PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 243 



Africa, he would doubtless have been the same to Orientals as 

 to Europeans. He was frank, because he was fearless ; he 

 inspired confidence because he was evidently a true-hearted man ; 

 his native self-respect was set off by a respectful manner towards 

 others ; his intolerance of sophistry sometimes betrayed him into 

 undue vehemence in controversial writing, but there was no 

 pettiness in his odium scientificum, and a pure love of truth shone 

 through all his most trenchant diatribes, political or theological. 

 As I shared most of his convictions on politics, we talked over 

 such questions without reserve, but I forbore, and never had 

 occasion, to discuss with him questions concerning religious 

 doctrine. I have, therefore, no right to speak from personal 

 knowledge of his attitude towards them. I cannot doubt, how- 

 ever, that whatever his creed, his inner life was that of a good 

 Christian, and that his hopes went beyond his beliefs, though he 

 was too honest to mistake hopes for beliefs or beliefs for demon- 

 strations. Assuredly, with all his apparent leaning to materialism, 

 and rigorous avoidance of sentiment in reasoning, he inherited 

 and even cultivated the precious gift of philosophical imagination. 

 Of him, as truly as of Lyell, it might be said, in the picturesque 

 language of Dean Stanley, that he chose for himself, and courage- 

 ously pursued, that perilous and lofty path which the vulture's 

 eye has not seen nor the lion's whelp hath trodden — the path 

 which leads upward from ascertained facts and inferences mis- 

 called ' laws,' into the sublimer regions of speculation, where the 

 mysteries of Theology, Metaphysics, and Natural Science mingle 

 and lose themselves, it may be, in the dim confessions of 

 Agnosticism, or, it may be, in the dim aspirations of faith " 

 (" Professor Huxley : Personal Reminiscences," Fortnightly 

 Review, New Ser., Iviii, 1895, p. 310). 



A still more intimate portrayal is given by Sir Michael 

 Foster in the concluding paragraph of an obituary 

 notice : — 



«... those who had the happiness to come near him knew 

 that besides science and philosophy there was room in him for 

 yet many other things ; they forgot the learned investigator, the 

 wise man of action, and the fearless combatant as they listened 

 to him talking of letters, of pictures, or of music, always 

 wondering which delighted them most, the sure thrust with 



