The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol 2 | Page 4

if you can, that I may secure you good quarters.
I shall ask the wife to fill up the next half-sheet. But for Heaven's sake
don't be angry with me in English again. It's far worse than a scolding
in Deutsch, and I have as little forgotten my German as I have my
German friends.
[On February 18 he delivered his farewell address to the Geological

Society, on laying down the office of President. ("Palaeontology and
the Doctrine of Evolution" "Collected Essays" 8.) He took the
opportunity to revise his address to the Society in 1862, and pointed out
the growth of evidence in favour of evolution theory, and in particular
traced the paleontological history of the horse, through a series of fossil
types approaching more and more to a generalised ungulate type and
reaching back to a three-toed ancestor, or collateral of such an ancestor,
itself possessing rudiments of the two other toes which appertain to the
average quadruped.]
If [he said] the expectation raised by the splints of horses that, in some
ancestor of the horses, these splints would be found to be complete
digits, has been verified, we are furnished with very strong reasons for
looking for a no less complete verification of the expectation that the
three-toed Plagiolophus-like "avus" of the horse must have been a
five-toed "atavus" at some early period.
[Six years afterwards, this forecast of paleontological research was to
be fulfilled, but at the expense of the European ancestry of the horse. A
series of ancestors, similar to these European fossils, but still more
equine, and extending in unbroken order much farther back in
geological time, was discovered in America. His use of this in his New
York lectures as demonstrative evidence of evolution, and the
immediate fulfilment of a further prophecy of his will be told in due
course.
His address to the Cambridge Y.M.C.A, "A Commentary on Descartes'
'Discourse touching the method of using reason rightly, and of seeking
scientific truth,'" was delivered on March 24. This was an attempt to
give this distinctively Christian audience some vision of the world of
science and philosophy, which is neither Christian nor Unchristian, but
Extra-christian, and to show] "by what methods the dwellers therein try
to distinguish truth from falsehood, in regard to some of the deepest
and most difficult problems that beset humanity, "in order to be clear
about their actions, and to walk sure-footedly in this life," as Descartes
says. For Descartes had laid the foundation of his own guiding
principle of "active scepticism, which strives to conquer itself."
[Here again, as in the "Physical Basis of Life," but with more detail, he
explains how far materialism is legitimate, is, in fact, a sort of
shorthand idealism. This essay, too, contains the often-quoted passage,

apropos of the] "introduction of Calvinism into science."
I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think
what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a
sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I
should instantly close with the offer. The only freedom I care about is
the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part
with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me.
[This was the latest of the essays included in "Lay Sermons, Addresses
and Reviews," which came out, with a dedicatory letter to Tyndall, in
the summer of 1870, and, whether on account of its subject matter or its
title, always remained his most popular volume of essays.
To the same period belongs a letter to Matthew Arnold about his book
"St. Paul and Protestantism."]
My dear Arnold,
Many thanks for your book which I have been diving into at odd times
as leisure served, and picking up many good things.
One of the best is what you say near the end about science gradually
conquering the materialism of popular religion.
It will startle the Puritans who always coolly put the matter the other
way; but it is profoundly true.
These people are for the most part mere idolaters with a Bible-fetish,
who urgently stand in need of conversion by Extra-christian
Missionaries.
It takes all one's practical experience of the importance of Puritan ways
of thinking to overcome one's feeling of the unreality of their beliefs. I
had pretty well forgotten how real to them "the man in the next street"
is, till your citation of their horribly absurd dogmas reminded me of it.
If you can persuade them that Paul is fairly interpretable in your sense,
it may be the beginning of better things, but I have my doubts if Paul
would own you, if he could return to expound his own epistles.
I am