Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And WorkMitchell, P. Chalmers (Peter Chalmers), Sir
Science
Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work
Mitchell, P. Chalmers (Peter Chalmers), Sir
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895
every place is a centre to the earth, whence highways radiate, or
ships set sail for foreign ports; the limit of a parish is not more
imaginary than the frontier of an empire." It is this wider sweep,
this attempt to see and to teach not merely the facts about things but
the relations of these facts to the similar facts in other things,
that makes the difference between the new knowledge and the old. The
questions to be asked and answered are not merely, What are the
structures in this animal? but, How and why do they come to be what
they are? Huxley was a ruthless enemy of the books and teachers which
or who made the mere acquisition of details of knowledge their chief
object.
"I remember," he wrote, "in my youth there were detestable books
which ought to have been burned by the hands of the common
hangman, for they contained questions and answers to be learned
by heart, of this sort, 'What is a horse? The horse is termed
_Equus caballus_; belongs to the class Mammalia; order,
Pachydermata; family, Solidungula.' Was any human being the wiser
for learning that magic formula? Was he not more foolish inasmuch
as he was deluded into taking words for knowledge?"
Huxley himself admitted his difficulty in remembering apparently
meaningless facts, and occasionally aided his memory by inventing for
them a humorous significance. Professor Howes relates a story of this
kind. While examining the papers of candidates for some examination,
Huxley came across one in which the mitral or bicuspid valve of the
heart was erroneously described as being placed in the right cavity.
"Poor little beggar," said Huxley; "I never could get them myself
until I reflected that a bishop could never be in the right." This
insistence on the uselessness of formal knowledge applied only to
those who were being taught or who were learning from books or
lectures. Of the value and discipline of knowledge of facts gained at
first hand from objects themselves either in original investigation or
with the aid of books, Huxley had the highest possible opinion. By
such a method of work alone he believed it possible to distinguish
what we believe on authority from what we have convinced ourselves to
be true, and, as we shall see later, he regarded it as the most
important duty of a man to have acquired the habit of classifying the
mass of ideas in his brain into those which he knew and those which he
thought to be true from having read or heard or imagined them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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