as a nominal assistant-surgeon, in order that he might work up the observations he had made during the voyage of the "Rattlesnake." He was thus enabled to produce various important memoirs, especially those on certain Ascidians, in which he solved the problem of _Appendicularia_--an organism whose place in the animal kingdom Johannes Müller had found himself wholly unable to assign--and on the morphology of the Cephalous Mollusca.

Richard Owen, then the leading comparative anatomist in Great Britain, was a disciple of Cuvier, and adopted largely from him the deductive explanation of anatomical fact from idealistic conceptions. He superadded the evolutionary theories of Oken, which were equally idealistic, but were altogether repugnant to Cuvier. Huxley would have none of either. Imbued with the methods of von Baer and Johannes Müller, his methods were purely inductive. He would not hazard any statement beyond what the facts revealed. He retained, however, as has been done by his successors, the use of archetypes, though they no longer represented fundamental "ideas" but generalizations of the essential points of structure common to the individuals of each class. He had not wholly freed himself, however, from archetypal trammels. "The doctrine," he says, "that every natural group is organized after a definite archetype ... seems to me as important for zoology as the doctrine of definite proportions for chemistry." This was in 1853. He further stated: "There is no progression from a lower to a higher type, but merely a more or less complete evolution of one type" (_Phil. Trans._, 1853, p. 63). As Chalmers Mitchell points out, this statement is of great historical interest. Huxley definitely uses the word "evolution," and admits its existence _within_ the great groups. He had not, however, rid himself of the notion that the archetype was a property inherent in the group. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance he made in 1852, was unable to convert him to evolution in its widest sense (_Life_, i. 168). He could not bring himself to acceptance of the theory--owing, no doubt, to his rooted aversion from à priori reasoning--without a mechanical conception of its mode of operation. In his first interview with Darwin, which seems to have been about the same time, he expressed his belief "in the sharpness of the lines of demarcation between natural groups," and was received with a humorous smile (_Life_, i. 169).

The naval medical service exists for practical purposes. It is not surprising, therefore, that after his three years' nominal employment Huxley was ordered on active service. Though without private means of any kind, he resigned. The navy, however, retains the credit of having started his scientific career as well as that of Hooker and Darwin. Huxley was now thrown on his own resources, the immediate prospects of which were slender enough. As a matter of fact, he had not to wait many months. His friend, Edward Forbes, was appointed to the chair of natural history in Edinburgh, and in July 1854 he succeeded him as lecturer at the School of Mines and as naturalist to the Geological Survey in the following year. The latter post he hesitated at first to accept, as he "did not care for fossils" (_Essays_, i. 15). In 1855 he married Miss H. A. Heathorn, whose acquaintance he had made in Sydney. They were engaged when Huxley could offer nothing but the future promise of his ability. The confidence of his devoted helpmate was not misplaced, and her affection sustained him to the end, after she had seen him the recipient of every honour which English science could bestow. His most important research belonging to this period was the Croonian Lecture delivered before the Royal Society in 1858 on "The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull." In this he completely and finally demolished, by applying as before the inductive method, the idealistic, if in some degree evolutionary, views of its origin which Owen had derived from Goethe and Oken. This finally disposed of the "archetype," and may be said once for all to have liberated the English anatomical school from the deductive method.

In 1859 _The Origin of Species_ was published. This was a momentous event in the history of science, and not least for Huxley. Hitherto he had turned a deaf ear to evolution. "I took my stand," he says, "upon two grounds: firstly, that ... the evidence in favour of transmutation was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena" (_Life_, i. 168). Huxley had studied Lamarck "attentively," but to no purpose. Sir Charles Lyell "was the chief agent in smoothing the road for Darwin. For consistent uniformitarianism postulates evolution as much in the organic as in the inorganic world" (l.c.); and Huxley found in Darwin what he had failed to find in Lamarck, an intelligible hypothesis good enough as a working basis. Yet with the transparent candour which was characteristic of him, he never to the end of his life concealed the fact that he thought it wanting in rigorous proof. Darwin, however, was a naturalist; Huxley was not. He says: "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" (_Essays_, i. 7). But the solution of the problem of organic evolution must work upwards from the initial stages, and it is precisely for the study of these that "species-work" is necessary. Darwin, by observing the peculiarities in the distribution of the plants which he had collected in the Galapagos, was started on the path that led to his theory. Anatomical research had only so far led to transcendental hypothesis, though in Huxley's hands it had cleared the decks of that lumber. He quotes with approval Darwin's remark that "no one has a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many" (_Essays_, ii. 283). The rigorous proof which Huxley demanded was the production of species sterile to one another by selective breeding (_Life_, i. 193). But this was a misconception of the question. Sterility is a physiological character, and the specific differences which the theory undertook to account for are morphological; there is no necessary nexus between the two. Huxley, however, felt that he had at last a secure grip of evolution. He warned Darwin: "I will stop at no point as long as clear reasoning will carry me further" (_Life_, i. 172). Owen, who had some evolutionary tendencies, was at first favourably disposed to Darwin's theory, and even claimed that he had to some extent anticipated it in his own writings. But Darwin, though he did not thrust it into the foreground, never flinched from recognizing that man could not be excluded from his theory. "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" (_Origin_, ed. i. 488). Owen could not face the wrath of fashionable orthodoxy. In his Rede Lecture he endeavoured to save the position by asserting that man was clearly marked off from all other animals by the anatomical structure of his brain. This was actually inconsistent with known facts, and was effectually refuted by Huxley in various papers and lectures, summed up in 1863 in _Man's Place in Nature_. This "monkey damnification" of mankind was too much even for the "veracity" of Carlyle, who is said to have never forgiven it. Huxley had not the smallest respect for authority as a basis for belief, scientific or otherwise. He held that scientific men were morally bound "to try all things and hold fast to that which is good" (_Life_, ii. 161). Called upon in 1862, in the absence of the president, to deliver the presidential address to the Geological Society, he disposed once for all of one of the principles accepted by geologists, that similar fossils in distinct regions indicated that the strata containing them were contemporary. All that could be concluded, he pointed out, was that the general order of succession was the same. In 1854 Huxley had refused the post of palaeontologist to the Geological Survey; but the fossils for which he then said that he "did not care" soon acquired importance in his eyes, as supplying evidence for the support of the evolutionary theory. The thirty-one years during which he occupied the chair of natural history at the School of Mines were largely occupied with palaeontological research. Numerous memoirs on fossil fishes established many far-reaching morphological facts. The study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstrating, in the course of lectures on birds, delivered at the College of Surgeons in 1867, the fundamental affinity of the two groups which he united under the title of Sauropsida. An incidental result of the same course was his proposed rearrangement of the zoological regions into which P. L. Sclater had divided the world in 1857. Huxley anticipated, to a large extent, the results at which botanists have since arrived: he proposed as primary divisions, Arctogaea--to include the land areas of the northern hemisphere--and Notogaea for the remainder. Successive waves of life originated in and spread from the northern area, the survivors of the more ancient types finding successively a refuge in the south. Though Huxley had accepted the Darwinian theory as a working hypothesis, he never succeeded in firmly grasping it in detail. He thought "evolution might conceivably have taken place without the development of groups possessing the characters of species" (_Essays_, v. 41). His palaeontological researches ultimately led him to dispense with Darwin. In 1892 he wrote: "The doctrine of evolution is no speculation, but a generalization of certain facts ... classed by biologists under the heads of Embryology and of Palaeontology" (_Essays_, v. 42). Earlier in 1881 he had asserted even more emphatically that if the hypothesis of evolution "had not existed, the palaeontologist would have had to invent it" (_Essays_, iv. 44).

From 1870 onwards he was more and more drawn away from scientific research by the claims of public duty. Some men yield the more readily to such demands, as their fulfilment is not unaccompanied by public esteem. But he felt, as he himself said of Joseph Priestley, "that he was a man and a citizen before he was a philosopher, and that the duties of the two former positions are at least as imperative as those of the latter" (_Essays_, iii. 13). From 1862 to 1884 he served on no less than ten Royal Commissions, dealing in every case with subjects of great importance, and in many with matters of the gravest moment to the community. He held and filled with invariable dignity and distinction more public positions than have perhaps ever fallen to the lot of a scientific man in England. From 1871 to 1880 he was a secretary of the Royal Society. From 1881 to 1885 he was president. For honours he cared little, though they were within his reach; it is said that he might have received a peerage. He accepted, however, in 1892, a Privy Councillorship, at once the most democratic and the most aristocratic honour accessible to an English citizen. In 1870 he was president of the British Association at Liverpool, and in the same year was elected a member of the newly constituted London School Board. He resigned the latter position in 1872, but in the brief period during which he acted, probably more than any man, he left his mark on the foundations of national elementary education. He made war on the scholastic methods which wearied the mind in merely taxing the memory; the children were to be prepared to take their place worthily in the community. Physical training was the basis; domestic economy, at any rate for girls, was insisted upon, and for all some development of the aesthetic sense by means of drawing and singing. Reading, writing and arithmetic were the indispensable tools for acquiring knowledge, and intellectual discipline was to be gained through the rudiments of physical science. He insisted on the teaching of the Bible partly as a great literary heritage, partly because he was "seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion in these matters, without its use" (_Essays_, iii. 397). In 1872 the School of Mines was moved to South Kensington, and Huxley had, for the first time after eighteen years, those appliances for teaching beyond the lecture room, which to the lasting injury of the interests of biological science in Great Britain had been withheld from him by the short-sightedness of government. Huxley had only been able to bring his influence to bear upon his pupils by oral teaching, and had had no opportunity by personal intercourse in the laboratory of forming a school. He was now able to organize a system of instruction for classes of elementary teachers in the general principles of biology, which indirectly affected the teaching of the subject throughout the country.

The first symptoms of physical failure to meet the strain of the scientific and public duties demanded of him made some rest imperative, and he took a long holiday in Egypt. He still continued for some years to occupy himself mainly with vertebrate morphology. But he seemed to find more interest and the necessary mental stimulus to exertion in lectures, public addresses and more or less controversial writings. His health, which had for a time been fairly restored, completely broke down again in 1885. In 1890 he removed from London to Eastbourne, where after a painful illness he died on the 29th of June 1895.

The latter years of Huxley's life were mainly occupied with
contributions to periodical literature on subjects connected with
philosophy and theology. The effect produced by these on popular
opinion was profound. This was partly due to his position as a man of
science, partly to his obvious earnestness and sincerity, but in the
main to his strenuous and attractive method of exposition. Such
studies were not wholly new to him, as they had more or less engaged
his thoughts from his earliest days. That his views exhibit some
process of development and are not wholly consistent was, therefore,
to be expected, and for this reason it is not easy to summarize them
as a connected body of teaching. They may be found perhaps in their
most systematic form in the volume on _Hume_ published in 1879.

Huxley's general attitude to the problems of theology and philosophy
was technically that of scepticism. "I am," he wrote, "too much of a
sceptic to deny the possibility of anything" (_Life_, ii. 127). "Doubt
is a beneficent demon" (_Essays_, ix. 56). He was anxious,
nevertheless, to avoid the accusation of Pyrrhonism (_Life_, ii. 280),
but the Agnosticism which he defined to express his position in 1869
suggests the Pyrrhonist _Aphasia_. The only approach to certainty
which he admitted lay in the order of nature. "The conception of the
constancy of the order of nature has become the dominant idea of
modern thought.... Whatever may be man's speculative doctrines, it is
quite certain that every intelligent person guides his life and risks
his fortune upon the belief that the order of nature is constant, and
that the chain of natural causation is never broken." He adds,
however, that "it by no means necessarily follows that we are
justified in expanding this generalization into the infinite past"
(_Essays_, iv. 47, 48). This was little more than a pious
reservation, as evolution implies the principle of continuity (l.c. p.
55). Later he stated his belief even more absolutely: "If there is
anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the
universal validity of the law of causation, but that universality
cannot be proved by any amount of experience" (_Essays_, ix. 121). The
assertion that "There is only one method by which intellectual truth
can be reached, whether the subject-matter of investigation belongs to
the world of physics or to the world of consciousness" (_Essays_, ix.
126) laid him open to the charge of materialism, which he vigorously
repelled. His defence, when he rested it on the imperfection of the
physical analysis of matter and force (l.c. p. 131), was irrelevant;
he was on sounder ground when he contended with Berkeley "that our
certain knowledge does not extend beyond our states of consciousness"
(l.c. p. 130). "Legitimate materialism, that is, the extension of the
conceptions and of the methods of physical science to the highest as
well as to the lowest phenomena of vitality, is neither more nor less
than a sort of shorthand idealism" (_Essays_, i. 194). While "the
substance of matter is a metaphysical unknown quality of the existence
of which there is no proof ... the non-existence of a substance of
mind is equally arguable; ... the result ... is the reduction of the
All to co-existences and sequences of phenomena beneath and beyond
which there is nothing cognoscible" (_Essays_, ix. 66). Hume had
defined a miracle as a "violation of the laws of nature." Huxley
refused to accept this. While, on the one hand, he insists that "the
whole fabric of practical life is built upon our faith in its
continuity" (_Hume_, p. 129), on the other "nobody can presume to say
what the order of nature must be"; this "knocks the bottom out of all
a priori objections either to ordinary 'miracles' or to the efficacy
of prayer" (_Essays_, v. 133). "If by the term miracles we mean only
extremely wonderful events, there can be no just ground for denying
the possibility of their occurrence" (_Hume_, p. 134). Assuming the
chemical elements to be aggregates of uniform primitive matter, he saw
no more theoretical difficulty in water being turned into alcohol in
the miracle at Cana, than in sugar undergoing a similar conversion
(_Essays_, v. 81). The credibility of miracles with Huxley is a
question of evidence. It may be remarked that a scientific explanation
is destructive of the supernatural character of a miracle, and that
the demand for evidence may be so framed as to preclude the
credibility of any historical event. Throughout his life theology had
a strong attraction, not without elements of repulsion, for Huxley.
The circumstances of his early training, when Paley was the "most
interesting Sunday reading allowed him when a boy" (_Life_, ii. 57),
probably had something to do with both. In 1860 his beliefs were
apparently theistic: "Science seems to me to teach in the highest and
strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian
conception of entire surrender to the will of God" (_Life_, i. 219).
In 1885 he formulates "the perfect ideal of religion" in a passage
which has become almost famous: "In the 8th century B.C. in the heart
of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a
conception of religion which appears to be as wonderful an inspiration
of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. 'And
what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God'" (_Essays_, iv. 161). Two
years later he was writing: "That there is no evidence of the
existence of such a being as the God of the theologians is true
enough" (_Life_, ii. 162). He insisted, however, that "atheism is on
purely philosophical grounds untenable" (l.c.). His theism never
really advanced beyond the recognition of "the passionless
impersonality of the unknown and unknowable, which science shows
everywhere underlying the thin veil of phenomena" (_Life_, i. 239). In
other respects his personal creed was a kind of scientific Calvinism.
There is an interesting passage in an essay written in 1892, "An
Apologetic Eirenicon," which has not been republished, which
illustrates this: "It is the secret of the superiority of the best
theological teachers to the majority of their opponents that they
substantially recognize these realities of things, however strange the
forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The doctrines of
predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and
the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan
in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent
Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately
revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer
the truth than the 'liberal' popular illusions that babies are all
born good, and that the example of a corrupt society is responsible
for their failure to remain so; that it is given to everybody to reach
the ethical ideal if he will only try; that all partial evil is
universal good, and other optimistic figments, such as that which
represents 'Providence' under the guise of a paternal philanthropist,
and bids us believe that everything will come right (according to our
notions) at last." But his "slender definite creed," R. H. Hutton, who
was associated with him in the Metaphysical Society, thought--and no
doubt rightly--in no respect "represented the cravings of his larger
nature."

From 1880 onwards till the very end of his life, Huxley was
continuously occupied in a controversial campaign against orthodox
beliefs. As Professor W. F. R. Weldon justly said of his earlier
polemics: "They were certainly among the principal agents in winning a
larger measure of toleration for the critical examination of
fundamental beliefs, and for the free expression of honest reverent
doubt." He threw Christianity overboard bodily and with little
appreciation of its historic effect as a civilizing agency. He
thought that "the exact nature of the teachings and the convictions of
Jesus is extremely uncertain" (_Essays_, v. 348). "What we are usually
pleased to call religion nowadays is, for the most part, Hellenized
Judaism" (_Essays_, iv. 162). His final analysis of what "since the
second century, has assumed to itself the title of Orthodox
Christianity" is a "varying compound of some of the best and some of
the worst elements of Paganism and Judaism, moulded in practice by the
innate character of certain people of the Western world" (_Essays_, v.
142). He concludes "That this Christianity is doomed to fall is, to my
mind, beyond a doubt; but its fall will neither be sudden nor speedy"
(l.c.). He did not omit, however, to do justice to "the bright side of
Christianity," and was deeply impressed with the life of Catherine of
Siena. Failing Christianity, he thought that some other "hypostasis of
men's hopes" will arise (_Essays_, v. 254). His latest speculations on
ethical problems are perhaps the least satisfactory of his writings.
In 1892 he wrote: "The moral sense is a very complex affair--dependent
in part upon associations of pleasure and pain, approbation and
disapprobation, formed by education in early youth, but in part also
on an innate sense of moral beauty and ugliness (how originated need
not be discussed), which is possessed by some people in great
strength, while some are totally devoid of it" (_Life_, ii. 305). This
is an intuitional theory, and he compares the moral with the aesthetic
sense, which he repeatedly declares to be intuitive; thus: "All the
understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the
force of the intuition that this is beautiful and this is ugly"
(_Essays_, ix. 80). In the Romanes Lecture delivered in 1894, in which
this passage occurs, he defines "law and morals" to be "restraints
upon the struggle for existence between men in society." It follows
that "the ethical process is in opposition to the cosmic process," to
which the struggle for existence belongs (_Essays_, ix. 31).
Apparently he thought that the moral sense in its origin was
intuitional and in its development utilitarian. "Morality commenced
with society" (_Essays_, v. 52). The "ethical process" is the "gradual
strengthening of the social bond" (_Essays_, ix. 35). "The cosmic
process has no sort of relation to moral ends" (l.c. p. 83); "of moral
purpose I see no trace in nature. That is an article of exclusive
human manufacture" (_Life_, ii. 268). The cosmic process Huxley
identified with evil, and the ethical process with good; the two are
in necessary conflict. "The reality at the bottom of the doctrine of
original sin" is the "innate tendency to self-assertion" inherited by
man from the cosmic order (_Essays_, ix. 27). "The actions we call
sinful are part and parcel of the struggle for existence" (_Life_, ii.
282). "The prospect of attaining untroubled happiness" is "an
illusion" (_Essays_, ix. 44), and the cosmic process in the long run
will get the best of the contest, and "resume its sway" when evolution
enters on its downward course (l.c. p. 45). This approaches pure
pessimism, and though in Huxley's view the "pessimism of Schopenhauer
is a nightmare" (_Essays_, ix. 200), his own philosophy of life is not
distinguishable, and is often expressed in the same language. The
cosmic order is obviously non-moral (_Essays_, ix. 197). That it is,
as has been said, immoral is really meaningless. Pain and suffering
are affections which imply a complex nervous organization, and we are
not justified in projecting them into nature external to ourselves.
Darwin and A. R. Wallace disagreed with Huxley in seeing rather the
joyous than the suffering side of nature. Nor can it be assumed that
the descending scale of evolution will reproduce the ascent, or that
man will ever be conscious of his doom.

As has been said, Huxley never thoroughly grasped the Darwinian
principle. He thought "transmutation may take place without
transition" (_Life_, i. 173). In other words, that evolution is
accomplished by leaps and not by the accumulation of small variations.
He recognized the "struggle for existence" but not the gradual
adjustment of the organism to its environment which is implied in
"natural selection." In highly civilized societies he thought that the
former was at an end (_Essays_, ix. 36) and had been replaced by the
"struggle for enjoyment" (l.c. p. 40). But a consideration of the
stationary population of France might have shown him that the effect
in the one case may be as restrictive as in the other. So far from
natural selection being in abeyance under modern social conditions,
"it is," as Professor Karl Pearson points out, "something we run up
against at once, almost as soon as we examine a mortality table"
(_Biometrika_, i. 76). The inevitable conclusion, whether we like it
or not, is that the future evolution of humanity is as much a part of
the cosmic process as its past history, and Huxley's attempt to shut
the door on it cannot be maintained scientifically.

AUTHORITIES.--_Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley_, by his son
Leonard Huxley (2 vols., 1900); _Scientific Memoirs of T. H. Huxley_
(4 vols., 1898-1901); _Collected Essays_ by T. H. Huxley (9 vols.,
1898); _Thomas Henry Huxley, a Sketch of his Life and Work_, by P.
Chalmers Mitchell, M.A. (Oxon., 1900); a critical study founded on
careful research and of great value. (W. T. T.-D.)

FOOTNOTE:

[1] _Nature_, lxiii. 127.

HUY (Lat. _Hoium_, and Flem. _Hoey_), a town of Belgium, on the right bank of the Meuse, at the point where it is joined by the Hoyoux. Pop. (1904), 14,164. It is 19 m. E. of Namur and a trifle less west of Liége. Huy certainly dates from the 7th century, and, according to some, was founded by the emperor Antoninus in A.D. 148. Its situation is striking, with its grey citadel crowning a grey rock, and the fine collegiate church (with a 13th-century gateway) of Notre Dame built against it. The citadel is now used partly as a depot of military equipment and partly as a prison. The ruins are still shown of the abbey of Neumoustier founded by Peter the Hermit on his return from the first crusade. He was buried there in 1115, and a statue was erected to his memory in the abbey grounds in 1858. Neumoustier was one of seventeen abbeys in this town alone dependent on the bishopric of Liége. Huy is surrounded by vineyards, and the bridge which crosses the Meuse at this point connects the fertile Hesbaye north of the river with the rocky and barren Condroz south of it.

HUYGENS, CHRISTIAAN (1629-1695), Dutch mathematician, mechanician, astronomer and physicist, was born at the Hague on the 14th of April 1629. He was the second son of Sir Constantijn Huygens. From his father he received the rudiments of his education, which was continued at Leiden under A. Vinnius and F. van Schooten, and completed in the juridical school of Breda. His mathematical bent, however, soon diverted him from legal studies, and the perusal of some of his earliest theorems enabled Descartes to predict his future greatness. In 1649 he accompanied the mission of Henry, count of Nassau, to Denmark, and in 1651 entered the lists of science as an assailant of the unsound system of quadratures adopted by Gregory of St Vincent. This first essay (_Exetasis quadraturae circuli_, Leiden, 1651) was quickly succeeded by his _Theoremata de quadratura hyperboles, ellipsis, et circuli_; while, in a treatise entitled _De circuli magnitudine inventa_, he made, three years later, the closest approximation so far obtained to the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle.

Another class of subjects was now to engage his attention. The improvement of the telescope was justly regarded as a _sine qua non_ for the advancement of astronomical knowledge. But the difficulties interposed by spherical and chromatic aberration had arrested progress in that direction until, in 1655, Huygens, working with his brother Constantijn, hit upon a new method of grinding and polishing lenses. The immediate results of the clearer definition obtained were the detection of a satellite to Saturn (the sixth in order of distance from its primary), and the resolution into their true form of the abnormal appendages to that planet. Each discovery in turn was, according to the prevailing custom, announced to the learned world under the veil of an anagram--removed, in the case of the first, by the publication, early in 1656, of the little tract _De Saturni luna observatio nova_; but retained, as regards the second, until 1659, when in the _Systema Saturnium_ the varying appearances of the so-called "triple planet" were clearly explained as the phases of a ring inclined at an angle of 28° to the ecliptic. Huygens was also in 1656 the first effective observer of the Orion nebula; he delineated the bright region still known by his name, and detected the multiple character of its nuclear star. His application of the pendulum to regulate the movement of clocks sprang from his experience of the need for an exact measure of time in observing the heavens. The invention dates from 1656; on the 16th of June 1657 Huygens presented his first "pendulum-clock" to the states-general; and the _Horologium_, containing a description of the requisite mechanism, was published in 1658.

His reputation now became cosmopolitan. As early as 1655 the university of Angers had distinguished him with an honorary degree of doctor of laws. In 1663, on the occasion of his second visit to England, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and imparted to that body in January 1669 a clear and concise statement of the laws governing the collision of elastic bodies. Although these conclusions were arrived at independently, and, as it would seem, several years previous to their publication, they were in great measure anticipated by the communications on the same subject of John Wallis and Christopher Wren, made respectively in November and December 1668.

Huygens had before this time fixed his abode in France. In 1665 Colbert made to him on behalf of Louis XIV. an offer too tempting to be refused, and between the following year and 1681 his residence in the philosophic seclusion of the Bibliothèque du Roi was only interrupted by two short visits to his native country. His _magnum opus_ dates from this period. The _Horologium oscillatorium_, published with a dedication to his royal patron in 1673, contained original discoveries sufficient to have furnished materials for half a dozen striking disquisitions. His solution of the celebrated problem of the "centre of oscillation" formed in itself an important event in the history of mechanics. Assuming as an axiom that the centre of gravity of any number of interdependent bodies cannot rise higher than the point from which it fell, he arrived, by anticipating in the particular case the general principle of the conservation of _vis viva_, at correct although not strictly demonstrated conclusions. His treatment of the subject was the first successful attempt to deal with the dynamics of a system. The determination of the true relation between the length of a pendulum and the time of its oscillation; the invention of the theory of evolutes; the discovery, hence ensuing, that the cycloid is its own evolute, and is strictly isochronous; the ingenious although practically inoperative idea of correcting the "circular error" of the pendulum by applying cycloidal cheeks to clocks--were all contained in this remarkable treatise. The theorems on the composition of forces in circular motion with which it concluded formed the true prelude to Newton's _Principia_, and would alone suffice to establish the claim of Huygens to the highest rank among mechanical inventors.

In 1681 he finally severed his French connexions, and returned to Holland. The harsher measures which about that time began to be adopted towards his co-religionists in France are usually assigned as the motive of this step. He now devoted himself during six years to the production of lenses of enormous focal distance, which, mounted on high poles, and connected with the eye-piece by means of a cord, formed what were called "aerial telescopes." Three of his object-glasses, of respectively 123, 180 and 210 ft. focal length, are in the possession of the Royal Society. He also succeeded in constructing an almost perfectly achromatic eye-piece, still known by his name. But his researches in physical optics constitute his chief title-deed to immortality. Although Robert Hooke in 1668 and Ignace Pardies in 1672 had adopted a vibratory hypothesis of light, the conception was a mere floating possibility until Huygens provided it with a sure foundation. His powerful scientific imagination enabled him to realize that all the points of a wave-front originate partial waves, the aggregate effect of which is to reconstitute the primary disturbance at the subsequent stages of its advance, thus accomplishing its propagation; so that each primary undulation is the envelope of an indefinite number of secondary undulations. This resolution of the original wave is the well-known "Principle of Huygens," and by its means he was enabled to prove the fundamental laws of optics, and to assign the correct construction for the direction of the extraordinary ray in uniaxial crystals. These investigations, together with his discovery of the "wonderful phenomenon" of polarization, are recorded in his _Traité de la lumière_, published at Leiden in 1690, but composed in 1678. In the appended treatise _Sur la Cause de la pesanteur_, he rejected gravitation as a universal quality of matter, although admitting the Newtonian theory of the planetary revolutions. From his views on centrifugal force he deduced the oblate figure of the earth, estimating its compression, however, at little more than one-half its actual amount.

Huygens never married. He died at the Hague on the 8th of June 1695, bequeathing his manuscripts to the university of Leiden, and his considerable property to the sons of his younger brother. In character he was as estimable as he was brilliant in intellect. Although, like most men of strong originative power, he assimilated with difficulty the ideas of others, his tardiness sprang rather from inability to depart from the track of his own methods than from reluctance to acknowledge the merits of his competitors.

In addition to the works already mentioned, his _Cosmotheoros_--a
speculation concerning the inhabitants of the planets--was
printed posthumously at the Hague in 1698, and appeared almost
simultaneously in an English translation. A volume entitled _Opera
posthuma_ (Leiden, 1703) contained his "Dioptrica," in which the ratio
between the respective focal lengths of object-glass and eye-glass is
given as the measure of magnifying power, together with the shorter
essays _De vitris figurandis_, _De corona et parheliis_, &c. An early
tract _De ratiociniis in ludo aleae_, printed in 1657 with Schooten's
_Exercitationes mathematicae_, is notable as one of the first formal
treatises on the theory of probabilities; nor should his
investigations of the properties of the cissoid, logarithmic and
catenary curves be left unnoticed. His invention of the spiral
watch-spring was explained in the _Journal des savants_ (Feb. 25,
1675). An edition of his works was published by G. J.'s Gravesande, in
four quarto volumes entitled _Opera varia_ (Leiden, 1724) and _Opera
reliqua_ (Amsterdam, 1728). His scientific correspondence was edited
by P. J. Uylenbroek from manuscripts preserved at Leiden, with the
title _Christiani Hugenii aliorumque seculi XVII. virorum celebrium
exercitationes mathematicae et philosophicae_ (the Hague, 1833).

The publication of a monumental edition of the letters and works of
Huygens was undertaken at the Hague by the _Société Hollandaise des
Sciences_, with the heading _Oeuvres de Christian Huygens_ (1888),
&c. Ten quarto volumes, comprising the whole of his correspondence,
had already been issued in 1905. A biography of Huygens was prefixed
to his _Opera varia_ (1724); his _Éloge_ in the character of a French
academician was printed by J. A. N. Condorcet in 1773. Consult
further: P. J. Uylenbroek, _Oratio de fratribus Christiano atque
Constantino Hugenio_ (Groningen, 1838); P. Harting, _Christiaan
Huygens in zijn Leven en Werken geschetzt_ (Groningen, 1868); J. B. J.
Delambre, _Hist. de l'astronomie moderne_ (ii. 549); J. E. Montucla,
_Hist. des mathématiques_ (ii. 84, 412, 549); M. Chasles, _Aperçu
historique sur l'origine des méthodes en géometrie_, pp. 101-109; E.
Dühring, _Kritische Geschichte der allgemeinen Principien der
Mechanik_, Abschnitt (ii. 120, 163, iii. 227); A. Berry, _A Short
History of Astronomy_, p. 200; R. Wolf, _Geschichte der Astronomie_,
passim; Houzeau, _Bibliographie astronomique_ (ii. 169); F. Kaiser,
_Astr. Nach._ (xxv. 245, 1847); _Tijdschrift voor de Wetenschappen_
(i. 7, 1848); _Allgemeine deutsche Biographie_ (M. B. Cantor); J. C.
Poggendorff, _Biog. lit. Handwörterbuch_. (A. M. C.)

HUYGENS, SIR CONSTANTIJN (1596-1687), Dutch poet and diplomatist, was born at the Hague on the 4th of September 1596. His father, Christiaan Huygens, was secretary to the state council, and a man of great political importance. At the baptism of the child, the city of Breda was one of his sponsors, and the admiral Justinus van Nassau the other. He was trained in every polite accomplishment, and before he was seven could speak French with fluency. He was taught Latin by Johannes Dedelus, and soon became a master of classic versification. He developed not only extraordinary intellectual gifts but great physical beauty and strength, and was one of the most accomplished athletes and gymnasts of his age; his skill in playing the lute and in the arts of painting and engraving attracted general attention before he began to develop his genius as a writer. In 1616 he proceeded, with his elder brother, to the university of Leiden. He stayed there only one year, and in 1618 went to London with the English ambassador Dudley Carleton; he remained in London for some months, and then went to Oxford, where he studied for some time in the Bodleian Library, and to Woodstock, Windsor and Cambridge; he was introduced at the English court, and played the lute before James I. The most interesting feature of this visit was the intimacy which sprang up between the young Dutch poet and Dr Donne, for whose genius Huygens preserved through life an unbounded admiration. He returned to Holland in company with the English contingent of the synod of Dort, and in 1619 he proceeded to Venice in the diplomatic service of his country; on his return he nearly lost his life by a foolhardy exploit, namely, the scaling of the topmost spire of Strassburg cathedral. In 1621 he published one of his most weighty and popular poems, his _Batava Tempe_, and in the same year he proceeded again to London, as secretary to the ambassador, Wijngaerdan, but returned in three months. His third diplomatic visit to England lasted longer, from the 5th of December 1621 to the 1st of March 1623. During his absence, his volume of satires, _'t Costelick Mal_, dedicated to Jacob Cats, appeared at the Hague. In the autumn of 1622 he was knighted by James I. He published a large volume of miscellaneous poems in 1625 under the title of _Otiorum libri sex_; and in the same year he was appointed private secretary to the stadholder. In 1627 Huygens married Susanna van Baerle, and settled at the Hague; four sons and a daughter were born to them. In 1630 Huygens was called to a seat in the privy council, and he continued to exercise political power with wisdom and vigour for many years, under the title of the lord of Zuylichem. In 1634 he is supposed to have completed his long-talked-of version of the poems of Donne, fragments of which exist. In 1637 his wife died, and he immediately began to celebrate the virtues and pleasures of their married life in the remarkable didactic poem called _Dagwerck_, which was not published till long afterwards. From 1639 to 1641 he occupied himself by building a magnificent house and garden outside the Hague, and by celebrating their beauties in a poem entitled _Hofwijck_, which was published in 1653. In 1647 he wrote his beautiful poem of _Oogentroost_ or "Eye Consolation," to gratify his blind friend Lucretia van Trollo. He made his solitary effort in the dramatic line in 1657, when he brought out his comedy of _Trijntje Cornelis Klacht_, which deals, in rather broad humour, with the adventures of the wife of a ship's captain at Zaandam. In 1658 he rearranged his poems, and issued them with many additions, under the title of _Corn Flowers_. He proposed to the government that the present highway from the Hague to the sea at Scheveningen should be constructed, and during his absence on a diplomatic mission to the French court in 1666 the road was made as a compliment to the venerable statesman, who expressed his gratitude in a descriptive poem entitled _Zeestraet_. Huygens edited his poems for the last time in 1672, and died in his ninety-first year, on the 28th of March 1687. He was buried, with the pomp of a national funeral, in the church of St Jacob, on the 4th of April. His second son, Christiaan, the eminent astronomer, is noticed separately.

Constantijn Huygens is the most brilliant figure in Dutch literary
history. Other statesmen surpassed him in political influence, and at
least two other poets surpassed him in the value and originality of
their writings. But his figure was more dignified and splendid, his
talents were more varied, and his general accomplishments more
remarkable than those of any other person of his age, the greatest age
in the history of the Netherlands. Huygens is the _grand seigneur_ of
the republic, the type of aristocratic oligarchy, the jewel and
ornament of Dutch liberty. When we consider his imposing character and
the positive value of his writings, we may well be surprised that he
has not found a modern editor. It is a disgrace to Dutch scholarship
that no complete collection of the writings of Huygens exists. His
autobiography, _De vita propria sermonum libri duo_, did not see the
light until 1817, and his remarkable poem, _Cluyswerck_, was not
printed until 1841. As a poet Huygens shows a finer sense of form than
any other early Dutch writer; the language, in his hands, becomes as
flexible as Italian. His epistles and lighter pieces, in particular,
display his metrical ease and facility to perfection. (E. G.)