vi LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY 



This was the note he struck in the appeal for intellectual 

 sincerity and clearness which he made at the end of his 

 New York LecHires on Evolution. The same note domi- 

 nates 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 develop- 

 ment 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 treat- 

 ing 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 cam- 

 paign 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 further from 

 his mind than the desire to found a school of thought. He 

 only endeavoured as a scholar and a student to clear up 

 his own thoughts and help others to clear theirs, whether 

 in the intellectual or the moral world. This was the 

 help he steadfastly hoped to give the people, that interact- 

 ing union of intellectual freedom and moral discernment 

 which may be furthered by good education and training, 

 by precept and example, that basis of all social health and 

 prosperity. And if, as he said, he would like to be remem- 

 bered as one who had done his best to help the people, 

 he meant assuredly not the people only of his native land, 

 but the wider world to whom his words could be carried. 



