The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol 1 | Page 9

bodies, including language and Psychology; thirdly comes History.
One object for which I have attempted to form an arrangement of
knowledge is that I may test the amount of my own acquirements. I
shall form an extensive list of subjects on this plan, and as I acquire any
one of them I shall strike it out of the list. May the list soon get black!
though at present I shall hardly be able, I am afraid, to spot the paper.
(A prophecy! a prophecy, 1845!).
[April 1842 introduces a number of quotations from Carlyle's
Miscellaneous Writings, "Characteristics," some clear and crisp, others
sinking into Carlyle's own vein of speculative mysticism, e.g.]
"In the mind as in the body the sign of health is unconsciousness."
"Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate
thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse
lies the region of meditation."
"Genius is ever a secret to itself."
"The healthy understanding, we should say, is neither the
argumentative nor the Logical, but the Intuitive, for the end of

understanding is not to prove and find reasons but to know and believe"
(!)
"The ages of heroism are not ages of Moral Philosophy. Virtue, when it
is philosophised of, has become aware of itself, is sickly and beginning
to decline."
[At the same time more electrical experiments are recorded; and
theories are advanced with pros and cons to account for the facts
observed.
The last entry was made three years later:--]
October 1845.--I have found singular pleasure--having accidentally
raked this Buchlein from a corner of my desk--in looking over these
scraps of notices of my past existence; an illustration of J. Paul's saying
that a man has but to write down his yesterday's doings, and forthwith
they appear surrounded with a poetic halo.
But after all, these are but the top skimmings of these five years' living.
I hardly care to look back into the seething depths of the working and
boiling mass that lay beneath all this froth, and indeed I hardly know
whether I could give myself any clear account of it. Remembrances of
physical and mental pain...absence of sympathy, and thence a choking
up of such few ideas as I did form clearly within my own mind.
Grief too, yet at the misfortune of others, for I have had few properly
my own; so much the worse, for in that case I might have said or done
somewhat, but here was powerless.
Oh, Tom, trouble not thyself about sympathy; thou hast two stout legs
and young, wherefore need a staff?
Furthermore, it is twenty minutes past two, and time to go to bed.
Buchlein, it will be long before my secretiveness remains so quiet again;
make the most of what thou hast got.

CHAPTER 1.
2.
1841-1846.
[The migration to Rotherhithe, noted under date of January 9, 1841,
was a fresh step in his career. In 1839 both his sisters married, and both
married doctors. Dr. Cooke, the husband of the elder sister, who was
settled in Coventry, had begun to give him some instruction in the

principles of medicine as early as the preceding June. It was now
arranged that he should go as assistant to Mr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe,
a practical preliminary to walking the hospitals and obtaining a medical
degree in London. His experiences among the poor in the dock region
of the East of London--for Dr. Chandler had charge of the
parish--supplied him with a grim commentary on his diligent reading in
Carlyle. Looking back on this period, he writes:--]
The last recorded speech of Professor Teufelsdrockh proposes the toast
'Die Sache der Armen in Gottes und Teufelsnamen' (The cause of the
Poor in Heaven's name and --'s.) The cause of the Poor is the burden of
"Past and Present," "Chartism," and "Latter-Day Pamphlets." To
me...this advocacy of the cause of the poor appealed very
strongly...because...I had had the opportunity of seeing for myself
something of the way the poor live. Not much, indeed, but still enough
to give a terrible foundation of real knowledge to my speculations.
[After telling how he came to know something of the East End, he
proceeds:--]
I saw strange things there--among the rest, people who came to me for
medical aid, and who were really suffering from nothing but slow
starvation. I have not forgotten--am not likely to forget so long as
memory holds--a visit to a sick girl in a wretched garret where two or
three other women, one a deformed woman, sister of my patient, were
busy shirt-making. After due examination, even my small medical
knowledge sufficed to show that my patient was merely in want of
some better food than the bread and bad tea on which these people were
living. I said so as