The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol 1

The Life and Letters of Thomas
Henry Huxley, vol 1

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Henry Huxley V.1
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Title: The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1
Author: Leonard Huxley
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5084] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 21,
2002]

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AND LETTERS ***

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LIFE AND LETTERS OF THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
BY HIS SON
LEONARD HUXLEY.

IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOLUME 1.

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
The American edition of the "Life and Letters of Thomas Henry
Huxley" calls for a few words by way of preface, for there existed a
particular relationship between the English writer and his transatlantic
readers.
From the time that his "Lay Sermons" was published his essays found
in the United States an eager audience, who appreciated above all
things his directness and honesty of purpose and the unflinching spirit
in which he pursued the truth. Whether or not, as some affirm, the
American public "discovered" Mr. Herbert Spencer, they responded at
once to the influence of the younger evolutionary writer, whose wide
and exact knowledge of nature was but a stepping-stone to his interest
in human life and its problems. And when, a few years later, after more
than one invitation, he came to lecture in the United States and made
himself personally known to his many readers, it was this widespread
response to his influence which made his welcome comparable, as was
said at the time, to a royal progress.

His own interest in the present problems of the country and the
possibilities of its future was always keen, not merely as touching the
development of a vast political force--one of the dominant factors of
the near future--but far more as touching the character of its
approaching greatness. Huge territories and vast resources were of
small interest to him in comparison with the use to which they should
be put. None felt more vividly than he that the true greatness of a
nation would depend upon the spirit of the principles it adopted, upon
the character of the individuals who make up the nation and shape the
channels in which the currents of its being will hereafter flow.
This was the note he struck in the appeal for intellectual sincerity and
clearness which he made at the end of his New York "Lectures on
Evolution." The same note dominates that letter to his sister--a
Southerner by adoption--which gives his reading of the real issue at
stake in the great civil war. Slavery is bad for the slave, but far worse
for the master, as sapping his character and making impossible that
moral vigour of the individual on which is based the collective vigour
of the nation.
The interest with which he followed the later development of social
problems need not be dwelt on here, except to say that he watched their
earlier maturity in America as an indication of the problems which
would afterwards call for a solution in his own country. His share in
treating them was limited to examining the principles of social
philosophy on which some of the proposed remedies for social troubles
were based, and this examination may be found in his "Collected
Essays." But the educational campaign which he carried on in England
had its counterpart in America. It was not only that he was chosen to
open the Johns Hopkins University as the type of a new form of
education; there and elsewhere pupils of his carried out in America his
methods of teaching biology, while others engaged in general education
would write testifying to the influence of his ideas upon their own
methods of teaching. But it must be remembered that nothing was