PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON THE DEGENERACY OF MODERN OPINION.
yr is not often that Professor Huxley wraps himself in a cloak 1_ of despondency, and like a scientific Lara, glooms out upon
the world from a darkness of his own making. But those who will read his recent lecture, now published in the February number of the Fortnightly Review, will find it concluding with one of the strangest threnodies to which even a self- tormenting man of genius ever yet gave birth. He con- cludes with a suggestion, which he says " may, perhaps, be dictated by a want of power, on the part of a man who is growing old, to adjust himself to a changing world. The great mark of senility, I believe, is to be a laudator temporis acti. But as Harvey says, 'the die is cast, and I put my faith in the candour of the lovers of truth and of learned minds." And again :—" As I have confessed, I find myself to be regrettably out of harmony with many worthy and enthusiastic people among my contemporaries ; and perhaps the prospect of the coming of the -new Era, in which these things shall be, does not affect • others as it does me. To say truth, I am rather glad to think, that the species can hardly be perfected thus far in my time. I most distinctly admit that I should be loath to be obliged to exist in a world in which my notions of what man should be and do, will have no application. As the old Norseman said, when the choice of heaven with the new generation and hell with the old was offered him, I prefer to be with my ancestors." There is a grandeur, no doubt, in this highly Conservative gloom of Professor Huxley's. Mr. Arnold's comment on Wordsworth's latest phase would apply to the present condition of Professor Huxley's mind :—
"He grew old in an age he condemned.
He looked on the rushing decay Of the times which had sheltered his youth,—
Felt the dissolving throes
Of the social order he loved,— Outlived his brethren, his peers ;
And liko the Theban seer, Died in his enemies' day."
But after all, the assumption of having outlived his generation, is not unfrequently the device of skilful irony on the part of one who, at the zenith of his influence, genius, and popularity, is willing to show how little, compared with his own, is the wisdom of the foolish and perverse generation with which his lot is cast ; and in Professor Huxley's case we find this irony the more clear, that he makes no concealment of letting the lyrical cry of his complaint rise here and again into sharp sarcasm, and then drop into the deepest tones of grave indignation. But our readers will be eager to know—what we have hitherto purposely kept back from them,—what it is which Professor Huxley finds so much amiss in the tendencies of the day, that he makes this solemn appeal to the past, by way of justifying himself for rejecting the new voices and abiding by the men of old. It is not our superstition he condemns,
nor our light curiosity, nor the flippancy of our frivolous age. --He confronts the seventeenth century with the nineteenth, only-to find the nineteenth lamentably wanting in all the greatest qualities of bead and heart, but it is not its contented ignorance with which he taunts it,—though he does not acquit it -even of that,—nor its selfish avarice, nor its shallow self-conceit. He goes back a couple of centuries, not, of course to con- front it, like Father Newman, with an age of gloomier and more passionate bigotry than ours, which had a stronger belief in-the sin of rebelling against authority, and so grasped truths which we miss, but for the purpose of confronting it with an age which had no scruple in vivisection! This is the great moral advantage of the seventeenth century over our own in Professor Huxley's eyes. That century, he says, never hesitated to inflict "pain and death in a good cause ;" and by." a good cause" Professor Huxley means not the cause of the righteous or the innocent, in the name of which the right is claimed to shed the blood of the guilty or even the blood of those who innocently identify themselves with the guilty cause, but the cause of the eager investigator, who claims the right of inflicting any amount of suffering that he finds needful, on the innocent creatures through whose tortures alone he thinks that he can find a clue to the truth be seeks. In a word, all Ibis melancholy brooding on a degenerating world, all this 'appeal to the glories of the age of Shakespeare and Cromwell, all this stern ridicule of the softness of a shrinking and . morbid age, is lavished on those who think torture inadmis- sible as a mere instrument for the discovery of truth. Pro- fessor Huxley arises and shakes the dust off his feet--not when he thinks of our lack of willingness to labour and to suffer in the highest cause, but when he finds us refusing to justify a manrwho, like Harvey,—in a day when anteathetics did not exist,—would cut open any number of living creatures that might be needfid to verify the theory of the circulation of the blood ; or eagerly condemning those who, in our own time, have done the like Calla considerable scale,—and this for eight hours at a time in the case of each tortured victim (rejecting, too, the use of antesthetics, on the ground that they disturb some of the elements of thwexperi- ment),—to test the relative :effect of various drugs in producing the secretion of bile. Nowovhether-Lto keep up the mild fiction of postponing, as Professor Huxley affects to postpone, the-'dis- cussion of the issue on 'which he yirtually passes the strongest possible judgment--Professor Huxieria. right or 'wrong in, this matter, surely it 'might be said that the disposition which he repudiates is hardly one of a kind to make him gloom over his lot in living in the age when it has shown itself, arid thankful that he must pass away before it can gain its full ascendancy. We can understand a man's in- tolerance of the superficial knowledge and conceit of our day,—of its slipshod deference to a public opinion which is no- body's private opinion,—of its ostentatious zeal for an enlighten- ment the characteristics of which it picks up only by hearsay and by no thorough-going discrimination of its own ; we can under- stand, too, the religious man's scorn for the religiosity which means nothing but a preference for giving big names to very slight emotions ; and we can enter into; the true philanthropist's contempt for that fashionable charity which compounds for genuine work by the drawing of cheques ; but even assuming for a moment Professor Huxley's view that it is the stern, scientific duty of an investigator to inflict torture freely, rather than-shrink from prosecuting the search for physiological truth, if that be the only means by which it can be found,—assuming, we say, for a moment that this view were true,—even so, we could hardly imagine a man seriously bewailing his lot in living in an age so degenerate as to decry this view, or congratulating himself that he must pass away before this false kindliness for the poor relations of man, can spread far and wide. Yet such is the temper of the remarkable peroration in which Professor Huxley appeals to the time of Shakespeare and Milton, Hobbes and Locke, Harvey and Newton, Drake and Raleigh, Cromwell and Strafford, against our own "softly-nurtured, not to say sentimental age," and which, in the depth of his stern melancholy, he concludes by avow- ing that he would much prefer the pangs of condemnation-with them, to earning the praises and rewards of our feebler day. Is there really, then, nothing more contemptible or weaker in this age of ours than its disposition to regard equal sufferings, whether of man or beast, as having equal claims on our pity? than its superstition,—if it be superstition,—in supposing that the same amount of torture which it would be wicked as well as criminal to inflict on a man with a scientific object, it would be wrong to inflict on a beast with that same object ? than its hesitation in regarding our sovereignty over the world of animal life as so abso-
lntely unlimited as our superior intelligence, cunning, and indiffer- ence to the inferior races have often practically made it?
And is science itself so exempt from all responsibility for this humane, or as Professor Huxley thinks it, weak-minded disposition, as Professor Huxley's scorn would imply? Is it I possible to trace the fine links which connect human life with I the life of the animal world beneath us, and yet refuse to extend the horror with which we should regard the torture of men from scientific motives, to the torture of the monkey or the dog with the same motives? Has the theory of evolution nothing to do with the sympathy which one of the greatest of the teachers of evolu- tion so scornfully condemns? Or does Professor Huxley wish us to draw the inference in the other direction, and to persuade us that we ought to be willing not only to endure pain ourselves, but to inflict torture on men as well as brutes, in the interests of the physiological science which he thinks deserving of so costly a sacrifice ? If he does, we admit the coherence of his logic, but have some reason to reproach him with having never openly avowed this article of faith,—an avowal which would, we suspect, have greatly diminished the influence of his authority in favour of the more ordinary view which he does support. If he does not, but would disavow with horror the right to elicit physiological truth at the cost of human torture, how can he wonder that he and those like him-who have so long been teaching us to see the essential similarity of the animal life in man and the same life in the higher mammals, should have done much towards under- mining the unscrupulousness with which men have so often inflicted on the lower animals, even for otherwise beneficent ends, sufferings which they would deem it. a pure iniquity to inflict for mere purposes of investigation on the vilest of the human race ? Assuredly it is strange that those who have done most to preach the gospel of the descent of man from the brute, should protest with so grand an indignation against the verrnatural inference that, so far, and in proportion, as the brute is capable of sharing our sufferings, so far and in that proportion he should be protected, just as man is, from our curiosity, and for precisely the same reasons ;—so far, but no farther, we say, for it will be found that a great many of Professor Iluxley's sneers are founded on the, of course, absurd assumption that the humani- tarians whom he ridicules and condemns desire to ensure to the brute perfect immunity from sufferings to which men do not for a moment hesitate to expose themselves.
Let Professor Huxley, then, cheer up. We do not, of course, take his profound melancholy as altogether serious. We are quite sure that there is in it an ironic vein, which is meant rather to make us ashamed than to excite our pity. But still, no doubt, there is a residuum of reality in his dejection, and though we do not exactly suppose that he would welcome death solely because it will rid him sooner of a society which condemns scientific torture in the interests of physiology, we do really take him at his word so far as to think that he is a little ashamed of belonging to a race which can hold such views as we have indicated, and that he would prefer to associate, barring perhaps their theological views, with the generation of Harvey and "his Sovereign," whose "favoured friend," as Professor Huxley tells us, Harvey was,—the sovereign in question being, by the way, James I., to whose moral discrimination we are somewhat surprised to find Professor Huxley appealing, as if it could add anything at all to his own judgment, or the judgment of men like him. We cannot, however, spare Professor Huxley, so well as he could spare us and those who think with us. Nay, we attribute directly to his teaching a good deal of the very moral tendency he so scornfully condemns, and are disposed to believe that his own practice would be a good deal more like our theory, than is his own theory. But if he must for once bewail his fate in belonging to so namby-pamby a generation as the present, let him console himself with the thought that had he lived with Harvey, and been, like Harvey, the "favoured friend" of Harvey's Sovereign, he would, at least, have had no dream of " the descent of man," and no difficulty, therefore, in convincing his contemporaries that the sufferings of the lower creatures had nothing at all in common with the sufferings of the "favoured friend" of James I.
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