Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley Part 20

The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.

CCCx.x.xVI

The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is truth.

CCCx.x.xVII

Your astonishment at the tenacity of life of fallacies, permit me to say, is shockingly unphysiological. They, like other low organisms, are independent of brains, and only wriggle the more, the more they are smitten on the place where the brains ought to be.

CCCx.x.xVIII

I don't know what you think about anniversaries. I like them, being always minded to drink my cup of life to the bottom, and take my chance of the sweets and bitters.

CCCx.x.xIX

Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life--the jamming common-sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.

CCCXL

Life is like walking along a crowded street--there always seem to be fewer obstacles to getting along on the opposite pavement--and yet, if one crosses over, matters are rarely mended.

CCCXLI

The great thing one has to wish for as time goes on is vigour as long as one lives, and death as soon as vigour flags.

CCCXLII

Whether motion disintegrates or integrates is, I apprehend, a question of conditions. A whirlpool in a stream may remain in the same spot for any imaginable time. Yet it is the effect of the motion of the particles of the water in that spot which continually integrate themselves into the whirlpool and disintegrate themselves from it The whirlpool is permanent while the conditions last, though its const.i.tuents incessantly change. Living bodies are just such whirlpools. Matter sets into them in the shape of food,--sets out of them in the shape of waste products.

Their individuality lies in the constant maintenance of a characteristic form, not in the preservation of material ident.i.ty.

CCCXLIII

Most of us are idolators, and ascribe divine powers to the abstractions "Force," "Gravity," "Vitality," which our own brains have created. I do not know anything about "inert" things in nature. If we reduce the world to matter and motion, the matter is not "inert," inasmuch as the same amount of motion affects different kinds of matter in different ways.

To go back to my own ill.u.s.tration. The fabric of the watch is not inert, every particle of it is in violent and rapid motion, and the winding-up simply perturbs the whole infinitely complicated system in a particular fas.h.i.+on. Equilibrium means death, because life is a succession of changes, while a changing equilibrium is a contradiction m terms. I am not at all clear that a living being is comparable to a machine running down. On this side of the question the whirlpool affords a better parallel than the watch. If you dam the stream above or below; the whirlpool dies; just as the living being does if you cut off its food, or choke it with its own waste products. And if you alter the sides or bottom of the stream you may kill the whirlpool, just as you kill the animal by interfering with its structure. Heat and oxidation as a source of heat appear to supply energy to the living machine, the molecular structure of the germ furnis.h.i.+ng the "sides and bottom of the stream,"

that is, determining the results which the energy supplied shall produce.

CCCXLIV

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fas.h.i.+on so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution--intelligible to the young.

CCCXLV

Government by average opinion is merely a circuitous method of going to the devil; those who profess to lead but in fact slavishly follow this average opinion are simply the fastest runners and the loudest squeakers of the herd which is rus.h.i.+ng blindly down to its destruction.

CCCXLVI

It's very sad to lose your child just when he was beginning to bind himself to you, and I don't know that it is much consolation to reflect that the longer he had wound himself up in your heart-strings the worse the tear would have been, which seems to have been inevitable sooner or later. One does not weigh and measure these things while grief is fresh, and in my experience a deep plunge into the waters of sorrow is the hopefullest way of getting through them on to one's daily road of life again. No one can help another very much in these crises of life; but love and sympathy count for something.

CCCXLVII

There is amazingly little evidence of "reverential care for unoffending creation" in the arrangements of nature, that I can discover. If our ears were sharp enough to hear all the cries of pain that are uttered in the earth by men and beasts, we should be deafened by one continuous scream!

And yet the wealth of superfluous loveliness in the world condemns pessimism. It is a hopeless riddle.

CCCXLVIII

A man who has only half as much food as he needs is indubitably starved, even though his short rations consist of ortolans and are served upon gold plate.

CCCXLIX

Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.

CCCL

We men of science, at any rate, hold ourselves morally bound to "try all things and hold fast to that which is good"; and among public benefactors, we reckon him who explodes old error, as next in rank to him who discovers new truth.

CCCLI

Whatever Linnaeus may say, man is not a rational animal--especially in his parental capacity.

CCCLII

The inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of history is just as much a question of pure science as the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter of geology, and the value of evidence in the two cases must be tested in the same way. If anyone tells me that the evidence of the existence of man in the miocene epoch is as good as that upon which I frequently act every day of my life, I reply that this is quite true, but that it is no sort of reason for believing in the existence of miocene man.

Surely no one but a born fool can fail to be aware that we constantly, and in very grave conjunctions, are obliged to act upon extremely bad evidence, and that very often we suffer all sorts of penalties in consequence. And surely one must be something worse than a born fool to pretend that such decision under the pressure of the enigmas of life ought to have the smallest influence in those judgments which are made with due and sufficient deliberation.

CCCLIII

1. The Church founded by Jesus has _not_ made its way; has _not_ permeated the world--but _did_ become extinct in the country of its birth--as Nazarenism and Ebionism.