xvi INTRODUCTION 



in everything look, gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture, 

 sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical or orator- 

 ical art, he had nevertheless the secret of the highest art 

 of all, whether in oratory or whatever else he had sim- 

 plicity." 



Simplicity, directness, sincerity, all these qualities 

 describe Huxley; but the one attribute which distinguishes 

 Dlstin ki m above all others is love of truth. A love ol 



guishing truth, as the phrase characterizes Huxley, would 

 attributes. necessar j}y produce a scholarly habit of mind. 

 It was the zealous search for truth which determined his 

 method of work. In science, Huxley would " take at sec- 

 ond hand nothing for which he vouched in teaching." Some 

 one reproached him for wasting time verifying what another 

 had already done. " If that is his practice," he commented, 

 "his work will never live." The same motive made him 

 a master of languages. To be able to read at first hand the 

 writings of other nations, he learned German, French, 

 Italian, and Greek. One of the chief reasons for learning 

 to read Greek was to see for himself if Aristotle really 

 did say that the heart had only three chambers an error, 

 he discovered, not of Aristotle, but of the translator. It 

 was, moreover, the scholar in Huxley which made him im- 

 patient of narrow, half-formed, foggy conclusions. His own 

 work has all the breadth and freedom and universality of 

 the scholar, but it has, also, a quality equally distinctive 

 of the scholar, namely, an infinite precision in the matter 

 of detail. 



If love of truth made Huxley a scholar, it made him, 

 also, a courageous fighter. Man's first duty, as he saw it, 

 A coura- was to see ^ ^ e truth ; his second was to teach 

 geous it to others, and, if necessary, to contend valiantly 



g ter> for it. To fail to teach what you honestly know 

 to be true, because it may harm your reputation, or even 

 because it may give pain to others, is cowardice. "I am 

 not greatly concerned about any reputation," Huxley writes 

 to his wife, " except that of being entirely honest and 

 straightforward." Regardless of warnings that the publica- 

 tion of Man's Place in Nature would ruin his career, 



